The Importance of Face-to-Face Interactions, the Liberal Confederacy, and More

Plus two BARPod episodes. Links for July 2025.

I was on the Blocked and Reported podcast twice this week. No show makes me laugh nearly as much, and I’ve been touched by all the nice things Katie has been saying about me, so it was an honor to be invited on. The first episode involved talking about the Chuck Johnson saga. I like to listen to BAR without spoilers and find it fun to learn about the twists and turns in the stories while hearing about how they unfold, so I won’t say anything about this one. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just go and have a listen. I promise you, it’s quite amazing, and hopefully you’ll understand my obsession with Chucky.

They also interviewed me on my politics and personal background more generally. That one is paywalled, but I suggest you subscribe and listen to it here. It was more personal than most podcasts I do, with a lot of discussion on my background, the cancellation attempt, and other topics.

I’m planning to take a trip to the Bay Area in the coming weeks, so reach out if you’re there and want to meet.

1. I just read The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience by Emory Thomas. It's a very short book, with the thesis that the Confederacy had to gradually sacrifice its principles in the course of trying to win the war. They began to urbanize and industrialize. Women took on more prominent roles in society. Blacks were given more freedom, and the decision was eventually made to let them fight for the cause, although they weren’t deployed in time. Localism was out, a strong national government was in. The Confederacy became the first government in North America to ever institute conscription, the year before the Union followed suit. On the economy, one scholar cited called the Confederacy “the most successful demonstration of State Socialism to be found up to the time in modern civilization.”

By the end, they were even willing to give up slavery itself! Thomas writes:

It was left to Jefferson Davis to demonstrate just how far the Confederacy was willing to go in the matter of emancipation. Later in March of 1865 Davis played what he believed was his final diplomatic trump card. He realized that only immediate foreign intervention would save the Confederacy by that time. Accordingly Davis dispatched Louisianian Duncan F. Kenner to the Confederacy’s unofficial embassies in Britain and France. Kenner’s mission was no less than to offer in the name of the Confederacy to emancipate all the slaves in exchange for recognition. The offer was as desperate as it was vain. Neither European power was willing to recognize a moribund South. Emancipation would come with a Union victory, and this would cost Britain and France nothing.

The Confederacy was past saving by March of 1865. The Kenner mission did, however, carry to completion the internal revolution in the Confederate South. Having sacrificed other features of the “Southern way of life,” the Confederacy ultimately placed slavery on the altar of independence. The Southern nation became an end in itself. Independence required the sacrifice. Faced with choosing between independence and the Southern way of life, the Confederacy chose independence.

The romantic vision that Confederates believed in and fought and died for was never a realistic option. It couldn't be a rural slave state indefinitely and not end up a poor, miserable backwater. If it achieved independence and tried to maintain its way of life, it would have been weak and subject to outside influence, Union and European.

The European attitude towards slavery and how it confounded attempts at forming alliances show that the institution would've been constantly under attack, from inside and out. Who knows, countries can sometimes exist in an isolated and repressive state indefinitely. See North Korea. But there's no way that the South could have remained as it was and been a powerful nation on the world stage or ended up in a situation where independence would not have been considered a disaster.

There's a lesson here for reactionaries everywhere.

2. Kotkin on Dwarkesh is self-recommending. See my review of his two volumes on Stalin.

No matter how many times it's explained to me, I still don't understand the Stalin phenomenon. And I doubt anyone else can either. The man simply wipes out every other power center in the government. Top levels of the political leadership, army, and secret police see massive turnover. No one is safe and anyone can be next. And he just does it? Without any serious challenge or chance to remove him? Kotkin tries to explain, but it just doesn't make sense. And I can't think of any other historical equivalents, in the modern era at least, when a leader acted without any restraint like this, and so completely wiped out not only enemies, but friends and loyalists. Was Stalin that amazing as a man? Could he inspire that much devotion and loyalty? Or was it a mass psychosis that made the government behave like this, and focus on Stalin as a God-like symbol? Does this say something deep about the Russian character? All we can do here is speculate.

I also was interested in the discussion of why the Tsarist regime was so indulgent of communist agitators, who would escape from prison and even do things like continue to write for newspapers while in custody. They weren't executed and their punishments were mild. Kotkin says something about Tsarist state capacity, though historically, state capacity has often been a reason to engage in more repression, not less. It is regimes with low state capacity that wipe out enemies because that's simple, while it's harder to enact more complicated forms of control. The fact that there was such a small educated class in Russia at the time should've made the challenge even easier. As Kotkin says, norms in the early twentieth century were just different. The point deserves more emphasis.

