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28 October 2025
I listened to some episodes of Interesting Times with Ross Douthat, a podcast where Douthat interviews mostly right-wing people (or people who know about right-wing things) to try to explain the "interesting times" of our current moment. The podcast is part of the New York Times organization, and so it is presumably intended for liberals to take in. It reminds me a bit of Know Your Enemy, Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell's podcast where they, as leftists, try to understand the right.
I find Douthat to have an interesting speaking style, a kind of command of his own mind and of a subject matter, where he can articulate ("pin on a board and see the parts of") a subject, and do this on the fly. I think this is a potentially valuable skill, and I found my own thinking moving a bit in this direction after listening a lot.
That's one possible recommendation for why to listen to the podcast. Otherwise I would recommend it as a way to listen to mostly right wing people talk about mostly right wing subjects, if you're interested in that.
One technical note about Interesting Times: it is one of the most aggressively mastered podcasts I've listened to. In other words, I have to turn it down the most to not bother my ears. Maybe I'm out of touch with podcasts these days and all the big names are like this, and I usually only listen to older or less-competitive ones that aren't? Part of the problem comes when switching between audio sources (i.e. switching from other podcasts). Suddenly my ears get blasted. But also, even in a world where all audio is mastered to the same "hot" level, I wouldn't like this. Loudness comes from compression, and compression leads to ear fatigue (some of the aggressiveness of Interesting Times' sound may also come from EQ).
Also a related aesthetic note, that Interesting Times has a kind of aggressive appealingness (like many of the successful things in American culture). Like with mastering, I'm guessing this is driven by an attempt to be competitive in the marketplace of attention.
A different podcast I listened to around the same time is Green Wave from the Green European Journal (a podcast about environmentalism, seemingly largely related to politics). Unusually low volume (and a gentler sound) and harder to "plug into and relax as it takes you on a journey" (less "charismatic"?). (I think you can kind of relax when you listen to it, but it doesn't "take you on a journey".) In a way, I like and respect Green Wave for that more than Interesting Times, but Interesting Times was more listenable. I think partly I may be more interested in American politics than environmentalism at this point. Also Green Wave is as far as I heard entirely readings from articles, while almost all of Interesting Times is conversation, which I find more engaging. I think some of Interesting Times' listenability is its charisma, and charisma is not something I've totally lost my taste for.
One moment stood out from my listening to Interesting Times:
In the episode titled "JD Vance on His Faith and Trump's Most Controversial Policies" (or "JD Vance on Faith, Deportations, Trump's Clash With the Courts | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat" on YouTube), Douthat interviews US Vice President JD Vance. The overall discussion covered different things, but the part that I found very interesting was around 0:41:14, or 0:40:00 (timestamps vary in different sources for the podcast): Vance says that President Trump has "better instincts about human beings than anybody that I've ever met...", "just, sort of, almost a bizarre level of intuition about people". This is something that Vance is "extremely fascinated by". Vance also was "extremely fascinated by" Trump's "humanitarian impulse".
A "bizarre level of intuition about people" and a "humanitarian impulse" in Trump, coupled with his friend (Vance) being "extremely fascinated by" him (and I could add, Trump obsesses many of his enemies to a similar magnitude) all very easily fit "Trump is a narcissist" (in the narcissistic personality disorder sense). (Trump's cruelty and fascination with beauty also fit the type.) Vance may not realize that Trump has NPD, or if somehow he falls short of the formal diagnostic criteria, at least something enough like NPD to be concerning (maybe labels aren't the point, the point is a person's energy, effect, and potential). It may also not have occurred to Vance that there might be something dark and weird about his boss, that his intuition might come from a dark source, and that his humanitarian impulse might be exaggerated for effect, an instinct that exists to make him look good and enhance his psychological power over others. Vance, to me, comes off as naive in the world of spiritual darkness. I don't know much about Vance, but maybe he just never ran into that exact kind of dark reality growing up or in his younger adulthood.
