Oshan Jarow: The Reality & Possibilities For Work

[01:33] Paul: Welcome to the podcast, Oshan. I'm excited to chat with you today. I feel like you're the other person on the internet which has created their own, I guess, pseudo PhD program. Don't want to go to academia, but still want to go really deep on certain topics and exploring like what the heck is happening with work. Um, I— it's been cool to see somebody else exploring these topics and know, okay, I'm not the only one thinking about these. Um, and a lot of your writing, I'm just super grateful for.

You've thrown me in a lot of new directions and opened my mind and imagination and new possibilities. So welcome to the podcast and just thank you for all the work you're doing.

[02:22] Oshan Jarow: Thanks so much, Paul. I'm really happy to be here, and likewise, you've done the same for me, so I'm happy to have this opportunity.

[02:28] Paul: I want to dive right into it. Um, I love how you frame your central curiosity, which is this quote: We're all going to die, but in the meantime, the world is far more mysterious, wonderful, and stimulating than human consciousness plagued by economic precarity can experience. That's beautiful. I love that. I love that, um, you're exploring these topics with kind of hope and wonder. Which I think is missing in so much debate about inequality, work, all these things.

When did the traces of this first start for you though?

[03:07] Oshan Jarow: Yeah. Uh, so let's say, where do we go back to? I guess it started out growing up, like in, in the household. My father was a professor, is a professor of Asian religions at Vassar. So I grew and he was kind of big on the whole hippie world and so on. So I grew up with a talk about consciousness and God and these kinds of things were really mundane.

So that certainly played a role. But then all the way through, when I went to college, I studied economics and philosophy. But underneath that, consciousness was always kind of the thing that I was most interested in. I was reading guys like Ken Wilber who wrote The Spectrum of Consciousness, which was a really interesting kind of first work that tried to integrate Eastern and Western approaches to that kind of thing. But yeah, in college, I think I studied economics almost as a rebellion against all that because it felt very abstracted and aloft and all these kinds of things, and I wanted something rooted in how I thought the world worked and this kind of stuff. So there was always that kind of weird juxtaposition of on one hand, economics, on the other hand, consciousness and meditation and these things.

And the department that I studied at was pretty mainstream, pretty orthodox, a lot of econometric modeling, a lot of statistics, and it just thoroughly disenchanted me with economics. I thought, all right, this is not what I thought it was. It's not interesting. It's not getting at the questions that felt alive and important to me. So after I graduated, I went the other direction and went out to Asia for about a year just to do the meditation thing, to do a lot of reading. But out there, I wound up reading kind of the the economists and the cultural theorists that I hadn't found in undergrad, which kind of showed me that it's possible to look at these two things together, to look at economic systems and also to look at both kind of the construction of conscious experience.

So what plays into, you know, my subjective experience of what it feels like to be me in this moment, right? That's not just a kind of a personal thing. There's kind of structural causality that's laced through that. And so it turns out there are a lot of people who've been looking at that question different angles. So I guess that all just kind of started when I got back from Asia. That question felt very important to me, especially because I'd been at little meditation camps and this and that largely with a lot of other white Westerners who had enough privilege to do these kinds of things.

But we weren't talking about what about people who don't have the capacity to leave a home, save up for 6 months, and then fly out to Asia. This is obviously a very a particular privilege to be able to do this. Or even just to talk about, you know, why aren't we structuring societies in ways that we can explore these questions without having to remove ourselves from them, right? What if society actually helped us in this process? So that just felt like a natural kind of area of interest to me, and I found that it wasn't super common, which is a little more encouraging because it was more interesting to kind of try to flesh out. And that's kind of where I've been since.

Like you said, I do a lot of writing on it. I have a podcast where I speak with people about it. And I think it's a really important niche. And for whatever reason, it's held my interest and it's a lot of fun.

[06:20] Paul: Yeah. Did you at any time during university or exploring Asia, were you thinking, okay, I'm going to go get a job working in like finance, economics? Was that ever in your mind? Were you thinking academia at any point? Because that was your father's path.

[06:41] Oshan Jarow: Yeah, it was kind of an accident the way things turned out. It was the fall of senior year, which is kind of when traditionally a lot of people go through the interview process, and towards January, you might be signing a contract. And so I was doing the process. I was going through all the entry-level economics positions, market analysts, this kind of stuff. And it just felt so dead. I looked at what the job actually entailed and usually it was cold calling or some kind of spreadsheet analysis.

So that didn't grab me. So I didn't find anything and it just kind of, the months kept rolling by and then eventually it got to a point, graduation rolls around. I had no idea what I was doing. My roommates had jobs lined up and I remember there was a moment I was kind of sitting on the porch of our house after graduation. So we had our robes on, I had like a bottle of cheap Andre champagne. And it was the first time in my life that since I just hadn't gotten a job, it was the first time in my life that there was no structure ahead of me to kind of organize and make sense of time.

You know, it was just kind of, here's the rest of your life in front of you. What do you want to do with it? Um, which I'm really thankful for. It was stressful and there was some anxiety in it, but it was really, um, it was a unique experience. I mean, I'd never had that before, right? Every, Before that, maybe I had summer vacation or things like that, but there was always a structure of time ahead to make sense of what I'm doing.

So that led to, you know, going home thinking and then going off to Asia. But yeah, I thought about it and I'm kind of happy that it didn't work out, that I didn't find a job that was good enough that I thought, all right, you know, I'll go that direction. And going into academia, I've been flirting with the idea for, I guess, a couple of years now. I mean, graduated in 2015. I've been flirting with the idea, but I've always wanted to go a different way first to see if I can kind of— because I'd much rather have a kind of self-directed curriculum. You know, I'd much rather do that, but it's, you know, there's trade-offs here and there.

[08:33] Paul: So it's—

[08:34] Oshan Jarow: the idea is on the plane, but for now, no thanks.

[08:38] Paul: Yeah, it's something I weighed for several years too. I think many people in academia urged me strongly against it. And I've kind of listened to them. And then I think just online, the writing world and just the ability to engage both with professors and with people in non-academia, it's— I think it's been a good fit for me too, because I can pivot and write about something silly and then write about something deep at the same time and not feel this pressure to kind of fit into the system. And I did 10 years in the system and always had to track, always knew what my metrics were. And I've kind of enjoyed the, uh, the floating nature of exploring these ideas without constraints.

[09:26] Oshan Jarow: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The flip side is you have to make it work, right? It's fun, but then you gotta, you gotta pay rent somehow.

[09:33] Paul: Yeah. So how, how have you thought about that? How do you think about, um, I mean, this is a— we can explore just this phrase, but you don't even know how to say it— making a living. Right? That to me is such a crazy phrase, right? Why?

We are living already. The idea that we need— one needs to make a living is— I mean, this just starts to open up the can of worms of the weight of our current consciousness and the words we have to describe it. But how do you think about that? Like, do you have a better way to phrase that? Or I say hack a living because it kind of helps break the frame, but Yeah.

[10:16] Oshan Jarow: Yeah. No, it's tough. I definitely don't have a good answer. The way that I kind of have been thinking about it recently is on one hand, I think it's pretty common to look at the way things are today and to say, you know, either things don't need to be this way, or maybe you'll point towards the injustice route and talk about how much money, you know, Jeff Bezos has and say, you know, why do I need to work 50 hours a week to barely scrape by? But On the other hand, I think it's interesting to take a really wide historical lens and to understand, look, humans have always had to do something. You've always had to expend a certain amount of energy, usually in really horrible conditions, just to keep yourself alive, this maintenance process.

