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The Gist
Mike Pesca on The Good Fight Club
00:43:40
Today on The Gist, we air some of Mikes appearence on The Good Fight Club Podcast. Please note that this was recorded on September 10th, before the shooting of Charlie Kirk. You can listen to the rest of the podcast using the link below. Produced...
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- [00:00]
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- [00:28]
Dan Harris
Hey, this is Dan Harris, host of the 10% Happier podcast. I'm here about a new series we're running this September on 10% happier. The goal is to help you do your life better. The series is called Reset. It's all about hitting the reset button in many of the most crucial areas of your life. Each week we'll tackle a topic like how to reset your nervous system, how to reset your relationships, how to reset your career. We're going to bring on top notch scientists and world class meditation teachers to give you deep insights and actionable advice. It's all delivered with our trademark blend of skepticism, humor, credibility and practicality. 10% happier is self help for smart people. Come join the party.
- [01:10]
Mike Pesca
Hi, it's Mike. It's Saturday. It's the Saturday show. You know how we do a one from the vault, one from the week theme and when we say one from the week, one of the best from the week. And here I bring you one of the best things I did this week, but it wasn't on the gist. Isn't it a shame when that happens? It was on a show that my friend Yasha Monk puts together called the Good Fight. And he has a panel discussion group. How novel. But he does it well. He doesn't even get so involved. He does assemble some very brilliant people. And since the regular show that Yasha hosts called the Good Fight, guess what? This collection, this assortment, this coterie of a few people talking is called. It is the Good Fight Club. Isn't that clever? The guests of the Good Fight Club were. Now Yasha is a guy I would call brilliant. He had on Amanda Ripley, who wrote one of my favorite books the year it came out, High Conflict. She is brilliant. And then there this other Bulgarian professor, Yvonne, you're going to find out about this guy. Every time he opened his mouth, it was additive. Ivan Krastov. So enjoy the Good Fight Club. And we'll be back on Monday.
- [02:35]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
I've been using AI tools a lot.
- [02:37]
Mike Pesca
They are excellent as thought starters. They are excellent for organization, which I don't have. I will tell you a specific way that I use it. As you know, I talk on this show and then I also have the written word on the Pesca Profundities newsletter on Substack. But you know, talking out a subject is a lot different from writing it out. So what I will do is I will take my spoken essays, I will put it into say, Claude from Anthropic and I will tell Claude to rewrite it with specific guidelines. I could emphasize the factual. I could say strip away the. I could just give it the prompt to strip away the colloquial.
- [03:20]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
You know, you could even do.
- [03:21]
Mike Pesca
You could tell Claude to write it in the style of. And then you could name an author.
- [03:26]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
Or two different authors and buy gum.
- [03:28]
Mike Pesca
If it doesn't do that. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop with good enough. It is really a collaborator. I will go through the essay. I will say I wouldn't say that. I would say that. I mean it's all what I said. But it takes spoken word, turns it into proper grammar, sometimes can turn it into the proper grammar in the style of Marcus Aurelius.
- [03:51]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
If I want to appeal to a.
- [03:52]
Mike Pesca
Stoic audience, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. I've also loaded in spreadsheets and code and asked it to give me an analysis that I was suspicious of. And it can confirm, it can talk you through and it has talked about talk me through. Essentially it's quote unquote thought process. And Claude code is a game changer for developers. It works directly in your terminal and it understands the entire code base. It works with people like me who only understand what code is trying to do.
- [04:30]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
And it works really well with people.
- [04:32]
Mike Pesca
Who are experts on coding and Claude.
- [04:35]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
Meets them at least halfway.
- [04:37]
Mike Pesca
I'm thinking of tasking it with something that it can do, which is to take control of the calendar, emails, all of my go to tools and just integrate all the incoming communication and outgoing communication in a way that really makes me look much more on top of.
- [04:53]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
Things than I really am.
- [04:54]
Mike Pesca
Ready to tackle bigger problems. Sign up for Claude today and get 50% off Claude Pro when you use my link, that's Claude AI slash the gist have to say, before I even knew they were a sponsor, I started paying full freight.
- [05:12]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
I think I might have to go back and use myself as my own promo code.
- [05:15]
Mike Pesca
That's Claude AI slash the gist right now for 50% off your first three months of Claude Pro. That includes access to all the features.
- [05:26]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
That I mentioned in today's episode Claude.
