30: Ross Douthat - The Rave Before the Fall

The Portal

Kast Media

Science, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 7.1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2020

⏱️ 157 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Just before the great indooring due to the Pandemic of 2020, Eric sat down with conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to discuss his book "The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success." Over champagne flutes filled with bubbly, the two discussed the various ways that the success and excesses of American Capitalism were now distorting the American Dream into a dystopian fever vision, making it far harder to wake up from this stasis in time to avoid the previous fates of fallen empires.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, this is Eric with a few words of housekeeping.
0:09.0	First of all, I just wanted to check in with our audience of portal listeners and say that
0:12.2	I've been trying to stay reasonably safe and sane, and have only in fact left my compound
0:16.2	twice in recent weeks, and both times were to do podcasts that I judged to be significant
0:20.8	enough to potentially warrant the slightly increased risk with no handshake in Norhugs
0:24.8	Exchange.
0:26.2	In the first place, I visited with my good buddy Joe Rogan over the JRE podcast to discuss
0:30.6	COVID, masks, the genius of American jazz dance, and geometric unity.
0:35.3	I believe at this point it has been viewed by just north of 5.4 million folks in less than
0:39.8	two weeks, so if you haven't already seen it, I would suggest maybe checking it out because
0:43.6	it seems to be fairly popular despite being a bit on the long side.
0:47.0	What can I say?
0:48.0	We went slightly viral if you will excuse the gallows humor.
0:50.8	Now the other new podcast I did was with my friend Lex Friedman, who hosts the MIT AI
0:55.2	podcast, which I did for the second time.
0:57.9	Lex is one of my favorite interviewers, in part because he works in a somewhat mysterious
1:01.5	way to get one of a kind interviews out of an amazing lineup of heavy hitters.
1:05.5	I would highly recommend tuning in to his podcast in general, in our episode in particular.
1:10.3	Now this of course brings us to our own podcast, and steering its course in the time of corona.
1:15.2	In an abundance of caution, good fortune, and frankly a bit of sloth in our release schedule,
1:20.0	we are so far not having to tape new in-person interviews for the portal, as we have you
1:24.0	covered for a little while.
	...

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