SPENCER: Nicholas, welcome.

NICHOLAS: Hi, Spencer. I'm looking forward to it.

SPENCER: When people think about governments representing the people, they think about elections. That's what comes to mind. But you argue that that's not the only way to represent the people. What's another powerful way to represent the people?

NICHOLAS: I want to say that it's not another way to represent people; I want to say that there are essentially two ways of representing the people, and they're completely different. We're very familiar with both of them, but we've doubled down in our political system on one method, which is representation by election, and the other is representation by sampling. What the hell is representation by sampling? Go look at a jury. That's the other way to represent the people,

SPENCER: So people are very familiar with this idea for jury selection. You take a random sampling of your peers. Do we use it right now in any other parts of government?

NICHOLAS: We do in Michigan, because Michigan had trouble with gerrymandering, and they came up with this institution, which is my favorite example of what we should be doing all around the world, all around the liberal democratic world. It's called the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. Now it's a bit more complicated than just random sampling, bu that t gives you the basic idea. It's 13 representative ordinary people from Michigan, and they're asked to supervise the process of drawing electoral boundaries, and that has cleaned up gerrymandering when the Supreme Court of Michigan wasn't able to do it, partly because the Supreme Court of the United States said that gerrymandering is kind of fine. Even when they get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, gerrymandering is just fine.

SPENCER: So why would using a sort of random sampling procedure produce a better result for something like gerrymandering?

NICHOLAS: Politicians, this is a very fundamental idea we have in all governance, certainly in public governance, which is conflict of interest. Every politician who deliberates on a set of electoral boundaries has a conflict of interest. They tell us that they want a democracy, but they also have a conflict of interest, and that conflict of interest is professionalized, habitualized, by a thing called a political party. People find themselves socialized into doing extremely immoral things in political parties that they wouldn't do on their own and they wouldn't do at the beginning of their political career, but by the time they've learned the system, that's what they do.

SPENCER: Could you elaborate on that a bit? What are the kinds of things that they end up finding themselves doing that they wouldn't think they would do?

NICHOLAS: Well, politics is about trading off ends and means. We have a sort of panto. That's a British word, like pantomime, sort of idea where we have goodies and baddies. But politics isn't like that. Politics is about log rolling. It's about assembling majorities, gaining power, and that involves trading off ends and means. If you find yourself in a party that is doing something that you're not that crazy about, and if a journalist asks you, "Are you in favor of this?" Well, you say, "Yes." You basically lie. You don't say, "Oh, well, not really, but you know, everything's okay. On balance, I'd rather be in this party than the other party." You're involved in a professionalized show, and you just get used to that. You're on stage, and you don't break the fourth wall. Occasionally you do, and some of the more remarkable and skillful politicians will do it occasionally, but basically you're putting on a show with your colleagues.

SPENCER: I've been on the board of different organizations throughout my life, one thing that really surprised me is the extent to which you feel pressure to vote along with the majority, and the way it kind of works out. It's not like someone saying, "Oh, you have to do this, or we're not going to like you," or something like that. It's just that you start to realize that when you vote against the majority, you kind of get a negative feeling from the people around you. Maybe they trust you a little bit less, and also you feel like you're not accomplishing anything, because the majority is going to win anyway. You're like, "Well, I could vote against them. I lost some political capital. They think worse of me, and it doesn't accomplish anything, because they win anyway." So it's just really fascinating.

NICHOLAS: Yeah, absolutely. What you've described is a sort of gateway to groupthink. In fact, that sort of exists everywhere. Our whole political system is competitive. Groupthink is one side versus another, but it's incredibly powerful in institutions. We might get on to talk about this more, but ideology connects up to that, because ideology assembles ideas into coherent patterns, whether that coherence is actually true to the ideas or whether it comes via tribal affiliations and so on. We think that way. One of the things that my pondering of this question leads me to believe — I can't prove this, but the more I've thought about it, the more I've wondered to myself — how much of what we see of the divisiveness, not just the divisiveness of politics, but the very fact that asking if someone is a Democrat or a Republican, a left winger or a right winger gives you so much coherent information about a person, is that an artifact, to a substantial extent, of the fact that we built politics around competitions rather than deliberations? Competitions occur when you build politics around elections, and you're much more likely to get deliberations and give and take, with people trying to figure out not what do I think and how do I win, but where are my red lines? What can't I live with? What do I have to persuade others to do? How far do I want them to come, and how far can I go towards what they want so that we end up in a place that most of us are pretty happy with? That's increasingly absent from our politics.

SPENCER: It's really interesting to think about how most people, in America, for example, can kind of place them somewhere on the political spectrum. While it's true there are some people that are really unusual thinkers or think outside the box, many people's political views will be, to some extent, reasonably predicted by where they fall on the single-dimensional line. A lot of information.

NICHOLAS: Yeah, it might not be perfect, but you'll get a lot of information. You can argue — I think we all think that — that's sort of inherent in the way that politics arranges itself into paradigmatic systems like science does. But I think, firstly, the less it has the better. The more I think about it, there's quite a lot of this that is just about the way we instinctively do politics.

SPENCER: Yeah, a good example would be the link between views on gun control and views on abortion. A priori, they seem like they should have nothing to do with each other. There are clearly social forces that link those views together, so they become correlated.

NICHOLAS: And when a really new issue comes up, the various factions, the various sides before it's become ideologized, there's a kind of phony war. I'd say this happened with COVID. It also happened to some extent with greenhouse gases over a much longer period because Margaret Thatcher was one of the first people out of the block saying we have to worry about human-induced climate change. There's no real reason why the right has to be against action on climate change. The right should be saying climate change is a market failure. Obviously, it's about pollution, and we need the most efficient possible response to that. Now, what's happened in my country is that the right saw a political opportunity in pulling apart a social consensus that we would accept climate change and then put carbon pricing around it, and that would have, by now, generated, I don't know, 1% of GDP in revenue for our budget. Well, we got rid of it, but there's no sense in which this is real right-wing thinking. It's opportunistic thinking.

SPENCER: There are some similarities we seem to observe between the left in some countries and the left in other countries, and similarly, the right in some countries and the right in other countries. What do you attribute that to? Why are there sort of similar rhyming patterns across countries?