- [05:29]
Mike Pesca
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- [08:06]
Yasha Monk
Are you in London next Thursday, September 18? If so, please join us for a live recording of the Good Fight Club with some of my all time favorite British podcast guests. We're going to have Fraser Nelson, we're going to have Helen Joyce, and we're going to have my old friend Shashank Joshi. And after that, we're going to do a kind of meetup in which we stay around and mingle with each other and have some drinks. That is next Thursday, September 18, at the Sickford Pap on 34s street in London. Well, today a really fun episode of the Good Fight Club awaits you, in which we talk about the drones shot down over Poland, in which we talk about crime and immigration in the United States. And we talk about a new test showing record low reading skills in the United States. We are leaving this whole podcast available to all of our listeners. But if you want to make sure that you don't miss the last third of a podcast going forward, and frankly, if you want to make sure that we can keep doing this work and bringing live podcasts to you and setting our ambitions ever higher, please go to Yashamonk. That'll get you 25% off your first subscription to the Good Fight, giving you full access to two interview episodes and one Good Fight Club episode a week, all for the price of about a dollar per week. And most importantly, it'll make you a supporter of of the space we are building together. Yashamonk.substack.com Club thank you very much. And now the Good Fight with Jasia Monk. Welcome to the fourth installment of the Good Fight Club. Today I am very happy to be joined by Amanda Ripley, who is the author of the excellent book High Conflict, which I believe I reviewed in the New York Times back in the day. And I fought for more space to review the book because I thought it was so terrible. No, it was so good. And she's also the founder of the organization Good Conflict. Welcome, Amanda.
- [10:46]
Amanda Ripley
Good to be here.
- [10:46]
Yasha Monk
We are joined by Mike Pesca, who is the host of the Gist podcast and sometimes the co host of a little poker night that he and I run together. Welcome, Mike.
- [10:59]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
And you fought for more space with a jack 9. I don't want to get into it. Yeah.
- [11:04]
Yasha Monk
And of course I am delighted to welcome back Ivan Krastov, who insisted on just being introduced as a Bulgarian political scientist that who is one of the most interesting writers and thinkers and owners of Toronto leaders today. Welcome, Ivan.
- [11:21]
Ivan Krastov
Thank you. Bulgarian is even going to be enough without political scientists?
- [11:26]
Yasha Monk
Every Bulgarian is a political scientist.
- [11:28]
Ivan Krastov
Absolutely.
- [11:31]
Yasha Monk
Now, you know, we had a plan to talk about a few things domestically and perhaps talk about France. We're going to Push talking about France to next week, because overnight there was a bunch of drones that were intercepted over Polish territory. And, you know, we're reacting to this story relatively quickly. Not all of the facts are known yet. But it does appear, Ivan, does it not, from how many of his drones were sighted, how far into Polish territory, that this is not one errant Russian drone that somehow got lost? It appears to be a deliberate provocation.
- [12:11]
Ivan Krastov
Exactly. You know, Poland already asked for a meeting of NATO, and Prime Minister Tusk just said that Poland was never as close to war today than it was in 1939. Since 1939. So from this point of view, of course, we don't know exactly what it is. It can turn out to be just a mistake and an accident. But it tells you something about the sensitivity and it also tells you something that many of the countries which are bothering Russia, which are bothering Ukraine, had the feeling that Russia is ready to test how NATO is going to react in the case of a provocation. And from this point of view, while not knowing exactly what has happened, it's interesting to understand what could be the consequences. One is Europeans probably are going to try to push President Trump to take position, and what kind of position he's going to take is going to be critically important. Because it's one thing to say I don't care much about Ukraine, but how much do you care about Poland? And secondly, of course, they're going to be on the Russian side, kind of a push to try to create a split between the countries that feel really much more threatened. The Baltics, the Poles and others who said, listen, don't push too much, don't provoke on our side. And certainly, in my view, this is a very strong message on the Russians. You want to have peacekeepers in Ukraine, you want to have a reassurance force. If there's going to be a ceasefire, be sure you're the target. And in my view, this is a situation in which the psychological pressure on both sides is going to be very strong. And we are entering a situation in which misjudgment, misperception, can escalate the situation even beyond that both sides have been pushing for.
- [14:04]
Yasha Monk
Amanda, you've written about high conflict in very different situations, but I'm sure it gives you an interesting perspective on how to think about a situation like this.
