The Wright Show, and Interview with Freddie deBoer

Robert Wright is one of the sharpest foreign policy analysts out there, and I recommend everyone read his newsletter. I was glad to sit down with him on The Wright Show to talk about my new book. You can get notes of the conversation by clicking on the YouTube link and going to the website, where you can jump to different areas of the discussion.

Also, if you’re not a subscriber to the CSPI podcast, you might have missed my discussion with Freddie deBoer. Having read his work, I thought we’d have similar personalities, but was amused to see that we’re really quite different. I smile a lot, he has a bit more of a serious demeanor, I wonder how that influences our politics. We are in strong agreement on some things, so I use the opportunity to probe mostly on the things we disagree on. I’m basically like “you’re smart and get a lot of stuff, how are you a Marxist?” And then he says “Ah but you see Marxism doesn’t mean what you think it means!” and tries to explain it to me, though to be honest I’m still not exactly sure I understand.

We also talk a bit about believing in certain inherent sex differences, an idea he calls sexist in the book, which I push back on. In the end, I really appreciated his candor about why he needed that disclaimer when working with a major publisher. Freddie is pretty open and honest, which is one of his strengths as a writer and personality.

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As a reminder, I’m still going to be just outside of Austin tonight. I’ve been pretty impressed with the city thus far, and am told they take COVID more seriously on the UT campus than anywhere else in Texas, even though they don’t seem to take it very seriously there at all. In other words, life largely looks like it did in 2019, and it’s hard to explain to people not on the West coast how shocking that is to see.