Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 262nd episode of the Atlas Society Asks. I'm Jag. I'm CEO of the Atlas Society. I am very, very excited at long last to have with us here today Martin Gurri. He's going to talk about the updated edition of his book, the Revolt of the Public and the crisis of authority in the new millennium.
Martin, thanks so much for joining us.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Happy to be here.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: So, before diving into the revolt of the public and all of its continuing manifestations of the revolt we see around us today, I'd like to set the stage a bit with some of your biography. You were around 10 years old when your parents left Cuba. I know you were quite young at the time, but any memories from growing up?
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, I think, you know, everybody's childhood is this magic island that is full of these wonderful memories and that when you leave it, you can never come back. Well, in my case, it's literally like that. It's this magic island and it's full of. I have many, many memories. My earliest memory was my parents telling me not to. I was three years old, my parents telling me not to look outside the window because it might be a shootout.
All right, that was the day Fulgencio Batista overthrew democracy in Cuba. It was the last day that there was democracy in Cuba. I was three years old. It was a long time ago, by the way, I did look out the window. I was hoping to see a shootout and the streets were empty.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Well, it reminds me of Ayn Rand's childhood experience. She was a bit older, she was 12 when she was looking out the window of her family's apartment and actually witnessed the bullet, Bolshevik revolution taking place. So if that happened when you were three, how about the years until you departed? Did you see and experience dramatic changes?
[00:02:02] Speaker B: No, I mean, the Cuban Revolution happened. I was a Havana boy, right? Havana was a very modern, very up to date, very Americanized. I really experienced very little cultural shock coming to the United States. All the TV shows were the same, for example, and the fighting happened at the other end of the island, which was, you know, the eastern side.
There was, I mean, I had been, there had been a dictator, but Batista was a dictator. So there were certain things. As a child you were told, don't say these words about Batista because they'll take your parents away. You know, imagine living, living with that sort of dread as a child that if you say something wrong. And of course, everybody hated Batista, but if you said anything to the wrong person, they would take your parents away. And then when Castro took over, I was there for not quite two years.
Everything was, I mean, it was total. Everything was revolution. Revolution. You picked up the phone and there was somebody spouting at you at revolution. You looked across the street and there was a militia outpost. You know, you, television, it was Castro giving a speech. You, you couldn't escape it.
There's a reason they call it totalitarianism. It's total.
[00:03:17] Speaker A: Well, you know, one of the things that was interesting for when I worked at Dole Food company, I was there for about a dozen years, and of course we had tremendous operations throughout all of Latin America. And I remember that so often there would be problems with the farms and the operations.
And when you kind of got down to the bottom of was activists who were fomenting dissent and problems and wanting to have, you know, the workers take over the farms. But when you kind of looked through the trail to find out where did these activists come from? Well, they, they either came from Cuba or they were found in the country, and then they were brought back to Cuba for training, and then the best of those went on to the Soviet Union and then came back and sent back to their in country. So I'm wondering if, knowing what happened to your country, was that any part of your. What drew you to become an analyst for the CIA, or was it other things?
[00:04:30] Speaker B: I can't even say that anything drew me to be an analyst to CIA. It was an arranged marriage that grew, I guess into a love affair in the fullness of time. I just answered an ad because I needed a job, and believe me, I didn't, I didn't even think I was going to get it. My wife said, no, no, this is going to fit you. And there were a whole bunch of people telling me that, literally and that in the newspaper. And I, I thought, I laughed. I thought, you know, me and the CIA, what a joke. And then next thing I knew it, I was there.
And I have to say, it was as with all jobs, up and down. But the people in there are.
There's a large number of brilliant people and equally large number of courageous people, many of whom gave up their lives while I was there.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Did any of the training or methods or simply the perspective that you gained while at the CIA inform the ideas that you brought to flower in revolt of the public?
[00:05:32] Speaker B: Mostly not, but I did have a privileged perch. I got accused a lot of times of being prophetic. I predicted Trump and stuff like that. Well, as a matter of principle, I don't believe you can predict the future. That's, by the way, is the CIA business model is predicting the future for the president.
And as long as the future, as long as tomorrow looks like yesterday, which is a lot of the time, then you can predict the future more or less accurately. But what the precedent wants is discontinuities and those the CIA always gets wrong.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: So.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: What was the question again now?
[00:06:10] Speaker A: Well, it was, it was whether, you know, looking at, looking at these disconnects and the information that they're getting and when the information doesn't.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: I was a media analyst, so I had this kind of like I was at this, this high place where I could see the world's media, tremendous translation shop. So the languages I didn't know I could, I could get.
So when the Internet hit, that was where I was. I was not prophetic. I was simply in a higher place than most and I could see a little bit farther in terms of analytic methodologies. That was kind of what I did.
