These days I am quite stressed about the fate of “liberal democracy.” Frankly, it’s not a concept I previously felt very attached to, mostly because I didn’t like the way the Biden Dems talked about it.
But now, we are in a far, far worse place. Masked ICE agents are grabbing people off the streets. Millions of kids will die due to mindless aid cuts and anti-vax policies. Free speech is in the worst place it’s been in decades. I have been forced to admit that the resistlibs were right. At the same time, I feel a bit angry at my side—the Democrats, the left—because I don’t think they’ve done a good job making its case, and it clearly failed at the ballot box last year.
So I wanted to talk to somebody who is a believer in “liberalism,” but who can also be candid about liberalism’s future, how it’ll deal with threats from AI to zoomer nihilism, and why people have become increasingly disillusioned.
I thought that
would be the perfect first guest. She’s a staff writer at and previously a senior writer for Vox’s Future Perfect. Her journalism spans topics like AI, social policy, and much more. Today we discuss:[00:10:00] How the Democrats alienated tech
[00:50:33] Zoomer nihilism and authoritarian envy
[01:02:11] Improving the UX of government
[01:16:46] AI and democratic institutions
[01:30:03] The Argument’s theory of change
P.S. I went on some great China podcasts to discuss my China trip: Sinocism with and , AI Proem with , and Sinica with and . The agency/NPC essay led to great conversations with at The New Yorker and at Politico. These have been my most popular posts to date—a lovely surprise!
Full transcript
Jasmine Sun [00:00:00]: Kelsey is a staff writer at The Argument and previously a senior writer for Vox’s Future Perfect. I was first introduced to her work from an old episode of 80,000 Hours, which I listened to in college when deciding whether to become a journalist. There’s been a six-year delay on that, but we are full circle now. Welcome!
Kelsey Piper [00:02:00]: Thanks so much, Jasmine. I am really excited to be here. We talked a while ago about the individualist, less-government-oriented abundance, and that’s very related to my vision of liberalism. But I’m also excited to talk more about national politics because it does matter a lot.
Jasmine Sun [00:02:14]: Let’s start with a personal question as an entry point: How did you begin to call yourself a liberal, and what does that mean to you?
Kelsey Piper [00:02:24]: The most fundamental political conviction I have is that people should broadly be free to live their lives according to their own best guess of the good, and should broadly be tolerant of other people living their own best lives according to their understanding of the good.
Not in a way where you think, “Oh, maybe they’re right.” There are some religions I looked into and I rejected. I don’t think they’re right, but I think they have every right to live the life that they think is right. And I know that they think that the thing I’m doing, as a lesbian in a hippie commune in the Bay Area, is catastrophically wrong. In many ways, only in America is there this deep sense that despite being such different people, we can more or less live together.
It’s very easy to be too Pollyanna-ish about this. There has been a lot of conflict. There have been a lot of mistakes. There are still a lot of mistakes. But for the most part, America is a multi-ethnic society, of which there are very few that are integrated and peaceful and supportive and healthy. It is a society that has a lot of immigrants and that has historically welcomed immigrants and been really excited to benefit from the things they can bring. It is a society that strongly values and strongly protects individual liberty, sometimes to the point where everybody else thinks we’re insane. The individual liberty to own firearms—everybody else is like, “Sorry, what? You have an individual liberty to own deadly weapons?” Yeah, we do. And also some of the strongest speech protections in the world, some of the strongest press protections in the world.
I don’t think that it is incidental to America’s success that we have all of that. I think you need a society that is free in a bunch of those ways to have enough space in it for the specific subcultures that I have treasured and valued and been part of and gotten a lot out of. And those specific subcultures have created an insane amount of value and made the tech industry the best in the world. So that’s where I’ve come from.
I didn’t engage in politics that much for a long time, and that was because I think it makes everybody worse. I think there’s something about putting on your blue hat or your red hat and going to war over who we’re going to elect that makes people less honest, it makes people less careful. It’s zero-sum. But like you, I felt like things went really off track and got us to a pretty bad place. I am angry at the people who made those calls. I’m also angry at myself for not being a little sharper-elbowed about those calls at the time.
Jasmine Sun [00:05:07]: Can I ask what the specific turning point was for deciding to become more engaged?
Kelsey Piper [00:05:12]: When Trump was reelected. I didn’t think he would be a good president, but I didn’t think he would be as bad a president as I now think he has been. I thought that, like his first term, he would make a lot of calls that I really disagreed with. He would be vindictive. He would try and prosecute people on fairly spurious grounds. He would election-deny. He would tweet out a lot of nonsense. But for the most part, the people surrounding him would want the country to succeed and stuff would mostly go along. The magnitude of the failures would be comparatively small. He had all these eccentric views, and people mostly stopped him from causing catastrophic effects with them.
A lot of people who voted for him, I think, voted for him because they were like, “Well, his first term was pretty good, at least until we got to COVID, and that wasn’t really his fault. Probably his second term will be like that.” And I actually think that if his second term had been like that, he would be a very popular president right now because there was a lot of unpopular liberal stuff. You could pick up a lot of low-hanging fruit politically just by rolling that back. And we entered the Trump administration in a very strong position economically. You just win.
Instead, I think he has been a much, much worse president than I expected, and I wasn’t having high expectations. The tariffs have been incredibly badly implemented. I know a number of people who worked in manufacturing, and he destroyed their companies. People got laid off. People are totally unable to find work. People’s lives are 50% trying to anticipate the costs of importing things that they need in order to expand our manufacturing base here in America. People who would’ve loved to see Trump onshore and industrialize were just completely screwed over because his tariffs were implemented so slapdash and so incompetently and so corruptly.
And then, aid is something that I care about. The global war on disease is something that I care about. I’m broadly pro-America as a superpower. I think that being the wealthiest country in the world is something that enables you to do a lot of things that no one else can do. That includes stuff like PEPFAR, where we drove down the cost of basic HIV medications from $1000 to treat someone for a year to like $10 or $20 to treat someone for a year. And we took it from a plague that was going to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions of people to a manageable and managed disease that was under control and where new cases were falling. PEPFAR was done by Republicans. It was conservative Christians who said, “America can do this, and we should,” and we did. It was insanely effective. It was just a huge achievement. It also makes us safer because if there’s a mutation of viruses abroad, they don’t necessarily stay abroad.
And this got paused. It got unpaused. A bunch of the intermediate organizations got, again, bankrupted by insane policies that were just so unpredictable week to week. They couldn’t make payroll. It is still operating now, but at a significantly reduced scale, and State keeps floating that they should maybe cut it back further. This is going to lead to an enormous number of people dying. I didn’t think they would do that. Their first term, under Trump, we passed a PEPFAR extension by voice vote in Congress. Nobody objected, so there was no need to even hold a count. That’s how popular it was. Now, no.
And then, on the democracy front, I think that one of the key things that makes our society work is that you can mostly expect that you will not be retaliated against by the government or prosecuted for things you say, or for disagreeing with the president. Trump is doing everything he can to change that. He’s pretty openly telling his attorney general, “I’m mad at that person. They’re guilty of a crime. Figure out what crime they’re guilty of and go after them.” That’s not how the system works. You investigate a crime, you figure out who’s responsible. You don’t say, “I’m going to look through everything this person has ever done and see if I can find anything, and then file charges, no matter how tenuous it is.”
So, it’s worse than I expected. And I started asking myself, what could I have done and what can I do now to get us off this track and on a better one?
How the Democrats alienated tech
Jasmine Sun [00:10:04]: I think a lot of people feel similarly. How were this many people surprised at how bad it is? I voted for Harris. I never considered voting for Trump, but I did not think it would be this bad.
Do you know folks who did vote for Trump in 2024 and regretted it? I’m curious what those conversations are like.
Kelsey Piper [00:10:35]: I’ve had a couple of those conversations. I think for most of them, it wasn’t a vote for Trump so much as a vote against the Democrats. They were really mad at what the Democrats were doing, and they didn’t feel like the Democrats had earned their vote.
And frankly, I think being mad at what the Democrats were doing was fair. Trump is worse, and I think Trump is far more dangerous in terms of the amount of permanent damage that he can wreak on our society. But it is simply the case that the Democratic party lost a lot of very winnable people by seeming like, in the case of people in tech, they didn’t want your vote. And one great way to have people not vote for you is to be like, “We dislike those people. We are hostile to them. We think they’re ruining our country.”
I think a lot of the antitrust stuff was ill-premised and deeply unpopular, and people interpreted it correctly as, “We don’t like you, and we’re going to figure out which ways we have to go after you,” in a way that felt really unfair because it was really unfair. So you alienate a lot of people in tech that way.
On cultural issues, I think people, especially in tech, tend to be pretty live-and-let-live, like, “I didn’t know that’s a thing, but you can do that thing if you want.” But there was a really serious surge of aggressive policing for having the right views, of hysterics about people who disagreed. We moved from “You should let people get married. You should let people change their name and gender if they want because that’s their business and not yours,” to “If you don’t see this the way I see this, you’re probably bad.” And that is obviously way more self-limiting in terms of who can get on board with it.
And a lot of people who I know who moved towards Trump, it was about getting canceled or treated with insane personal hostility over something they said. And even if I disagree with the thing they said, it was clearly not helpful to cancel them over it. Of course, if you are hostile to people, they’re usually going to vote for the other party. They’re going to say, “Well, maybe Trump is a boorish, corrupt idiot, but he doesn’t hate me, and I don’t want the people in power to be people who hate me.”
Jasmine Sun [00:12:47]: I think Ezra Klein has been saying this a lot. There’s a sense that Democrats do not like you, do not respect you unless you fit within a very narrow cultural milieu that’s an incredibly small number of people.
I published an interview earlier in the year with a young male founder who supported Trump and then has since changed his mind. But he admits basically to it being mainly an aesthetic thing about feeling like the Democrats didn’t do anything. It was a vote against them. And one of the things that surprised me about the reaction to this interview was that people were specifically angry at the line where he says, “Yeah, I guess it wasn’t really about the policies. I just sensed this vibe.” And then I was like, “But that’s how everyone votes.” Most people vote on vibes. You actually do have to seem like you like people.