- [14:13]
Amanda Ripley
Yeah, I mean, I think it's an excellent point that the risk of miscalculation and misjudgment is very high. Whenever emotions are high and communication is low, there is a huge amount of risk but also we know that there is a history, right, of Russia testing in these ways. So we also know that in the United States we have a somewhat erratic leader who wants to be liked by Putin by all signs. So we are dealing with some unstable people with a lot of power, which is frightening, Meg.
- [14:56]
Yasha Monk
I mean, you know, there's a real risk that in between us recording this on Wednesday morning, American time and the episode releasing in less than 24 hours, Donald Trump will say something. Well, hopefully he will say something and hopefully he'll say the right thing. But at the risk of speculating on something that by the time people are listening to this is already out of date, what do you think his reaction is likely to be? And if you were advising the Polish government at the moment and the European leaders, how hard do you push on Trump? Because on the one hand, this may be the moment to get him committed to NATO security to say it's one thing for me to play good cop, bad cop in Ukraine and try to push Zelensky to a peace deal on very tough terms. You know, when it comes to the skew of NATO, I'm really there. But of course, if the European leaders push him in that way and his response is to run the other direction and to post something on Truth Social that's saying, oh well, some fake news about the drones or I've spoken to Putin, he assures me this is all just a coincidence and they're not really Russian drones at all or whatever it is you might say that would actually, you know, undermine the security guarantee of NATO in a article for all of them.
- [16:06]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
All right, so for 77 years the United States President could be counted on to be the de Facto leader of NATO. And I think for 70 something of those years it was pretty clear what the United States President would say in such a situation, which is this cannot stand, and then he deploy all diplomatic channels to make it clear to a Russian president who maybe before Putin wouldn't dare such thing, and we didn't have the exact technology for it. So there is ambiguity. And I think it's very fascinating to think what Putin might be thinking. I was thinking about the matrices of consideration. It might be an accident that he's taking advantage of. It seems like it was something on purpose. He is not saying anything. They're not clearing it up beforehand. He wants to see how Donald Trump will react. So what we should all want in the west is for Donald Trump to act like a normal United States president. You could do that without losing face or without with just Saying words I think, I don't know if Donald Trump will do that. And I think to go a few more feet out, I. If I had to guess, the reason that Putin is doing this is to give himself another point of leverage in some sort of Ukrainian negotiation. Because. And we can start talking about this, there is the drone war and there is the land war, and they're very much two different things. And the drone war is mostly psychological, to break the will of the Ukrainians, which hasn't been done. But now we're seeing a different effect of the drone war to open up this, what I would say point of leverage, maybe that he could negotiate away in some future bargaining session. But it's also very fascinating. And because the word I just keep coming back to is ambiguity. It's big, ambiguous, what Putin wants, and the ambiguity of what Trump is going to do makes it even more fascinating and dangerous.
- [18:01]
Ivan Krastov
Do you know what, in my view is extremely important? We don't know what is in the head of the American president, but if you compare it, Europeans, and particularly those who are sharing both with Russia and Ukraine, and if you compare the American administration and not Trump himself, you're going to see something very, very interesting. And this is what kind of historical analogies they work with. Europeans very much work with the Second World War II analogies. The story is that you have a provocation that very much the ghost of Munich is around. My feeling is that for a lot of people around Trump, it's much more World War I. So the story is it's a problem because in a certain way, the World War I started not because somebody wanted it, but because there was this kind of alliances, and Europe was divided on alliances, and the alliances are increasing the risk, and America can become the hostage of some of these more hawkish members of the alliance. And as a result of it, the most important is not to overreact, not to do this, not to do that, listen. These very different basic impulses of how you understand the situation, in my view, is critically important, because this is interesting in a certain way. President Putin is going to. To test, and he has been testing before. He had the feeling that he's not risking much. And then the story is, if you manage to really split NATO allies on the level of what kind of historical analogies you're working with, decision making is going to be very difficult.
- [19:39]
Yasha Monk
Which of those analogies, Ivan, do you think is closer to this moment? Or is there a third analogy we should be making instead of Listen, funnily.