I tried, me and a bunch of us, it wasn't just me, tried desperately to get CIA to get beyond the very methodical intelligence sort of structures that, that, you know, mental structures that have dominated analysis there for so long, to look at different sources, for example, open sources. But more than secret sources, I don't think we were very successful.
[00:07:14] Speaker A: So now that we've got the biographies somewhat out of the way, over the course of hosting this podcast, every week Since April of 2020, I have, as a matter of professional diligence and necessity, read hundreds of, of books by the guests of this show. And while I have definitely learned something from each of them, I can count on one hand the books which have fundamentally altered the way that I understand the world. And your book, Revolt of the Public, is one of them.
So for me, part of the enduring power of the book is how now, more than a decade after the book was originally published, we see at every turn conflicts between elites and the public that read like ongoing case studies of the dynamic that you originally laid out for us.
Now, your most recent edition of the book has a closing section, reconsiderings, in which you examine Trump's 2016 win and Brexit through the lens of your original thesis.
But so much has happened since then. Elite public conflicts over COVID policy, over so called misinformation, and of course, Trump's dramatic and decisive return to power at the White House. So in thinking about how to cover all of this in an hour and also take some audience questions, perhaps the best way to proceed is to first elucidate the central thesis of your book, illustrate how some of the book's most powerful examples, and then talk about how the revolt played out over the four years of the Biden and how it's playing out now and where we go for from here, particularly as we stand on the precipice of yet another technological revolution with. With deep implications for both elites and publics. Does that sound like a good game plan?
[00:09:14] Speaker B: Sounds like a lot.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: All right, well, this is how I interpreted the central takeaway of Revolt of the Public. That the digital revolution empowered ordinary people with unprecedented and access to information.
Traditional institutions, governments, media, expert classes have lost control of the narrative and face growing insurgencies demanding transparency and accountability. And that this shift has challenged stability and democratic.
The stability of both democratic and authoritarian systems. Is that more or less how you care to elaborate?
[00:09:55] Speaker B: I would say one of the fundamental facts that became evident in my research was that our governing structures, in fact all our institutional structures depend, which are 20th century industrial age structures, depend on kind of a monopoly or semi monopoly over inflammation in every domain.
And when they have that semi monopoly, they become, you know, John F. Kennedy giving a speech, or Walter Cronkite reciting the news and have authority, because since they have that information and you don't, and you can't talk back and you have no other sources, then you're eager, you're thirsty, you're parched, and they give you a little bit to drink.
What you have now is what I call a tsunami. It's a flood of information.
And this structure simply cannot withstand that. The moment that the Internet began, you could see institutions everywhere, some sooner like the media, some later, many political institutions, but all went into crisis.
So it's a function of the volume of information as much as it is of the fact that the public does have a voice now, which it never did before.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: What is the fifth wave that you describe in your book? And when do we really see it start to take off?
[00:11:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think there are different.
There have been different moments. Information doesn't evolve slowly. It just has these moments when there's sudden changes and the social structure adapts to that. It has to adapt to that.
So, you know, you have. The first wave was the invention of writing, which was very elaborate and thousands of characters. So you needed a kind of like a priestly or a mandarin class to run. To run the.
The second was the Alphabet, which made possible all the classical republics. The third one was the printing press, which was kind of like the Internet. There was a big Upsurge from below and created all kinds of trouble.
The fourth was mass media, which I was born into, and that seemed almost eternal. And the fifth, of course, is the digital era, the digital dispensation. And I consider AI to be just a culmination and explosion of the digital era. I don't consider them to be separate ones.
And what it has done, of course, is undermine all those top down hierarchical institutions that depended on that monopoly of information to have their authority and their legitimacy.
Almost every institution today finds its legitimacy completely under question and eroded.
[00:12:43] Speaker A: Why was 2011 such a turning point?
[00:12:46] Speaker B: Well, that's a good question.
If you look at dynamic systems, there is a tendency for things to just kind of like shift and move and suddenly something.
It's a tipping point, literally.
And I think 2011 was a tipping point.
There was the Arab Spring, which was a number of countries that followed more or less the same pattern of using the Internet to organize against dictators that had been there, in the case of Egypt for 30 years.
Then there was the indignados in Spain.
There was the Occupy Wall street here at home.
The Israelis had their social justice surge over there. It was a number. And they all seemed to be similar. They all were the same kinds of people that were revolting. They were not minorities, oppressed minorities that were not the working class. They were mostly educated young people from fairly affluent backgrounds repudiating the systems under which they lived. And in some cases where the dictators held sway, like in Egypt, you kind of understood why. But in Spain, which is a country that has had a dictator not that long in the past, the repudiation of democracy and of the system was a little puzzling.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: How are the masses different from the public? You write that the public is not the people, but it likes to pretend that it is.
Help us unpack those distinctions.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
Every protest you see claims to represent the people. Right?