And so if you ask yourself rather, how has that process evolved over the past 2,000 years? Not only do I think that's really interesting and it tempers a little bit, I think, our our tendency to get really worked up and angry about the way things are. Because on one hand, yes, there's massive inequality, there's all kinds of economic things we should talk about, and I love that, I do a lot of writing on that. But on the other hand, I think it's important to understand, you don't just get born and get to have everything you need. You have to figure out a way to make sense of how to stay alive in the world. And that's also what I think makes kind of this early 21st century economic situation we're in so interesting is our capacities and what we have the resources and the technology to do, I think opens up some avenues that have just never been possible historically.

So I think it's fun to put it in that kind of historical lens.

[11:55] Paul: Yeah. So I think diving into the history really opened things up for me as well. Just reading people like Weber and other people and how they thought about work. It's— most people don't realize that work was not seen as like an instrumental, like, good or end or an aim of life until probably the last 500 years. And then before that, it was kind of— and you still see traces of this today, but, well, you got to work, but it's what you got to do to kind of get your food and cover your basic cost of living. But yeah, it's— I think I am overwhelmed by the possibility too.

So maybe talk to me about that. What, what has changed? Like, to me, I see more people than ever able to make way more than they could ever possibly need. but they're kind of trapped and not able to see that. What are some of your hypotheses for why that's true?

[13:07] Oshan Jarow: Yeah, I think one of the really interesting points of, of, of that process has been just the question of what do we value and how does what we value influence economic outcomes, influence the, the kind of outcomes of what everyday life looks like for ordinary people. So for example, the US is a really interesting case study. In the US, from about 1830 until 1930, industrial capitalism had really gotten rolling. You also had really powerful labor unions. And you had this kind of shared cultural sentiment that the highest dividend of economic progress was going to be what they called higher progress. But it wasn't just an abstraction.

The way they understood that was as shortening the working week for all. And so from 1830 until 1930, if you look at average hours worked, decline. Started out at about 75, and it went all the way down to, I think, hit 37 amidst the Great Depression. And then it stopped. And this had a lot to do— it just flat. Yeah, exactly.

From 1930 until like 1980. And that had a lot to do with coming out of the Depression, coming out of the war. You know, there was a big push for consumption, there was a big push for full employment, but we just kind of lost this idea that we valued leisure time. And that kind of idea, that cultural shift, led to not only stagnating working time, but in the '80s actually started increasing once again, which historically, wildly unprecedented. Like, if you went back to the aristocracy 2,000 years ago and said, hey, rich people— because it's mostly white men that have led the increase in working times, like investment bankers and lawyers, because now it's almost a status symbol to work 70 hours a week. Entirely unprecedented.

And that's not out of any economic necessity. It's out of what we've deemed important, out of a lot of social dynamics. And so there's people trying to open this question back up of what do we value, why do we value it. But it's very difficult because it requires working against the economic framework that has really dominated the past 50 years, in which leisure time is kind of drawing against growth. It's drawing against economic activity. And I think there's a lot of problems inherent in that formulation, but I think it's really interesting to look at how we value or when we value things when that changes the way that you see on top of that kind of economic system change.

Yeah.

[15:27] Paul: I personally ran into some of these deep assumptions when I started working self-employed. My salary basically went to like 20%. Of what I was making, but I had a lot more time and it made a lot of people around me uncomfortable. People were like, why wouldn't you want to earn more money? Like, you have these fancy degrees, like, that's the goal. And you can kind of start to unpack, okay, these assumptions are really deep and people have had them their whole lives for multiple generations now.

Nobody knows where they come from. And I'm the annoying one that's like, whoa, where'd that come from? Let's explore that. Let's go back. But I also think there's, and you've written deeply about this, the leisure, our conception for what leisure is has been morphed almost by our economic reality. And we don't have cultural traditions, especially in the US.

I think Europe still has some. That's why you're seeing some of the 4-day workweek experiments, the 30-day workweek experiments. But in the US, we don't really have that aristocracy tradition. And I mean, Andrew Taggart's written a lot about this, like leisure historically was contemplation of the mystery and wonder of the universe, right?

[16:51] Oshan Jarow: Yeah.

[16:52] Paul: Or active engagement with, I guess you could say, things that bring you alive. Whereas now we think of leisure as Netflix or a vacation, which I think a vacation for people has really become a way to rest for more work. And I see all these patterns in the first 10 years of my career, and I'm kind of just sad that I didn't have a broader imagination for possibility. How— yeah, how have your explorations of leisure— like, what was your conception of leisure growing up? And I know you've talked to people like Ben Honeycutt and others. Like, how has that shifted for you?

[17:34] Oshan Jarow: Yeah, I think you're right that culturally we have this idea that leisure, and this is Pieper's line, is just a break in the utilitarian chain of things that, you know, working, working, I'm going to crash on the couch, back. And that if you have that break where you're not working, like that's your leisure time. And Pieper kind of turns this on its head and he says, no, leisure is an entirely different ontology. Like it's a different way of experiencing the world. It's a different way of being. And that notion that, that there's a different way of being is so foreign, I think.

And it is so difficult to like even begin to approach what that means. Like for me, what, what the first thing that broke, not the first thing, but what really introduced me to like the experiential reality that like leisure is something else. It took psychedelics. I mean, it was my first time on mushrooms. It was like, oh wow. It's like, this can feel different.

Just being here in this moment can feel different. And then in meditation practice, it was kind of a much more patient and diligent kind of exploration of that. But it's really fascinating. I had no idea. And I think there's also a tendency, you know, people, like you said, people will actually feel sad about themselves, like, oh, I wish I had done this or that. And there's this tendency, I think, to privatize these situations, to think like, oh, this is my fault.

Like, I can't believe I didn't do that. But I think it's just as important to look at the way the system is kind of set up around us in order to perpetuate these attitudes. And not to kind of take it within ourselves and harbor all these really negative emotions and, and so on and kind of flagellate ourselves, but to, to ask what is it about the incentives of the systems we live within that create these attitudes, these mentalities, and what kind of room do we have to work with that. And again, that brings us kind of back to, to the 21st century, and what I think is a big explosion in our possibilities is we have a lot of room, but in order to kind of discover that room We have to get back into this question of what's important, what do we value, and so on. And that's, that's the tough stuff.

[19:32] Paul: Yeah, I see much of the debate around these questions stuck at the very measurable in terms of money, right? This person has more money than that person. This person has this title or this position. And if you look at the statistics for the last couple of years, you would have me in borderline poverty and struggling and failing, right? Except I feel like I'm thriving. Um, so, and of course there's enormous privilege in that.

I do, I was able to build savings, um, through other kinds of work. Um, but even people I know do look at me as struggling. And it's really hard to convince someone that, okay, you could do more with less, or there are other modes. I think this goes back to what you talked about at the beginning with economics. They love the measurable. Everything's become econometrics.

And I think one of my favorite economists, Russ Roberts, has actually tried to broaden this conversation and say, I was actually wrong. I didn't think about dignity. Or love or flourishing because we can't measure these things. Um, how do, how do we escape, uh, this trap of like how we think about things? Like politicians today, I don't see any hope on either American political party. They're so— they just have different groups they support, but they're all in the same frame.