NICHOLAS: Because I think that there is some coherence. Firstly, there's a lot of ideology that does kind of make sense. If I'm asked what a left-wing position is, it's a position that is more open to experimentation, less favorable, less keen on being hogtied by tradition, and tends to take the side of victims or people doing badly. On the other hand, a right-wing position is one that tends to identify with people in authority and emphasizes the need for authority and so on. So there's a lot of coherence. Then occasionally there are kinds of crossovers. But there's an awful lot of international communication and actually international rehearsal or international solidarity. You see Steve Bannon running around the world trying to put together a particular coalition of political parties with particular views; this happens on the left as well. Of course, it happened during the Cold War. There's a great deal of deliberate sponsoring of ideas. I would urge you not to forget Marie Antoinette's hats.

SPENCER: Oh, yeah.

NICHOLAS: Yeah. So Marie Antoinette, in the late 17th century, starts wearing hats that are going higher and higher. Then there's scenery built into the hats. There was apparently one that had a fountain in it, and it just got more and more elaborate. Of course, this caught on among the stately women of European courts. There are elements of fashion. We are memetic creatures, so there's a lot going on.

SPENCER: I guess my current view is that there are these natural anchor points, to some extent, based on views about the way the world works, personality, things like that, but I don't think they're that strong. I think they tend to push groups toward one side or the other, and then I think social forces do the rest of the work, where social forces are very, very strong. If you're raised with a certain worldview, you probably have that worldview. If you know that the other group that opposes your group has the opposite worldview, you'll view that worldview much more negatively than you would otherwise. So things get much more polarized than maybe the natural anchor points. Would you agree with that?

NICHOLAS: I totally agree with that, but I would throw in some more things. America has a very famous, internationally recognized tradition of celebrating its politics, and since not exactly the founding fathers, but the generation after the founding fathers, celebrating its political parties. Way back when, the political parties — one of the most interesting things about America is that Republicans used to be left-wing —you would grow up and identify as a Republican. This competitive political system induces a social structure and, if you like, an epistemological structure, which arranges these patterns for you. I'm arguing that that's a big deal, and you don't have to agree with me; you might just think it's a bit of a deal. I think it's obvious that it has to have some effect. The way I see it, this has kind of seeped into our way of thinking through a whole lot of pathways that we could talk about.

SPENCER: I think in America today, it almost seems inevitable that groups hate each other and think the other side is evil. But that wasn't always the case. There have been lots of examples where there's been a lot of respectful disagreement among political parties.

NICHOLAS: That's right, and there's a famous — this is going to sound stupid of me because I'm going to say there's a famous political scientist, and then I won't be able to tell you his name. It starts with P, a European name, but in 1979 he wrote an article that sort of turned into a book. He said that democracy is essentially about the losers of elections, not the winners. What he meant was that you don't have a democracy, or your democracy is in trouble the moment the losers start saying, "Well, that wasn't fair." A democracy is about the people who the decision goes against, and they say, "Well, we'll have another go at that in four years' time." But we're all Americans, we're all Australians, and we did our best, but the Australian or the American people decided we were wrong, and that's falling apart. It's falling apart under the theater of political contest. I would argue that the actual social reality is not really all that polarized. It's nothing like as polarized as it was, say, before the Civil War in America, or during Chartism in the United Kingdom in the 1840s and 50s. There have been times when things have been far more actually polarized in the community. Things are very unequal in the United States, but certainly the level of poverty among poor people is just through the floor compared to today.

SPENCER: Are you saying that people are much less poor today on average?

NICHOLAS: Absolutely, of course, they are. It is. I'm not trying to make light of their poverty, but hunger is not a major problem. Addictions are, crime is, there are many problems. I'm not trying to say these people should all pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I'm simply saying that poverty was a much more physical phenomenon. Diseases, shocking living standards, 12 people living in a room and so on.

SPENCER: When you think about polarization, if you go on social media today, it seems like it's the most polarized it's ever been. There's so much vitriol. But when you say the communities are actually less polarized, what do you mean by that? Do you mean if you take two random people, chances are that they can just get along if they're in a room together, even if they're in different political groups?

NICHOLAS: I mean something a little more than that. That's true. But also, if you take a left winger and a right winger, and you say, "What do you believe in? Do you believe in independent judges now? Not, do you believe the judges we have right now are independent, but do you think it'd be a good idea to have independent judges?" And I know the numbers on this. If you ask Americans in one of the most gerrymandered liberal democracies that I know of, if you ask Americans, "What do they think of gerrymandering?" Well, 92% of Democrats say it's bad or very bad. That shouldn't surprise you, but what do you think the percentages of Republicans are?

SPENCER: I see, they say it's really bad as well.

NICHOLAS: It's not. They're 88%. So, that's just one example. Do people believe that if you're seriously poor, you should get welfare? Yes, they do. Almost, there's just a large number of unarguable propositions that people will be happy with. Do they think that we should fund public transport and private transport? Yes, they do. There are just huge amounts of commonality, and the politicians have to turn it into a contest. Since perhaps the advent of social media, that's become a kind of it's no longer a spectator sport. It's a kind of participatory sport where people actually join this process of polarization, but it's kind of cosplay. It doesn't mean it can't end in bullets being fired and hatred being endlessly rehearsed and then made manifest. But if you actually ask, "What are you disagreeing about?" It's a few percentage points on the tax code. It's whether you have a generous or a mean welfare system and so on.

SPENCER: Although aren't there some real fundamental disagreements around religious values or abortion, things like that?

NICHOLAS: Yeah, in America, there is, and in most, in all the other liberal democracies that I know of, abortion is not a big deal. It might be in Eastern Europe, I don't really know, but America is particularly distinctive in that regard. And good on the Americans — they take these things seriously, and they're to be taken seriously if you believe very strongly one way or the other. We have to respect that democracy. We have to take that into account. I'm not saying, "You know, silly Americans." It is true that now, I can give you a line of reasoning that says, "I'm a Republican, or I think abortion is murder." Well, should I go and get my rifle out or should I perpetrate violence against abortionists? Well, maybe you should. I don't think you should. I do not recommend it, but reason doesn't tell you these things. Ultimately, it's a kind of social instinct that I'm not going to kill mine. I have to live with my neighbors, and I passionately disagree with them about abortion, but I'm going to leave it to democratic means. That's a great breakthrough we had coming into modern times, and we've got to hang on to it. In saying that, Spencer, I'm not trying to make light of it. I don't believe that abortion should be banned, but I take the views of people who do think so absolutely seriously. I hope they won't perpetrate violence on me, though some of the ways they're thinking about this, i.e., abortion is murder, leaves them with questions. If I think they're stigmatizing and making life impossible for people who get pregnant and will bring an unwanted baby into the world, I could get on my high horse. I could come up with a scenario where their behavior is beyond the pale. What we've done since the Reformation, really, in the 17th century, is we've said we're not going to kill each other about those things. We're not going to resort to violence. We will accept that these are difficult decisions that we solve in a democratic way, and that's fraying. Your example of abortion, I think, is an outlier. I think most of the other things we can say, "Well, I disagree, but this is obviously something that we have to agree on through a democratic process."