The masses is simply an old fashioned 20th century sociological term in which you kind lumped everybody who was not an elite into the gigantic pot, the public. I follow Walter Libman, whose definition is basically, it's not everybody, it's not all the. The people. The people don't really exist. That's sort of a, you know, philosophical fiction.
It's not the masses, that's an old fashioned term. It's whoever is interested in a particular affair. So the people, I mean the public in Egypt for example, at the Arab Spring, were all those people who interested in the particular affair of getting rid of dictator Hosni Mubarak. They came from many Many different backgrounds. Some were socialists, extreme socialists. Some were just everyday normal young Egyptians of, of the educated class. Some came from the young wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. So if you took all the people in T Square, they didn't really agree about much except one thing. They wanted Mubarak out.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: Another one of the examples that you use in your book, you contrast the public reaction to JFK's Bay of Pigs fiasco with how the public reacted to Obamacare and the anger that sparked the Tea Party movement. Why did you choose these two reactions for comparison? And what does the difference tell us about the world, the new world in which we live?
[00:16:03] Speaker B: You know, it really important topic of research and speculation. Everybody assumes that there's good reasons for this, but maybe, maybe so, maybe not. Is why are people so angry? All right, why. Why is a revolt of the public so set on bashing at, at.
At the institutions, all institutions right? Now, my example had to do with JFK ordered Bay of Pigs through the CIA. By the way, the Bay of Big's invasion of Cuba.
I mean, half a thought, a minute's reflection on that should have stopped him. It was 3,000 people trying to overthrow a mobilized government in a nation of 8 million people. I mean, you. They couldn't have won.
So it was a. It was a very bad moment for jfk. He gave a speech in which he said, at the same time, he didn't acknowledge that we were involved, but said it's my responsibility.
As a result of that, his popularity, his trust in him, which had been in the 70%, which is right there, insane, went up to the 80s, all right, everybody sided with him. After all, it was the Cold War. He was our guy. We wanted him to succeed, right? And so everybody gathered behind him and supported him.
President Obama did his stimulus bill, and before, and in fact, by its own terms, he set out, you know, his White House set out some terms of what it expected to do. It didn't do any of the things that it intended. So in its own terms, it's kind of failed. But the interesting thing was before it even failed, before it even passed, Obama's popularity began to plunge because everybody felt like this was some kind of horrible thing that he was doing. And basically, the public, what would eventually become the Tea Party, which took away his governing coalition in his first midterm election, was already coalescing against this action of his. So on the one hand, you have the wish to support a precedent because of the geopolitical situation of the moment. The other one, you have that anger that needs to be explained, that turned against Obama and said, all these things you're trying to do, you're destroying the economy, you're socializing the economy, you're doing this, you're doing that.
And it was more than just people shouting online. It had a tremendous electoral effect.
The Democrats lost both the House and the Senate in the next midterm election.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: So one of the vivid examples that you use to illustrate how access to information undermine authorities was the 2009 controversy involving leaked emails from climate scientists. What happened?
[00:18:58] Speaker B: Yeah, that was kind of a fun story. There was this University of East Anglia climate unit. I think it was somebody, maybe the Russians, who knew, who knows, Somebody stole thousands of emails of these climate scientists.
And if you read them, they tell a fascinating story. It's what I would call, after it wasn't my term, a knowledge cartel. These people felt like they owned this information and they were not going to share with anybody. So they had a particular interpretation which was very aggressive, saying climate change was very strong, and they felt that anybody who disagreed with them should never be allowed in a serious scholarly magazine.
And when one or two scholarly studies disagreeing with them suddenly appeared in one of these magazines, then they just, they, they, they excommunicated. They said, we have to not ever contribute to that magazine again. So basically, it didn't have to do with the data, it had to do with his knowledge cartel. These people felt like they own this information, they own its interpretation, and anybody who wanted to break that monopoly was just marginalized and not allowed to publish, which is death if you're a scholar. So I thought that was just an interesting example of how elites work together to basically have that very one idea.
It comes down from the top and everybody has to dance to it.
[00:20:44] Speaker A: Well, yes, it was a blow, but I also wonder if anything has really changed. The media narrative continues. The climate journals continue to police their ranks. And even renowned climate scientists like Judith Curry, who was a guest on the show, says that the older, more objective academics in this area are vastly outnumbered by the new academic activists entering the field. So, I mean, is there a sense in which anything really changes? Or maybe do we see a change in the fact, when you look at the poll numbers, the public, by and large, isn't buying what these experts are selling.
[00:21:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think everything has changed. I think everything has changed. I think, yeah, that the old prestige media is still controlled by the elite, still promotes these very cherished ideas like climate change.
But look what happened in the last election.
Those sources that mainstream media has completely lost Its influence completely lost its audience, except for the people who already believe in that, who are a diminishing number.