- [19:48]
Ivan Krastov
Enough, I believe all the Political leaders also very much shaped by the analogies from the time they have been present too. It's one thing to read a book and try to justify what you're doing from this point of view. The clash between President Trump and President Putin and for example Polish leader Donald Tuski, is an interesting psychological story. President Putin is somebody who believes that weakness is the worst that the country can radiate. He was a person, and this is part of his biography that people very rarely talk about. He was outside of his country when his country is changing B outside out of the Soviet Union. When Gorbachev came to power, as you know, as an intelligence officer, he was stationed in East Germany. This is like being outside of the United States. Now is the change of power and second coming of Trump. You stop to understand things which people understand simply because they're there and as a result of it. For him, the disintegration of the Soviet Union is something that he not simply cannot accept, he cannot understand. So he's going to try to show strength and toughness regardless of what is the reality there. And by the way, Prime Minister Tusk is coming from a similar tradition. This is a heroic Solidarity generation and they know that. If you attest it, you should respond. This is a people who basically are tough in politics. They're not taking hostages. And Poland is a country, if you compare there now they have a mid defense budget of around 5% of their GDP. This is serious for them. This is not just diplomacy. And on the other side you have Donald Trump who in a strange way is very much shaped by first of all this kind of a cultural developments of post 1968. He does not know how to think in terms of war. This is interestingly that he knows something about trade, wars, he knows probably something about making love, but war is not part of his experience. And I do believe this is really interesting because from this point of view, it's not about intelligence information that they're going to get. Obviously the Poles and the Americans are going to share similar intelligence information where this kind of drones came from. But it's very difficult to basically go on intentions and then it's going to trust your instinct. And I'm afraid that they have different instincts.
- [22:19]
Yasha Monk
That is interesting that we think of Trump as tough son of a bitch who has a zero sum worldview. But to think of him as somebody who despite his opposition in some ways to the 1960s hippie movement, is still much more shaped by it than Ivor Donald Tusk, leader of Poland or certainly Vladimir Putin in Russia. Amanda, Mike, what do you make of this?
- [22:46]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
Well, if I could prompt Amanda, I would just think about Trump's worldview and his way of thinking in geopolitics. He's not a multilateralist. He doesn't really understand that or conceptualize that. And that fits in with, I think, another form of thinking, which is that he's not third order thinker, is not even sometimes a second order thinker, and does not say he's stupid. There's a very good argument for being very straightforward and thinking of everything is the deal right before you. And he definitely doesn't think way down the road, but the polls do. And Naito is a multilateral organization where it's all built on if Article 5 and the dominoes falling, essentially. And I think all of that pretty much eludes Donald Trump's worldview. And so if Ivan says the interesting thing is what analogies will be deployed, I'm thinking which of his advisors who have his ears will steer him in a period of real ambiguity, at least to me, as to what he actually will do and how he actually will think about this.
- [23:54]
Amanda Ripley
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting to think about the stories that we tell ourselves and how. So I'm glad Ivan framed it this way. I think the stories that we tell ourselves matter more than anything else. And sometimes those are shaped by our advisors, like Mike said, and sometimes those are shaped by history and personal experience and with trumpets. I think it's particularly shaped by psychology and by his needs for attention and a sense that he matters, by his fears, like he's, you know, he's. His psychological challenges are right out in the open in a way that's very unusual, I think, for most public figures. So I would assume that his history of wanting to be the savior will be, so to speak, in conflict with his history of not wanting to get involved and to put America's interests first. But anything he says, as we know, could change. So it's predicting. The only way to predict Trump is to predict what someone who's very narcissistic will do. That is the only consistent pattern that I've seen. And someone who's very narcissistic tends to create a lot of crises and then try to come in as the hero with a total disregard for fact or history or logic or even objective national interest. So whatever that is in this case is yet to be determined, but I suspect he will try to play the hero in some way.
- [25:32]
Mike Pesca
And we'll be back with another segment from this. The good Fight Club in a moment.
- [25:44]
Ivan Krastov
Foreign.
- [25:47]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
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- [25:59]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
That's not the itinerary we're following.
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- [26:15]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
Bon voyage.
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- [27:16]
Mike Pesca
This is myself with moderator Yasha Monk, Amanda Ripley and Yvonne Krustev on the episode of the Good Fight Club that aired a couple days ago on the Persuasion Channel. And you could hear the whole thing there. But we're going to play another segment right here on the best of the gist.