SPENCER: I believe it was Duncan Sabien who had a quote, which I'll just paraphrase: the measure of civilization is the number of tools that we decide not to use against each other. Once we decide to not throw stones at each other, we become more civilized. Once we decide to not shoot each other, we become more civilized.

NICHOLAS: Yeah, and we grow in some faith that it'll get us somewhere. This is one of the things that democracy is pretty high on the human sophistication stack, and anyone can defect against that. It's a high state of tolerance. It's a high state of civilization. If there are large factions who think, "I don't accept this. I'm going to do whatever I can to take advantage of myself. I don't really respect the people who disagree with me enough to accept their view," then the thing can unravel quite quickly, because the other side ends up reciprocating. The other side says, "Well, fuck you. You've just shown complete contempt for our views. We're entitled to do the same for you."

SPENCER: Yeah, it seems to me that obviously it's a far cry from shooting people or even throwing rocks at them, but challenging the fundamentals of democracy without good reason seems to me like one of these actions where you say, "Oh, I'm not going to accept that election. Even though that person won the election, I'm not going to accept it." It seems like it's one of those tools that sort of undermines the whole process, right?

NICHOLAS: We've had huge, massive blows against the broad democratic norms in your country for almost a decade now, and it does a lot of damage. It does a lot of damage. It also shows us how strong or how many institutions we had evolved to broadly, if not defend democratic norms, to behave consistently with them. It takes an awful lot to dismantle authoritarianism, to get to a truly autocratic government. But it has a kind of momentum, and you can, it's a Jenga column. You can take out some big and important blocks. That's why I have such excitement about something like the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, because everything I know tells me that ordinary people look on at what's happening and they're horrified, they're aghast, and at the same time, they know that democracy as we're practicing it is a freak show, so they're kind of lost. What the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission tells you is that you can build institutions in which ordinary people from the life world defend democratic norms. It's an idea hiding in plain sight, because that's exactly what a jury does. It doesn't try to answer the question, Is the defendant guilty or not? democratically, particularly; it's not thinking, What would the people say? But it is saying, "We are the people, and we are here to decide according to law. This is part of our democracy," and it's hiding in plain sight, this institution which invites ordinary people to defend democratic norms, and they can do it because they believe in them, and they don't have the conflicts of interest that we began by talking about.

SPENCER: Yeah, so let's talk about that. You might think, when redistricting, you're trying to say, "How are we going to carve things up? Politicians are thinking, "What's going to get the most votes for my side?" But you might think that ordinary people would think that way too. They might think, "I want my side to win, so I want to carve it up that way." Why is it that if you take a randomly selected or semi-randomly selected group of ordinary citizens and have them carve it up, do they come to a different result than if you have politicians do it?

NICHOLAS: I could give you a few answers to that. I know lots of politicians, and they're almost all going into politics with pretty good motives, and then they become part of a machine, and they become habituated to certain kinds of shortcut taking. That's kind of their way of life. Ordinary people aren't like that. Most people think of going into a shop; you could maybe make a few dollars a day or a week by deliberately shortchanging people in a shop. You could do it systematically. If you were caught, you would just say, "Oh, sorry, there you go." Shopkeepers could do it too, but most people don't do it. They don't do it because they would feel bad doing it. If you are among your peers, you feel bad screwing them over, especially if you're in an institution that is there to come up with boundaries that everyone can agree on, Republicans and Democrats and ordinary people can agree on. Your listeners will be familiar with the term "Schelling point," I expect. There's another obvious equilibrium of an agreement; otherwise, you're just going to get endless bickering if you don't head in the right direction, which is, let's make these things fair. I'll give you another answer, actually, which is something that Machiavelli said. Machiavelli said that if you're the prince, don't worry about the ordinary people because they just want to get on with their lives. They want to look after their kids. You want to worry about the grandi, the powerful ones, because they're insatiable. If you get into systems of power, those systems of power are built by people who want power as competition for power, and the whole logic of that is a very different story.

SPENCER: It also seems like there's an element of winner-take-all in politics where, obviously, it depends on the political system, but if one side has slightly more votes, they can kind of steamroll the other side, and they make all the decisions, and they're going to make it favor their own group. It also seems like there's a kind of funny element where, once you are part of a group, you view your group as the good guys. Maybe it's not so bad to do something that's a little bit sneaky to help the good guys.

NICHOLAS: Think about what they did to us in the last term. That's what we say to each other.

SPENCER: So the rationalizations are really strong, and altruistic rationalizations are even scarier because it's one thing to rationalize for your own self-interest, but to rationalize, "Oh, it's for the good of humanity while I'm cheating."

NICHOLAS: So I want you, Spencer, to help me coin a term because we're all familiar with this idea of paradigms. Are we in a Copernican paradigm or a Ptolemaic paradigm of how the solar system works? Is it planets going around the sun or the other way around? I want a word that means paradigm, but it has a moral imperative infused in it. You can call it a normal dime, but it's not going to fly. The point is that we fall into these paradigms when we're thinking about things that are not moral, that don't involve morals at all, but thinking about what to do, about what policies to follow. There's a paradigm there. There's a whole way of thinking, and that comes with a story that will end up with us being the good guys and the people who want to do other things being the bad guys. It just goes on and on. This is a much naughtier problem than the problem that Thomas Kuhn talked about, which was summarized well long before him, "Who was it that said that science changes one funeral at a time?" You don't tend to persuade people; if you've got a better explanation, you often have to wait for the guardians of the old way of thinking to die off. This is much stronger when our identities sense, "Well, you people should do this or that," that's going on all the time.

SPENCER: So what are some other areas of civic life where we should be using jury as a random selection, in your view?