They talk about jobs and income inequality. And I think time inequality is something you talk about that could transcend that. But what other things have you seen that could possibly transcend that conversation and debate?

[21:28] Oshan Jarow: Yeah, real quick, I want to add to— you mentioned Russ Roberts. I also think it's interesting to add Tyler Cowen into that mix because you don't have to go like far left, like super progressive Democratic socialists to find someone who finds leisure time incredibly important. Cowen, in his book Stubborn Attachments, he has this idea. He kind of modifies growth and he defines it as an accumulation of wealth plus, which is basically GDP factoring in environmental concerns and leisure time. So I thought it was interesting that even Cowen, wherever you want to place him on the political spectrum, kind of places leisure time at the fore of kind of moving forward how we value things. But yeah, my focus has really been on time and specifically how free we are to do what we like with our time.

I actually think you can ground this in an interesting economic theory. There's Amartya Sen, who's probably one of the greatest living economists still, and he's known for developing what's called the capabilities approach. And he basically said, like, look, we need to move beyond defining poverty as simply a deprivation of income. It's like, this is important, but we have to understand more broadly that freedom— like, to develop freedom, it requires increasing our capacity to live or to choose between different ways of living that we have reason to value. And one of the biggest constraints that I see on the different kinds of ways we can live, on the ways that are available to us, is how much time do you have to spend kind of in this economic mode of earning enough resources to not only meet your needs but to participate at a basic level in society.

Like even Adam Smith, if you go back, Smith said that everybody, no matter where they are on the economic ladder, should earn enough to be able to have all of the things that are considered basic requirements for dignity in society at the time. And for Smith, that meant everyone should have enough to buy linen shirts. He was like, "Linen shirts are surely part of a dignified life." I like that. So if you look at time today, there's a lot of neglect, I think, on— or rather, maybe to start with, there's a lot of focus on looking at the different kinds of goods that people have access to do.

So if you work 40, 50 hours a week, you can make the argument that you have access to a certain level of nutrition or housing or healthcare that is not that far off from, example, Warren Buffett, where if you go back historically, you look at the difference between the bottom 10% and the top 10% in terms of what kind of goods and resources do they have access to. I mean, that chasm was huge. But what we don't look at is how much of your time, of your lifetime, do you have to exchange basically in order to get access to those things? So where Buffett earns enough in probably a couple of seconds, it might take someone else a week, a month, a year. So if you look at time as a kind of a leverage point, what I think is interesting is to think about how do we decrease the amount of time that people have to exchange in order to meet their life's needs?

Because by doing that, you open up time for people to choose to live differently if they want to. And I think that's important because in the 20th century, the labor movement had a strong emphasis on reducing the working week and really doing it from the top down. Whether you lower the overtime threshold or work-sharing program, but it was kind of telling people, "You're going to work less now." What I think is really interesting is we have a different suite of policies in the 21st century that can focus more on giving people optionality, on giving people kind of a wider capacity to choose. Maybe they want to work 80 hours a week as a lawyer, fine. We shouldn't tell them that's a bad thing, but we should give people the real option to choose to live differently without sacrificing their basic needs. Or not we should do that, but we can do that.

And I think that presents a really kind of rich possibility. André Gorz, too, a French philosopher who I really like, the way he put it, it's like the only way that you're going to get through this, you can't just kind of tell people to choose to live differently, you have to give them enough space and time so that that space of leisure time begins to meaningfully measure up to the space of economic rationality of labor time. And the more you kind of decrease that ratio in favor of leisure time, the more you're going to see kind of bottom-up emergence. You're going to see people choosing to experiment, to explore different ways of living. And to me, that's a really interesting approach. Yeah.

[25:41] Paul: And I've essentially been trying to do that in my own life, really exploring, okay, what is it like when I open up time for non-work? The reality is I don't BS people. It's really uncomfortable. Yeah, it is more uncomfortable when you're in the States because you can't escape the reality you're living in, and you feel bad for not working more or not earning more money when you're surrounded by people that are defined by that. But I'm also here to report that it is incredible, like, what is possible, and just your orientation to the world, like over the past few years, I felt like I've just kind of like softened into life a little more, and, uh, I've been able to open up things like, uh, a little more playfulness and a little more comfort with uncertainty, which if I compare that to my previous life, comfort with uncertainty is probably worth a couple million dollars in wages.

[26:49] Oshan Jarow: Yeah. And it's funny you mentioned playfulness too. That's such a good kind of point to isolate out. Playfulness is so difficult when you're really kind of mired within a kind of economic labor-centric rationality because playfulness, the point can't be beyond the activity itself, right? When you're being playful, it's intrinsically motivated. You're not doing it in order to achieve whatever out there.

And that kind of way of being is directly labored against in the kind of work-centric system we've had. You mentioned Honeycutt. Honeycutt studied this. There's also a psychologist, Peter Gray, who studied— if you look at the decline of play in American society, so the amount of unstructured playtime that children have, that started declining in about 1955. And as that goes down linearly, there's a direct, and Gray would argue causal, increase in psychopathologies, so like narcissism, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, a sense of hopelessness, and specifically, a sense that you cannot impact the world, almost that you lose your capacity to do so. And this ties into some really interesting theory like Mark Fisher and capitalist realism.

But play— and not only that, I mean, play is a wonderful source of innovation. Like the things we discover in that mentality of play when you're just doing it for fun throughout history, I mean, that's contributed some of our greatest innovations. And so it's a really dangerous thing, I think, to squeeze out play like we have. And it's a really wonderful thing to try to cultivate it.

[28:16] Paul: Yeah. And Jonathan Haidt's written about that too, and how that's showing up in young people today. And it's, it's pretty striking. I think it feels dangerous to play as an adult, right?

[28:33] Oshan Jarow: Subversive. Yeah.

[28:35] Paul: It's like you're, you're wasting time or why get more serious? You're an adult now.

[28:42] Oshan Jarow: Mm-hmm.

[28:43] Paul: Um, so I want to read a quote you wrote, which I think gets to the heart of some of these things too. The projection that we'd waste our time with idling activities like Netflix and the beach neglects that most working-class humans today are overworked and barely getting by. Current notions of how we spend our leisure time are products of and responses to our life conditions. So I think what you're saying here is that leisure is kind of downstream of economic circumstance. And our assessment is essentially right, right? If we just release people tomorrow, they will just waste their time.

But this is a human capacity we need to develop through play and also just giving each other permission to not have to be a worker every day.

[29:35] Oshan Jarow: Yeah, that's such an interesting point. And there's so many people to highlight who are doing really interesting kind of work on that. One of them who I really like is Zack Stein. And Stein's whole thing is, for example, take basic income. He supports a basic income. He supports economic design that helps us move beyond a kind of wage labor-centric way of living.

However, he also says that fundamentally, that is an educational problem, that you can't just give people money and let them exist— not let them, but if you just liberate people from quote-unquote wage slavery and then have them exist within the same society as we have it structured, you're going to run into some really interesting and maybe problematic outcomes. He says that we need to give people the capacity to become self-directed learners, to be able to educate themselves, to redesign school, which is really nothing more than a funnel into the labor world as we know it. So I like this idea that moving beyond a kind of wage labor-centric way of living is fundamentally an educational problem that requires looking at all the neighboring institutions alongside economics, right? Looking at schooling, looking at family life and parenting and all these kinds of things.