I don't vote (for altruistic reasons), and I'm not going to say that if I were to vote, I would never vote for Trump in some hypothetical situation (it would depend on his competition). I am somewhat policy-agnostic -- I think a lot of what makes partisans think the other side is evil, and their own side good, is not collective or individual character, but just "do you subscribe to the correct (in my eyes) policy choices?" -- and I guess I'm not political enough to want to engage with that question right now. In this apolitical state, I don't strongly object to Trump's policies (although the execution of policies when it is forceful, merciless, lazy, or malicious, or something like that, is harder to excuse from an apolitical perspective). But having America run by a dark, weird person who manages to elicit intense loyalty from people who don't get how weird that is (see Trump's comment about "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's like incredible."), and who elicits an almost just as weird "anti-loyalty" from his haters, does not seem like a good thing from a spiritual perspective. Worse for Trump's fans whom he captivates than for his haters, though he punishes the latter with his policies, his reward for the former. Trump, maybe somewhat on purpose and absolutely by instinct, sets himself up as a god, more so than your average US president. Spiritually speaking, he's taking large swaths of America for a ride, wasting time and mental space they could use to get closer to God, and making them hate each other when they could have grown past that, potentially. These things significantly weigh against me voting for Trump, in the hypothetical where I was a voter and he was running again, and weighs against me voting for similar people.
There is one aspect of Trump's policy agenda that I do object to, which is his framing of it as "America first". There might be reasons why the policies that fit under that framing, if well-implemented, could be wise and beneficial. But I see Trump teaching America to be a more egoistic country, and in this, he tempts America to being mediocre and to lacking the heart of God (who "so loved the world that he sent his Son...").
But as I write this, I realize that perhaps it's unwise even to speak out against Trump, as though even his threat to people's spiritual life is a big deal when it's not really so much, given that there is the Millennium in which people can recover from him. However, this life does matter somewhat, and opposing Trump (here, for non-policy reasons) might be worth doing. But then, is it really apolitical to do so? To some extent, the political issue that divides people in America is "are you for or against Trump, the person?" apart from his platform. As a writer, perhaps I err on the side of explaining more, bringing more into the discussion (so I choose to be somewhat more political in this case), but if I weren't a writer or something similar, I might try to keep my anti-Trump opinions to myself, if I saw a way to try to reach Trump supporters, move the conversation away from politics and toward things that are less controversial, and more eternally relevant.
Thinking about Interesting Times and its charisma again: imagine someone running for national office, particularly for president, a campaign trail heavily covered by media and thus heavily implicated in image and attention-getting. What's the minimum amount of charisma needed to win? Your competitors may determine that for you, in the sense that if you fall behind too much in charisma, they may defeat you. What is the automatic response to charisma -- its weirdly powerful charm and your strange trust of it -- if not mental slavery, spiritual possession, and a kind of fleshly idolatry? Losing yourself and being led by someone, trustworthy or not. To some extent we are helpless before charisma, and so it is not a sign that our hearts place someone higher than God. But it certainly tempts us to do that, to the extent that we can.
Tyler Cowen, in Creative Destruction, talks about how businesses like restaurants can only reach a high level of quality if there is a base of customers who are selective in their tastes and thus reward higher-quality restaurants by choosing to eat there. So the institutions are a reflection of the people they serve. If America likes pop music, pop podcasts, etc., things that grab your attention, then who else will it elect but pop politicians who control their attention -- narcissists? So if this is a bad thing, how can Americans be trained to lose interest in products of "narcissism culture" (the shiny, the "engaging", the media that, like narcissists, compel attention and even obsession) and instead choose cultural products, and leaders, for their objective value, not based on how enchanting they are? People who choose things to listen to because they choose those things, rather than their instincts choosing for them.
I think about my own role, ethically, as a writer and artist, and wonder how much I myself contribute to "narcissism culture" -- the compelling, engaging, "juicy", competitive vibes. As I write this, with the 27 people besides me who follow my subreddit r/10v24 (my best metric of popularity), not all of whom necessarily read my writing in any depth, I can believe that I may not be "compelling, engaging, etc." But if I think that an alternative to "narcissism culture" should be more widespread, how can it become such without becoming more narcissistic? Its songs, for instance, initially easygoing and free-will-eliciting, like Green Wave, but then becoming more sweetened, "cooler" in a social sense, more electric, more addicting, like Interesting Times, just to "get the message out there". The danger that "what you win them with is what you win them to", that good truth packaged in a way that says subtextually "actually ignore this" doesn't get the job done. Maybe what's more realistic is that people have to see through "narcissism culture" and then they are able to move on and value more substantive things. But I wonder if there is a way to help people to see through it faster.