NICHOLAS: The more I've thought about this, the more I've seen that everything is kind of tipped into these adversarial relationships. Let me tell you about an example. It'll be completely analogous with the United States, I expect, except that it's more serious. In the United States, you've got a much larger military. Let me tell you about the Department of Veterans Affairs in Australia. The Department of Veterans Affairs has a budget. It uses it to fund benefits for veterans and so on. Politically, who does it deal with? Well, there's the Returned Services League; there are various groups of people, and they do a fine service. They are membership organizations that veterans can join, and they aggregate veterans' views, but they aggregate the views only of their members, only of people who are paying them money, that is, people who are perhaps unusual in their identification with this role. An organization like that will want to get into the media because it will want to prove to its members that it is doing its job and all of these kinds of things. So you get a biased population, and you get biased behavior. I hope that doesn't come across as any kind of disrespect to those organizations. This is just the way life works out. When you're trying to achieve something, you get in the papers. We all know there are certain strategies for getting in the papers. Now, as I pointed out to various people in the Department of Veterans Affairs, I'm not trying to stop the Returned Services League from having any say. They absolutely have a democratic right to say whatever they like, but I think they should have a council of veterans, and they should randomly select a group of veterans, pay them for their time, get them to meet once a month, probably meet each other in person, and then spend most of the rest of the time on Zoom and so on. They get the time to really put effort into their responsibilities, which are to represent veterans. Then we get a much less adversarial, much more considered, and much more democratic picture of what it is that veterans want. That's a kind of general template for thinking about a different way of going about things. What we do at the moment is have elections, and the elections will be about electricity prices or Gaza or something like that, and then someone gets elected, and then they have to just make decisions about veterans, and those decisions get administered by a bureaucracy. Then the various interest groups try to have their influence if they're not happy with things or if they want certain other things to happen. Can you see why that's a pretty unsatisfying way of meeting veterans' needs? So the idea of representation by sampling provides a whole range of quite different ways of going about things. Personally, if I were a veteran, I'd feel much better if a group of fellow veterans really had an important role in how the Department of Veterans Affairs was run, what things the veteran community decided to go into battle with the government about, ways it tried to develop the portfolio, and come up with new policies and new resources for veterans and so on.

SPENCER: So we've seen two examples where random sampling can be helpful. One is something that's highly polarized, like gerrymandering. Another is where you want a more representative body that reflects a group. But I understand you have a more general theory of when to use voting with competition versus when to use random sampling. Could you describe that theory to us?

NICHOLAS: So I would call it a description. It's a taxonomy, really. In the language of an economist, governments provide public goods. Public goods are things like schools, hospitals, roads, and so on. Those things I think of as competitive public goods. What do I mean by that? Well, we can have an election, and one group of politicians or one party can say we'll spend more on schools, more on health, less on roads, and we'll give you a small tax increase. Another one can say we're going to spend less on schools, less on health, more on roads, and we'll give you a tax cut. All of those things are what I call competitive public goods. They're provided by the government, and political competition, if you make certain assumptions, which I won't go into now, but at least in an ideal sense, political competition gives you a reasonably satisfactory way of solving those questions: do we spend more on schools or less on schools? Do we have more or less tax? Now, let's think of a different question, rather topical in your country right now, and that is a statistical agency. It's a bit topical for me because my brother is the person who Donald Trump would have fired if he was American. He's, in fact, the chief statistician in Australia, and I don't think you want political competition determining how the statistical agency calculates unemployment, how it calculates inflation, and so on. I call those things unitary public goods.

SPENCER: What do you refer to there?

NICHOLAS: It refers to the fact that I don't think a way to answer questions like who to appoint and how to govern a thing should be handled by setting up political competition. It's unitary in that sense that these are the things we need bipartisanship over in a purely electorally driven system. But what I would argue is that we actually need to develop institutions that are true to the unitary nature of the public good. Now, the public good of redistricting is a unitary public good. It's not a competitive public good. We have developed an institution, the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. They'll think I'm doing an ad for them. We've developed an institution to govern that particular unitary public good, and we're in terrible trouble. We've basically left it wide open to pollute these unitary public goods because we allow the executive, and this isn't just true of the United States. In some senses, the United States has more safeguards than other countries because it has confirmation hearings and things like that, and they've all been captured by party politics. Many other countries have nothing in their constitution that actually constrains the power of the chief executive to appoint judges, senior bureaucrats, and basically everyone. Modern democracies were brought about by the democratization of monarchy. In other words, the pyramid of power and patronage going up to one point remains in place. The founding fathers thought, "Why don't we build some checks and balances into that?" We can talk about that, but the fact we can see staring us in the face is that we've built a kind of on-ramp for authoritarianism. You just capture the commanding heights and turn all this apparatus over to your own partisans.

SPENCER: So what's the most general description of when something's a unitary public good, and thus might benefit from something like a random sampling procedure versus a competitive public good?

NICHOLAS: Oh, well, things that you want to be bipartisan, structural. Think of politics as a game. Think of it as a game of tennis. This is the video series that I'm launching in a few days. Think of a game of tennis. Let me ask you, is tennis a competitive game or a cooperative game? The answer is, it's both. The competition is based around the rules. So politics is a game. It's a competitive game, and there are a whole lot of rules, and the rule making, we want to be unitary. If you look at a game of tennis, you have two players, they're competing, and one umpire. Now, in fact, you've also got a referee, but they're all there. That's a good explanation of what I mean by unitary. We want one answer. It doesn't even matter if it's not the perfect answer. We want a person who is not biased, a person hopefully with some kind of comprehension, and we want an independent decision. That's true of all kinds of things. It's true of the judicial system. It's true of politicians' salaries. We don't want competition. We don't want politicians competing about that. Just lots of things that are independent, that our democracies would be much stronger if they were independent.

SPENCER: Yeah, I think tennis is such a good example because you don't want the players competing over what the rules of tennis are. You want them competing within the rules of tennis to win the game.

NICHOLAS: To the extent that they don't. In my videos, I have this thought experiment, which is, let's have a Wimbledon final, and let's take away the umpire, and let's say that the players have to agree on all line calls, and maybe there's a referee out the back if they can't agree. Well, it would sort of stop all the time, and players would constantly try to take advantage of the other player. Now what happens? Two things happen. It becomes a worse game, and it also becomes a less just game. In sport, justice and quality are kind of fused together, and as you unpick them, things go badly. I use this in an article I wrote a few years ago to contrast judicial procedure or legal procedure in countries with adversarial legal systems, like yours and mine, and countries with inquisitorial systems. Now think of expert evidence in common law countries like yours and mine; each side introduces their own expert. Well, we're not going to believe either of them, are we? We know that those experts were chosen specifically by each side to put the best spin on their position, and experts have different views. In a European court or a Japanese court, the judge will say, "Well, we obviously need some expertise here. We'll get some advice and we'll try to find it." You might end up with more than one. Advocates for either side can bring their own experts and question and put those views, but there is a kind of a strong unitary center because this is a process of getting an answer that's not infected by conflicts of interest.