- [27:35]
Ivan Krastov
One footnote but important for me. You remember his comment that President Xi has promised him not to invade Taiwan during his term. For him, this is also about personal relations. Listen, when basically President Putin or the Chinese leaders are trying to frame their politics, they probably think in decades for Trump is also very much about personal relations. Is Putin going to betray him personally? Because probably he has personally promised him that he's going to do nothing outside of Ukraine. And I do believe this is making the conversation so difficult and also so difficult for Trump and because the conversations that we have, I'm sure that you have the same conversation in the Warsaw government building and also in many other countries. So everybody tries to manipulate Trump in a way because he is the one that has the real military power, but also he's the only one who has not made his mind. So suddenly he's going to be also the target and not of a drones, but of a story a different sides are going to put on him.
- [28:43]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
Yeah. The only thing that I think just.
- [28:46]
Yasha Monk
About this overall situation is that I think the immediate risk of nuclear war in this conflict has sometimes been overstated and sometimes been overstated for strategic reasons as an excuse for Europe not to come to the robust defense of Ukraine and so on. But I'm teaching a class called Catastrophe this academic year in which I'm looking at different kind of potential risks for humanity. So I'm looking at artificial general intelligence and climate change, and, you know, I'm looking at pandemics, and I'm looking at World War three and nuclear war. And my, not my rational calculation, perhaps that too, but my gut level instinct about how likely a nuclear confrontation is, you know, in the rest of our lifetimes, has taken significant gone up over the last few years for two reasons. First, that you have much more bellicose and erratic political leaders in the world. But second, that it's just much harder to think that there is, you know, responsible institutions that on the things that most matter, will always get things right, will always be able to contain a pandemic. We'll always be able to communicate in the right moment. We'll always be able to make sure that no real parts of the state take initiative in a way that they themselves may not be aware of. And so I do think that something like this kind of scenario is how World War three could start. Right. So perhaps that sleepwalker analogy is not the wrong one. The problem is, it seems to me that Trump's White House is drawing the wrong lesson from this deep poker scenario.
- [30:34]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
I just have one prediction. In the next three days, Donald Trump is going to say, I talked to President Putin and I told him to knock it off. That's my prediction.
- [30:42]
Yasha Monk
Well, let's keep it a bad prediction. That, that, that, that sadly seems likely, but perhaps we'll be positively surprised. Let's talk a little bit about US Politics. Mike, I want to throw it over to you for, for this part of the conversation. Now, we've had a number of developments in the last few days that seem unrelated but perhaps have a connection between them. One is that the US Supreme Court has allowed certain kinds of immigration rates to continue to go forward. So there's an element here about the extent to which the Supreme Court is reining in what may be abuses of power by the Trump administration. But it's also an element about one of the potential strong points of Trump and Republicans. Their ability to say we are standing up for law and order. And all of these squeamish liberals who care about constitutional niceties are just trying to stop us from actually doing what Americans want. And this I think is connected to another development which happened about two and a half weeks ago on August 22, 2025, a horrible killing of Irina Zarudska in Charlotte, North Carolina. An unprovoked attack on the light rail system they have in that part of the country in which somebody sitting behind her suddenly stabbed her to death and then apparently seems to have said something like I got that white girl or remarks to that extent. This was not covered in national media for those, some local news articles about it. And then when the video became public, started to go viral on social media and has now become a huge rallying point of some people generally concerned about public safety in the United States and of some people who are trying to use it, I think quite straightforwardly to push a racist agenda. I think on both of those points, there's a risk that Democrats are put in a dilemma. On the one hand, they have to stand up for the Constitution and for the fact that Trump can't just expand his powers in willingly way. And you know, they should not make common cause with some of the genuine racists on Twitter who have been using this horrible killing as a launching point for all kinds of absurd terraits. On the other hand, of course there's a risk that all of this just paints Democrats as precisely the party of people who are more worried about all of his niceties than about controlling the border and preventing the murder of innocent people just wanting to get home on, on, on, on the light rail system. Mike, how are you thinking about this political moment?