Kelsey Piper [00:13:42]: The set of people who will vote purely off “this list of policies has higher expected GDP growth than this other set of policies”—they’re not zero, but there are very, very few of them compared to people who broadly vote for, “Are people like me welcome? Are people like me liked and valued? Do people like me belong in the room?”
Ezra is a person who has been great on this because I think Ezra really cares about the Democratic Party reaching those people. And so he’s at least trying to talk to people and ask, “Where are you coming from?” I think some other people are like, “Well, you shouldn’t have voted for Trump.” And I don’t think you should have voted for Trump in terms of, “I think it had consequences that were predictable and bad.” But what’s the point?
Jasmine Sun [00:14:40]: Totally. The leopards eating faces thing is kind of funny, but it’s also really bad. We’re never going to win in a world where we laugh at everyone who gets their face eaten.
Kelsey Piper [00:14:51]: You really have to say, “Okay, we clearly screwed up because someone who agreed with us about a lot of issues felt like we hated them. We should change that.” And it’s never to me worth going, “Haha, you made a bad decision.”
Jasmine Sun [00:15:05]: One thing that is interesting is that this person I’ve caught up with a couple of times since the interview, and now he is very upset about Trump, particularly around immigration and tariffs. Two things that Trump was extremely clear about his agenda on before the election. So I do wish that we all could have known in advance because he did say he would do these things. But maybe there’s something with the messaging there.
Replaying the 2024 campaign, why wasn’t it clear enough what Trump was going to do on tariffs and immigration, at least to the tech world?
Kelsey Piper [00:15:47]: Part of the problem is that people didn’t want to hear it because they’d been hearing it for a long time and they had fatigue about how bad Trump is. They start to tune it out.
But the other thing is it is just much harder to persuade people of a simple fact about the world if they don’t think you share their values. If they think that you care about what they care about and you’re saying, “Trump is going to be bad,” they’re just way more willing to listen than if they think that you hate them and are reluctantly proselytizing because, “Well, I guess we need your vote, you annoying straight white male tech bro.” Then of course, they’re not going to trust that you are giving them your best information in good faith about what’s going to happen. Of course, they’re going to be like, “Well, I should keep in mind your agenda.” So you need the messengers to be people who clearly share the values of the people they’re talking to.
Jasmine Sun [00:16:40]: What do you think these values are? What do you think are the values of these independent-ish, swingy tech people?
Kelsey Piper [00:16:49]: I would say the values of these independent tech floaters include: building things is good. Building companies is good, even if they’re software-as-a-service slop companies. You don’t have to win a majority’s approval for the worthiness of your thing. You can build a thing and sell it to the people who do think it’s good, and that’s enough. This individualist idea that “the thing I’m doing is good, and it doesn’t need to be popular to be good, and it doesn’t need to be incredible, world-changing stuff to be good.” Broadly, the act of building and participating in this ecosystem is good in itself.
Another big part of it is very much coming at these cultural issues from the perspective of “you can do what you want because it’s your life,” instead of “this is the true way and this kind of person is the best kind of person” or whatever. I know nobody in tech who is anti-trans people in the sense that we all know a bunch of trans people and they’re great. It is a free country. It is horrifying if they are legal targets for discrimination. But I know a lot of people who felt like they weren’t just being asked to sign on to “people can live their lives.” They were being asked to sign on to a bunch of claims beyond that about what the inherent nature of gender or sex was, which I don’t think matter. None of my conviction that people get to live their life depends at all on which technical definition of biological sex makes sense.
At least in the Bay Area—and I don’t know nearly as much about how it plays nationally—the left used to be the party of “people can do their thing and that’s okay.” And the more it became one unified account of what the current acceptable language was and the current acceptable framework was, then a lot of people felt like, “I’m behind the euphemism treadmill. I get yelled at a lot. I don’t know if any of this stuff makes sense, and I’m worried people will hate me for not being exactly on the same page.” It was just way wiser to stick to “someone else is leading their life. That’s their business. You don’t like it, go lead your life. It’s a free country.” That is the thing I keep coming back to. I think these people are natural allies for the Democrats as long as the Democratic stance is “it’s a free country.”
Jasmine Sun [00:19:20]: For a long time, the Christian conservatives were the moral police telling you what is the inherent nature of marriage, what is the inherent nature of gender, what does it mean to consume products and technologies well versus to do it in an immoral way. And now both parties are doing quite a bit of this.
Kelsey Piper [00:19:39]: You see a lot of it from both sides. There was never a very large live-and-let-live faction, but they used to be more Dem, and then they swung more Trumpy in 2024. And I’ve seen a lot of them lately swing back, saying, “Hey, whoa, this isn’t what I voted for.”
They shouldn’t have voted for Trump, but you didn’t have Kamala Harris up on stage saying, “It’s a free country.” That was not the angle from which she chose to defend the rights of unpopular minorities. She could have. “People should get to lead the lives they want, and they should have safety and healthcare and all of the things we all want”—which I still think is a majority popular stance.
Jasmine Sun [00:20:29]: I was thinking about all of these weird Silicon Valley ideology subcultures that people can talk about, like “tech right,” “abundance,” “network state,” whatever. There are some narratives that undergird them all.
I try to boil it down to three. One, Technological and scientific advancement is the root driver of historical progress, from economic growth to social liberalism to geopolitical dominance. Two, empowering brilliant outlier individuals is the key to success. They can be any kind of person: founder, scientist, operator. They can be what race, what gender, whatever. They are valued for intelligence, agency, and drive, but they have to be free to do their own thing—free from bureaucracy, free from a collective that tells them how to think and what to say. And three, markets and competition are the most effective system for surfacing the best, whether it’s markets in startups and innovation, markets in truth like prediction markets and Substack, or markets in talent like immigration. But there need to be efficient mechanisms for the best to rise. And that requires tech to respect variance a lot, to be okay with a lot of failures and weirdos and crazy people because sometimes the variance will go in the good direction and that’s going to return the whole fund or move society forward.
I think it also requires an acceptance of some amount of a merit hierarchy. Democrats have become much less willing to talk about or believe in the idea of a merit hierarchy in general. The idea that there are certain people or organizations that are at the top and deserve their position, not only through some structural privilege, but through working harder or being smarter or whatever. And there’s something around that respect for individuals, their variance, their brilliance, that seems to have been lost a bit.
Kelsey Piper [00:22:15]: The specific thing I would say is that there’s plenty of Democrats who are on board in principle with a perfect meritocracy, where everybody has the exact same amount of privilege going in, and then we see who performs the best. That will never exist in the real world. Parents will always want to get what’s best for their children. Some people will be born richer. We can do a lot to make sure that the poorest kids have a good education, to make sure that there are scholarships to all the best schools. But you are not going to achieve a perfectly level playing field.
If you’re only okay with meritocracy if the playing field was perfectly leveled to start, then in practice you will never be okay with meritocracy. You will never look at a real-world meritocracy and say, “That’s good enough.” Because of course, some of these Stanford dropouts had a trust fund that let them spend five years screwing around and going through YC twice. Of course, many of us are benefiting from the huge advantage of being born in the United States of America. There’s always going to be some reasons that some people have a leg up. And I think you can try and address those. You can say it is an enormous tragedy whenever somebody who could have achieved great things doesn’t have that chance. But if you’re like, “I’m not comfortable with the very idea of competition and the rise of whoever can make it until we have completely leveled the playing field,” then never in our lifetimes will you actually be okay with it. So I think even though I am very in favor of making sure that everybody from every square of life has opportunity, even though I do think there is an insane amount of missed talent who we should be giving more to, you can’t wait until everything is perfect to feel comfortable with competition and business and stuff like that. Because in practice, this is just a stance that’s against business.
Jasmine Sun [00:24:14]: And it’s also that many of the people who have risen through competition have partially earned it. I think that’s another thing that I feel the left has become much more uncomfortable with. I can think of many people I know who deserve more than they have gotten in life, and maybe it was because they didn’t have the opportunities or the privileges starting out. And like you, I care a lot about leveling the playing field, distributing extra resources to people who start out with less opportunity. But also, credit where credit’s due. I know very few very successful people who I don’t think deserved it at all. I can pretty much always identify a reason that that person has made a lot of money or become very famous or become at the top of their field.
There’s a way in which the left right now explains away all success through structural factors and is unwilling to acknowledge almost any component of individual achievement. And taking that credit away and thus trying to suppress the top outcomes is tough. Like in gifted education debates, obviously it’s true that children who come from families who have a lot of resources for tutoring will have more kids like that in the gifted programs. That doesn’t mean that all of the kids are there because of that, and no one has any talent or need for accelerated education.
Kelsey Piper [00:25:34]: The strongest example you run into is people who insist that Elon Musk has no inherent talents. Now, I’m currently very angry at Elon Musk because I think a bunch of the things that DOGE did were catastrophic. But it is just factually the case that launching rockets into space is very hard, and that being a CEO is very hard, and building electric cars is very hard, and building solar panels is very hard. And there’s just no way that a random person in Elon Musk’s shoes would’ve founded those companies and achieved the success that he did. The man has, or at least a couple of years ago had, extraordinary talents that delivered an enormous amount of value to the world and to the customers of his products.
It’s a real-life Greek tragedy that with all of his extraordinary talent, Elon turned away from the thing that he was uniquely outlier good at, which is building real things in the physical world, towards trying to make sure nobody can ever say anything left of center, putting out animated anime avatars in scanty outfits, and DOGE, which wrecked a bunch of really, really important and valuable stuff. But there’s a difference between saying, “I wish Elon Musk had chosen to use his talents better,” and “Oh, Elon Musk, he’s not talented at all.” And the latter is just delusional. It’s absurd. And anybody who’s saying that is clearly not thinking about just how hard it is to do things. And often it seems like it’s because they haven’t done things, right? If you’ve never tried starting a company, if you’ve never tried running a complicated hiring process, if you’ve never tried building something complicated in the physical world that needed to work on the first try, then it’s very easy to be like, “Oh, I could do that.” And then once you try it, you’re like, “Wow, I can see why people who are good at this get paid a ton of money.”