SPENCER: I think that's a really great example as well, because imagine you've got two sides with a lot of money fighting in court. And the question then becomes, "Can either of them dig up an expert who sounds convincing that supports their side?" And the answer is almost always yes. There are some experts...

NICHOLAS: But if you're poor, you can't dig up an expert.

SPENCER: But if you have enough money, you can get someone with a PhD to say you're right and make some arguments.

NICHOLAS: Adversarial justice is constantly that you've got each side of lawyers trying to strategically influence not just the arguments, but the way the case is run, and that basically turns that massively more expensive, something like four times as expensive. It's therefore four times as unfair to poor people, people without the means.

SPENCER: When I've been up for jury duty, there's this process where the lawyers can eliminate potential jurors. It sounds like a great idea in theory because, "Oh, I'm eliminating the people with bias," but you realize it actually converges on eliminating the people I think are not going to cause me to win, which is different. So it really seems like it would be better.

NICHOLAS: It's an interesting thought because it's exactly the sort of thing that's gone wrong with confirmation hearings that were a good idea. I think confirmation hearings are a good idea, but they've basically been captured. If you want, let's just do a bit of live rethinking here. I'll just sort of improvise. If you want challenges, I would argue tentatively, until someone comes up with a better argument, that maybe past jurors who have some experience with bias might be the body that says, "No, no, we're not too happy about that person. We think that person might be biased." Anyway, you can see the point I'm making: if you have sufficiently entrenched partisanship, it's very difficult to build rules that lead partisans to converge on the answer.

SPENCER: Let's talk about our institutions themselves. What does it take to rise in an institution today, like in the US government, for example? I don't mean just under Trump; I just mean more broadly.

NICHOLAS: The theme of what I've been talking about regarding our democracy has been one way to think about it is to say that if you set everything up as a competition, rather than understanding that everything in life is an entanglement of competition and cooperation. Everything in life is like that. We've done this with promotion as well. How do we promote people? We hold open competitions. It seems obvious: if you're going to promote, you want a new CEO, or you want a new chief technology officer, you open the position, anyone can apply, and then it's an open competition. What could be more sensible? Now, it's sensible enough, but is it a good way? Is open competition a good way to appoint the most powerful politician in your country? The founding fathers didn't think so. That's why they invented the Electoral College. Of course, political parties kind of completely swamped it almost immediately. But the Electoral College was a body where people would deliberate. They would deliberate in what we would now call a bipartisan way. This is the idea, and they would say, "Who could be our president, who would represent us all?" They're thinking quite like a king at this stage. They're thinking by analogy with the British king. They're saying, "Who can we have as a powerful executive, who we will all feel reasonably represented by?" They're also thinking of George Washington. I guess most Americans know that George Washington famously makes a big show of how reluctant he is to take on the power of the presidency and the power of generalship even before then. That's the sort of person they want. They want a person who doesn't want power. It's a very simple idea that if you're giving out power, maybe the people who want it most are not necessarily the best possible candidates. So that's a kind of provocation about the way in which, again, we take competition as a paradigm, as the only. I'm not arguing against these things. I'm saying that they shouldn't be the only way we think, but they are the only way we think.

SPENCER: So in our institutions today, what happens in practice? Who ends up in power?

NICHOLAS: Well, we hold these competitions. Of course, powerful people know about the Pyramid of Power and patronage. That's why it looks like a meritocratic process, and sometimes it is, but powerful people say, "You know, that person's a team player and so on." There are lots of things going on under the hood, and there are different ways to think about this. It's very convenient for me that the Catholic Church has just demonstrated this because the Catholic Church has an institution quite like the Electoral College. Now, I don't want to tell you it's very democratic, but it is very democratic if you're a Cardinal. Now that's 100-odd people in the Catholic Church of a billion or so, so it's not our idea of democracy. But what's striking about it is that it isn't an open competition. They don't say, "Well, who wants this the most? Who's going to promise us the most?" It doesn't work like that at all. If you think about it, certainly in my lifetime, while there have been popes I would find ideologically not terribly fond of, and others that I have been fond of, every one of them has been a formidable person. This process in which the Cardinals have a secret ballot, and they continue to ballot, and they continue to discuss, and they don't stop until they get two-thirds of the vote for a particular person. The French actually have a name for this: elections without candidates. That is one way of embracing what I call bottom-up meritocracy. One of the things it does is that it's very serious about merit, and there's competition going on, but it's not open competition between the candidates. It's people deliberating on who would be best.

SPENCER: I sometimes think about the way that Tibet elects the Dalai Lama, which is fascinating to me because I guess they would describe it as looking for the reincarnated Dalai Lama, but as someone who doesn't believe in reincarnation, the way I would describe it is they pick a child at random, and then they spend years training that child through, for example, meditation and other methods, and then they try to produce a Dalai Lama. Most people would say that the Dalai Lama is a pretty remarkable person, especially since they pick them essentially at random.

NICHOLAS: Yeah, yeah. So, what I would say about that is that I've been trying to think of institutions that are better suited to the modern world, and there's nothing less suited to the modern world than something like the Electoral College. For instance, I know a few people, one or two people, I don't want to carry on about it too much, but I know some people who arguably could have some influence on electoral politics in the United States. When Joe Biden finally realized that his position was untenable and he had to retire, I tried to speak to the people I knew in the United States, and I said, "Why don't you conduct a search like the Cardinals search for the best Pope?" That is, get a random sample of Democrats. That's a non-trivial question: who goes into the pool? I'm not sure how I solved that, but even if it was senior Democrats, you could do what they do in a papal conclave. This is how officeholders were chosen in Venice. There's a Senate of 120 people. Not one of them stood for election. They have a group of randomly selected voters who, once they're randomly selected, are immediately secluded, locked up, and told, "We're not letting you out," and eventually, they'll starve you out. They'll give you less food after five days or something until they get another 10 senators. Those people are trying to choose the best senators. They're not trying to build their own power. They're not engaged in a power game. They're engaged in a merit game. Imagine if the Democrats had gone into a process over a week or two to choose their nominee in that way. They would have gotten a better nominee, I think. Anyway, this is a nice way to illustrate the ways in which we have made governance and politics. It's not just in politics; the example comes from politics, but we've fused rising in an organization onto power. We've said to people, "If you want power, if you want more money, if you want more recognition, if you want more status, we've got a competition here. Write out your entry. Give us all your speeches. Rally all your troops. Do your worst." The one who does all this and gets the most people to vote for them, and of course, power is being handed out in this process, they're the ones who win. It's a terrible system.