- [33:44]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
Yeah, so the world over, immigration is a gigantic problem for centrist parties or sometimes in the case of Merkel and Germany, her politics, are they even centrist? She's a little bit to the right. The AfD is now the number one polling party in Germany and Le Pen's party is the number one polling party in France. And Farage's party is the number one polling party in the UK I mean is especially in Germany. It sort lead but immigration and local populations being upset about immigration are driving it. And it's not even necessarily the mistakes of incumbents. It's just a misunderstanding of, I think A fundamental aspect of human nature, that people define themselves as themselves and believe in borders and not abstract notions of shared humanity or something like this. The Democrats, I do think, and we all saw this documented, somewhat drove themselves over a cliff with ideologues and notions that the vast majority of Americans did not agree with. Even during the apex of the moment where policing reform was more popular than it's ever been, the 2 to 1 majority of Democrats wanted more policing and more effective policing rather than less policing. And that was the, that was the cry of Democrats. So crime is not up in the United States in the last two years. It's remarkably down. This was after a rebound when it was remarkably up. But compared to pre pandemic levels, it might be doing pretty well. Compared to the Obama administration, worse. Compared to the crack epidemic of the 90s, it's doing much better. But that's a trap for Democrats to fall. And they pick a fake starting point or whatever starting point serves their needs, and they talk about how great Chicago or Washington, D.C. are doing, and they're not. They're just not. Especially in certain neighborhoods, they're really, really not doing. So. Matt Iglesias has this construction where he says Democrats really have two choices. They could change their policy on crime to pretty much match Republicans, which they're not going to do, or they could change the subject. I think that's where they are. And I think Donald Trump instinctively knows this. And by injecting national guard into D.C. and threatening it or rattling his saber about that, he brings up the salience of the issue. And then when you have this murder in Charlotte, something Donald Trump had nothing to do with, it once again makes the point that Democrats are not understanding this issue. If you analyze the initial statements of the mayor of Charlotte, there was one sentence about the victim and there was a typo in that sentence. It was a written statement and the entire statement was all about compassion for this murderer. So I do think Democrats. I don't know if Matt's right. I don't know if it's change your policy or change the subject, but it's a giant loser for them and they're out of step on a, on a key issue.
- [36:44]
Yasha Monk
Amanda?
- [36:45]
Amanda Ripley
Yes, I think they're in a trap, and this is a trap that you'd think they would have figured a way out of by now because it's a very familiar one, I do think. Funny how it brings us back to the stories in our heads, the stories on our TV sets, the stories in our feeds, those matter more than the facts. And this is something that I think Democrats have yet to fully come to terms with, especially sort of elites. We know that the most recent Gallup poll shows that Americans think that murder rates have gone up since 1990 and since 2020. This is a misperception. They are incorrect. We know this. Right. But the U.S. murder rate in 2024 was down about 30% relative to 2020 and 50% relative to 1990. And yet Americans think it is up, and especially Americans over 65. So this is where there is some maybe hopeful news about this perception gap and how easy it is to manipulate Americans on this fear. Jeff Asher, who does an excellent newsletter on crime, has pointed out that if you look into that data, what you see is that younger Americans, fewer than half, think the murder rate is up. So they are more accurate in their assessment of the situation. Americans age 18 to 29, Americans age even 30 to 44, where you get into trouble is 45 and above. 65 and above 63% say that the murder rate in US cities has increased since 1990. I mean, it is a total disconnect from reality. Now, there are lots of interesting reasons for that and possible solutions and interventions for that, but it is important to realize that this is the perception, and for most Americans, this is the reality. So it's a difficult trap for Democrats, for sure.
- [38:50]
Yasha Monk
I just worry that changing the subject never works. You know, European politicians always ask me, should we just change the subject so we don't focus so much on immigration? There's some political science studies that seem to suggest that, you know, if you talk about immigration, you just lose, and it just feeds the far right for various methodological reasons, I've never bought those studies, but I just think you need permission to speak. And as long as on the most important subject of the moment, people feel that you're out of step with them, you're not going to have permission to speak about anything else. And the only thing that's even worse than changing the subject when people expect you to say something about that subject, is to start to lecture them. This is what the Biden administration did in the last year. So the administration about the economy. The economy is great, actually. You should be really proud of Bidenomics. This is going amazing.
- [39:43]
Amanda Ripley
And.
- [39:45]
Yasha Monk
Jason Furman makes an argument that that was factually not quite right, but Biden wasn't actually that great. Whatever the truth of it is, you know, arguing with voters over the perception of the facts is just never going to work. Now, I'm as saddened as you are, Amanda, by The fact that the murder rate is clearly down since 1919 in many cities. I mean, still today, despite the recent uptick after 2020 and then the decline again, you know, a place like New York is just phenomenally safer than it was 30 years ago. But I just worry that the temptation for Democrats is going to be to try and lecture people in that. It's not going to work. I know, Emily, that's not what your political proposition is.