Jasmine Sun [00:27:38]: And if we don’t think that people like Elon have any talents at all, it also creates a world where you don’t care about winning them back. Whereas I’m like, there was definitely a world where Elon Musk continued to be a Democrat, continued to focus on things like clean energy and STEM education and high-skilled immigration. But if you don’t think that he’s actually outlier talented, you don’t care about getting people like that on your side.
I had a debate with a friend of mine yesterday over Roy Lee, the Cluely kid, along similar lines. Clearly it is an idiotic startup. I think we have a lot of very different values. At the same time, “Interview Coder,” Roy Lee’s first product for cheating on interviews—that stuff worked. He became famous because his product worked, which shows both product and technical talent. It’s not actually easy to make a wrapper that effective that nobody can detect. I’ve heard him on podcasts; he seems extremely sharp. He’s also obviously very good at playing the attention game, understanding narratives and marketing distribution, and also recruiting people and generating buzz. My thought is, “How do we make sure the next Roy Lees do something else with their lives?”
But my friend was like, “Well, I don’t think that he has merit at all. I feel like his only skill is scamming people.” The question that we were discussing is whether or not the end is decoupled from the means. Because I felt like his talents could be deployed towards another end in another world, just as Elon could deploy his talents towards other ends. Whereas I think she felt that he didn’t have merit, there was no meritocracy that brought him to the top.
Kelsey Piper [00:29:36]: It’s hard to decouple. A lot of people feel like they can’t say Roy Lee clearly has product and engineering talent without endorsing what he’s chosen to do with it. But I think it’s very possible to say these are enormously talented people. The decisions they make about where to spend their time and what to build have a huge impact on our society.
Silicon Valley half runs on everybody trying to figure out what’s cool and what everybody else is doing and what will get them intros to all the great parties. It is great and healthy if we are like, “Don’t build scam companies. Don’t help people cheat. Build something real and impactful.” I don’t think there’s any issue with exerting social pressure in that direction. But you can do that without treating talent as fake, without writing off Elon Musk as not that smart.
And I think the Democratic Party could absolutely have kept Elon Musk on board by continuing to court business in the way that politicos usually court business, where they have meetings with them and they say, “We’re so glad you’re building. Building is so important. Can we pitch you on building all these things we need built? Can you tell us your secrets? What rules are getting in your way?” Sometimes they go way too far with this. I do think it’s easy for businesses to sometimes get crony capitalist cutouts and regulation against competitors because politicians want to cater to them. But it is also nuts to just be like, “We refuse to cater to you in any way and in fact hate you.”
Jasmine Sun [00:31:07]: It was interesting to me how many of the tech right folks specifically talk about the fact that no one would call them on the phone from the Harris admin, or how no one would take a meeting. It was very symbolic stuff, actually.
Kelsey Piper [00:31:20]: But I think it’s reasonable of them to take that as a sign about whether their perspective is valued, whether the work they are doing is valued, whether they are seen as a constituency. And they should be seen as a constituency. You need someone who takes those calls. And maybe Musk, as he declined, would’ve not been okay with any amount of pushback. But you also want to recognize where real good is coming out of tech. And there is lots of real good coming out of tech. And you want to say, “How do we make that possible? How do we double down on that? How do we bring that to more people and more places?”
Jasmine Sun [00:32:01]: Among my tech circles, which probably skew towards younger folks, the default political attitude is disconnection. If you ask people, “Do you like Trump? Do you think what he’s doing is good?” Most people will be like, “No, it’s super bad.” Even if they supported him before. But they turn their attention back to, “Let me just grind, let me just build.” I don’t think people know what to do. I don’t think they feel that they have options.
People are also not speaking out. You see Trump doing these dinners with Zuckerberg and Tim Cook, and it’s clearly a very personalist administration, and I think people feel that if they speak out, it will cost them their careers. It might cost them a VC who is still a Trump supporter. It might cost them down the line if they become more successful. There is a real chilling effect on speech.
Why do you think more is not being said or done, now that a lot of folks in tech have decided, “Oh yeah, this is actually super bad and contrary to our selfish business interests as well as our values”? Or what do you wish more people were doing?
Kelsey Piper [00:33:14]: People are right that it’s a very personalistic administration and there’s a lot of personal benefit to going along with it. I also think there is plenty of personal benefit to having principles and actually standing up for them.
Substack, when it was very unpopular, stood up for, “We really believe in this free speech thing.” And I think this was actually in the long run totally to their advantage because who’s in power changes, and if you have principles, you’re harder to bully. If they’ve rolled over for Trump and then the next Democratic administration is personalistic and bullying, they know you rolled over for Trump. You are going to be willing to settle for a ton of money with them too. Whereas if all along you’re like, “We’re not doing that. We’ll see you in court,” Trump backs down. He often doesn’t actually take it to court, or he takes it to court and it gets immediately dismissed because his team is frankly not very smart and reasonably often is sending in court cases that are just not very good. His libel lawsuit against the New York Times was just bad. So I think people somewhat overestimate the degree to which their selfish interests run towards never criticizing Trump.
I also think it used to be if you were on the right, your Twitter account would probably not be under your real name. And then you could say all the things you thought that your friends would judge you for. So if you’re feeling stressed about causing trouble at work or whatever, you can have an anon Twitter where you’re like, “I think that abundance is great.” You can have an anon account where you’re wearing a mask and saying, “These tariffs are the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” You have no idea how many people have said to me privately, “Okay, the tariffs are incredibly retarded.” They all use that phrase. But they don’t say it in public. They could say it.
Jasmine Sun [00:35:00]: That’s the thing. They don’t say it, and I’m like, why? Is it just retaliation? Is it embarrassment?
Kelsey Piper [00:35:08]: I think it’s healthy to participate somewhat in the discourse, but I think it’s fine to do so anonymously. You don’t have to be putting your startup on the line for everything you do. But just completely withdrawing, I don’t think is a great call because a lot of this is going to affect your business. It is going to affect your life. It is going to affect your friends. It is going to affect people very close to you. And at some point, you should say, “No, this isn’t cool.”
I think people also underestimate how much that works, when the administration has floated things and they immediately got a reaction of, “This is terrible” from a wider range than the usual suspects. If you always say everything the administration does is terrible, then it’s not going to do anything. But if they hear it from people who aren’t the usual suspects, that does matter.
Similarly, I think the Democratic Party is in terrible shape right now. The politicians are mostly an establishment that is just not equipped to meet this moment, doesn’t really understand what their constituents want, and is hearing from the most vocal people. But the demands of the most vocal people are incoherent because the most vocal people are just going “fire alarm, fire alarm, fire alarm.” And that’s not healthy. You have people who are trying to be thought leaders. That’s certainly what we’re trying at The Argument. But it really remains to be seen if any of that resolves into a platform that can win elections. And I don’t think the Democrats are screwed, because Trump is governing so badly that I think the Democrats will win in the midterm even though they haven’t really figured any of this out.
But in the long run, they’ve got to figure this out. So I think it’s valuable for people to publish an essay that’s like, “This is what I think the Democratic Party should be about.” We can get lots of different people articulating that, and then politicians read them. Politicians read the same X and the same blogs as the rest of us. They listen to the same podcasts. If you have ideas, they will be heard by people with the power to act on them.
People underestimate how useful it can be just to articulate, “Here’s something that would be good to do and here’s my case that the Democratic Party should do it.” And also how useful it is to call up your representatives and tell them things that you want them to do that aren’t dumb and destructive. If you call them up and you’re like, “I’m really excited to see the Democratic Party again articulate a vision for business and manufacturing because all of our plants have been shattered by the tariffs and you guys need a plan to rebuild,” I think they hear that. That’s something they’re not hearing from everybody, and they’re interested, and they will look up what you’ve got to say if you’ve got some ideas. Similarly, AI. What the Democratic Party’s stance on AI should be is a very open question. And a lot of people could start articulating some visions there that are more complicated than “beat China, full speed ahead.”
But at the same time, I’m also pretty sympathetic to “I’m mostly going to log off. This is not a good use of my energy.” The one thing I would say is that donating to candidates who are pro-business moderate Democrats has a huge impact on whether they win primaries. People see whether those candidates are getting support, and that influences their decision to run for office at all. If you mostly check out but you’re willing to occasionally write some checks, it’s a way of sending a signal that’s much stronger than your vote.
Jasmine Sun [00:38:43]: You’re saying that if one of these moderate pro-business Democrats ends up raising a lot of money, other Democrats will also pay attention to that and notice, “Oh, these are the ideas that get traction.”
Kelsey Piper [00:38:52]: Yeah. People pay a ton of attention to which candidates are having an easy time raising money and which candidates are overperforming in the polls, like running ahead of where a generic Democrat in their area would be expected to do. So if you see somebody you like, I think donating and supporting them has a disproportionate impact on moving the party in their direction.
Jasmine Sun [00:39:18]: I imagine that you also talk to some more libertarian friends who just are pretty pessimistic about the administrative state period, don’t really want to build any state capacity, are suspicious of “abundancey” ideas because they’re just like, “there’s no way that we can reform an institution that is this slow and bureaucratic and ineffective.”
You have a libertarian streak. How do you persuade people that our institutions are worth saving? Rather than “We just need to build alternatives and outcompete.”
Kelsey Piper [00:39:51]: If I saw some of these alternatives looking viable, I would be pretty excited about that. I’m going to be talking with Balaji about some of the network state stuff. Maybe he’ll persuade me. But where I’m at right now is that for the most important things states do, people don’t actually have a plan to replace them. People mostly don’t have a plan to replace the kind of capital outlay that the United States of America can do on something it has decided is important. They mostly don’t have a plan to do national defense. And I actually think national defense is really important.