And as for the activists, that's an interesting question, and it's a long story, because we're dealing with a curve that peaked during the Floyd riots and now it's declining. But I personally believe that there is a thin crust of real, sincere activists in all those professions, and everybody. And they set the tone, and everybody below that simply uses those words because they think that's what they're supposed to do. They think they're going to get ahead. They think people will smile on them. And I believe with what's going on today with the Trump administration, if money suddenly goes away because you are perceived to be a politicized scholar, a lot of these people will basically, the polarities have been reversed and they will toggle to the new magnetic north. They will change their tone, and they're tuned to whatever is the new accepted way of thinking.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: Interesting times. All right. Well, you've got a lot of fans in our audience. Alan Turner says, I read the first edition of your book when it first came out. He's going to check out the new edition. We're going to get to a few of these questions.
My Modern Galt asks Mr. Gurry, what would you define as populist? Do you think what we're seeing today is actually populism? So how does populism fit in with the people and the public and the mass?
[00:23:37] Speaker B: I hate the word, by the way. I hate the word populist. And I will observe that there isn't a single populist. And there are so many in the world that calls him or herself that. Right. That's something that the elites call basically a populist to the elite is a person who is popular and shouldn't be. So you call them a populist. Right there. It's a phenomenon.
The public is definitely in revolt.
It is bashing at the institutions. It wants change, but it doesn't know what. It has no plan for change. And a populist is somebody who, a politician who taps into that hunger for change and seeks to represent it. And they seem to have, I mean, it's not universal, but they seem to have many interesting traits in common.
They're weird, right? They say weird things.
That seems to be not a personal eccentricity. I mean, if you listen to Javier Milei in Argentina, I actually sat in a room with him giving a speech. He says all kinds of bizarre things.
That's a political stance. That's a Political. He is saying, I am not them.
No elite talks the way Trump talks. No elite talks the way Malay talks.
So it's a way of differentiating themselves.
Like the public, most populous, don't have a program. Their program is anti, you know, I'm anti the system.
And they get elected and suddenly they are the system. And it gets very complicated for them.
And many of them honestly don't know what to do.
Malay is different. He is a libertarian.
Anybody who is an Atlas Shrugged fan should love Milei. I mean, the guy is an absolute anarcho libertarian and he's succeeding wildly. Right. And I think what Musk did with the Doge here was a direct inheritance of what Malay was doing in Argentina is still continuing. Musk is in Iran or still continuing.
So you see populists getting slowly cobbling together a program.
Trump is, has a lot of, a few positive ideas. A lot of what he is about, though, is tearing down, tearing down the old establishment. He has been remarkably successful at that.
So just keep in mind that populism is not something that anybody calls themselves. It's. It's almost a temp, a term. And usually it goes within Europe, for example, always gets. It's like far right populist. It's like. And you look at the European far right populist, like the alternative for Deutschland in Germany, and they're like Republicans, you know, their, their ideas are not particularly far right.
[00:26:39] Speaker A: So do you think it's kind of used as more of a slur? Even though in the past, people that considered themselves populists, I mean, were just as much on the left as would be on the right.
[00:26:52] Speaker B: Oh, that's totally true. But I don't think any of them have called themselves populists. It is an intended, you know, it's a way of diminishing somebody who is popular. You don't say, well, he's a very popular. He's a populist. So it's kind of like it means that you're a demagogue, you're popular, but you shouldn't be because you're saying things that are easy to say but hard to do just to please the public. And I mean, that is the elites talking.
I don't share that belief.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: All right. Alan asks, do you think the Internet and social media has given rise to more misinformation, disinformation then in the past? Any thoughts on AI, further leading us away from the truth?
[00:27:39] Speaker B: So, yeah, it's too early to speculate on AI, I think.
But, but I think whenever you multiply the amount of information, a lot of it is always going to be noise. And I think a lot of the digital information you see out there is noise.
I think a lot of information everywhere has always been noise.
So you balloon it up to many, many higher levels of magnitude, you get that much more noise.
I hate the word disinformation. I hate the word misinformation. I only use it to laugh at them because that also, like populist is an elite word used to say, used to mean something like, you know, shut up, peasant, or something like that. When they, when, when, when, when the elites don't like the public saying things, having access to, to the Internet and saying things that they want to have heard, well, that's disinformation. Shut up. Don't, don't say that. Unless, by the way, if you're the Biden administration, you say, let's censor it. Let's just filter it out. And many European countries, I mean, I just saw a French government poster saying, you're allowed to say everything you want in France as long as it's not illegal. It literally said that.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, it reminds me of the Ayn Rand quote, that you can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. And all of these attempts to censor and to control information, do you think that they're by and large futile in this fifth wave, in this new world? We were chatting just before we went live about how the fact that there's a firewall in Iran that is maintained by the, the Iranian regime and the military, and yet 90% of Iranian youth are on active on social media every day. They're just going to other VPNs and finding other technological ways to get about it. So maybe just a little bit, like in this new age of increased access to information, will these censorship policies really have any chance of succeeding? And does that actually require kind of a conspiracy to keep information from the public?