- [40:27]
Amanda Ripley
No, but you raise a good point, which is, then what? And I think in high conflict, in a polarized country, you start to feel like there are only two choices, and that's always wrong. So what we've tried to experiment with when we work with organizations trapped in high conflict is to not ignore people's perceptions and the stories to your point, that does not work. But try to get to the understory of what we're talking about. Right. So you can get in a fight all day long about whether crime is up or whether it's down in D.C. and in fact, crime statistics are complicated. We all know that. Right. And that is where you get trapped. So what is underneath it? The understory of most pervasive conflicts that really tear people apart is usually the same things over and over, but you have to identify what those things are and talk about that. Right. So the understory of this is fear. Whether it's right or wrong or justified or unjust, it's fear. People are afraid. So speak to that. You know, you can't argue with that. And there are lots of ways in which people are right to be afraid. And there are lots of ways in which the current administration is making many people feel safer and many other people feel much more afraid. Right. So speak to the understory and don't get caught in this. Never ending. He said, she said about the stats, Jovan.
- [42:00]
Ivan Krastov
And here I very much agree that there is understory and this fear. And the problem is fear of what? And part of it, in my view, is the fear of world changing very fast. And listen, we can go with one statistic, the other statistics, but we can talk about the housing crisis, which is very real, particularly in many places in Europe. But one of the basic things that is happening to people is that they lost the idea that they're at home. They don't believe that they understand the world in which they are. They don't have the feeling that they understood. And the idea of home is very much also connected to idea of feeling free. And I do believe this is the story you cannot Change the subject, but you can change the frame. And this is quite interesting from this point of view. Look at Italy. When Mrs. Meloni came to power, she came with a very strong anti migration sentiment. At the same time, since she is in power, the number of migrants in Italy has not decreased, they have increased. But her voters has the feeling that the problem of the migration, at least on some way, is taken care of.
- [43:00]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
Why?
- [43:01]
Ivan Krastov
Because they believe that she feels the situation in the way they feel it. They're ready to live with a policy failure, but they're basically not ready to tolerate somebody who perceives the problem differently than they perceive it. And from this point of view it's interesting because many of the voters of the far right, they're also migrants in a way. They want to migrate back in time because they have the feeling that there is no place for them anymore. Their place is not their place. So they want to go back in time when there was a demographic composition of their societies that they understand or they believe that they understand. And we know how all this is going to end up. Not that you can travel back in home, but for them the vote for the far right is exactly this. This is a ticket, this is a ticket to the world that they want to return to. And by the way, they even from time to time feel jealous to the migrants, because migrants has a place to go back and they don't have the feeling that there is a place for them to go back. And. But this type of a story, in my view is critically important because at least what I see in Europe, and particularly in places like the United Kingdom and others, it's not. The migration is the most important issue. The problem is that migration is the one that shapes voters choices, while other issues are simply starting to disappear. You start to have one issue, parties. And from this point of view I could be wrong. But my feeling is that the old left right divide have been strongly destabilized. And then you have a clash between two quite a popular apocalyptic views of the future. On the left it's much more about climate. On the right it's much more about demographic anxiety on the left, about the last man on the right, about the last Bulgarian or the last German or I don't know, the last whom. And if we are not going to deal with this, if people basically fear the future because they fear the change, it's really difficult to have an easy conversation. Because when you fear the future, this is not an anxiety that you can easily deal with.
