The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas by Gal Beckerman

Episode Date: February 20, 2022

The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas by Gal Beckerman An “elegantly argued and exuberantly narrated” (The New York Times Book Review) look at the building of social movements—from the 1600s to the present—and how current technology is undermining them “A bravura work of scholarship and reporting, featuring amazing individuals and dramatic events from seventeenth-century France to Rome, Moscow, Cairo, and contemporary Minneapolis.”—Louis Menand, author of The Free World We tend to think of revolutions as loud: frustrations and demands shouted in the streets. But the ideas fueling them have traditionally been conceived in much quieter spaces, in the small, secluded corners where a vanguard can whisper among themselves, imagine alternate realities, and deliberate about how to achieve their goals. This extraordinary book is a search for those spaces, over centuries and across continents, and a warning that—in a world dominated by social media—they might soon go extinct. Gal Beckerman, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, takes us back to the seventeenth century, to the correspondence that jump-started the scientific revolution, and then forward through time to examine engines of social change: the petitions that secured the right to vote in 1830s Britain, the zines that gave voice to women’s rage in the early 1990s, and even the messaging apps used by epidemiologists fighting the pandemic in the shadow of an inept administration. In each case, Beckerman shows that our most defining social movements—from decolonization to feminism—were formed in quiet, closed networks that allowed a small group to incubate their ideas before broadcasting them widely. But Facebook and Twitter are replacing these productive, private spaces, to the detriment of activists around the world. Why did the Arab Spring fall apart? Why did Occupy Wall Street never gain traction? Has Black Lives Matter lived up to its full potential? Beckerman reveals what this new social media ecosystem lacks—everything from patience to focus—and offers a recipe for growing radical ideas again. Lyrical and profound, The Quiet Before looks to the past to help us imagine a different future.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks it's voss here from thechrisvossshow.com thechrisvossshow.com hey we're coming to you on a great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here We've got an amazing author on the show. He is the author of the book that just came out February 15th,

The Quiet Before on the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas. His name is Gal Beckerman. He's going to be talking to us about his new amazing book that you definitely want to order up off the interwebs, wherever fine books are sold. In the meantime, see our video version of him on youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss. Here's a video version of him. What is he, like an avatar in the meta universe or something? I don't know what that means to me. Go to

goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, seeing everything we're reading and reviewing. All our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, the massive LinkedIn group, 132,000 people, and also the LinkedIn newsletter, which is killing it. We just signed this morning for a booking John Avalon, editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast and CNN, who will be on a show for his book on Lincoln later this month, and also Dwight Chapman, I believe I'm pronouncing that correctly, the president's man.

He was actually one of Nixon's trusted aides. I'm really excited to see this. So make sure you guys subscribe to the show and watch for that to come up. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character.

I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book wherever fine books are sold. So today we're talking to Gal Beckerman. He is the senior editor for Books at the Atlantic,

a former editor at the New York Times Book Review. He is also the author of the widely acclaimed When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone, which won the National Jewish Book Award and the Sammy Rohrer Prize and was named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and The Washington Post. Welcome to the show, sir. How are you? Thank you so much for having me. Doing well. Awesome, Sauce. Glad to have you. Congratulations on the new book. That was always fun. Thank you.

Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. Sure. Well, there's a lot of information on my personal website, which is just gallbeckerman.com. And you can find different ways to buy the book. It's basically wherever books are sold, you can find it at the moment. I think that's all the plug I've got. There you go. So what motivated you to want to write this book? Yeah, well, so I've been observing, like all of us, the last 10, 15 years of social movements

that grabbed everyone's attention for a very brief period of time, thinking back to what we used to call the Twitter revolutions of the early aughts. Arab Spring comes to mind, all the way to Me Too and Black Lives Matter. And these were movements that had big ambitions for changing kind of structural foundational things in our society and politics. And they seem to have these very short shelf lives. And I became fascinated with sort of why that was. And also the pattern seemed a little familiar to me from social media, the notion that you can have something that sort of grabs attention for a short period of time and then disappears.

And I wondered if it was the fact that these movements were basically born and using social media in such an integrated way that might have led to this kind of metabolism that they had. It's pretty interesting. So I'm going to be interested to see your experience with it. My experience was we got started on Twitter and social media very early on. It was that kumbaya, like you say, the Arab Spring. And it's like, this is going to be the thing that revolutionizes and democratizes everything.