And it's also even more fundamentally, like in the quote you mentioned, one of the things I was trying to point to too is this growing idea that behavior is very much an ecological outcome. It's a relationship between us and our environments. And on one hand, sure, you can say you can try to change yourself and that's going to lead to behavior change, but behavior is just as causally influenced by the environment. So a lot of arguments against kind of increasing leisure time is to look at how people are behaving today when they have it, right? You can say, look, people just drink beer, there's crime, there's this or that.

And I think those statistics are problematic to begin with, but even then, what you're saying is you're assuming that you're not accounting for the change in the environment, that when you change the way that they are forced to live their lives, you're changing the psychological environment that they live from. And that's it's going to have some pretty profound effects. And then maybe the last person I'd throw in there is Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian. He, in 2014, wrote a book, Utopia for Realists, where he introduced a lot of these ideas like basic income, like a 15-hour workweek, all this stuff. But he just released a book on human nature.

And one of his points that was really interesting is he was like, the assumptions that you have about human nature that you bring into designing a system, whether or not they are accurate, if you hold those assumptions, the system will amplify them. And so he said, what you have to do, if for example, if we're going to decide to value playfulness, we have to assume humans are playful, design for it, and you're going to get that outcome over time, whether or not it's a perfect fit. Now, um, I did. So what you don't have to assume there is you don't have to agree that everyone, um, would be incapable of making the most of leisure time. I don't really agree with that either. However, even if you feel that way, That's not an argument against designing with these, these other values in mind.

[32:33] Paul: Yeah. It seems there's a pervasive learned helplessness, which is a byproduct of our current system. Right. I felt this deeply when I was working in big companies. I was confident I could have impact or change through the, through the working world. I worked in consulting and worked for big companies.

I did projects at C-level executives. And we do these big projects, we roll them out, and you're convinced like this is going to make work better for people and the organization better. What happens half the time or more is that they fail or actually lead to worse outcomes. And people smartly realize, okay, I'm just gonna kind of like mail it in, do, do whatever I need to do to survive. I'm not really going to find a reason to improve things, but this expands out to how we think about everything, right? And it's an assumption that, okay, university education has to triple in price every 20 years, or healthcare has to go up.

And then the biggest problem is how do we get people more money, right? And this learned helplessness kind of just accepts the status quo. And I think what you're arguing for is Okay, how do we, how do we get down to the foundational level, change the aims of what we're trying to do, and then still have whatever, like the, some of the great things about capitalism, let things emerge organically through experiments, um, but see what happens? Um, why, why are so many people kind of in a state of learned helplessness Yeah, and not also at the same time not open to, okay, things could be better. I mean, is that— it's just so deep. I don't even know if I have a question.

I'm just like, this is such a big challenge, and I don't— I'm lost. I don't know how to convince somebody that's like, ah, it's just the way things are, that okay, there's it could be different.

[34:47] Oshan Jarow: Yeah. I mean, I'm also lost and I'm also kind of adrift in that question, but one of the areas that I found pretty relevant is if you— it kind of requires power analysis. So if you look at power in society, and especially over the past 50 years, you see— so you can look at economics and that's kind of a lot of powers downstream of economic power. It's the familiar story that the labor share of profits has been decreasing, that workers have not been seeing wages rising with productivity. But the idea that economic power is declining, I think, is very deeply interconnected with this kind of sense of learned helplessness. And the way that we think about responding to that, if that ever becomes a relevant question, is often so limited.

The way I think about that is there was an experiment used largely to justify SSRIs and antidepressants. Which I forget what it was called, but basically you had a big glass cylinder and you filled it half with water and it was pretty tall and you dropped a rat into the water and the rat would— there's absolutely no way for it to get out. You know, they can't crawl up the glass. So they kick for a while and eventually they give up and drown. And then the researcher would pull it back up after it had given up. And the way that what they were trying to do was develop the SSRIs so that the rat would spend longer and longer kicking.

In this hopeless situation, and the longer that it would kick, the more they would deem the, the intervention successful. And there's— it's, it's such a crazy perfect metaphor to me, is like what we have deemed success is this very marginal, kind of sick and twisted, like cruel optimism of here's this hopeless environment in which there's very little you can actually do but we're going to try to make it so you can tread water just a little better, just a little marginal improvement. And that's how we're going to think about progress. Um, and so this again brings in the whole kind of behaviors ecological. If you change the environment, I think that's where you get a lot of, a lot of changes.

And that's also why, you know, I'm, I'm very interested by, um, universal policies, things like basic income, things like universal healthcare, things like co-determination to change kind of corporate governance, to give workers actual direct seats at the tables of power. There's a lot of ways that we can intervene in the environments so that people can begin to feel they have a little more agency or back to send, they have a little more capability to actually act upon the world. And these are things we see borne out in evidence. I mean, Finland just released, well, just a couple of months ago, a full report of their 2-year basic income trial. And one of the most interesting outcomes from that is they did qualitative interviews with people. So afterwards, they just sat them down and had long talks about what it was like.

And one of the most consistent findings was, and I'm quoting them here, that people felt they had a greater capacity to influence their own future. Just, I think there was by giving them the equivalent of, I think it was $800 or $900 a month, but there, there's no way to quantify that. I don't think you can put a metric on how important that is. And especially downstream, if you're able to increase people's capacity and their sense that they have a say in the shape of their lives, 10, 20, 30, 40 years down the road, that just compounds and compounds and compounds. So like you said, it's difficult to quantify that, but I think that's one of the most important things we can look at is how do we help people and change the environments that make us feel like we have no capacity, no power to enact change or to choose between different ways of living that we have reason to value.

[38:22] Paul: I definitely want to dive deeper into UBI and some of those different things that can break the frame, but I think For me, you mentioned at the beginning this idea of suffering, right? A lot of people pair the idea of work with the idea that you should suffer through one's life, and that has a long history. That's kind of like the— you can go back to the Bible and it says work is toil, right? It's kind of this necessary evil that you have to do in life, and It still exists today. And I think an interesting exploration for me has been diving into, okay, what are the work beliefs that people have and where do they come from? And this has been really interesting to talk to people, showing them the history of these work beliefs and the fact that they haven't been fixed and some of them have emerged.

The Protestants came up with a newer version, slightly crazy at first, now accepted widely as just the norm. And that makes people question, oh wow, these are kind of just made-up beliefs for how we think about work. Did you have work beliefs growing up about like what work was? I think for me, I looked around me and saw people kind of compromising, and I kind of did intuit the idea that like work should be suffering. You should have a long commute. You should have to spend long hours.

You should have to like work overtime. And I have only recently shifted away from that. And I think UBI is one of those things that does help reframe it as, okay, this person can have agency and suffer less.

[40:09] Oshan Jarow: So have you had a trajectory of how you've thought about work and the work beliefs I think I was pretty lucky in the sense that I grew up in an unorthodox enough kind of household and family that I didn't have a strong sense of that. Certainly, I wasn't kind of exposed to any organized religion, although I was exposed to a lot of— if you want to do this spirituality and religion dichotomy, a lot of spirituality. But no, I didn't have a lot of that. So I didn't have some kind of big reckoning where I look at the way I'd been living. I was like, wow, like, what the hell is wrong with you? Now, granted, I feel that way about a lot of other dimensions in my life, but work was never this thing that I was deeply steeped and indoctrinated into kind of like the Protestant ethic about.