[00:30:10] Speaker B: Well, I mean, if you're in North Korea, you can do it. Anything short of that. No, you can't.
And what is remarkable though, to me, is that you say, you quote Ayn Rand and say, well, you can't keep the consequences of losing touch with reality. But this elite class has done an amazing job of ignoring the consequences.
They ignore reality, the consequences show up. They ignore the consequences of reality. For example, in Germany, their energy policy has been disastrous. And I mean, anybody just independently observing what was going on could have predicted what happened eventually, which is they had these very expensive green investments.
Basically, this made Their products that much more expensive. It's an economy based entirely on exports. Now their exports are not competitive and they are in recession. So all this predictable. But the elites there to this day have not owned up to this. And they will think maybe another generation or something. But I believe that you can ignore, I wonder how Roman emperor is, watching the empire crumble, said, no, no, things are still doing great. I mean, look, all my dancing girls are still here. So it must be good.
You can ignore even the consequences for the longest time.
[00:31:38] Speaker A: Well, that's really an interesting thing to say because, you know, I'm going to have David Zwieg with his new book Abundance of Caution on next week. And reading that, you know, you had people like Kim, who was the father of public, of children in public school saying, you know, there, there's evidence that you better not evade because there's, there's evidence that schools are open and operating and everything's fine in Europe. There's evidence that there's going to be tremendous learning loss and there's, you know, all of this evidence. And yet the elites chose in those blue state areas to ignore that evidence to maintain the school closures. And now we have the consequences of evading that evidence, which is, you know, mental health issues, abuse that happen, massive learning loss. So I guess that just dovetails into a question here from lock, stock and barrel.
What impact, positive or not, did the COVID lockdowns, school closures, pandemic interventions have on the trust in elite institutions?
[00:32:57] Speaker B: That was a very interesting story and by the way, that I haven't read Zweig's book, but I read a book by Stephen Macedo and Francis Lee called in Covid's wake.
They're both, by the way, very, very liberal authors.
And I rarely, I'm a, you know, I'm a believer in standing back on understanding and not, not getting upset or getting, I got angry reading that book.
To answer the question initially, Covid was a godsend to the elites.
Basically, the elites had had all their, all trust in them had been eroded. They had been fumbling around.
They, they were exposed as, you know, not knowing what they were talking about. That's what the Internet does. You know, the olden days, you could get away with saying anything, who could talk back, who knew better? Well, now everything's happening. All your, even your sexual escapades are out there for everybody to know. So they had basically lost all prestige. And here comes Covid and really the population of the United States was terrified and desperately wanted to believe for one brief moment that the people in authority knew what they were doing and were going to keep them safe and sound.
And the consequences were just horrific. We're just starting with the fact that Covid probably started with a leak, a lab leak in Wuhan that for all we know, we helped fund. Okay, that particular research.
So. And then all these mandates that, if you read that book in Covid, the science at the moment that Covid began was completely the opposite of what we did. At some point, the Chinese decided they were going to lock down and they're going to do all these heroic dictatorial things.
And then they claim, yes, we solved the problem, and the World Health Organization said, yes, you solved the problem, and everybody else followed suit. But, well, we're not a dictatorship. We're not like, our system is not the Chinese system. We were basically imposing a dictatorial system, and it didn't work for the Chinese.
Zero Covid. They tried to impose that. And the Chinese went out on the street shouting against the Communist Party for the first time in years. And the Communist Party, in its wisdom, backed away from zero Covid.
I think it began as a boost for the elites that they felt they once again could claim an authority, a source of authority, by saying, we have science on our side.
And they botched that so badly and they harmed so many people in so many different ways, harmed the economy in so many ways, that it was a tremendous loss. What the elites are today, I think, is way, way less trusted than they were at the beginning of COVID And it's hard for me to see how they recover.
[00:35:56] Speaker A: So you talk about this desire to negate. You talk about the anger of the public, the. The public that is revolting against the elites. I wonder if the anger goes both ways. Do you get a sense that there's also anger from the elites towards the public? I remember my friend Jeffrey Tucker wrote an interesting article that some of these really kind of cruel and punitive and, frankly, irrational policies during COVID were almost an attempt to punish the public. You didn't listen to us on climate change. You didn't listen to us on this issue and that issue. So now you're.
[00:36:41] Speaker B: You're.
[00:36:42] Speaker A: We're going to force you to listen to us on this one.