And then it seemed like after the Arab Spring, like governments and powerful political people said, this is a pretty powerful tool. Let's see how we can use this for evil. And then, of course, Mark Zuckerberg took over. So give us an overview of the book and what's inside. So like I said, I started with this idea that maybe something is missing. Maybe these movements are sort of skipping a few steps and not using the right tools, right? Not using the right tools to sort of develop and grow and become more sustainable. And so the first thing I did is I looked historically. I said, let's look pre-digital going back. I go back to the scientific revolution in the 17th century and understand the different

means of communication, the different media that were being used by different vanguards, different groups of people who were trying to make change in their own societies. So the book really has kind of two parts. So it's the first part goes back, like I said, to the 17th century and looks at a few different moments starting from there. You have letters before the scientific revolution, petitions and the roles they played in sort of leading to the working class in England getting the right to vote in the 1830s, all the way through futurism in Italy in the 1910s, and samizdat, which was sort of underground writing in the Soviet Union during the 60s, all the way to zines in the 90s, the role that they played in third wave feminism

kind of developing. First half of the the book second half of the book i say okay now we've learned all these lessons from looking historically what can we how can we apply those to the last 10 15 years of social movements and understand what they're doing right and the ways in which they're being undermined by by social and and so what did you find in the book with uh these things is it because we have so much data, like it's hard for people to stay sustained on any one thing? Or is it just the, what is it? Well, the big takeaway was that what social media is, is it's a certain kind of tool, right? And it's some kind of communications tool, most akin in my mind to just an extremely effective bullhorn, right? You have

this ability to, if you're an activist, right, and you have an idea that you want to sort of get into the world, you have the opportunity with social media that we've never had before, with the speed and scale that is kind of unprecedented, to call everybody to the streets, right, very quickly. And that's an incredible tool. I mean, that's amazing that we have that at our disposal and that it's not monopolized by one person or just a small group of people. Anybody can presume more loudly than I would have ever been able to before. The problem is that a bullhorn is a very particular kind of tool and it doesn't allow you to do a lot of other things, right? It doesn't allow you to huddle quietly with a small group of people and strategize and plan, figure out your organizational

structure, hammer out your ideology, decide what your goals are, all get on the same page. A small group of people figuring out how they want to change the world need to kind of understand what the steps that they're going to take are. It allows you to sort of skip over all of that, all of those things and go straight to the streets. And in doing so, you're losing the real elements that you need to build a lasting movement. And so the takeaway, in a sense, was that you need the quiet before, right? You need these moments of small, intimate conversation that sort of build to changing of minds. That makes complete sense to me now.

I never really saw it from that angle until you nailed it. And of course, the title of your book, The Quiet Before, it almost seems like, and correct me if I'm wrong, it almost seems like they're doing it in reverse. Like it suddenly goes viral and then everyone's like, let's turn this into a movement. We should organize this thing because my little tweet went viral. Absolutely.

And then the problem is that you begin to think that tool, that bullhorn is the only thing you need because it's so useful for that one purpose, right? You're like, oh, this must be the thing. This must be the thing I keep using. But we also know about that bullhorn that it's impossible in terms of building the consensus or getting people aligned, or it actually undermines all of that. So you're able to make the big explosive attention grabbing thing happen. And then you don't know how to follow up on that. You know, you don't kind of keep it moving. And so they need to be in an incubation, as you write in the book of necessary process of certain conditions. And you talk about Black Lives Matter. There's a whole load of social

fixes that were going on, especially in the last two or three years, or some of the things that contributed to them not doing as well or having the staying power that you would have thought they would have had. Well, I mean, it was a really interesting movement for me to look at because they benefited in enormous ways from that kind of visibility and attention that was the kind of social media phenomenon, right? And it was just this hashtag that went viral and at one level, by one metric, extremely effective because they managed to really change a conversation in America, force people to have a conversation they didn't want to have, or they might not have wanted to have about the persistence of racism. And all of that is incredibly important. I mean, even the concepts that they introduced into the bloodstream were ones that I think personally was a good thing