That being said, I didn't have a strong understanding of what else to do. Like, it was clear to me, like, You need to work, you need to have a job and all those kinds of things. What's been helpful for me recently is using Hannah Arendt's distinction between labor and work, because I've come to— I actually really like work. Like, I love work. I think it's one of the best things humans can do, but the definition is a little different. The way she defines labor, and actually she's drawing from Marx here, is that labor is humankind's metabolism with nature, which is to say it's just a cyclical thing you have to do.

It's you acquiesce to the world as it is in order to get what you need in order to survive, and you do it day in, day out because that's what being a human is. But then work is distinct from that cyclical process of doing what you need to survive. Work is something that has definite beginning and endpoints, that work is something that you create, that you bring into the world, that will stay in the world once you're gone. So like you could take a book, for example, right? A book is contributing to what she calls the public realm. Which is kind of like the more durable realm of human creation that accrues over time and generations.

And so when we talk about getting beyond work, and I think you feel the same way, but I won't speak for you, is we're not saying like humans shouldn't do anything of what we consider work. Like that's not the case at all. There's all kinds of work to do. There's really important work to do. And work is a really nourishing, kind of vitalizing thing to do if it is something that one way to think about it is the more intrinsically motivated work is, A, the more close to actual work it is, and B, I think the more value it actually contributes to your life and to society. So a lot of what I think about economics is how do we transition what work is so that it becomes much more of an intrinsically motivated activity as opposed to its conflation with labor, and labor being the thing that kind of gets all the merit of work and therefore justifies itself.

[42:54] Paul: Yeah, I love that. I think I read, uh, Gore's as well, and he talks about we— our conception of work has been narrowed to what can be paid for, and then what can be paid for, um, and you have a certain set of professional qualifications or technical skills. So we've really narrowed, um, what we call work And some people, some activists push back on that and say, okay, we should consider raising a child as work too. But I think that's a mistake because that it's just expanding the scope of what can be paid for and looking at that as something worth doing. And I'm more interested in coming at it from the other dimension. And like, yeah, I think words, even words like labor and work, it's hard to differentiate those.

Everyone thinks of labor movements and what can be paid for. But it's, it's, it's really hard to talk about these things because I feel the same way. Like some of the things I do, I love, like writing, and there's not much economic incentive. I don't think a lot of people get into writing for the economic motivations, but, um, people will say to me like, oh, you quit your job to like work less, but you seem to be like working a lot of hours. And I don't really have an entry point to that conversation. Yeah, like I don't have the terms, and I, I've been exploring, okay, what are the modern work beliefs?

How do we reclaim some of the words or concepts, and I don't even know where to start.

[44:43] Oshan Jarow: It's tough, man. And I, like, in my life, for example, once I got back from Asia, the way I was paying my bills is I was working at a fine dining restaurant. And so during the day, like, you know, however many hours I spent working, that was my labor. And then I'd get home and I'd write essays, I'd work on the podcast, and that was my work to me. But when I would speak with people and, you know, I'm meeting someone and you do the introduction thing, I always felt like I have to lead with the labor because that's where I'm getting money, therefore, it's elevated to the status even though the gravity of my life, like my interests, my fascinations, I couldn't care less about the restaurant industry. People would always say when I tell them, they're like, "Oh, do you want to own your own restaurant?" Like, "No, not at all.

I just want to have enough time to write and pay my bills." What's your career path? Yeah, exactly. Well, I don't know. And like you said, that uncertainty is difficult. Especially when the things that fascinate you in life are things that you cannot earn money from, which, which is also a very dangerous proposition. Like, a lot of people will say if you start earning money from your writing, for example, it could kind of subvert the whole thing.

It's a very difficult incentive game. But when you aren't able to pay for your life from the thing that gives you life, and not only that, but the thing that you then do in order to make money claims so much of your time, it's this very difficult situation that I think is very draining. And so again, if we can shift that balance a bit, not so that people only have to work 2, 3 hours a week, but even if there was no necessity to work beyond 25, 30 hours a week, that opens up 10 hours in order to put more of your time, yourself, your being, your attention into things that even though they're not generating a return on the market, like you say, they're things that you value. That would be nice.

[46:23] Paul: Yeah. And this is almost the hidden possibility that has been unleashed for a lot of low-wage folks or people like you with the gig economy. Um, and I see like you basically see full-time employees who either politicians or high-wage earners who are outraged at Uber and they want to turn them into employees. Um, and I see I mean, we should definitely take short-term action. Some of the conditions are awful, but we should also use this as an inflection point to say, okay, what is possible? Because somebody could— like, you could easily do Uber for 20 hours a week and kind of fund your academic exploration on the side, right?

That's pretty amazing. That seems worth doing. You're contributing to the society and community. And you're able to kind of fund things you want to be doing, right? That, that's exciting for me, and I don't see that conversation happening.

[47:34] Oshan Jarow: Yeah, I mean, and it's tough too because the thing with Uber, like, one of the lines of argument against is that like their main innovation has been misclassifying or not classifying their employees as employees, which means they don't have to pay for the car depreciation costs, they don't pay for gas, they don't pay for a lot of the benefits that comes with traditional employment. And then the move they make then is therefore, we should classify them as employees. But it's also interesting to think about, okay, but what if we pass universal healthcare? What if we pass a basic income, a negative income tax that says you're going to get at least $13K and it scales up? What if we pass a cap and trade or a carbon tax that has a dividend back out? Like, what if we design economics so that you aren't dependent upon employment in order to be okay?

And like, how far can we take that? Because it's also very important not to get lost in the kind of utopian fantasy of, you know, fully automated luxury communism right now. Like, I'm not saying it's not possible one day, but how far we can take that needs really rigorous economic analysis. But you're right, we don't see a lot of people talking about, okay, if there's a problem in the labor structure of of Uber, if people are being exploited, the only option available isn't necessarily classifying them as employees, although that is within the nearest realm of political feasibility. It's more difficult to imagine passing this sweet healthcare basic income, social dividends. That's much more difficult to imagine.

But at the same time, especially these past few months, you've seen the Overton window just blown open and you've seen a lot of things put on the table. I think it does make a lot of difference to try to bring this into the conversation is what other conditions would make this kind of gig work more feasible for people? And then what kind of different ways of living might that open up? And should we explore those possibilities?

[49:17] Paul: Yeah. And it's really hard for me to avoid this obvious possibility. My wife is Taiwanese. So when she leaves her job, she still has universal healthcare. And there's a cultural norm that, okay, if you live with your family, that's not frowned upon, right? Some of these things in the US are built in culturally, right?

It is shameful to have to rely on other people, whereas in other parts of the world that may not be true. Um, so I see like nobody worries about healthcare in Taiwan when they're young, right? It's definitely a concern for anyone that's old, but, um they're not making any sort of labor decision because of keeping some health insurance program. Yeah, that's assumed, that's there for everyone. And it's pretty cool to see kind of the lack of that worry. And then I go to the US and I talk to friends who are making $200,000 a year, and they say, well, I can't leave my job.