[00:36:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't agree with that. I think. I think it was. It was like, oh, wait, they're listening to us now. Let's see how much we can push them around. And here come the Chinese with this dictatorial model of locking down and wearing masks everywhere and, you know, basically nailing doors shut so nobody leaves their apartment. And they, and, and, and the democracies, including us, said, hey. The elites said, hey, how far can we push the public? And they learned that they could push us very far. I mean, I was out there with my mask.
I mean, I had a, like a 10 hour airplane trip wearing one of those terrible masks that just pressed your face back, but then you took it off to eat. It was completely unscientific. It was some kind of ritualistic thing that they were forcing us to do because they could.
I don't think it was punishment. I think it was, how far can we stretch our power? How far, how far we could control this population? It was an experiment, and I think it backfired in the end.
[00:37:44] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I, I think the, the real shock of the pandemic was not that, you know, people revolted, it's that so many more people complied.
So, you know, staying on this theme of this, this neo nihilism, the public bent to negate kind of Trump's negating instincts, thoughts on the recent negation to the extent that it is a negation of USAID and any concerns about negating certain institutions like that without consideration of what, if anything, fills itself place.
[00:38:25] Speaker B: I mean, I live close to Washington, D.C.
you know, there are many, very many good people who worked at the government. I'd like to think I was one of them once.
And there are many corners of the federal government that are obviously necessary for modern life to get on, but it is a bloated mess. Okay, USAID was a Cold War outfit. It essentially gave money to unsavory rulers so that they would be on our side and not the Soviets. That's a perfectly noble mission in my book. We bribe people to be on our side.
After the Cold War ended, it just became one more source of one more gusher of tax money, non governmental organizations to do some bizarre ideological thing decided this way or that way depending, but with. Absolutely.
It was like the Winston Churchill pudding. There was no theme there.
There was no there that held that organization together. It did its job in the Cold War, rest in peace, and continue to live on.
[00:39:46] Speaker A: So I mentioned how your book was one of few that I've read since this podcast began that really did alter the way I look at things. And one of them was the passage in which you talk about the concept of telescopic philanthropy as described and illustrated by Charles Dickens in the character of Mrs. Jelly Belly in Bleak House.
How does it apply to the temptation to get kind of swept up in righteous causes, to affect things over which we have no control and ignore opportunities to make improvements in our own lives.
[00:40:30] Speaker B: Yeah, this is something the Internet invites us to do. That's a great book that Mrs. Jellyby is a character in. She was conducting this crusade to save the natives of Bora Bulaga on the east bank of the Niger, she said, and spent all her time writing letters to important people to save these, these natives. Meanwhile, her child, their children were running wild and having accidents and terrible things were happening to them and she could have cared less. Right.
That was telescopic philanthropy. I think the Internet makes us feel like we, we can ignore our everyday, our personal issues and our everyday issues, our local community issues, and try to save the Earth. Right? Try to save the Earth. Think about that. That's a religious statement.
Saving the Earth. I always wonder about that one. And there's some version of that in every one of those other social justice declarations.
You can somehow achieve some magical, almost mathematical sense of equality by putting people of various minorities in various proportions, while maybe our personal lives are not what they should be. You know, I always feel like, you know, if you can lose five pounds, then maybe you should start thinking about bigger things. Most of us can't. Right? Most of us can't lose five pounds. And if we do, we gain it right back.
So there is a sense in which the personal, the people, you know, the small sphere gets overridden by this cosmic sphere of super important stuff where you think you're striking a pose, but you're in fact just deluding yourself. You're deluding yourself and you're probably harming the people closest to you that you should be paying attention to.
[00:42:30] Speaker A: So in your chapter on reconsiderings, you seem to suggest that China's internal fragility to potential revolt of the public at home is likely to temper any foreign adventurism. Do you still believe that to be true?
[00:42:46] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. And I think it's gotten more so.
I, you know, I never, like I said before, I never prophesy because, you know, if you want to be wrong, make a prediction and you're bound to be wrong. But I, it seems to me, I don't, I'm not. Another caveat is I. I'm not a China expert, but it just seems to me that they are kind of on the cusp of change. There's some weird things going on with Xi right now.
He seems to be losing some of his power.
He made a big, bold play for, you know, I want to be a. The global equivalent of the United States. Their economy is sort of, you know, it's hard to tell because their statist are terrible, but they are not growing like they used to grow. They may not be growing much at all. They have whole pockets of that economy that are really kind of disastrous.
And they have frightened a lot of people who have come running to us. I mean, they're the best allies we have because they are such bullies in the world, particularly their own neighborhood, that everybody looks to us to protect them. So I gave Covet as another example. They went, they went big on zero, Covid. They were going to be the ones that said it was such a disastrous policy that within three months of having pronounced that policy, they had to pull it back. They had to pull it back. That was really a lot of lost face on that, on that regime. So, yeah, I think it's keep an eye on China. It's a gut feeling more than anything else. I'm not going to say it's a, you know, hard evidence, but keep an eye on China.
