Podcasting and the Fragile Public Discourse - Tiger Interviewed by Rob Johnson
The following is written by Tiger Gao and originally published on tigergao.substack.com:
I recently received my first ever podcast interview as a guest on the Economics & Beyond podcast hosted by Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). This is certainly a great honor for me, as Rob’s guests typically range from Nobel Laureates to accomplished public intellectuals. And now he’s got Tiger Gao…
We talked for 3.5 hours, and the interview is being published in two parts, with this first half being Rob interviewing Tiger on podcasting and social discourse, and the second half being Tiger interviewing Rob on the future of economics and his work at INET.
Here are some of the main themes that we discussed in part 1:
My own “elite education” experience
In my traditional path of “elite education” (first attending a private boarding school then Princeton), I didn’t find the kind of exciting intellectual fulfillment that I was looking for, which compelled me to forge my own path and build my own ecosystem – hence the genesis of Policy Punchline
The dangerous intellectual thought bubble that Princeton students (and elites in general) could be in; how they may often have a sense of moral righteousness and lack of self-awareness that are preventing them from empathizing with the dilemmas and mindsets of most Americans
Huge “mindset” opportunity cost of the highly educated: they are more incentivized to pursue what is seen as sexy by peers (like trying to become “Forbes 30 under 30”) rather than working on urgent problems for the world. There’s a deep naïveté and lack of nuanced understanding for the complexity of the world’s problems – people opt for catch-all solutions and scalability before nuance and net-positive impacts
Decline of “elite education” in general: elites don’t have skin in the game anymore; back in 1940s an entire class in my boarding school enlisted to fight in WWII – that would be unthinkable today; they make decisions increasingly detached from the realities other than their own
Podcasting vs. legacy & social media
Podcasts are open-protocol, just like email or blogs. You put it on an RSS feed, and any app can receive that feed. It’s not published onto a specific system, and it’s not controlled by any aggregator like Facebook or Instagram. The platforms can only censor on their medium, but you cannot stop the feed. This allows podcasts to be incredibly intellectually diverse
Our common information delivery systems are all short and sweet: mainstream news; Twitter – all these paint disingenuous representation of people’s arguments
It’s easy to package narrative into something short and sweet. In long form podcasts, we can sniff out the BS much better just by being able to prod things and see people logical processes
Our cultural, social, political discourses are very fragile these days. I see long-form podcasting as almost the last line of defense. The point of podcasting is a mutual coming to truths, and not just you giving me your platform for my opinions…
Differences between long-form podcast vs. Clubhouse (not a big fan) vs. Substack (a huge fan, as shown by me writing this piece on Substack right now)
The Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) and counter-narrative podcasting
IDW and its associated voices: Eric Weinstein, Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, Sam Harris, Tim Dillon – what I consider to be one of the most dominant “counter-narrative” cultural phenomenons in today’s media landscape
Policy Punchline is not narrative-driven; we don’t have a pre-defined narrative that we hope to convey. We interview people across the ideological & epistemological spectrum. If there’s any narrative we have, it’d be that we’re counter-narrative. We want to examine why certain narratives are dominant and how we should think about them, and that includes IDW
I would also say that Eric Weinstein is perhaps one of the most significant influences on me over last year. He is a good friend of Rob’s; his wife Pia Malaney leads INET’s San Francisco office; and he frequently cites INET’s work
IDW especially manifested itself through podcasting, which is a counter-narrative way of exploring some of these issues, and people like Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein, and Joe Rogan have done quite a good job protecting this space
Fragility of today’s media, social, and cultural discourse
This discussion is partly inspired by a podcast interview by Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan before the election took place, as well as discussions with many of my friends. The arguments by Harris and Sullivan are:
The press has discredited itself. Legacy media is clearly broken; it is one endless and incredibly boring recitation of prejudices and biases. There is a lack of intellectual diversity within their own ranks. Instead, it’s constant pandering, abandoning any pretense of neutrality.
Sure, the Hunter Biden story has no bite to it, and any level of possible corruption is not nearly as much as what the Trump family has exhibited. But the mainstream media just tried to suppress the story so much. They’re more interested in controlling the news rather than airing it.
The job of a journalist should be to get as much information to the public as possible, not to pass on normative judgements or advance some social justice causes in their minds. This is Glenn Greenwald’s argument as well, as he spoke about this on Joe Rogan.
The media clearly don’t like Trump. They see the American voters as these fragile beings who can be so easily manipulated, such that they almost feel an urge to protect them against some evil force! But by doing so, they testify to the fragility of today’s media landscape and discourse – which is that any slight deviation from the constant attack on Trump or any slight deviation from the upholding of this pristine picture of the “truth” would completely derail our country back to another 4 years of Trump, which these people simply cannot accept.
We’re in a great asymmetry: Fox News needs not get anything right, whereas NYTimes can’t get anything wrong. Who caused this great media slant? Most in media clearly think it’s because of Trump, and they’re doing the right thing. But is their knee-jerk reaction also doing damage to the discourse and liberal democracy? Also yes.
We did not go too deep in commenting on Harris and Sullivan’s arguments. I only brought it up because at the end of the day I’m not really motivated to either prove that Trump isn’t that bad or to “own the libs…” What is most fascinating to me is to explore the general fragility of our media landscape today.
It seems to me that we’re in this downward spiral: the overall media infrastructure and people’s ways of processing information have become much more fragile.
Any slight deviation from the current trajectory seems to inevitably lead us to something worse politically and socially, but this current course also seems to be taking us somewhere bad. This is why I’m not very optimistic.
Fragility of my own remarks
As some of my close friends were helping me prep for this interview, one of them gave me this piece of advice: “It’s not necessarily about what you say, but how exactly you say it. There are words, phrases, and ideas that immediately trigger people to think the other way. For instance, Tiger, please don’t bring up concepts like ‘cancel culture’ because no matter what your argument actually is, people’s mind would immediately drift to think that you’re right-wing upon hearing that phrase, and your actual point would be lost.”
But is this really the right way to think about this? What one is supposed to do is that you try your best to make nuanced and thoughtful arguments and not resort to isolated incidents as the foundation for your arguments, and you try to be open-minded and logical, but that’s kinda all one can do and all one should do, right?
The fact that some of my friends were more concerned with the form and not substance of my arguments only points to the fragility of today’s discourse. People lose patience. Any slight deviation (whether in form or substance) from what is perceived to be right will result in almost immediate banishment. This makes me feel even more strongly about the necessity of long-form podcasting.
With that being said, I still feel that I was not nuanced enough in many parts of my responses to Rob’s questions – I wish that I could’ve spent more time exploring certain details and making my logic more explicit. So I hope that you may graciously tolerate my rambling and give me the benefit of doubt when you listen through the interview.
I also want to clarify, again, that there is really not one set of narratives that I seek to firmly stand by and disseminate. I try very hard to not attach myself with layers of pre-defined identities – such as “Democrat or Republican” – as I think they keep me from promptly updating my beliefs and exploring a wide range of ideas. Maybe I will look back in a few months and disagree with some of my opinions today, and I’d take that as a sign of progress. By putting all this out there transparently, I hope it makes my remarks in this interview less fragile than they could be.
Rob Johnson