Politics and immigration

And then also, American culture is very different. This is a point I did not fully appreciate until living both places extensively. America has a culture of optional assimilation, where it is much easier and then much more condoned for someone coming from Denmark or Ukraine or wherever, come to America, buy into the American set of values and norms and culture, and then be able to be respected as Americans by other Americans. This is what's so funny to me when there's discussion like, "America is such a racist country." I'm like, "Have you ever been anywhere? Do you know what other countries are like?" Like, if you think America is the most racist country, you are simply misinformed. I mean, we're dealing with that, with time we've spent in Denmark. My wife is American of Scandinavian heritage-... but multiple generations in the US. Very difficult. Very difficult-... as a blonde, blue-eyed woman who's put in all sorts of efforts of learning the language and doing everything, still very, very difficult to assimilate to Danish culture. In a way where if that had been the other way around and she had been Danish and moving to the US, it would not have been that difficult at all. And this was the other thing. I mean, living in a country like Denmark with a, an American wife who is of Scandinavian heritage and has put in all the effort, and still realizing, man, assimilation is incredibly difficult, even when you're 97% there all the way.

Holy smokes, must it be almost impossible if you come from a completely foreign culture-... and foreign norms and the rest of it. And of course, that's what the stats I just quoted bear out, that the more dissimilar the culture is and the further it is the less likely to be successful.

`4:37:14`

Yes, but not just that alone, I would say. It's more of the great divide that happened around 2020, where I think a lot of these political fault lines really opened up. And I mean, the shorthand in the US, I think is were you woke or not? And clearly, I had a bunch of people that I thought I had good relations with for many years, who suddenly once that political fault line opened up, they were clearly just not anymore. And I think that's regrettable. And I think I've, I've tried to put an effort into, um, sort of both understanding where that comes from, in part because I've changed my mind on several of these topics over the years, and it was like, well, sometimes you just change your mind after time. Sometimes you change your mind after you get new information. There's all sorts of reasons and moments why you may change your mind, and we don't all change our mind on the same schedule or at all. Um, so surrounding yourselves and, and or at least interacting with people that don't think like you on every topic, I think it's quite healthy. I mean, I occasionally discuss politics with my brother. I mean, we don't quite see eye to eye on all these topics, and sometimes the discussions can get a little heated, but then they'll also calm down and we realize, all right, okay, so we don't agree on this, and then we agree on a lot of other things. We appreciate a lot of the same things.

Now, this was actually one of the things when we had our big blowup at Basecamp, I came to appreciate in a whole new way this- Earlier norm that talking politics or religion or money with strangers or even acquaintances, and certainly with colleagues, was just not a good idea. That you had a much higher likelihood of being able to carry a good working relationship with someone if you're not rubbing your political differences up against each other all the time. So I actually think liberals and conservatives should work together. I think the country would be much worse off if there's a complete separation between the tribes, and then there can't be any overlap or interaction. And I think that mingling is so much easier to do if you just don't focus on your differences all the time. Focus on what you like together. I mean, this is some of the people I've had unfortunately drifted from in tech. We had so much in common, so much shared love for, say, Ruby or other things and, like, isn't that unfortunate?

`4:40:38`

One of the great illustrations of that for me was when I watched a clip from William F. Buckley's show. I think it was called Firing Line or-

`4:40:46`

... something like that. And he had a member of the Black Panthers-... on his panel. It was quite obvious that those two gentlemen did not share a lot of politics. They were able to carry a conversation for, I think I watched it, 25 minutes. And Buckley's just asking, like, "So what do you think about this? What do you think about this?" And like, the Black Panther would reply as you would expect the Black Panther to reply in the '70s. Like, there was not a lot of sort of conciliatory tones. And I just thought, like, wow, that is so rare. If you had seen that show today, it would've been a shouting match. It would've been just accusations being hurled back and forth. The fact that Buckley was able to just have these conversations with people he vehemently disagreed with and still explore all the intellectual facets of their standpoints and letting them speak to those facets, talks of a lost era that I'd very much like to get back to. I mean, I always actually loved talking politics with friends that I trusted could talk about these topics in a way where it didn't have to be existential.