[00:44:26] Speaker A: Fascinating. We will. All right, turning to events that happened after you wrote reconsiderings, let's talk about Biden's election in 2020 with 81 million votes compared to Obama's much smaller vote count of 69 and 66 million. And so the Biden gets in ends Trump's first term. How do you interpret this massive vote count in the framework that you've set up? Was this a revolt of the public or was this a revolt, in a sense of the elites?
[00:45:04] Speaker B: I have no idea how that number was arrived at. I am not, by the way, a MAGA guy and I have never stated that the election was fraudulent in any way, but just within this last year, I think during this last election, I became familiar with the number you just gave. How out of sync that. I mean, the Obama numbers were records, right? And this thing was like 20 million more than that. And then we went back to. So I have no idea. I'm going to be honest with you, I have no idea how that number was arrived at. Voting was made very easy during the pandemic. You know, people could do all sorts of things that were not allowed before just to make sure that the vote was counted. Even though people couldn't leave their homes or whatever. Maybe that was it.
But I cannot account for that. I would, I would be a liar if I said I could.
[00:45:54] Speaker A: All right, well, just thought I'd ask because I'm curious too.
All right, let's talk about Biden's short lived disinformation. Governance board I know you hate that word. We do too.
Pillory by critics for being an Orwellian kind of ministry of truth, as well as the entire industry of fact checkers and misinformation experts. Do you really think that such efforts were naive in believing that they could really turn the tide against the tsunami of information that they found threatening? Or does the fact that so many digital and social media companies bent to their will suggest that, in fact, such a board was truly a danger of the government successfully controlling what the public was able to perceive as true?
[00:46:46] Speaker B: I mean, the board itself lasted about an hour, so that it didn't have much more than influence. The woman they wanted to make head of that board, Nina Jankowicz, is something else. All right. I mean, I don't know if it's still there, but you could certainly find YouTube video of her singing that, let's put it this way, asking who she has to romance to get ahead in the world.
She was just a strange individual.
But the larger, more serious question of censorship, I'm a little divided on that question. I tend to believe you can't do it. You can't totally shut out the tsunami. But there was a moment where there were all these three or four or.
[00:47:31] Speaker A: Five.
[00:47:34] Speaker B: Gigantic digital companies. Google, Apple, at the time, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft.
And that's not that big a number. You can take all those CEOs, put them in one room and say, this is what we're going to allow, and this is what we're going to not.
In essence, that's exactly what happened.
The Biden White House, I always say that because I don't really believe Biden was in control much the whole time, but the Biden White House would literally call up Twitter and say, why are you allowing this thing that we don't like? And Twitter would take it down, sometimes even get rid of somebody who would. Somebody's account just basically shut them out.
And while the ultimate result was that people became aware of this and Musk bought Twitter, I think that was a big part of that.
And through that wedge, all these efforts became known. I'm not sure that Musk hadn't bought Twitter, that we would know about it as well. I mean, there was a sense that it was happening because people were seeing that their posts were not going anywhere.
But the extent to which it was all controlled by the Biden administration might not have been known. I mean, thankfully, it's a speculative question now, because they're gone and the whole thing is being torn down. And suddenly, you know, Zuckerberg and all Those people are, are all for free speech, but they weren't for a while.
[00:49:07] Speaker A: Yes, definitely singing a different tune. Including Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post. Okay, I'll take one last question since we are coming up to the top of the hour.
Iliacin on YouTube asks, Are there any parallels between the loss of faith with Western governments and media institutions and what was happening with the public in the final years of the Soviet Union? You know, people knowing that Pravda was, was fake, for example.
[00:49:36] Speaker B: Gee, that's a really interesting question.
That's a really good question.
I hate to say that this is all I'm improvising because I don't think I've thought about that.
I had a friend, sadly he died, who was a very, very deep Soviet expert, and he says he remembers when the system just got stopped working.
And people just assume that whatever they tried to do inside that system wasn't going to happen. Okay. I think the idea. And so there was a cynicism that was built into the system. Nobody complained, in a sense because you expected things not to happen. I think we're not there yet. I think we expect things to happen. We expect the system to some degree to take, take itself seriously and function as it's supposed to. The US Government should do the things that governments are supposed to do when it sets out to, for example, create digital charging stations. And you allocate billions for that.
You know, do it, don't just do three or four, but do thousands of them. They can't. And I think that that makes people, that makes the public upset and angry.
But that's a really good question. That's a really good question. I think, I think we're in an earlier period. I think we can still save this thing and I think maybe we're actually working towards that right now.
But there's an element of truth in that. There's similarities too.