I like micro-city, micro-nation projects. I like special economic zones. I don’t think that any of them will meaningfully increase my freedom. I just think that my personal ability to be safe everywhere I go, start a school without filling out an insane amount of paperwork, send my kids to whatever school I want them to go to, donate my money wherever I want to donate my money—the thing that actually most consequentially increases all of those freedoms is just a Democratic party that is more libertarian and more pro-business in a way that is achievable.
There are lots of popular ideas that I think go along with everything that you and I care about. Most Americans love capitalism. Most Americans love both Zohran Mamdani and capitalism.
Jasmine Sun [00:41:22]: Which is super funny. I keep thinking about the Zohran Mamdani halal cart ad. You’ve seen that one, right? It’s so good.
Kelsey Piper [00:41:30]: I take vehement issue with most of his worldview, or at least the worldview that he expressed a couple of years ago before he started running for office. But genuinely, keeping prices down and limiting permitting in New York City is a great policy platform. If somebody was running for that who didn’t have the history of saying pro-communist stuff, I would be their biggest fan and out there every day. And that stuff clearly resonates with people, and it resonates with people because it’s right and it’s important and it affects their day-to-day life.
Here in Oakland, it used to be that the big hack for getting lunch cheaply was that bagels were like two dollars. At some point in the last few years, bagels started costing the same as everything else you can get for lunch. Everything’s like ten dollars now. It makes me sad. I would be so excited about candidates who just did more to ask, “What are the cost drivers for our restaurants?” There’s this big faction on the left, the anti-monopoly people. A lot of their thing is, “We want small business.” Well, what is going to help small businesses? Easier permitting rules, making it easier to start a business, making it easier to run a coffee shop out of your house instead of having to run it out of a commercial facility. There’s a lot of stuff that simplifies the process of starting your own business, that simplifies the process of running a larger business, that reduces costs. And we can do that.
Jasmine Sun [00:43:03]: And again, it goes back to that thing of, can you raise opportunity for the bottom and for the small businesses, versus punishing the top and the big players that exist?
Kelsey Piper [00:43:15]: That’s the striking thing to me about the anti-monopoly movement is that they only seemed to see, “Oh, we can punish the big companies for being monopolies,” and not at all to think from the bottom up, “What are the barriers to someone who wants to start a business that competes with Google? What would that person benefit from to become a competitor to Google?” That is actually the far more productive lens.
Jasmine Sun [00:43:41]: The other thing I wanted to say about the halal cart ad is that I am sympathetic to many wonky, abundancy, permitting-reform people. And I think that they do a very bad job explaining it.
The thing that I loved about that ad is it was literally just, “Why is your chicken and rice now $10 instead of $8 dollars?”1 It turns out that there are all these rules and it costs this halal cart owner $20,000 just to get a permit for a cart for a year. And it made it so concrete because everyone knows what it means to have a $8 versus an $10 plate of chicken and rice. I don’t need people to endorse all of his policies wholesale, but that’s the same reason I like a lot of your explanations of what liberalism means to you—the whole, “I can start a micro-school. I can run a coffee shop out of my garage.” I don’t think people connect that much to abstract political principles. They connect to what their daily life looks like, what it looks like for their community, for their friends, what they can do. So I do want to see a lot more wonky abundancy types finding ways to communicate their vision to a broader public.
I was talking with
, for example. She wrote a post about four-dollar lunches in Japan recently, and how in a lot of the world, you can have extremely cheap, healthy, complete meals. And part of that is because it is much, much easier to run a tiny, tiny kitchen out of your home or out of a cart, out of a small stall. And the US just makes it so expensive. I was at the Asian Art Museum at a craft market thing, and there was a woman selling these gorgeous cookies. I was chatting with her and she told me that it took her nine months to get through all of the inspections and applications to just sell cookies at a farmer’s market every month. And it was just insane. I want to see more campaigns run on things like “four-dollar lunches.” A four-dollar lunch just feels like an amazing slogan for a Democratic campaign. And then the policy folks can figure out what exactly is needed to achieve that.Kelsey Piper [00:45:48]: I think a lot of Zohran’s political genius—which again, I can acknowledge while not agreeing with him, just like with Elon Musk—is that abundance tended to come from wonks who find very compelling arguments like, “This NBER analysis finds that this set of permitting changes reduced the rate of business openings in this community.” Normal voters are like, “I don’t know what you’re going on about. That doesn’t sound relevant to my life.” But, “Why is this thing more expensive than it used to be? Here’s why. I’ll change that rule. It will be cheap again.” “Four-dollar lunches”—those really resonate with people.
So when I say there’s room for a more libertarian, more pro-business Democratic party, I absolutely don’t mean that we will ever have a candidate who’s like, “I am a pro-business, more libertarian Democrat.” That will not win the vote. But we could have people who say, “Four-dollar lunches, two-dollar lattes. We can bring these to our cities now by changing these laws that make these things more expensive than they have to be.”
Jasmine Sun [00:46:44]: What are other slogans? I feel like you have a lot of ideas like this.
Kelsey Piper [00:46:50]: I am myself among the wonks who finds that this regression discontinuity is really compelling. But I think some other stuff in that space is “all of our cities can be clean and beautiful.” People hate new construction either way, but they hate it so much more when it’s ugly. I wouldn’t want to impose “beautiful” requirements on new construction since that joins one of the 300 requirements on new construction that makes it impossible. But I would be really excited about cities having a large budget that they can use to bribe developers to make things more beautiful, to directly make streets more beautiful, to enlist citizens in making streets more beautiful.
One thing along those lines that I’ve thought about forever is that suburbs look so much prettier if they have giant old-growth trees. There are two reasons they don’t. One is just they take a long time to grow. And the other is that insurance companies hate them passionately because they drop branches on roofs. And I was wondering, what are the limits of engineering trees to grow faster and also not drop branches on roofs? How hard have we tried this? Have we tried this a fraction as hard as we’ve tried having a slightly more marketable strawberry? Maybe we could have gorgeous, leafy, foresty suburbs and cities everywhere if we were strategic about what kind of trees we create. And again, that’s not itself a slogan. People are not as excited as I am about genetically engineering trees, but people are excited about their cities being beautiful.
Jasmine Sun [00:48:42]: Are there candidates or organizations that you think are doing a good job of communication?
Kelsey Piper [00:48:49]: I like the Welcome people, a group that is just running the polling and explaining to Democrats what things are popular and what things they need to stop doing. But I think it’s a lot easier to describe where the ideal candidate would be than to surface the ideal candidate. They might not exist. And I also think it’s good to know where the median voter is, but someone who is authentically kind of there is just a much better candidate than someone who’s like, “Yes, I have read all of the briefings and I understand that the correct immigration position is that we should enforce the border but expand legal immigration.”
Jasmine Sun [00:49:33]: People felt that way about Kamala. Even once she started changing her messaging to be more on-poll, no one actually believed it and she just couldn’t sell it.
Kelsey Piper [00:49:43]: Well, part of that was that she was on video from 2019 saying different things. But also part of it is that I just flatly don’t buy that a prosecutor from the Bay Area had any of the stances that she had. If she had been all along like, “Yeah, I think the Democratic Party’s wrong, I’m pretty tough on crime,” then I think not only would she have gotten the voters who are tough on crime, she would also have gotten all the voters who are like, “Oh, you have at least one principle. You are not just the product of the calculations of the Democratic Party.” You want someone whose attitude about border security is, “I care about border security. I want our rules to be fair and enforced.” You don’t want it to be someone who’s like, “Well, fine. You guys kept voting against us for not doing border security.” There’s no trust.
Zoomer nihilism and authoritarian envy
Jasmine Sun [00:50:33]: I think that’s all right.
One of the exercises I was excited to do with you is to do a quick LARP. One of the threats to liberalism I’m personally most concerned about is just what I call “zoomer nihilism.” When you look at the polling, when I have conversations with other people my age and younger, I think people are just extremely nihilistic about institutions and democracy and liberalism, period. And I find it very hard to communicate the value of these sorts of things in a way that seems concrete and convincing. So I want to reenact conversations I have had with Zoomers in the past few months, where I tell you the thing that someone told me and then you can try to persuade me.
Number one, I am an American-born female college student. I just went to do a summer program in Beijing. And one thing I noticed, even though I didn’t really know anything about Beijing before, was that it was so safe and so nice. When I walk around in US cities at night, it feels really dangerous. And as a woman, I do not like it. And in Beijing, there are street cameras everywhere, there are people outside, and it just feels super safe. I had some conversations with some of the Chinese students, and there definitely is censorship, and you definitely can’t access social media. So I’m aware of that cost. But in the end, people can still have conversations friend-to-friend that are pretty open. So I don’t know, is it that big of a deal? Why don’t we just increase the amount of surveillance and censorship in the US as well? I’m not really political, so I don’t really care.
Kelsey Piper [00:52:05]: I think there is a bit of a false tradeoff here. I don’t think you have to get at all more authoritarian to have safe streets and safe cities. You probably need more cameras in public areas, but the cameras in public areas don’t have to go with censorship. I don’t think that the reason China is safe is because it is more censorious. I think, in fact, tough-on-crime policies have historically existed in liberal democracies and can exist again.
So you don’t actually have to choose between a society where you’re free to say what you believe and a society where it’s safe to walk down the street at night. Don’t let anybody make you choose. You should get both of those things. One of the reasons they are both important is because something that people care about that they are not allowed to argue for, they probably won’t get in China. Now, it happens that the Chinese government does care about public safety, so that people get, even though people aren’t allowed to argue for it. But were it unsafe, you would not be allowed to say, “Being unsafe is a really big hit to my quality of life.” And because you wouldn’t be allowed to say that, you wouldn’t have people reverse course. So I think speech is really important and is specifically important for getting cities that are better.