- [44:58]
Yasha Monk
Why do people fear the future in this not Just political moment. But in this nearly historical epoch, on the specific area of crime, I can run the numbers of both ways. I can say since 1990, crime is down in New York is vastly safer than it was when my cousin was growing up in the city, for example. I can also say New York is vastly more dangerous than Paris or Berlin are. And Paris or Berlin are vastly more dangerous than Tokyo and Beijing are. And actually it's perfectly rational for Americans to be angry about the state of public safety. I think there may even be a deeper point which is that there is, I think, a specific moment of hope and growth in which things are just easy for societies. When you're growing your GDP by 5 or 6% a year, when you take a society, most of which was peasants, most of which was factory workers, and you're giving them much better education, you're giving them middle class jobs, it is very easy for people to feel like things are getting better and they're going to continue getting better. And this happens, you know, when societies go from low income to middle income to hopefully high income. This is what happened in many of the societies we know best after World War II in the Wirthschaftswunder years in Germany, the Trent Glorieuse in France, in the post war boom in the United States. Once that moment is over, you can actually continue to have robust economic growth as the market has had over the last 20, 30 years. Some things can get better, like crime actually dropping over the last 30 years, but it just feels like things are stagnant and that makes you afraid for the future. I wonder, by the way, from my recent travels in China, whether that country isn't starting to reach that stage. On the one hand, in China you have a lot of people who are still very low wage workers who still have very recent roots. You know, having grown up in a village without running water and now their delivery worker in Shanghai or in Beijing, and they have a much better life than their parents had and perhaps they still have some way to go towards the top. But you're starting to have an impression when you talk to young graduates of elite universities in Shanghai and Beijing, of it's really hard to find a good job. And I thought, you know, in my parents generation, if you have a good degree in economics or engineering from one of these universities, you have open career paths. And now there's not a lot of those jobs going and they demand a lot of work for you. And by the way, the price of apartments in these cities has shot up. And just, you know, I don't have as much reason to be optimistic as my parents did. And it sounds surprisingly similar to what I hear from people in real life and sometimes online, you know, in the big cities in the United States. So is this fear that even talks about just something that's going to accompany every society once we've had this amazing, you know, 30 or 40 years of one time economic growth, of transformation of our societies and then that becomes the new normal?
- [48:10]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
Well, to what you're saying, one reason that people fear the future is that they rue the present. And in the United States, not to even speak of China, but in the United States, in many ways, by many metrics, they're right to rue the present. In the Financial Times, John Burton Murdoch puts together these charts to try to understand why our lifespan in the US Is so much less than those of us Europeans, the French, the Germans, the English. And by the way, those countries have a number of problems that maybe public health isn't one of them. Now, opioids was this huge driver and that affected specific communities. But even if you're talking about the kinds of things that we are talking about, we once had progress. The future was once much brighter. Not even in terms of the 5% economic growth of the Clinton years, just in terms of traffic fatalities, which in, during the Obama administration in the 2010s were quite low or something like 30,000 per. Oh, I forget, forget the denominator. Now they've gone from a metric of in the 30s to in the 50s. Maybe that's distracted driving, but just more people are dying. And if you look at the murder stats, Amanda, you're totally right. It's all about narrative. But I sense that those. So two things. One, Gallup has always polled is murder or crime better or worse? And the answer is always getting worse. It's even when it was getting better for the last five, 10, 15 years, it's always getting worse. It's just a constant of human or American nature.
- [49:39]
Mike Pesca
But you know, if you looked at.
- [49:40]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
The Obama years or in New York City, the, the Bloomberg and then de Blasio years, there were 300 murders a year in New York City. And then in the last couple of years they were 500 murders murders. If you look at nationally, there were 1400 murders in 2010 and in 2023, there are 20,000 murders. So things were, objectively speaking, getting worse. They were getting acutely worse. For the communities where almost all the murders occur, these, the south part of Chicago and Austin, the neighborhood in Chicago. I do think that if a Democrat were or a progressive were trying to craft the narrative. They would start from the basis of, okay, things really are getting better. And they look at the 1990s and they'd look at the last couple of years and they convince themselves they're getting better. But I think empirically speaking, there's plenty of reason to think they're not. And it's a real shame. And I think it's maybe extra dislocating when we've achieved this progress. And murder is not like cancer. It's not like there's a known intervention and you just apply it and you will cure it. But when we've achieved this progress, lived with this progress, felt this progress, and then seen it slip away the Gist was produced by Cory Wara, the very nimble and able Cory Wara. Ashley Khan is our production coordinator.
- [51:04]
Mike Pesca
Kathleen Sykes and I collaborate on the.
- [51:08]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
Gist List substack every Wednesday.
- [51:09]
Mike Pesca
Wednesday It's a straight up Pesca profundities newsletter.
- [51:13]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
It's a lot of labels here, but I will just tell you go to.
- [51:15]
Mike Pesca
Mikepesca substack.com to see what I'm writing about.
- [51:19]
Mike Pesca (Co-host or Guest)
And Michelle Pesca is COO of Peachfish Productions, Oomproo G Peru Duparu and thanks for listening.