SPENCER: One thing I wonder about is, suppose you do get a random selection of people, pick 120 people for the populace, and they have to choose the leader, that kind of thing. What actually happens in that room? I've been called for grand jury duty. I know a lot of people who have been on jury duty, etc. Often, the complaint you hear is that they feel the reasoning process is not very strong, that people are misled and confused. One person I know who was on a jury said they think the jurors literally didn't understand the bar they were supposed to meet in order to give a guilty verdict. You could say, "Well, is that really such a good process? Maybe that actually has its own biases. Maybe it solves certain problems or creates other problems." What do you think about that?

NICHOLAS: I sort of think it's true. It solves a lot of problems. It means that these people are trying; most of them. Nobody makes them try. You can't do anything about it if somebody just turns up and doesn't concentrate at all. But most people are doing their best, and yes, there will be inadequacies. Human beings have inadequacies. Whenever I hear this, it is essentially said on behalf of a system, and you only have to look at the system to see that no one's trying to get the right answer. If you have a debate on gun control in the House of Representatives, no one's trying to get the right answer. The Democrats are all trying to hit their talking points, and the Republicans don't want the NRA to try to get them deselected. That's as simple as that. They're not even trying. That's my immediate reaction. I think there are lots of other things you can say. One of them is that people say juries are experts. You've kind of said that; so are parliamentarians, so are congresspeople, and we build institutions to give them access to experts. One other thing that I think is pretty interesting would be, and this is something they don't quite do in East Belgium, but they do something a bit similar. One other thing I would like to see is that, as a jury, if you've got a standing citizen jury, they're there temporarily, and then other people come along. One of the things I'd like to do is to get a vote of people, a secret ballot, and they'd be asked, "Who do you admire most that you've worked with on this jury? Who do you think has done the best service for the community on this jury?" The people thus identified then become a kind of council of elders for the new assembly that comes along, and they can help give those people guidance. There are lots of ways in which we can build the quality of these institutions. Our elected institutions have had 250 years. They're not always building quality, but they have had 250 years of history, and they've been adapted to various crises. These are all things that we need to hope a people's branch would go through. I don't want it to be perpetually naive, just new people turning up all the time. I want to help it develop a sense of itself, a sense of its history, and so on.

SPENCER: In our modern environment, what are some other examples of particular institutions where you could see really good benefits from switching to this methodology?

NICHOLAS: Certainly politics. I think you see, I think universities have a terrible problem because universities have this unbelievably crude and reductive method of choosing who's a good academic. It's the person who's managed to hack the system of citations best. Being clever is quite a good way to hack to get more citations, and writing good papers is quite a good way to get more citations, but so is p-hacking, hacking and a million other things. I think that is a very unlayered system of merit selection. What I mean by that is that it's an index that you add up, and everyone is judged by the same thing. Now compare that to a process in which you might, by secret ballot, randomly select some academics and ask, "Who do you really admire?" You get a group of people who do you admire, who is not really highly published, but you still admire, and who is not published because they've taken risks and tried to do long-term things and tried to do things differently because they're actually trying to innovate rather than just come up with the quickest way to write a paper that you can publish. You can build those awarenesses into the system, understanding that, like a market, you can't do better than trying to harness the knowledge in the market or in the air among these people. But you've got to be clever about how you build incentives so that you actually get that information out. At the moment, we're not even trying. We're assuming that these metrics just give us a complete answer. It's absurd.

SPENCER: It seems in doing so, you'd really have to have a system where you get no benefit based on who you vote for. They don't find out that you voted for them, and that kind of thing.

NICHOLAS: Absolutely, absolutely, and this is why these methods come into their own in politics and large systems, in workplaces where people know each other. In academia, for instance, people in their own field will kind of know each other. They're not pristine, they're not perfect. They come with the sort of issues you've just foreshadowed. You try to work with those. You do what you always do when you innovate, which is, you start with something you think is a working model. You do it, and you go all over the place trying to work out what worked and what didn't work. You don't just ask the people running the system; you ask the people in the system, which is one of the things you do in a citizen jury. What you do in a citizen jury is you say at the end of it, do you think this jury was run in a way that was fair, or was it led? Do you feel that you were kind of led to certain answers rather than other answers and so on? So that's what I would do.

SPENCER: You've used this phrase, "injecting a retrovirus into politics." What do you mean by that? Why use the phrase retrovirus?

NICHOLAS: The way most political thinking is done is by overconfident people saying, "I've got this really great way to think about what's wrong in politics. Here, do what I say, and if you don't do what I say, you are a traitor to the cause, and we need a revolution, and we need to grab power, and so on." Now I don't believe any of this, so imagine I'm trying to come up with a kind of political activism. A lot of people who are promoting citizen assemblies are running citizen assemblies. They're going off to politicians, and they're trying to get politicians to support citizen assemblies. They'll say, "Will you fund a citizen assembly on housing costs or this or that or the other?" What that does is it brings the whole process under the control of politicians. It basically rehearses the idea that this is all essentially at the service of the politicians. A lot of people promoting citizen assemblies are trying to promote it to politicians, saying this can help you get out of a tight spot, as it did with the Irish with abortion and with same-sex marriage. I don't think that works either. On the one hand, you've got people saying, "I've got the answer, we need a revolution, do all this stuff." On the other hand, you go to the existing system and make a mistake, which is thinking that the existing system is a clearinghouse of ideas, and you go there to persuade people. You don't go to politicians to persuade them. That's not really what they're thinking about. What I want to do is develop an activism of sortition, sortition being the term used for representation by sampling. What we do is government by lot. I don't want to persuade politicians to do this because I know that they won't be persuaded, particularly when you finally get somewhere. You kind of take one step forward and a few steps back because there's a one-off citizen assembly, and then it comes up with recommendations, and that turns into a sort of issues management thing for the politicians, and then it all goes away. So I want to build some institutions and run them. I want to run them with private money, philanthropic money, crowdfunding money, and so on. I want to show people this thing is working, and where I put my faith is that this is an incremental change, and it can also be a transformative change because it actually introduces a new institutional logic into our politics. I live for the day when people say, you might know that scene from When Harry Met Sally, where Sally fakes an orgasm in a café and the woman next door says, "I'll have what she's having." I live for the day when people in Michigan say, "Well, we've got problems with what we pay our politicians. Let's do it the way we did it with the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. Let's do this in a bunch of other areas to do with the appointment of judges, etc." So you're introducing a different DNA. That's my retrovirus. You're not powerful in the sense that you've taken the commanding heights of the system, but you're powerful in that you are introducing a different way to do things. I can tell you this: when people are involved in this way of doing things, almost all of them think it's incredible and fantastic, and a non-trivial portion of them think it's life-changing because they walk out of these things saying, "Why aren't we doing this?" They discover that they are Democrats. They wonder whether they're really Democrats, as in they believe in democracy, not Democrats as in the party. The way an American will think at the moment, I'm alleging is, "Well, you know, I believe in democracy, but it's a freak show. It's a complete freak show. Maybe I'm a fool to believe in democracy." They go through this process and they say, "No, no, that's democracy. That's disagreeing with my next-door neighbor, even getting quite angry about it at the end of the process, feeling really good about my next-door neighbor because we didn't agree, but we did get to see something of where they're coming from, and we are okay with this idea that we're right, so we disagree. He's pro-life, I'm pro-choice, and that's okay." That's what's rehearsed with this different institutional DNA, and I think that has a huge amount of power.