But you might say, “Okay, but in practice, China’s cities are safer, right?” I think this is true. Crime was extremely high in America for a while because of leaded gasoline. There were probably a bunch of other contributors. We phased out leaded gasoline, some people aged out, and we had policed a lot more. Crime went down, and I think we got complacent. Nobody wants there to be tons of people in prison who made one bad mistake when they were young, so we reduced sentencing. That can be a good thing. But people definitely underestimated the costs of the amount of crime that is still the case in American cities. And we were like, “Well, it’s a lot better than it used to be.” It is a lot better than it used to be, and it is not good enough. As long as there are major areas of cities where a woman can’t walk alone at night listening to music and paying no attention to her surroundings and be safe, we have failed. This is an achievable level of crime reduction while giving everybody due process, while not monitoring people’s private communications.
You could just be relentless with sting operations. There’s occasional porch piracy in my area, and Amazon will refund you, so it’s really not a huge deal, but it makes me really angry because a police department that was well-funded could pretty much solve porch piracy by occasionally putting sting packages on people’s doorways and then tracing them when they got stolen and then arresting the people involved. There’s not a lot of porch pirates. It’s a small number of people. And if you arrest that small number of people and are very public about how you’re doing this, porch piracy ends, I think, pretty fast.
But I also think there are just a lot of options that are only mildly creative that we are not currently using. One thing I’m interested in is more prosecution for people who have past arrests. We will be less willing to drop charges, less willing to do a plea deal, less willing to negotiate if you have a lengthy criminal history. Because a lot of the people doing this stuff, they have been arrested 30 times already. They have a number of previous convictions. And I think it is genuinely important to me that our society offers second chances. It’s not that important to me that our society offer tenth chances. At some point, what we’re doing isn’t working. I want prisons to be humane. I want prisons to be safe. I think there’s a lot of violence in our prisons, and that’s also really bad. But you can’t just keep trying the same thing and expect a different result.
Jasmine Sun [00:55:49]: So it sounds like you’re saying there are targeted, specific ways we can fix public safety, fix policing, etc., that don’t require broad authoritarianism or censorship. Let’s chat about the censorship thing too.
So, as a pretty apolitical college student, I don’t post about politics anyway. I’m not telling my American government about things I care about because I don’t even think that stuff really does anything or works. I don’t really want to argue with people about politics on the internet. And what some Chinese students said is that China too is a democracy in a way, because the state makes decisions that benefit the broad public. For example, investing in transit infrastructure, clean energy, thinking in a long-term, broad-based way about what’s going to help the majority of the country in the long term. So why is it the case that the US is considered a democracy and China is not, if the Chinese government has much higher approval ratings? Even when you look at the most conservative polling, the CCP has like 70% approval ratings. So why not decide a democracy based on approval and what actually happens instead of by whether or not you run an election every few years?
Kelsey Piper [00:56:59]: Well, controlling the media makes it pretty easy to have high approval ratings, right? Inasmuch as there are serious problems, you can avoid people hearing about the serious problems unless they affect them personally or someone near them. Everything I know about crime in Oakland is because of accessing uncensored media where other people tell me things about crime in Oakland, and from going to my city portal, which has data totally available to the public. It is not just that I get to vote in elections. Because I get to vote in elections and because my government is supposed to be accountable to me, there’s all this information that is made available intentionally so that I can learn things that help me vote better. And if I didn’t have any of that information, it would be very easy to persuade me there had never been a crime in Oakland. Or there had been one; I saw one once. But you could easily convince me that was the only crime in Oakland if you controlled all of my access to media and could report whatever statistics you wanted.
China has had a number of dictators. Some of them have done a pretty good job at improving the well-being and wealth of the people of China. And I think the Chinese people are right to credit making them a lot richer as a really good and important thing. Some of them have also made some absolutely monstrous decisions that led to mass starvation, that led to millions of people’s lives being ruined over absolutely nothing. I don’t think that there is any process which reliably makes sure that the next dictator is going to do a good job at producing economic growth as opposed to starting a war that is enormously destructive or adopting policies that lead to famines or adopting Cultural Revolution policies.
And so I think it is genuinely valuable for people to have direct input in the form of “they will kick out the government if it is failing badly enough,” and not just input in the sense that the government values their approval. Because the government has a bunch of ways to get their approval, only some of which involve actually doing right by them. And if the government stops doing things that they approve of, they have many fewer ways to force it to reverse course. The Chinese government is somewhat responsive to people, right? I think a lot of the stuff they did around COVID once vaccines were available made people’s lives a lot worse needlessly. And eventually, there was enough anger about that that they reversed course. But people here reverse course a lot quicker because they were losing elections. You have a quicker feedback mechanism if the people in power have to care what you think instead of just hopefully caring what you think.
Jasmine Sun [00:59:43]: But I can think of issues where the way that issues polled has not corresponded with policy outcomes for quite a long time. So I might feel that no matter how much the majority of Americans want healthcare to be cheaper, want a higher minimum wage, or want the US to stop supplying arms to Israel, we have no say. So is the US really any better on that front?
Kelsey Piper [01:00:10]: I think it is easy to think of things that people have wanted for a long time and not gotten. But that’s because all of the ones that you do get kind of fade into the background. It is outrageous how long it takes to build a new bridge or whatever. But there are also lots of bridges you use all the time. They’re there and they work and they’ve been expanded, they’ve been made safer, they’ve been decongested. I think the list of things you want and haven’t gotten is actually pretty small compared to the things that you want and get in our society.
America is way, way richer than China, and I think this is in significant part because Americans consistently reward politicians who deliver economic growth and punish politicians who don’t deliver economic growth. America has areas where the cost of living is really, really low, that are still good places to live. My impression is that in China, there are cities that you really want to live in if you possibly can, and that people can’t all move to those cities because they’re not allowed to all move to those cities. Whereas in America, everybody, if you can afford to move somewhere, you can. I could move to New York City tomorrow if I wanted to. That’s not something I think about very much as an important freedom I have, but I would give up quite a lot to get it.
And similarly, America, for all of my complaining about our education system, has really good schools that are nonetheless mostly not miserable for kids, and has sports and activities that kids really love and are really motivated by. And we tend to top all kinds of international competition leaderboards, despite having a lot fewer people than China.
“Am I actually getting the things I want?” is always a good question to be asking, but make sure you’re also thinking about the things you want that you’ve had your entire life and just never had to think about getting because you get them automatically.
Improving the UX of government
Jasmine Sun [01:02:11]: Now I’m taking myself out of the role-play, but how do we make it clear when politicians deliver? The way I’ve thought about this is the “revolt of the public” problem, which is that it is more viral and more interesting and more compelling for the media and people to talk about institutions failing to deliver. That is what you hear about all the time, and that does distort our view of institutions. I feel a little bit stuck on this one. I don’t know how we tell those stories.
Kelsey Piper [01:02:44]: I worry about this a lot. Another example: people are very critical of the American healthcare system. It is very annoying to interact with the American healthcare system. It can unexpectedly cost a lot. It is also one of the world’s best healthcare systems in terms of its ability to deliver excellent health outcomes for people. For most types of aggressive cancer, the United States of America is the best place to be. For a premature baby, an extremely premature baby, you would rather be in either the United States or in a tiny handful of small European countries. For drug development, a lot of that is happening because of work in America.
But people hate the healthcare system because you probably don’t have a rare aggressive cancer. You probably don’t have a premature baby who needs a lot of extra care. You probably do go to your doctor and they refer you to a specialist and the specialist is out of network and it’s a giant hassle. So there’s a lot of stuff where I would overall totally go to bat for the American system as a superior system to most other possible systems. A lot of people are just like, “The European healthcare system is across the board better.” I’m like, “It has a better customer service experience. That matters a lot, but it’s not the only thing that matters.”
Jasmine Sun [01:03:57]: How do politicians make that salient to us? I didn’t realize our prenatal care was so good. And I feel like I’m reasonably media literate, and I too feel that everything is much worse than it is because I log on and I look at the news.
Kelsey Piper [01:04:15]: And none of the news is ever that now we can save babies at 23 weeks, which is halfway through pregnancy.
Jasmine Sun [01:04:23]: And even if people publish that, journalists don’t have an incentive to, because nobody will read it. It’s kind of boring.
Kelsey Piper [01:04:29]: You don’t argue about it. And you certainly don’t have it form a deep part of your worldview the way that going to the doctor and having it be an enormous hassle does.
So I do think that part of this is, we’ve got to think of the customer service element when we’re designing policies. Since that is most people’s actual contact with the system. This came up with Obamacare. The wonks were trying to achieve a bunch of competing objectives. Some of them they achieved quite well. Some of them they didn’t achieve as well as they hoped. But one of the biggest things that went wrong was the customer service experience of Obamacare was a disaster at first because they didn’t have a good team to build the website.
And I think if American healthcare had a large product team whose job was just to keep track of America’s healthcare quality compared to everybody else’s healthcare quality along a lot of different categories, and one of those categories was “you’re just a random person trying to go to the doctor, how much of a hassle is it?”, then we would rapidly find a bunch of ways to reduce hassle because that has just not been the policy priority. The policy priority is usually stuff that matters a lot, like bringing down costs. But because we’re such a rich country, I honestly think customer experience matters as much as bringing down costs.
Jasmine Sun [01:05:46]: This also feels like a theme in this conversation. Like how much your lunch costs, are the streets nice when you walk outside? There are all these tiny little touchpoints that you have with the government. And there’s a reason that when Americans go to China, they just take this train and they go outside and they’re like, “This rocks.” And then they go home after a week and there is maybe a broad inattention to the customer service experience of government.
Kelsey Piper [01:06:12]: I think there absolutely is, and customer experience is a big part of people’s buy-in to their society. I think it is importantly true that there’s a lot of stuff the American healthcare system does well, but also it is important that one of the things your healthcare system delivers is not being an enormous stressful headache, even if it’s delivering comparatively good health outcomes. Some people are going to say in the comments, “Doesn’t America have worse health outcomes than Europe?” This is true, but it is because we have more guns, we drive faster, we make worse lifestyle choices. If you look at stuff that hospitals actually control, we do a lot better. Just because I was thinking people are going to ask about why we’re doing worse than Europe, and the answer is we make worse choices than Europe, and then our better medical system tries to make up the difference. But you’ve got to get the customer service stuff right in addition to getting the fundamentals right.