What would— how would I get healthcare? Yeah.

[50:27] Oshan Jarow: And you can see that in like, in the literature too, you can see that as you decrease dependency upon employers for healthcare, they've done, they've done things in Newark, New Jersey. It gives interesting stats, but even more broadly, you see entrepreneurship rates go up. It's like one of the things that keep people from this very American ideal of starting your own business, of being your own boss, of an intrinsically motivated business, is that if you leave your employer, there's to start up whatever you want to try, you are risking a lot because there is no universal coverage. There is no— there's a very small floor in the economy that we have the capacity to raise. We have the resources, we have the technology, but we have an economic ideology that strongly, strongly fights against it, right? We have this idea of workfare.

We have the idea that all benefits are contingent upon employment. So if you're not employed, you miss out on a huge swath of benefits. So it is really interesting, even just from a very deeply American angle, to talk about raising the economic floor and decreasing the amount of anxiety people are plunged into if something goes wrong, you're going to increase innovation, you're going to increase entrepreneurship, you're going to increase people's agency. And I think that's one of the most effective ways to go about it is to couch this whole thing in the kind of American rhetoric of innovation, right?

[51:37] Paul: Yeah, that's, that's what excites me. I, and I think that's the interesting frame is how do you tie this to things people already are bought into? I am self-employed, so I came back to the US and I could not get access to the healthcare exchange for 3 weeks because it starts at the first of the month. So I had to do— and I had a health issue, so I had to do a number of things uninsured. It is crazy to navigate. I spent a couple hours on the phone yesterday negotiating fees I had to pay.

Turns out everything's negotiable because all the whole system's—

[52:16] Oshan Jarow: the prices are totally arbitrary.

[52:18] Paul: Yeah, but it's an enormous amount of stress and people see that and they're like, yeah, I don't want to go down that path.

[52:24] Oshan Jarow: Yeah, right.

[52:26] Paul: But yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's crazy. I think around the ideas that Americans are excited by, there's this survey I highlighted in one of my newsletters, a survey of American freshmen. And they show what do you value most in life. The 1950s and '60s, number one was like how to live a meaningful life. That was like what people were most worried about. And then two is like having a family.

Three is like getting good at what you do. And then in the 1970s, you've written a lot about this, what jumped from out of nowhere was being wealthy. And living a meaningful life basically fell in proportion to the money gain. And that's a mystery in itself. And money has become central, I think, because of a lot of our systems have become complicated and expensive. But what interests me is number 2 and 3 have still stayed the same— having a family and being good at what you do, right?

So how do we reframe these debates around like, how do we unleash young people, right? How do we enable people to have families, right? It's, it's actually scary for me to be self-employed and bring a child into, into life because you don't know what the healthcare scenarios could be. Like, I feel like I'm a better person and contributing and able to help people and being creative, but the system is telling me, go get a job, Paul, you're a freaking idiot for trying to bring a potential child into this world. And we need to reclaim that, right? Like, how do we enable people to have families and thrive and do creative things, do the things that push our culture forward without economic precarity?

And you've written about that with your time inequality. You've written about that with UBI. Do you want to say more about some of the other— like, you've written a lot about what are the different kind of like policy options. How do we tie these policy options to things people are already bought into, like raising a family or entrepreneurism?

[54:49] Oshan Jarow: Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a million-dollar question. Maybe one kind of piece of groundwork to throw in, you mentioned it just a little bit ago, is we look a lot at— take healthcare, for example. We look a lot at efficiency and at choice, but the idea of mental health or anxiety doesn't factor in at all. And if you ask yourself what the change of anxiety levels will come from moving from the kind of system we have now to universal healthcare, there's a lot of substance there that gets passed over. And you can do that for a lot of different policies. If you look at— it's one of the touch points, I think, between economics and consciousness or subjectivity, is if you ask yourself in what ways certain economic structures either contribute to or kind of help us move beyond certain dimensions of anxiety.

That's a dimension that I think has been left out for a long time, and it's starting to come back in. But I also think, especially kind of in the conversation So one of the ways a lot of people refer to kind of economics from the '70s until today is neoliberalism, neoliberal capitalism. And one of the interesting angles in the kind of debate that's asking what comes next, right, what's the kind of post-neoliberal framework, is that you can actually make the argument now purely on economic grounds. So for example, rather than having a moral critique of neoliberalism, saying it's unfair, saying whatever, which will very rarely convert anyone who isn't already predisposed to your idea. You can make the argument purely based on growth, on stability, unlike traditional metrics that make capitalism work well on innovation.

You can show we have the empirical evidence that suggests all kinds of gains in efficiency for economic democracy, like co-determination. We have the evidence for entrepreneurship and healthcare. We have the evidence for growth and stimulating demand with basic income and also with entrepreneurship. So with all these kinds of different ideas, you can couch them within these existing attitudes of economic growth is something that allows us to move beyond zero-sum games or something that allows us to share in prosperity. If you— and, you know, the question of green growth is obviously very vital, and I don't think we have to abandon growth altogether. The question of stability, which has always been important in the economic literature, which factors in inequality, all of these things.

I think that's very possible. And I think it's not being made as much as it should, that argument, that even on the kind of traditional criteria, these alternatives might outperform the status quo. But I think that's really interesting. And also, I think you see that happening in people like Russ Roberts, people like Cowen, who's trying to factor in leisure time. That's a pretty radical thing when you ask, how do you actually do that? Because you can't just decide that, oh, we're going to value leisure because as we've seen over the past 50 years, It doesn't happen naturally.

You have to have a mechanism that converts that kind of valuation into the real capacity for ordinary people to do that, and that requires policy. So I think you're right, that that's the question, right? How do we appeal to existing attitudes to show these different possibilities? And the optimistic thing, I think, is that we have a lot of ways of doing so, that we have the literature, we have the ideas, we have the bridges between them. So we just have to kind of elaborate them.

[58:05] Paul: Yeah, I'm probably a little more skeptical than you that numbers get us there. I just think like numbers, literature, research studies are not gonna get us there. I think it's the qualitative stories you hear from places like Finland. I think, I worked in strategy consulting. I know how to manipulate any data to give me what I wanna see. And I think enough like smart people, there's enough information out there now you can kind of find the data to fit whatever you want.

There's a pretty strong anti-UBI argument, though it might start from a different foundation, and there's a really strong like pro-UBI argument. I think what's fascinating for me are stories that are attached to truth, right? The danger is when you're getting stories attached to non-truth, right? But yeah, I think Jordan Hall put this video out about the possibilities of UBI, and the story goes, okay, right now Goldman Sachs hires a janitor for $20,000 a year. Suddenly you give that person $1,000 a month and that person says, screw you, Goldman Sachs, I don't want to clean your toilets. And they can't hire anyone, right?

So then the price goes up, supply and demand, and Goldman Sachs now needs to hire a janitor for $75,000 a year because who the hell wants to clean toilets if you don't have to? Right. Then downstream entrepreneurs go, oh, how can we design toilets to self-clean themselves? Let's develop a new technology or a new way of thinking about this. Right. So then you have all this downstream creative creativity opened up, right?

And then, I mean, the biggest problem then is what do you do with the wealth that's unlocked? And but that can help fund UBI, and that's kind of like an unknown upside that we, we don't really know about. We've seen UBI experiments, but we've never seen it as a whole society, right?