SPENCER: Before we wrap up, let's change topics. What is scientism?

NICHOLAS: So scientism? There are different definitions of it, but let's say there is the sort of big scientism and small scientism. Scientism is the idea that science is the paradigm of knowledge. It's the way to get to the truth about reality, and arguably the only way to get to the truth about reality. And it's subtly wrong.

SPENCER: I think we would agree science has a lot of value and power in figuring out the truth about reality. So is the issue that it overstates the case that there are actually other good ways to get to the truth, and maybe science is not always the best way? Is that the problem?

NICHOLAS: Yeah, but there's a subtle thing, which is that science — here's a formulation for you — it's quite a cool formulation. I think science is about what necessarily is the case in the universe. And there's another set of reality-based disciplines. Medicine is one, engineering is another. They're not sciences. Aristotle would have called science episteme, where we get our term epistemic, and he would have called engineering and medicine phronesis, forms of practical wisdom. Now, as we all know from medicine and engineering, they're reality-based. No one teaches you engineering and tells you that you have to have the right feeling about the bridge. You've got to have the bridge made of the right stuff. But medicine and engineering are only interested in reality insofar as it helps them build a new reality. So they're not interested in the science of tungsten. They're interested in what happens. Could we make this steel? Could we change the alloy mix and put more tungsten in this steel? And would its tensile strength enable us to solve an engineering problem? And that is subtle. To complete the formulation, science is about what is necessarily the case in the universe, and these other disciplines, what Herbert Simon calls the sciences of the artificial or design, are about understanding the multiverse — in other words, all the possible states of the universe, not impossible states of the universe — so that we can build a world that we prefer to the one that we're in. And we're just so used to assuming that anything that is reality-based isn't scientific. Anyway, science has a set of constraints that make it less useful, particularly in human sciences, but also just to build a bridge. There's this other way to think, and I think that most of our most important disciplines are forms of practical wisdom, and all of the human disciplines are really there to help us do things and make the world better. I can elaborate on this in economics. This idea that economics needs to be a science produces this strange thing that there's all this what Milton Friedman called positive economics, and then you build these highly artificial structures, a bit like Euclid's elements, and you say, "That's our model of the economy." Then we'll take this model that we've built, which actually isn't very realistic — it's just very mathematical — and we'll use it to answer these questions, "Should we raise taxes or lower taxes?" It's all pretend. It's not a properly integrated investigation of the question, should we raise taxes or lower taxes? Anyway, I can imagine you thinking I haven't explained that very well. Because I'm thinking I haven't explained it very well. It's a very subtle point, but someone like Maynard Keynes thought that a great deal of economics was ill-suited, that people got themselves tangled up in theological debates about how they were going to consider what the economy was, rather than focus on policy questions and how to get better information, better answers about how to make policy decisions.

SPENCER: I think something that may be confusing about your perspective to the listener is that we would agree that economics and medicine have to be built on science to some extent. You need some understanding of the basic truths about them.

NICHOLAS: That's a good point. The Egyptians started using salicylic acid to help with headaches and various other things. They didn't know anything about it; they just knew that it worked. What I'm saying is medicine is built from there, and then it becomes reality-based. If it turns out it doesn't work anymore, we'll stop doing that. Science is a different thing. Science investigates for its own sake. This phenomenon, this thing...

SPENCER: It's a fair point. Sometimes you can have a medicine that works, and you don't know why. Maybe you just stumbled on it. You can figure out something about how to build bridges without understanding why it works. That being said, understanding reality at a deep causal level can help you do things like build better bridges and develop effective medicines. Clearly, we need science as sort of this backing that helps us do better, wisdom-based practices, right?

NICHOLAS: Yes and no. Of course, yes, because we have to be reality-based. Science is about reality, and there will be riches in there for us. But let's take this idea of scientism in medicine. I don't know whether you're familiar with the work of John Ioannidis at Stanford University, a pretty famous epidemiologist.

SPENCER: I never know how to pronounce his name, but yeah, I'm familiar.

NICHOLAS: My wife's Greek. It doesn't mean I know how to pronounce his name, but she'd call him Ioannidis. There's a D in there. So he's got this sort of factoid, which is that half — and I may have this slightly wrong, but this is broadly his claim that half — of all, or more than half of all pharmaceutical findings, or all results in published medical journals are wrong. In other words, they don't replicate. And of the ones that are right, a majority are not useful. To be useful, something has to be able to be clinically taken up. But because medical science rewards publications and finding stuff out and doesn't relate it to the problem that we are actually interested in, it does kind of science that's usually, generally, not very good science, but it's science. It finds a thing out, but it's just spent a huge amount of effort finding out the wrong thing. This is about the way you connect up the energies of people, and what we've got at the moment is a system where the energies of people are focused on the metrics, and they're focused on getting an article published, and they're focused on their discipline, and their discipline has its own kind of sociological laws, and they're poorly related to what we want out of this discipline. In my argument, this is sort of all over the place. It's about professionalization and irresponsible professionalization. Again, I think some of you asked, "Where could we use it?" Firstly, what I call bottom-up meritocracy, which is some of the mechanisms we've talked about, but also sortition, just selection by lot. I'm arguing that the professional structures we've got in place, where you get promoted from a lecturer to a senior lecturer, to a reader, to a professor, are not serving us very well. People are defending those jobs and defending the metrics on which people's performance is based. They get inducted into this system, and there isn't really anyone to say, "Hang on, this system should look different, and the way we're thinking should be a bit different."

SPENCER: I think it's often helpful to clarify the distinction between science in its ideal form and science as it's practiced. I think we can agree that there are many ways that science as it's practiced differs from its ideal form, but I think you're still saying that even in its ideal form, science has these limitations. What would it look like if economics were to take your advice? How would it be different from what we're seeing now?