Some of this you can fix with fun, wonky stuff. I recently heard from Matt Yglesias, I think, that our airports are not as nice as airports in China or airports in a lot of places. You don’t walk in and you’re not awed by how gorgeous this airport is. And people love being awed by how gorgeous the airport is or how gorgeous a train station is. One of my defining experiences of some cities is the moment of getting in, seeing the train station and going, “Ah, humanity is good and great.” I don’t think there’s an airport in America that says, “This is a civilization that has been to the moon.” Anyway, the reason that there isn’t is that airport upgrades are funded by a specific per-passenger fee. That per-passenger fee was fixed in nominal terms by Congress, and now inflation has gone up. So the effective per-passenger fee for upgrades to the airport is like half of what it used to be. So the airports have less money for upgrades. You could literally just tie the per-passenger fee to inflation, and then they would have more money for upgrades. All our airports would look nicer.
A lot of things are more hard to fix than that. Our construction costs are really high. You’re not going to have tons of incredible, awe-inspiring buildings if your bus stops are insanely expensive to build, even if they’re very basic. You kind of have to get good at building stuff to have the experience of walking down the street and everything looking nice. That is part of why I’m so stressed about Trump crushing our manufacturing, and we need immigration to help with lower construction costs and stuff like that. But I also think, for stuff like healthcare, I just don’t think people have put as much thought into the customer experience side as they’ve put into a bunch of other things. So it seems like there’s low-hanging fruit.
Or the DMV. We revamped the DMV recently. The TSA is actually, I would argue, grounds for hope. The TSA got wildly more bearable and futuristic and pleasant to go through over the last five years.
Jasmine Sun [01:09:12]: Yeah, it’s not that bad. I rarely have long waits.
Kelsey Piper [01:09:15]: I still have the memory of when it used to sometimes be you have to get to the airport and account for maybe 45 minutes in the line. That basically never happens. You don’t have to take off your shoes anymore. They’ve got that new thing where you don’t even have to show your ID because it scans your face. And I know some people are nervous about that. That’s the kind of thing where I’m like, they already had the ability to tell whether I’d purchased a plane ticket. They can scan my face. That’s not one of the fights I’ll pick. So I think just thinking about beautiful airports that you walk into and the face scanner immediately identifies you as cleared for security, which you walk straight through and you have cheap, plentiful food and goodies—that is mostly a user experience thing. It’s mostly not a “we don’t know how to build anymore” thing. We can make it happen.
I think you’re right that fundamentally, a lot of people are skeptical of democracy if their day-to-day experience of living in a democracy kind of sucks. They’re like, “Well, what are we doing all this for?”
Jasmine Sun [01:10:20]: I was in China recently for a few weeks and you go there and you feel, at least I felt, in awe of this consumer paradise. And then I have to purposely make sure I read a bunch of stuff to bring myself back down to reality about what the actual experience of China is. But almost anyone who goes to a tier-one city like Shanghai, you experience cleanliness, you experience convenience, you experience that everything is cheap. And it’s not only cheap because of purchasing power. It’s also cheap because you can literally buy a full meal for what is to a Chinese person also very cheap. Things are awe-inspiring. The high-speed rail is fast and nice and clean. But also it boards starting 10 minutes before departure and it departs on time. Both of those things happen every single time. There are so many people on the train, it’s a logistical feat. When your WeChat is working, everything is so easy.
Yes, on one hand, American liberals can look at China and say, “Well, that’s just surface-level stuff. And the fundamentals are actually very different.” And I think that’s true. But also, I wish America invested more in the surface-level customer experience stuff. Because again, most people’s touchpoints with government are fairly limited and you just have a kind of annoying experience with healthcare and permitting and you’re like, “Okay, fuck this. I’m out.”
Kelsey Piper [01:11:45]: Or like reporting a crime. I feel like people have just experienced a crime. They’re really stressed out. They want the process to be easy. They want to feel like their problem is being taken seriously. They want to see that the system is working to solve what happened and it’s not just going into a file where it never gets looked at again. Obviously, crime is a substantive problem as well as a UX problem. But I do think a bunch of it is a UX problem in that I think if the experience of reporting a crime felt a lot more empowering and useful and you could see it move through the system and see, “This is the person working on your case. We have run the video,”...
Jasmine Sun [01:12:28]: I’m imagining the Uber Eats app telling you “Cooking,” “On their way,” and they text you every time there’s an update.
Kelsey Piper [01:12:35]: It really feels like one of the big things that a society can now do, which was impossible until a little while ago, is UX. And doing that just makes people’s lives a lot easier. It makes it a lot easier to see what the government is doing for you.
I would also be a fan of sending people a breakdown of their tax bills. This will probably never happen and would be incredibly politically contested if it did. But I would be a fan of something that was like, “Here are how many kids you saved with the part of your tax bill that went to foreign aid,” which is like one-thousandth of it. “Here’s how much you paid for some retirees, you paid for some schools, you paid for the military. And here are some new cool things that each of these departments did this year and here’s how we changed how we spent your taxes compared to last year.” Obviously, this would be controversial. I think that when people learn how much of your taxes are paying down interest on the national debt and paying for Social Security and Medicare, then people will be less enthusiastic about paying their taxes. But I would be pretty excited about just a more accountable and transparent state that’s more like, “Here’s what we’re doing and we will actively make the case for what we’re doing. And also you can change what we’re doing.”
Jasmine Sun [01:14:00]: The open data stuff suffers from UX problems where a lot of American cities have actually gotten quite good in the last 15 or so years at sharing data and putting it on the internet in places where you can download big CSV files and, if you so desire, analyze a bunch of it. But the interfaces are all really bad for everyone except the hobbyist wonks who really care about that stuff.
Clara and I were talking about how we wish SF had a really user-friendly city dashboard that looked bright and fun and was easy to make sense of. And we have the data to do it. We also now have LLMs that make it much easier to ask questions about the data, parse the data, turn it into graphics that are interactive. But again, because the data is mostly just in hard-to-access places, I don’t think as much use is being made of it as I wish there was. And so there’s a lot there that I think could be done also to help better understand, “What did my last mayor do for me?” If I care about pollution, homelessness, and whatever, you pick your areas and you can just get a little report card and see how you’ve been doing. And that can help tell you, “Do I want to reelect the person who is currently in office or do I want to do something else?” Relative to most Abundance types, I’m a much bigger believer in perception and narrative and the importance of getting comms and aesthetics and vibes right.
Kelsey Piper [01:15:21]: Especially for local politicians, there often isn’t very much accountability for what they’re delivering because in a small town, how many people are going to make it their full-time job to deliver that accountability? I frequently use publicly accessible datasets to get an understanding of what’s going on in my city. I have found ChatGPT an enormous asset in this because it can tell me which is the dataset that is going to be most likely to answer the question that I have. It seems like you could probably expand this and have an AI assistant at the mayor’s office or whatever and you can just ask it questions in plain language and it gets the answers for you and presents them to you with a visualization without the step where you are inputting a request and then getting a CSV and then running a bunch of analyses on it. Because even that step is obviously losing a ton of people. So I think there’s some potential now to make more people benefit from the open access data that most American cities have.
AI and democratic institutions
Jasmine Sun [01:16:46]: We don’t have a ton of time to go too deep, but I’m curious how you’re thinking about AI and democratic institutions. It might be helpful to give a one- to two-sentence summary of your broad beliefs about where AI progress will go, then which risks or impacts you rate the most highly or are thinking about the most.
Kelsey Piper [01:17:09]: If, using our current strategies for getting the AIs to do what we want, we actually built something that was super intelligent—like individually capable of acting in the world while being smarter than us—that probably would be catastrophic. I’m not full doomer, but mostly because I think that we are not actually close to that. I don’t want humanity to be replaced by something else. I don’t think it’s a great plan to just build something and not see whether it’s something that we get along with and then be like, “It’ll probably work out.”
There’s so much we haven’t unlocked that doesn’t require building a bigger, better model. It just requires getting better at getting the behavior we want from the models. I feel like every day I discover, “Oh, if I ask this question in this way instead, or if I let it know about this rule, I get better results.” I was talking to someone the other day, I was explaining that I use it to mod video games sometimes. And they were like, “How many tries do you have to do?” And I was like, “Oh, I just tell the AI that I hate having to do anything twice so it can think for as long as it wants, but once it gives me an answer, it had better work on the first try.” And they were like, “That works?” I was like, “Yeah. It seems to, so far.” We have barely scratched the surface of these things, and there’s so much there.
I think we are going to have a ton of displacement and unemployment. I think companies are much more reluctant to hire junior software engineers, not just because you can do a junior software engineer’s job with AI, but also because they expect that by the time those junior software engineers become senior software engineers, we will be able to do a senior software engineer’s job with AI. And I don’t think that’s a wrong expectation. I think it’s insanely disruptive.
Similarly, journalism is kind of dying. And I think the environment on social media and on almost all forms of communication is being intentionally and deliberately shaped by people who are willing to run huge bot networks or whatever, and away from real conversations with the fellow people who we need to compromise with and need to win over to make democratic governance work. At this point, I would be excited about a social media platform that differentiated Americans and non-Americans, not because I don’t think there’s a ton to learn from people everywhere else in the world, but because sometimes the conversation I’m trying to have is, “What compromises should our politicians be making with their constituents? What policies should we be adopting?” It is frustrating to have a lengthy conversation and then it turns out you are talking to someone who is in Russia or is in Iran or is in India or Pakistan and engagement farming for Elon Bucks or whatever. A lot of people’s understanding of who they have to compromise with and who they are even talking to has gotten really skewed, and that makes me pretty nervous.
And then, the video slop—I don’t think it’s going to end our civilization, but I don’t feel a lot of enthusiasm for it.
