Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…He did make that case and it was a great conversation. And my response to that is great, that’s a good thing. We don’t need a three-letter acronym to do that. You don’t need special programmatic DEI incentives to do it because companies are always going to seek in a truly free market, which I think we’re missing in the United States today for a lot of reasons, but in a truly free market, companies will have the incentive to hire the best and brightest or else they’re going to be less competitive versus other companies. But you don’t need ESG, DEI, CSR regimes in part enforced by the government to do it. Today, to be a government contractor, for example, you have to adopt certain racial and gender representation targets in your workforce. That’s not the free market working. So I think you can’t have it both ways either. It’s going to be good for companies and companies are going to do what’s in their self-interest. That’s what capitalists like Mark Cuban and I believe. But if we really believe that, then we should let the market work rather than forcing it to adopt these top-down standards. That’s my issue with it. I don’t know what it is about human psychology, but whenever you have a sort of administration, a committee that gets together to do a good thing, the committee starts to use the good thing, the ideology behind wish there’s a good ideal, to bully people and to do bad things. I don’t know what it is. This has less to do with left-wing versus right-wing ideology and more the nature of a bureaucracy is one that looks after its own existence as its top goal. So part of what you’ve seen with the so-called perpetuation of wokeness in American life is that the bureaucracy has used the appearance of virtue to actually deflect accountabilities for its own failure. So you’ve seen that in several different spheres of American life. You could even talk about in the military. You think about our entry into Iraq after 9/11 had nothing to do with the state objectives that we had. And I think by all accounts, it was a policy move we regret. Our policy ranks and our foreign policy establishment made a mistake in entering Iraq, invading a country that really by all accounts was not at all responsible for 9/11. Nonetheless, if you’re part of the US military or you’re General Mark Milley, you would rather talk about white rage or systemic racism than you would actually talk about the military’s actual substantive failures. It’s what I call the practice of blowing woke smoke to deflect accountability. You could say the same thing with respect to the educational system. It’s a lot easier to claim that, and I’m not the one making this claim, but others have made this claim, that math is racist because there are inequitable results on objective tests of mathematics based on different demographic attributes. You can claim using that then math is racist. It’s a lot easier to blow that woke smoke than it is to accept accountability for failing to teach black kids in the inner city how to actually do math and fix our public school systems and the zip code coded mechanism for trapping kids in poor communities in bad schools. So I think that in many cases, what these bureaucracies do is they use the appearance of signaling this virtue as a way of not really advancing a social cause, but of strengthening the power of the bureaucracy itself and insulating that bureaucracy from criticism. So in many ways, bureaucracy, I think, cars the channels through which much of this woke ideology has flowed over the last several years. And that’s why part of my focus has shifted away from just combating wokeness because that’s just a symptom, I think, versus combating actual bureaucracy itself. The rise of this managerial class, the rise of the deep state. We talk about that in the government, but the deep state doesn’t just exist in the government. It exists I think in every sphere of our lives, from companies to nonprofits to universities. It’s the rise of we call the managerial class, the committee class, the people who professionally sit on committees, I think are wielding far more power today than actual creators, entrepreneurs, original ideators and ordinary citizens alike.…

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