[00:51:09] Speaker A: Well, I, I think there definitely could be similarities, particularly when you're talking about those parts of the population that see themselves more aligned with elite or wanting to be perceived as, as part of the right thinking crowd in terms of falsifying their beliefs in saying that, oh yes, we definitely believe that this young girl is actually a boy. Or yes, we definitely think the world is going to end in eight years or what have you, when in fact, you know, they, they're just saying that to kind of get along with, with what others, they think others want them to believe.
[00:51:53] Speaker B: I mean, I think, yes, that's what I said before. Right. The elites are almost part of Being an elite is being able to get you to believe the unbelievable. Right?
And so the consequences of losing touch with reality come in. And as I said before, they lose touch with the consequences as well. It's everything can be explained. You know, the religious mentality.
There's always an explanation, right?
So I think the elites are, in their own very atheistic and materialistic way, very much of a religious, almost fanatical approach about the things that they believe in. There cannot be an answer. That is the wrong answer that you look for an explanation that puts it back into your comfort zone of this is what it is, because that's what I want it to be.
[00:52:45] Speaker A: So, as I mentioned before, there was a lot, and I think we have managed to cover quite a lot in this interview.
And I want to again reiterate to those who are watching and asking all of your great questions to make sure that if you haven't bought this book, read the book. There's a wonderful audio version as well.
I highly recommend it. You know, I don't often say that because I, I. We have a new author on every week. This is definitely one you won't want to miss. So Martin, is there, you know, we've covered a whole bunch of things. Is there anything that we haven't touched on that you feel is important for our viewers to know about the, the material that you cover in the book and where we go from here?
[00:53:28] Speaker B: Well, I mean, I think the moment in history that we're at right now with Donald Trump, who is basically the revolt of the public in power, right. And so the interesting question is to what extent, you know, to put away populism, that that's just the word, to what extent does somebody like that, that was elected by people who wanted to change everything, people who were basically wanted to bash the institutions and thought this is the guy who will most tick off the elites.
So now there he is, he comes back and has been amazingly successful in doing the things that he has tried to do. But there's still a question at the bottom of all this is what does, what does the, the MAGA vision, whatever you want to call it, look like if he were to get everything he, he wanted, I mean, how different would that be? In what way and form would that be different from what was there before? I think that's to be watched. I don't think it's an answer, but it's an interesting moment.
[00:54:28] Speaker A: Final question. You ask whether liberal representative democracy can survive the rise of the publics. What reforms or adaptations do you think are necessary to maintain stability in this new era.
[00:54:45] Speaker B: Well, I mean, I think we have inherited these tremendously steep hierarchical organizations and you know, if General Motors wants to be that way, you know, go with God. But a democratic government. These are very undemocratic structures. Right. They're very top down structures and the public resents that. At the age of the, of the, of the Internet, which is a flat structure, the public resents these, these very steep, many layered hierarchies.
So we need to quench those hierarchies down. You're always going to need some kind of hierarchical structure. That's the way the world works. But they do not have to be that steep and they can be digitized. So the public has much more of an input in that. I think AI can help a lot. I think AI can make this crazy, you know, Hydra that is the government, the federal government visible. That's what Musk did. He basically put AI and suddenly the president could have had visibility on every little project that was going on.
I think something like that to be done. And then I think we need a new class of elites. I think that this class that either was trained in the 9th, in the 20th century to be top down or they're young people with old brains. Right. That want to be that way. It's a very comfy way of being. You're protected, you're sheltered, you can look out your windows and never have to interact with the public. I think we need to get rid of these people. We need a set of elites that are a lot more modest and humble about how much they know. Because the more you say, I know how to solve that problem as if politics were a mathematical equation, the more you're going to be found out to be BSing.
It's not a problem, it's a condition. It's hard.
And science doesn't work like that. So you say, let's try this, let's try the other trial and error.
So we need for elite rhetoric, our political democratic rhetoric to change.
[00:56:43] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I think that's a good point. I had teased next week's interview with David Zweig, his book Abundance of Caution. And throughout it he said that he had wished that different language had been used. That rather than saying, oh, we absolutely need to do this intervention, we need to keep schools closed for a year or longer, otherwise people will die. If they had instead said something along the lines of, we're going to try this, we're not sure that it's going to work, but we're going to give it a try and if it doesn't work we'll iterate and, and we'll make some changes.
[00:57:21] Speaker B: So that's science. That's the way science works. And I think but it's far more comfy to, to do what the Chinese did, right? Say no, we are the authority and you will obey.
[00:57:33] Speaker A: That's true. All right. Well, thank you, Martin. This was just a wonderful hour and thank you so much for your flexibility and your patience as we had to deal with some of your, your issues and really thrilled that we were able to reschedule for this week.
[00:57:48] Speaker B: So I'm very, yeah, I'm happy we could do it.
[00:57:50] Speaker A: Thank you and thanks to all of you who asked great questions. Again, make sure to join us next week when author and journalist David Speak joins us to talk about his book Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus and A Story of Bad Decisions. We'll see you then.