Jasmine Sun [01:20:13]: I want to talk a little bit about some of the short- to medium-term stuff, like economic displacement. I listened to a couple of your podcasts that you’ve done about this recently and have been trying to make sense of the labor impacts myself. I go back and forth on it because it’s hard to see and the economic data is confusing. Sometimes I’m like, “Oh, well I think the AI is probably more of a complement than a substitute because it can only do 50% of all the tasks in a role.” But the thing that I am worried about is I think even fairly small amounts of job loss can have pretty dramatic political effects.
Kelsey Piper [01:20:49]: I think that smallish amounts of job loss can have outsized political impacts if those people have a very hard time finding new jobs, which is going to be true if their entire skillset is now replaceable. And if it’s a job that people were promised was a good job and you would get to keep it, I think that that’s going to be a shockwave and it’s going to happen.
Jasmine Sun [01:21:13]: Whenever I ask my friends in AI “What do you think we should do about the economic displacement you think will certainly happen?” I basically have not heard a single idea that I feel, or they feel, genuinely optimistic about. You wrote a recent post, it’s not about AI, but saying, “Giving people money helped less than I thought it would.” And it was about cash transfer programs. You’ve also talked about AI-induced job displacement. For a long time, I think everyone in Silicon Valley was like, “Yeah, we’ll just do UBI.” And now we have no plan for either how to make something like UBI or much larger cash transfers than we’ve tried politically feasible, nor is it clear that those would actually improve people’s lives that much. So I just haven’t heard any other ideas. Have you heard any ideas?
Kelsey Piper [01:22:08]: To be clear, I think you could have UBI as part of such a program. Giving poor people cash transfers does not solve very many of the problems associated with poverty—problems that I think we hoped were caused by poverty in a straightforward way, where if you were a little bit less poor, they wouldn’t happen. They don’t improve your health outcomes all that much, except in rare cases. They don’t make people much less stressed or much more able to lead the kinds of lives they want to live. So that’s kind of disappointing. But they don’t do nothing.
And that’s very different from what you would be dealing with if you had mass layoffs. What’s going on with poverty is partly that in our society, being poor is generally a consequence of having some other problems and you will still have those other problems if you’re a bit less poor. That assumption might be why we’re not seeing bigger impacts from cash transfers. And if suddenly a lot of people are poor just because AI took their jobs, then they don’t have some other problem. They just have the problem that they don’t have a job anymore.
I was also talking to someone the other day who was like, “Clearly what we need to do is a three- or four-day work week and an aggressive transition to that.” So instead of laying off 20-40% of your staff, you cut everybody’s hours back. If we could coordinate that somehow as a society, that seems massively better than a ton of people suddenly being unemployed. Now, companies won’t want to do this. If you’re a company, keeping some people full-time and jettisoning whoever’s weaker or not in as much of a good position is a lot more appealing. So a lot of this depends on who has the bargaining power. And AI does not increase worker bargaining power. But I do think that it would be good if we became a society where everybody had more leisure time as a consequence of productivity increases, instead of a society where more people have no jobs and other people are working longer hours because they have less bargaining power and are very scared of losing their jobs. So that is a case where I’m like, “Man, I wish we had a better coordination mechanism to try doing this in the way that’s gentler and distributes the costs more.”
I am excited about giving people more opportunity for jobs in the physical world. This is part of my interest in reducing permitting and starting small businesses and making our cities beautiful. All of those things require work in the real world that AIs aren’t good at. So if we have fewer people in office jobs but we have a lot of wealth, then it seems like we might be able to invest more in other things that are really important.
Jasmine Sun [01:24:58]: I think my equivalent here is service-y, emotional labor jobs. Can we have very small student-teacher ratios or something? I feel like increasing the way that we value service and social work—whether teachers, social workers, nurses—having them focus more on the relational, emotional stuff. Because what often is bad about, for example, education or social work is that these workers are so overloaded with the sheer number of people they have to deal with that it becomes a much more disciplinary and not very fruitful relationship. And if those ratios were much smaller because we just took a bunch of people from doing secretarial Excel work, and some of them got really excited about being teachers and they were compensated well, that feels pretty exciting.
Kelsey Piper [01:25:58]: It’s not like there won’t be work to do. It’s a question of whether we manage distribution so that people feel like they have meaningful stuff to do, and doing that stuff meaningfully impacts their lives, as opposed to a world where we cut people a check and we don’t give them any avenues, and then they don’t do great.
Jasmine Sun [01:26:20]: The other thing that you mentioned was our online epistemic environment. You’ve called yourself a free speech absolutist. You’re very skeptical of any sort of policy interventions in what kind of speech is allowed to spread on platforms. I’m curious if the fact that there are so many distortions in the online media environment right now affects your stance on that at all. It is going to be just super, super cheap for any bad actor, domestic or foreign, to generate tons of online content and to change the information environment in an unanticipated way, so that it’s not really a normal public square anymore. Does any of that make you more interested in regulation?
Kelsey Piper [01:26:59]: I do think that it scares me and I think the platforms should be thinking about what they’re going to do. I like Community Notes and I like the massive expansion of stuff in that direction. They recently introduced an AI that writes community notes. I’d be excited about them just running a predictor that, based on the contents of the post, the contents of the note, and the first 10 votes, guesses and jumps ahead to the step where the note goes up.
Similarly, I’m really mad at Facebook. I feel like they’ve just embraced being the platform of slop. They are just, “We’re just going to shove slop in people’s faces and benefit from some people being confused and thinking it’s real.” I just think that this needs to be addressed either by civil society—by people saying, “This is bad. I’m angry at Facebook, I’m going to delete my Facebook, I’m going to boycott Facebook, I’m going to shame my friends who work at Facebook”—or through content-neutral laws. I think it would be fine for the government to require that companies indicate what country the person making a post is from. That’s not censoring content. That’s a little bit of information that might affect how you choose to engage with the content. I think it is fine for them to require labeling of AI content.
And I’m in favor of companies changing their amplification strategies for the common good. If you are a company, one of your obligations at this point is to ensure that our society is a healthy and functional society. I think if you control Twitter, one of the things you should be doing is trying to make Twitter a healthy ecosystem, not by doing tons of censorship, but by ensuring that the “For You” page is not maximally, perfectly designed to show everybody content that will make them absolutely furious.
Jasmine Sun [01:28:44]: Is there an incentive for this though? I also tend to be relatively skeptical of governments telling platforms what they should do. I certainly don’t think our current government is going to push any of this in a good direction. But lots of people are very unhappy with the way that Twitter is being run, have been very vocal about how much they hate it and how much they want to decrease the amount of bots and harassment. And Elon clearly doesn’t care. So you seem quite optimistic about paths that I’m not sure are proving out.
Kelsey Piper [01:29:13]: I don’t think they’re guaranteed to prove out.
I think it is easy to compare the ideal form of government censorship to the actual form of private pressure. Neither the actual form of government censorship nor the actual form of private pressure is doing very much that’s encouraging. But getting it wrong with private pressure is easier to come back from. And I think a lot of these problems have been kicked down the street a little bit and they’re going to become harder to avoid as the AI stuff really takes over. So companies that aren’t thinking about this now will be forced to think about this pretty soon.
The Argument’s theory of change
Jasmine Sun [01:30:03]: I want to end with a last set of questions about writing and journalism and your career. This is partly selfish, as I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing as a writer. Presumably, some listeners may be in a similar spot.
One, do you have a personal theory of change? And through that lens, can you tell me why you decided to join
?Kelsey Piper [01:30:26]: My theory of change is that right now, one of our society’s two major political parties is a personalist cult around Donald Trump. And the other one is a floundering mix of establishment Dems, who don’t even know what they’re selling except that it’s not Trump; socialist Dems, who have a sincere conviction that something is very broken in our society that deserves but are wrong about the answer; and wonky technocrats who have a bunch of good ideas that they’re just totally unable to connect with what the American people care about.
That feels to me like a very unusual, out-of-equilibrium situation into which it is particularly valuable to try and have a vision for what all of these people want. And I don’t know exactly how to do any of that, but it seems to me like it really needs to be done. It seems like there are way too few people doing it. And in fact, writing a blog not only can change the world, it’s usually the thing that does.
So my hope for The Argument is that it will be fun to read because we are arguing with each other about all of these questions, and that from that, some stuff will emerge that people feel authentic enthusiasm about as a positive vision for our country and not just a “stop Trump” vision for our country—though we also need to stop Trump.
Then the other part of it is just, I think the next couple of decades are very high stakes. I think they’re very high stakes for the principle that people should be free to live their own lives however they want. I think they’re very high stakes for the principle that we can and should build things, but they should be real things and not just maximize numbers that may or may not have anything to do with human flourishing. I think they will be a really big deal for the idea that all men are created equal and that everybody should have a good shot at a good life. So even though I would prefer not to be on the websites that make everybody miserable and spending all my time on a topic that makes everybody crazy, I think the work to be done right now is of unusual importance.
Jasmine Sun [01:32:41]: So you did join explicitly as a reaction to Trump Two, and how bad it is?
Kelsey Piper [01:32:46]: Yes. I think if Trump Two had only been as bad as Trump One, maybe I would’ve joined, but I would not have felt this urgency around “the most important work to do right now is to have an alternative to Donald Trump that is a good direction to take our country in,” instead of Trump-but-from-the-left, or continuing to lose.
Jasmine Sun [01:33:14]: What do you think you guys are trying to do differently than more wonky technocrats who can’t connect? A lot of the authors—who I love and respect as writers and thinkers—are wonky technocrats.
Kelsey Piper [01:33:26]: A hundred percent. So this is
’s genius. I had no solution to this. I was like, “Well, I’m a wonky technocrat. I will keep being wonky and technocratic and hope it works.” And Jerusalem was like, “The thing that our side has is lots of highly verbal, very witty people who don’t like each other and have been politely not talking about it.” And do you know what people actually love? People love to read people fighting.The liberal tradition is the tradition of people sneering at each other, sometimes in incredibly British ways, sometimes in incredibly French ways, sometimes in incredibly American ways. But it is a tradition of arguing, and arguments are fun. We can’t win the war for attention by having the most outrage videos of murders. We can’t win in that arena. We can absolutely win in the arena of “People like to see people fight it out.” They like to read through my free speech absolutism argument with my coworker and go, “I’m on this side, or I’m on this side.”