NICHOLAS: I really should have a kind of fully formed answer. I keep thinking of things where things would be different. For instance, economists, when they deliberate about tax policy, would know something about what people think about tax policy. They would be able to say that in this part of the country, people think this. They would understand something of the psychology of paying taxes. There's an important aspect of your psychology in paying taxes, which is called tax morale. "How much of a mug do I feel for paying my taxes when I know other people are avoiding those taxes?" They would know something about that. They would know something about the history; they wouldn't have this very crude idea that these economic models don't tell you very much. They're very much a beginning; they help you structure things but we tend to use them as replacements for reality. It's Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Economics could think of itself as a problem-solving discipline, as a discipline in which lots of people were working on interesting angles. The way economics has worked is as a kind of monoculture. It was high status to do theory and low status to do empirics. That's now turned around. But what's now the case is that you've got all these little experiments. The NBER is just full of articles about how they did a natural experiment when certain people started going into prison in a certain year, and they looked at whether they did better or worse. Now that's kind of useful. It's nice to know, but they're doing it because they can, because it conforms to what an article looks like in an economic journal. If it's about prisons, how much do these people know about prisoners? How much do these people know about prisoners' families? How much do they know about attempts that have been made to improve prisons over time? Not much; that's not their field. So they're not focusing on problem-solving. They're focusing on building more of what their discipline does.

SPENCER: So one view that I think runs counter to yours is that science is about figuring out what's true, and then to decide what to do, we have to layer on values. So a scientist can't answer what we should do, but if you have the combination of what's true, which comes from science, and what values we're optimizing for, then that sort of answers everything we need to know.

NICHOLAS: Okay, so let's say we're solving a problem. We've got a problem with prisons, and the problem is very high levels of recidivism, for instance, or the fact that this is just a truth about prisons, pretty much all around the world, that they're pretty bad at rehabilitating people and so on. So an economist working in that area might not themselves do lots of other work, but it wouldn't be normal for them to do lots of this work without close collaboration with psychologists, prison administrators, and some criminals either in prison or out of prison. It's just a lot to know about this stuff, and all these disciplines are being kept busy, but it's sort of obvious that they're not together trying to solve a problem. Does that sound plausible? I mean, I improvise that, and I probably should have a more structured example. Occasionally, I go for a walk or something, and I think there's a really good example, and I don't have that, but that's not a badly improvised example. If you're going to do something about the economics of prisons, it's not that I want to declare war on economists who want to do a paper on prisons, but it should really be part of a social effort to try to make this institution more fit for purpose.

SPENCER: This reminds me a little bit of my experience when we were running research about astrology. We had put out some results where we found that sun signs, whether you're Pisces or Aries, had no correlation to anything about people's lives that we could find. But astrologers got really mad at us. They said that's not really a fair test. That's sort of pop astrology. It's not real astrology. So we said, okay, that's interesting. We could design an experiment about, quote, real astrology. We designed a first version of this experiment, and we ran it by astrologers, and they pointed out very validly that it was actually a very flawed design. We ended up working with five astrologers giving us feedback as we developed the new design and made it much better. But it really got me thinking about how I don't think we could have designed a good experiment related to astrology without astrologers; it just wouldn't have been possible.

NICHOLAS: Yeah, that's right, and I'm with you rooting for the astrologers to be shown to be pseudoscientists, but maybe they're not. Certainly someone like Rupert Sheldrake says interesting things. Are they true? I've no idea. I do know that the fact that they're fringe is really quite sad. We might have had the answer as to whether they were fringe or not if we took it seriously, but we don't take it seriously.

SPENCER: If you're trying to make prisons better and designing experiments that will illustrate how to make prisons better. Having that sort of rich understanding can guide the experiments.

NICHOLAS: That's just the start. Out of the experiments, you're trying to gain knowledge that might help us make prisons work better. You don't know where that's going to lead, but this is the analogy with Johnny and Edison. The point is that you can come to the truth, and it won't be useful what you are. This whole process is shaped by a purpose. You may be familiar with a philosopher called Michael Polanyi, who coined the expression tacit knowledge, the idea that we know far more than we can say. His model of the world is that the most fundamental type of knowledge we have is this practical wisdom. We learn to crawl, walk, and talk by striving for something. We are trying to create a pathway in the multiverse for ourselves, trying to change things to make our lives better. That's where knowledge comes from. Nature makes the same point that intelligence is this adaptive capability, adapting us to our world. Science is a very rarefied, very special, very wonderful way to get to the truth. This is perhaps a way to understand why science is so rare, why it has evolved in its full form only once. It's a very specialized way to get to the truth. It's a sublime way to get to the truth, but it's part of a much wider, more purpose-driven context. We are purpose-driven. There is no God's eye view; we can only build something from our perspective. You can contribute something from your perspective, and so on. Scientism doesn't put us on that path. Scientism has us trying to impersonate God, which often takes us on the wrong path. It turns us into imitators of science. We notice that there's a lot of mathematics in some sciences and not a lot in others. Economists have persuaded themselves that if you really want to be scientific, it has to involve a lot of mathematics. I would argue, sorry, I'm on my soapbox, but I would argue that what I said to you about the difference between unitary and competitive public goods is a piece of economics. There's no mathematics in it.

SPENCER: Final question for you: What would you like to leave the listener with before we wrap up?

NICHOLAS: I'd like to leave the listener with the idea that you can get a long way by looking for simple things that describe something you're thinking about. Very simple things. Everything I've thought about this over the last five or ten years has essentially followed from the idea of asking, "Why have we made competition with God? Not that I'm trying to argue a left-wing case for more cooperation. I'm trying to argue that we've misunderstood that competition and cooperation are entangled. They're always entangled." I guess I would like to leave listeners with that as an example of a method. Of course, you might want to go out and gather a lot of numbers on things. You might want to read lots of great thinkers, but it's Charlie Munger's idea: take a simple idea and take it seriously. You might take a long time pondering just to get to the idea that is the fulcrum, and then you might be able to come up with a retrovirus. That's kind of what I'm suggesting I'm doing here.

SPENCER: Thanks so much for coming on, Nicholas. We'll also put a link to your YouTube channel where you explain a bunch of these ideas in much greater depth in the show notes. So check that out if you're interested. But thanks for coming on.

NICHOLAS: Thank you very much, Spencer. In literally days, and it will probably be done before this video comes out, I will have launched the beginning of a series of 20 short videos on these ideas, so hopefully people can check some of them out and see what they think.