This is Eli Lake and welcome back to the re-education.

My guest today is Ari Lam, the chief executive of Benazion and the host of the Good Faith Efford podcast.

Our topic is why so many Americans are so miserable when life for the most part seems to be getting much easier, particularly if you take the long view.

I was on an airplane and there was internet, high-speed internet on the airplane.

That's the newest thing that I know exists. And I'm sitting on the plane and they go, open up your laptop, you can

go on the internet. And it's fast and I'm watching YouTube clips. I'm in an airplane. And

then it breaks down. And they apologize, the internet's not working. The guy next to me goes,

p, this is bull-s-h-it-.

Like, how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago.

We just heard one of my favorite bits from Louis C.K.

And even though it's a comedy routine, he's making a serious point.

Imagine going back in time, say 100 years, to a typical family farm. There would be no air conditioning. There would be no refrigeration. Every year at the harvest, the family would

have to toil for days to get their crop into cans or to the market, or their produce would spoil.

No indoor plumbing, just a putrid outhouse.

If the family was lucky, there may be a radio.

The family would be at risk catching any number of diseases, from polio to tuberculosis.

If his son or the father had served in World

War I and was lucky enough to return, there would be a very good chance that he would be missing

a limb or an eye. The children would be lucky to finish high school. The mother would have no

recourse if she was abused in her marriage except to leave

with no chance for support for her husband and no right to see her children. And if the family

was black, they would be second-class citizens, at best and at risk of state-sponsored terror from

...