I found Kotkin much less insightful on China than Russia, his area of expertise. He seems unwilling to give the regime any credit at all for the pivot away from central planning. I'm no fan of the CCP, but I don't see the idea that they were forced into reforms as credible, and Dwarkesh does a good job pushing back.

3. Reflections on thinkers using ChatGPT. The fact that ChatGPT can replace mediocre analysts but not me yet gives me a sense of pride. Will it do so eventually? I don’t know. But it feels like the gap between recycling older thoughts and providing new ones that synthesize work from various fields and sources of information may be vast. Famous last words?

4. Washington Post podcast on the Diddy trial. This thing was a travesty. There are federal laws that ban prostitution across state lines and drug distribution. There are also laws that ban criminal conspiracies. The government put these together and decided that a guy buying prostitutes and doing drugs at parties was therefore someone who needed to go to jail for decades for "human trafficking." He might have been guilty on a strict reading of the law, but this is an absurd law. If I were on the jury, I would've voted not guilty on all counts according to the principle of jury nullification. In the podcast, they talk about how these women appeared to be enthusiastic participants in some of the acts, but they loved him and their careers depended on him. So what? It's illegal to sexually take advantage of people who want something from you? This is a ridiculous state of affairs where women can use their bodies to get ahead, and then when it's over try to have the man they made the implicit deal with bankrupted or thrown in jail. Glad the jury saw through it. There’s a similar issue with the Epstein “victims” who have all kinds of credibility issues but whose words keep getting treated as gospel.

5. I highly recommend Ed Glaeser's excellent Triumph of the City.

Some of my favorite passages and thoughts below.

Tolstoy may have been right that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” but among cities, failures seem similar while successes feel unique. Someone wandering through Leipzig’s boarded-up neighborhoods could very well think she was in Detroit. Empty houses give off a similarly depressing feeling whether they’re in England or Ohio. But no one could ever confuse Bangalore with Boston or Tokyo with Chicago. Successful cities always have a wealth of human energy that expresses itself in different ways and defines its own idiosyncratic space.

One reason I love reading books on history and learning about foreign cultures is that they expand your ideas of what is possible in terms of arranging human affairs. This book made me realize that successful cities provide their own kinds of experimentation that show how radically different the world can be.

Glaeser stresses the importance of face-to-face contact, a message that I think has become more important as the internet has swallowed real life in the seventeen years since the book was published.

Pundits and critics have long argued that improvements in information technology will make urban advantages obsolete. Once you can learn from Wikipedia in Anchorage, why pay New York prices? But a few decades of high technology can’t trump millions of years of evolution. Connecting in cyberspace will never be the same as sharing a meal or a smile or a kiss. Our species learns primarily from the aural, visual, and olfactory clues given off by our fellow humans. The Internet is a wonderful tool, but it works best when combined with knowledge gained face-to-face, as the concentrations of Internet entrepreneurs in Bangalore and Silicon Valley would attest. Every one of Harvard’s economics students uses technology constantly, but they also get plenty out of face-to-face meetings with their peers and professors. The most important communications still take place in person, and electronic access is no substitute for being at the geographic center of an intellectual movement.

I’ve realized the wisdom of these points through the limited travel experience I’ve had in recent years. My partnership with Insight Prediction started with a meeting at Manifest, and my last trip to DC put me in touch with Marian Tupy at Human Progress, who I’m now writing monthly articles for. When I travel, I gain a surprising amount in terms of opportunities for business and professional collaborations and cementing friendships in really short periods of time. Experiences simply matter more when you’re with other humans. When I went to Poland a few years ago, I met a fan who said that I taught him about the importance of approaching women and how it can change your life. People have told me similar things through DMs and emails, but I rarely remember it, while having someone explain how I helped them in person becomes a cherished memory. Everything about real life interactions just feels more real, for understandable evolutionary reasons.

All this gives me a deep sense of regret that, for personal reasons, I cannot live in New York or DC, but maybe I’ll get out East eventually.

As Glaeser suggests, there’s a lot you can theoretically do online. I’ve learned that in the course of building my public profile almost totally through cyberspace. Yet it’s clear that face-to-face contact remains indispensable. I guess people still need to pick up on my “aural, visual, and olfactory clues” for things to click. Kids today who from their earliest days are missing out on constant real life interaction may not know what they are losing! Again, this is another reason to continue being angry about Covid restrictions, and also to take the phone addiction issue seriously.