[01:00:15] Oshan Jarow: Right.

[01:00:15] Paul: Because if only some people are getting UBI in Finland, there's still somebody else you can hire to clean your toilets, right?

[01:00:23] Oshan Jarow: Yeah, yeah, it's— there's a really interesting paper written by Philippe Van Parijs, who's kind of one of the biggest academics in the basic income world, and he wrote it back, I think it was in '89, and it's called The Capitalist Road to Communism. And it basically describes the logic you just described, that if you have a sufficient UBI, there's a really interesting kind of inversion in wage behavior where, like you said, people who are doing work that has a lot of drudgery, like work that we just don't want to do, they gain a lot of bargaining power. And the more bargaining power you gain, the better, uh, wage contracts you're going to receive. And so you see this weird inversion where really, um, undesirable work, the wages go up, and then work that you want to do anyway, wages go down.

And so you have a flip in the usual inversion, and then you have employers are incentivized to automate a lot of work because they don't want to pay $75,000 to, to an employee. And so you see an incentive to actually push, uh, full automation. One of the important questions there, though, is given the current power structure and the current way that wealth operates, there's no reason that the wealth that would be generated off of the automation is something that would be broadly shared. So we have to talk about how do we all share in the wealth that is created and this kind of stuff. And that's really important. But yeah, it is interesting to think about the changes in incentives, the more bargaining power.

Kind of people at the lower end of the economic ladder get, how is that going to change all those kinds of wages? And the janitor story is a really good one. Yeah.

[01:01:54] Paul: Yeah. And there is a broader acceptance, I notice, especially I think talking to previous generations recently. There's almost like categorical confusion or like, WTF, why does Jeff Bezos have $200 billion? Like, I think you or I have dug into how did that happen. It's a combination of zero marginal cost. Then you have these superstar firms that are in the top 1% out-earning like crazy.

And then automated algorithms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon basically run on automation. And can create unbelievable wealth. Like, the market cap of them today is like 6 or 7 times what the largest companies were 10 years ago.

[01:02:46] Oshan Jarow: Right.

[01:02:47] Paul: That's unbelievable. So people have a sense like, okay, Jeff Bezos has more money, but they haven't yet made the connection that like there are these super wealth creation engines that this society has. They have tens of billions of dollars on their balance sheet because they don't know what to do with it. How do we redistribute that wealth? And I think we'll get there. Right now, what I see is basically we have the dumbest possible ideas.

We're at like 0.1 version, right?

[01:03:25] Oshan Jarow: The economy wasn't designed for this.

[01:03:27] Paul: You know, no, it's uncharted territory. It's kind of unbelievable that we've achieved this too. We had this paper, I think, in the 1950s, the Triple Revolution. They were like afraid this was going to happen. And one of the biggest concerns was what are people going to do with their free time once everything's automated? It didn't happen then, but it's happening now.

Like Google sells ads on algorithm and then it has a whole bunch of employees from what I can tell, some of my friends working there. They're just kind of like working out random stuff and hoping they can come up with another business idea with all the excess cash. Why, why doesn't Google just have their own UBI to kind of support the communities around them? And maybe that will be a possibility. But I mean, our political parties are led by 70-year-olds who basically have no imagination for what could be. Have you seen anything globally, like interesting political stuff or ideas like To me, it just seems like Dumb and Dumber.

[01:04:27] Oshan Jarow: I think that's a fair way to put it.

[01:04:29] Paul: It's like either people should be able to get unbelievably rich or we should double down on very complicated, expensive systems and give them to people. It's like, what do we— come on.

[01:04:42] Oshan Jarow: Yeah. Well, I think, too, one of the important notes, like one of the reasons that wealth inequality has ballooned so much, I have no problem with saying, for example, let's say Sarah starts a company and some innovative tech startup, and she winds up selling it to Facebook for $1 billion. I have no problem saying that Sarah has rightfully earned that $1 billion. That makes sense. They valued your company, great. But the thing about wealth is like, that's not what makes Sarah super wealthy.

Now that she has $1 billion, like the best way to get wealthy is to already have it. So once you have $1 billion, you can invest that and you're sitting on 8%, 9%, 10% returns. And then that's when that starts cascading. And that's where the question of, what are you earning privately versus what's kind of a collective— what's the collective nature of value production? It's in those kind of second-order effects where once you've gotten wealth, the way the economy is set up, the way capital gains are dealt with, so on and so forth, it's very easy to just have that number then just grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. And the question is, is that— A, is that just, and B, is that doing the economy any good, or would that do better with the kind of cyclic cyclical system that cycles that back out to everyone to stimulate demand all over.

So yeah, when you look at the way that operates now, it doesn't seem to make much sense. And globally, I mean, in terms of policy, I focus a lot more on the US. I see the US as, for better or worse, a kind of laboratory where we're pretty far along in some kind of process. And whatever we do here can It's like an experimental place. There are certainly places that are going interesting directions. I know Taiwan is doing some really interesting things that you probably know way more about me, especially in terms of state capacity.

But I'm really interested in how the US is going to deal with it, because the US could be really screwed, or we could be really phenomenal. I don't think we're— we're not written off, nothing like that. But it would require a big shift in thinking. And, and how we approach wealth and value creation, and not only the distribution of wealth but the pre-distribution, right? So it's on one level you can look at, um, okay, wealth is accruing up here and we need to tax it and give it back down here, and fine. But it's even more interesting to talk about how do we get wealth to be created in a more egalitarian fashion in the first place, and, and not in line with this idea of like the equality of outcomes.

That's not a very interesting position to me, but If you have meaningful equality of opportunity, I think that you can actually— you would expect a bit of a more less lopsided distribution. And if you look at our distribution now, it does not suggest that we have equality of opportunity. And so I think that that's also a place where you can generate some pretty broad coalitions, not again, not just on the far left, but more center, even more to the right. Equality of opportunity is a pretty wide banner that a lot of people come together on. We just don't agree on What does it mean to have a— like, what does it take to have that?

[01:07:35] Paul: Yeah. And a lot of people don't seem to see the connection in how they actually build their wealth. And this is why I keep coming back to work beliefs. I see like boomers, for example, I see some people that have created a lot of wealth for themselves, but they're not fully making the connection that that's from a return on capital and not a return on their labor. But at the same time, I also have compassion because the work system many of these people came up in forced them to alienate from society, to not be their full selves at work. And I've almost thought there needs to be kind of like we need some sort of ritual, um, to help people transcend to kind of this new phase and not just look at, okay, I have a lot of money because I suffered and put my, um, put so much effort into it.

That is true, and it's like yes and rather than either or. Um, but it's, uh, it's so hard to figure out how to do that, and I think that's a cultural problem. That's not a LC problem. And yeah.

[01:08:57] Oshan Jarow: [Speaker:DAVID] Ritual is the— I love that phrasing of it because ritual is so interesting in its role with kind of our cultural attitude, especially about work. If you look at rites of passage rituals throughout other cultures, you look at Aboriginal culture, Eskimo culture, Native Americans, they all have essentially variations on the same theme of there's a point where you transition from immaturity to maturity. And what they— so the Eskimos, for example, the ritual everyone goes through is you sit in a freezing igloo for 30 days with barely any food, barely any water, no contact, and you do absolutely nothing. And you come like that close to death. Or in Aboriginal culture, there's a walkabout where you go out into the desert for like 3 months. And in all these situations, you're kind of put into raw, direct contact with your own experience of the universe in their cosmology.