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One idea inspired by an episode of Green Wave ("Reclaiming Time"): Capitalism makes us so engaged, competitive, tired, that we don't have the mental space and time to think of and enact alternatives -- and this is a form of social sustainability. In other words, although capitalistic engagement and continual economic growth are not personally and ecologically sustainable, capitalism seemingly protects itself from being "uninstalled" by being so engaging, and this makes it a stable form of political and economic organization, as long as it can tap into enough labor and natural resources (but these can be finite in the short run, and in the long run there has to be a limit to capitalism's growth, at least). A dark possibility: a social system simply disables humans' ability to change it, reduces people's humanity. Capitalism isn't always like this, but also maintains its social sustainability by seeming like a good thing to people, offering them rewards that they buy into. A challenge for more human-respecting sustainability would be to allow people free will and yet somehow those people won't use their free will to dismantle that sustainability.
I see a connection between "narcissism culture" (charismatic culture) and capitalism: engagement, compulsion, commanding attention and allegiance, quieting (within the mind and from without) independent thought and will. Narcissists and capitalism try to turn you on, both pleasurably and punishingly. Both are spirits of dominance. Yet we seem to need them? How could we live without engagement and competition? Do we really want to go back to the pre-capitalist world, if that's the alternative? Or to somehow eliminate charisma, a probably omnipresent part of human societies? Maybe there is a real challenge here, to think of how to minimize capitalistic and charismatic energies, while still managing to be engaged and productive. Perhaps the key word is "slavery": are you your own master (who is then able to acknowledge the good), or are you a slave of capitalism and its political analogue (the system of amassing social influence competitively, sometimes known as "democracy")? Do you exist?
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(I found these episodes on YouTube and Podbean. Episode titles are for Podbean.)
"He Believes America Should Be a Theocracy. He Says His Influence Is Growing" (with Doug Wilson)
"Ezra Klein Is Worried -- But Not About a Radicalized Left" (with Ezra Klein)
"Can the Catholic Church Quit the Culture Wars?" (with James Martin)
"Is 'Toxic Empathy' Pulling Christians to the Left?" (with Allie Beth Stuckey)
"How the iPhone Drove Men and Women Apart" (with Alice Evans)
"What if There's No Way to Stop Trump's Approach to Power?" (with Jack Goldsmith)
"The Grand Strategy Behind Trump's Crackdown on Academia" (with May Mailman)
"The DOGE Alum asking if Foreign Aid is America's Problem" (with Jeremy Lewin)
"What Makes Art 'Left-Wing'?" (with Tony Gilroy)
"JD Vance on His Faith and Trump's Most Controversial Policies" (with JD Vance)
"I was set to interview Charlie Kirk. Then he was assassinated." (Douthat monologue)
"Amy Coney Barrett Is Looking Beyond the Trump Era" (with Amy Coney Barrett)
"The MAGA Women Dress Code" (guest audio from "The Opinions")
(Two episodes I listened to not so recently:)
"Ross and Ezra Klein Discuss Trump, Mysticism and Psychedelics" (with Ezra Klein)
"A Mind-Bending Conversation with Peter Thiel" (with Peter Thiel)
(I found Green Wave episodes here.)
"The Cities Feeling the Heat"
"Green housing threatens affordability, but it doesn't have to"
"Enemies of Society: How the Media Portray Climate Activists"
"The Women of Ventotene"
"A recipe for survival"
"Health vs. Wealth? Political Choices in the European Health Union"
"Light, Air, Sun, Carbon Neutrality: Greening Vienna's Social Housing"
"Green Class Struggle: Workers and the Just Transition"
"Reclaiming Time"