Jasmine Sun [01:34:25]: And you think this won’t fracture people more? Some people would argue that the left is too fractured and you don’t want to reveal all these fissures. You got to be like MAGA: a single vision.
Kelsey Piper [01:34:36]: So the left is super fractured, and this is in some ways really harmful for our ability to win elections. But I don’t think papering it over was working.
One account you could give of what went wrong with the Democratic party is that the very strong showing Sanders had in 2016 scared the establishment a lot. I think most of the stuff Sanders wanted would not have worked, but I still wish he had won because the establishment was a mess and needed to lose. And I would rather have had somebody who had bad ideas than have an effort to double down from people who weren’t really where the electorate was at all. Anyway, the establishment interpreted it as a lot of appetite for socialism when there is not actually a lot of appetite for socialism. There’s a lot of appetite for “not the Democratic establishment.” But they moved left, they adopted a bunch of the identitarian woke stuff. And I don’t think everything in that package was bad, but I think a lot of it was. And then you had this farther-left party. This did not satisfy the socialists at all. It alienated a lot of people who would happily have voted for a less-left Democratic party. And then other stuff went wrong, from COVID to, I do think a big influence on 2024 was Gaza, where the Democratic party just seemed like it had no convictions or where it did have convictions, it wasn’t interested in explaining or persuading anybody.
So we tried papering over, and at some point, papering over isn’t working. If we’re willing to argue with each other, then we can get somewhere. And sometimes something resonates unexpectedly. A lot of my recent education posting has resonated. And if you’re trying to paper over, you don’t have the openness and willingness to engage that lets you discover the stuff that does resonate. I expect to win, optimistically, half of the battles that I pick on the future of the Democratic Party. But I think everybody will be stronger for having fought some of this stuff out. And frankly, it’s hard for stuff to get worse. The Democratic party is always going to get the votes of the people who don’t like how Trump is burning our country down. And there’s a lot of those people. But to be competitive in conservative states, the Democratic party needs to majorly change. And I haven’t seen anybody with a route to changing it. So it feels like there’s not a lot of downside. You’re not going to alienate the people who are just voting against Donald Trump wrecking our country. And you might actually win over some people that we have not yet won over, who we really need to win over.
Jasmine Sun [01:37:31]: There’s a way in which arguments are honest. One of the core problems with the Democratic Party is that it feels like a profoundly dishonest party where a small group of people decide what the party line is, don’t really talk about it, pretend they all agree with each other, and pretend that that is in fact the will of the people. And anyone who says otherwise is crazy. And maybe insofar as the Democrats just have an honesty problem and that hurts their credibility, just having more out-in-the-open true pluralism, different people saying their honest views and fighting it out, might be temporarily a good thing. And then, a few of those ideas will rise to the top and a good agenda might come somewhere from there.
Whereas I think for the past while, we haven’t even really gotten to test ideas like Bernie’s because he was never allowed to win. A lot of people feel cheated. They were like, “Okay, you might think socialism is bad, but you should let him try socialism and see.” And I think that Zohran Mamdani deserves to win. I think that he should run his grocery pilot. It would be far, far worse to have Cuomo or Adams or the Democratic establishment suppress that.
Kelsey Piper [01:38:43]: I don’t think that Zohran’s ideas are very good. If he is a good mayor, I think it will mostly be because he changes his mind, and he does seem like a smart guy. But I think he is going to be the next mayor of New York City, and I will criticize him where he seems like he’s doing a bad job and then cheer on the things he does that seem good. And ultimately, if socialism is bad, it is bad because it has bad consequences. And we’ll see the consequences and we’ll say, “See, that’s why you shouldn’t have done government-run grocery stores.” If it looks like you’re scared of them, then people are going to think you are.
Jasmine Sun [01:39:19]: I think that is how socialists feel. It’s like, “Oh, you guys don’t even want to try. What are you hiding from us?”
Kelsey Piper [01:39:25]: I think that if Sanders had won the Democratic primary, he would probably have lost the general because the voters really don’t like socialism. I think if he had won the general, he would probably have been a really unpopular president. But I think any of those would’ve been a better outcome than a ton of people just going, “Well, the system is rigged. Why are we even trying?” If you lose because people don’t believe your ideas, that feels a lot better than if you lose because people manage to coordinate to prevent you from getting to make your case. And I think you can say, “Well, it was a bit more complicated in 2016,” but I think that in a healthier party, you have more arguments. Not all possible arguments are unifying, but openness to argument is ultimately the only thing that’ll work.
Jasmine Sun [01:40:02]: How do you create an environment—and it might just be selection—where people are comfortable disagreeing with each other? Most people have a very low tolerance for disagreement and it feels really scary.
Kelsey Piper [01:40:18]: Some of it is definitely selection. Some of it is setting the tone early. The very first “Mad Libs” The Argument ran was between me and Matt Bruenig, and it was kind of mean in tone, honestly. Some people were like, “Kelsey, what?” And maybe we should have toned it down a bit more. But I think there’s something about, “Okay, if that is in-bounds, then the thing I wanted to say is definitely in-bounds.” Just being like, “Yeah, there’s a line and it’s way over there.”
The other part is having an articulation of why argument is good. For a while, the norm was, “You don’t disagree under the same masthead.” I don’t think it was catastrophic in itself, but then it evolved to, “Don’t fight under the same masthead, except if you are all ganging up on one or two people in the company who you really disagree with,” like when the New York Times staff kind of revolted about the Tom Cotton editorial. So once we opened that can of worms, I think the best evolution was towards, “Yeah, we’re going to fight. We’re going to get out there and we’re going to argue with each other.”
Jasmine Sun [01:41:43]: One of my first reactions to The Argument‘s launch was, “Aren’t Kelsey and Jerusalem both ex-competitive debaters?” I don’t know where this tidbit in my head came from. I have no clue why I think or know this. One, is it true, and two, how do you think this shapes your view on arguments?
Kelsey Piper [01:42:12]: It is absolutely true. And certainly the kinds of people who become competitive debaters in high school and the kinds of people who decide as adults they should change the world by arguing—causal inference is hard, but the correlation is certainly high.
We live in a society where ideas are weirdly rare considering how cheap cognition is. I write a lot of things that it seems to me like anybody could have written but didn’t. I got back on Twitter because I sent a couple of tweets that did incredibly well and people were like, “Oh, this is really important.” And I was like, “It feels like whether or not I was here, that should have gotten said.” But that didn’t happen. There’s just so much that only gets said if you say it. The world is weirdly small. There’s probably a ton of things where you are the only person who sees things the way you see them. And if you aren’t going to stand up and fight for them, no one will.
Jasmine Sun [01:43:18]: I think that’s true. The last question I was going to ask was, what kind of person would you advise to pursue writing or journalism or posting as a career?
Kelsey Piper [01:43:30]: Generally, I think if there’s stuff that you would say that isn’t being said and you don’t think you’re going to take sanity damage from participating in our political environment, it is actively good for you to do so. If you think it will make you into a crazy, miserable, worse version of yourself who is distracted from all of the work you were doing to actually build things, then don’t do it. Occasionally read some good articles about where to donate and call up your representatives and leave it at that.
But if you’ve got things to say and you don’t think it’ll drive you completely insane to participate in our political conversation, those things probably won’t get said unless you say them. And if you’re not very good at writing, it has gotten easier. Don’t just have the AIs write it for you. The act of writing is the act of thinking. You’ve got to write a draft yourself. But they are very powerful tools for having an editor. They are very, very helpful for “what is the best counterargument to this thing I’m saying,” or fact-checking, or “what are some tests I should run to see if I’m right about this?” So it is easier in some ways to check your work and polish your work up to a higher quality level. And you should realize that the only way for it to be said, and therefore the only way for it to be in the corpus that these AIs are all drinking up and forming the next generation of our world, is if you say it.
Jasmine Sun [01:45:01]: I already knew that it was important to write and I wrote casually before, but I have still been surprised how small the world is, how often you can be the first person or the best person on a particular topic without much effort. You got to put some effort into it, like a week of dedicated effort or something, but not impossible at all. And then also you get lots of social rewards, like getting to meet other really smart people interested in your area. There just literally aren’t that many good posts in the world, despite all the number of posts in the world.
Kelsey Piper [01:45:34]: This has been one of the biggest repeat realizations of my adult life, that most things won’t get done unless you do them. It’s not fair. The world is just much less zero-sum than I imagined, and you’re much less replaceable. This is really empowering in a lot of ways, but it’s also kind of frustrating sometimes. It’s like, “Oh, it would be nice if somebody else was on this, then I wouldn’t have to be.”
Jasmine Sun [01:46:00]: Where can people find your work if they want to read more of your writing or thoughts?
Kelsey Piper [01:46:08]:
is on Substack or at theargumentmag.com. I am on Twitter at @KelseyTuoc. I am not anywhere else at this time. Occasionally I hear what they’re saying about me on Bluesky and it’s never good. So I haven’t been motivated to get an account.Jasmine Sun [01:46:28]: That’s very fair. Amazing. Thanks so much for spending a couple of hours with me. This has been really fun, and also cathartic to have a conversation about national politics in a city and a place where people are not as concerned about it as I wish they were and think they should be.
Kelsey Piper [01:46:47]: Likewise. And I’m really grateful for all the thought you put into these questions. So thanks so much.
Jasmine Sun [01:46:53]: Cool. Thank you, everyone, for listening. If you liked this conversation, you can share it with a friend. If you have arguments with Kelsey or me, you can put them in the comments. We cannot promise a response, but you are free to exercise your right to speech.
Thanks for reading and listening,
Jasmine
I said $7 and $8 in the podcast, but this was wrong when I looked up the ad later, so the transcript is corrected.