And that has a— that kind of pulls you out of your cultural echo chamber. It pulls you out of the, the cultural attitudes you've absorbed, and it gives you this kind of firsthand relationship with whatever the heck you feel is going on. And it gives you an experience that I think is really valuable. And we don't have rituals like that. Like I mentioned, like when I went from— or accidentally didn't have a job, and so I went from college to not knowing what— like, that was an incredibly diluted form of kind of like experiencing something that I wouldn't have otherwise. Richard Tarnas actually is a professor, I think, at the California Institute of Integral Studies, but he wrote a phenomenal paper on this.

And, his whole point in the U.S., he's like, "Since we've abandoned these rites of passage rituals, since we don't have ways of generating these firsthand direct relationship with what's going on, it's kind of sunk into the background and occurring at an unconscious level." So, he sees a lot of the crises we're going through as kind of the boiling over of this neglect that we've had and the rituals occurring on a collective scale, which is a fun metaphor. But all to say, I think you're absolutely right that it goes well beyond policy. We need to talk about how do we relate to one another? What are the social rituals that we have? Even rituals that like everyday rituals, you know, we have sporting events. Obviously there's a fascinating kind of religious dimension to that.

So if you look at what are the rituals we have, very few are connected to kind of pulling us out absorbed ways of being. So, that would be a really interesting lever.

[01:11:07] Paul: Yeah. And I have so much compassion for people. I talk to— I have these curiosity conversations where people can just book them with me every week. And I've been talking to probably 3 to 5 people a week, especially picked up since the pandemic. But I talk to people of all ages. And I think people get angry about wealth inequality but don't see that people that have been through this economic and labor system are a bit exhausted and frustrated.

And when people say, you have too much money, you should give it back, like, they're rightly— their expected response is going to be resentment and anger, right? But what I see when I kind of open up and have deeper conversations is there's a lot of wisdom there. Or a lot of hunger for more life. And I think there's profound possibilities in like thinking about our elders in different ways and trying to pass along different types of wisdom and knowledge. But we'll see. We'll see.

I just don't know. It's— I think it's an exciting time, but I think a lot of things right now are really about experiments and imagination and possibility. And I'm not sure we have a lot of that, but I think we could see a lot of interesting things come out of this pandemic.

[01:12:40] Oshan Jarow: Yeah. Well, just to push back on that a little bit, I think that a lot of your work, your work is, like you said, you're highlighting the stories where this is happening. You know, things are happening and the internet's definitely facilitated our kind of exposure to a lot of different things that are going on, but that's one of the things that I always treasure about following everything that you're writing about and putting out there is that not, you know, I'm lost in like a policy world, which is kind of view from up here, but it's happening on the ground at an individual level, and we need to bring these both together, right? And understanding that in my own life, I have more space to act than I realize, likely, but also, you know, I shouldn't individualize that and take any guilt from my failure to do so.

I should understand the way that the and how the surrounding systems are kind of interacting with me to create that outcome. But I think that the more we bring these together, we bring together the real stories of things that are happening, and an understanding of what is possible, what we have the means, the resources, the ingenuity to do. I think these can spiral together. And I think you're right. I think things are changing all around us, right? It's a very volatile time, and it's dangerous, and it's also exciting.

[01:13:45] Paul: Yeah, I think— One of the essays you sent me, I think you sent me or you linked it in your newsletter, was Capitalism Redefined. I've read it a couple of times. It's a great essay, but it might be a good point to close and we can leave the audience with some optimism. But the quote is, great debates rage about whether to raise or lower interest rates or increase or decrease regulation. And our political system has been paralyzed by a bitter ideological struggle over the budget. But there's too little debate about what it is all for.

Hardly anyone ever asks, what kind of growth do we want? What does wealth mean? And what will it do for our lives? I love that. And I, I, it pains me to see this in our current debates. It's like we have in the US, we have one party that's like, we need to pay people more.

And this party's like, we need to pay people less. And I'm just screaming like, what is it all for? Like, can't we have a discussion? Has anyone read philosophy? Like, and these are not— these people are not wired to have that conversation. But I'm just glad people like you are and trying to push us to dream bigger and think about what, what do we really want?

What is wealth?

[01:15:05] Oshan Jarow: Yeah.

[01:15:06] Paul: And you too, man.

[01:15:07] Oshan Jarow: And it's funny, actually, the last kind of thing in terms of what wealth is, like, again, this is what's been so wonderful about like going back to the history, like in the ancient Greek civilization, the way they defined wealth was almost verbatim. This is from Hannah Arendt again. Wealth was the capacity to exclude labor from humankind's life, which again, is not something I'm saying we need to adopt, but they had a very specific understanding that the wealth had a point. And the point of wealth was directly related to liberating, at that time, white men to participate in the public realm, to participate in creating the world that feeds back to shape us. Right. And now we've kind of, I think, drifted away from, like you say, the conversations about what is wealth and what can it allow us to do.

So I hope it comes back.

[01:15:51] Paul: Fantastic. So we'll close there. We could probably talk for another couple of hours. We actually didn't even dive that deep into something you've written pretty extensively about, UBI. But I think the more important conversation is the deeper stuff, the foundational stuff. And UBI, I think it could be 7 other things.

I don't think you really care what the solution is. It's, it's more about transcending and unlocking and dreaming. What are you energized about? What what's exciting you and where are you headed and perhaps let us know where people can find you.

[01:16:30] Oshan Jarow: Yeah. I'm energized about the wide array of different conversations that are happening. I think a lot of the conversations that we've mentioned have been happening for 5, 10, 15 years now, but especially over the past 6 months, you see a lot of energetic debate about, and even in the mainstream, about what is economics for, what is wealth. I mean, economists like Mariana Mazzucato, who's firmly planted in the language of the existing tradition, is changing it from within. So as someone who spends a lot of time reading economic policy and really interested in that world, I think it's a really exciting time that I think this kind of hold, the capitalist realism, learned hopelessness phenomenon, is absolutely being punctured. And I think that there are really systematic ways of thinking about transcending that, that are on the mainstream table, that are up for debate.

And I think that we're seeing our imaginations being opened by this kind of cascade of crises, not only pandemic, not only the environment, not only racial inequality and brutality, all of these things are cascading and it's spiraling together with these real kind of rigorous theoretical understandings in the academic disciplines that so often drive policy. And I think you're right, we need to get to this bottom level of the ideas and how we relate to the ideas of work. But also, I want to see that kind of cashed in in policy. I want to see it put in practice. And I think that's happening. If anyone wants to, I publish most of my essays and my podcast on my website.

That's musingmind.org. I'm pretty active on Twitter. If you're on there, definitely reach out. I also have a contact thing on my website. Just like you, the reason that I'm doing a lot of this public-facing stuff is to find the others, to create community around these questions. And it's been a wonderful journey so far.

I mean, like you, we met exactly through this kind of stuff and it's been great and I've learned so much. So please, if anyone's interested, reach out and let's see what we can cook up.

[01:18:30] Paul: Fantastic. Well, I appreciate the time today, Oshan. Looking forward to continuing the conversation.

[01:18:37] Oshan Jarow: Absolutely.