that we should be contending with those issues. The problem is they really wanted to change, if you talk to the activists, they really wanted to change realities on the ground, particularly when it came to how police were treating communities of color. How do you connect these two things? How do you connect this extraordinary visibility and a lot of these what could be called symbolic wins? Every company in America releases a press release saying that Black Lives Matter. But what does that do for you? What does it actually do for you on the ground in communities where the change that has to happen that indicates real change is very local, very much evolving,

organizing, getting your local city council to begin to get on board with these ideas, and also refining your ideas. So they're not just defund the police or abolish the police, which is a great slogan, but it doesn't kind of allow you to reach for the compromises that you need to create the real sort of reform movements within localities that will actually shift maybe money away in the budget from the police towards social services, let's say. That's a very real idea. But actually getting that to happen is a different sort of work and demands different tools than just drawing attention. Yeah. And so just to keep shouting into the bullhorn of Black Lives Matter,

you've really got to start meeting with, I guess, police boards or police unions or whoever oversees them, the city, state, county, meeting with them and getting that done. And I guess they never really got too deep into that. Well, it depends. I focused on this group in Minneapolis that had a really interesting experience because they sort of had learned from the earlier waves of the Black Lives Matter movement. If you remember, like 2015, 16, it first kind of exploded and then it kind of disappeared. And then we emerged in 2020. For all of us kind of watching from home, that's how we experienced it.

But for these activists, they felt really burned by that first moment. They felt that everyone paid attention and then like left. So a lot of the kind of the smartest, most engaged organizers that I talked to were trying to do things differently. And in Minneapolis, for example, there were groups that really managed to, if you remember in that summer of 2020, Minneapolis was the one place where the city council actually said they were going to get rid of the police. It was a big headline. It was probably the biggest headline that emerged in terms of real concrete change from all those protests. But then what happened is there were a lot of roadblocks along the way. It's not so interesting to get into the details of it.

But that group, those groups, those activist groups were left with the reality that this thing they wanted was not happening. And the only thing they could do is try to get a referendum in front of people to vote on this issue of whether they should reform the police. And they had to go out, they had to petition to get this referendum in front of, on the ballot. And it was an incredible process for them that was the opposite of social media, right? It was going with a petition door to door, trying to collect names, trying to convince people, talk to them about what it means to have a community-led safety. All of that stuff was very formative for these groups and it taught them how to work on a more local level. Yeah. And it's interesting how it's kind of died out. One of the sad factors that happened was crime has increased because of COVID and people's desperate situation, being evicted from homes. There's a lot I don't think a lot of the defunding of the police ever really took place.

You have, you know, anybody who reads the papers, it's COVID and the economic fallout from that. But, you know, now that whole defund the police concept or idea is now reversed where people are like, we need more cops. And I'm sure that they aren't enacting any policies where make sure we don't hire some racist cops. They're just going to hire more people. And I think Me Too was another movie that was really interesting to watch of an arc of it, because when it started out, I mean, there was there was stuff that made sense. I forget the name of the giant Hollywood studio head that was just a monster, Bill Cosby, and everything else.

And then it really started getting out of control where just it seemed like everyone in the world was trying to figure out a story to become famous off and see if there was some money in it. And it started to get crazy where just everybody was coming up with something. And the part I think it got so weird that i think people started going this is getting out of control like this is like people are starting to manufacture stuff and at the end of it that aziz and zari date took place that clearly was just a bad date the guy wasn't interested yeah and that's when people really went okay this the people are being bad actors here and they're just trying to jump on a train.

And that may have been, correct me if I'm wrong, because you're the one that researched this, but that may have been a thing where someone should have sat down and said, what are the rules of Me Too, as opposed to just the free-for-all? Or, and this is sort of the interjection I would make, is what are the objectives of Me Too? If we feel that there is a real problem in society with powerful men abusing their power to kind of sexually manipulate and to take advantage of women, how do we actually change that at a systemic level? And not just what felt, what began to feel like these kind of, again, sort of symbolic victories. Like, let's take down this famous man. Let's take down this famous man. A lot of them need to be taken down. But then if that just becomes like your only means for operating as a movement, like picking off one person after another.

And then you become sort of dependent on that too, right? Because that's the thing that draws attention. That's the thing that gets the news story. That's the thing that kind of keeps the social media ball rolling. You sort of are forgetting some of the fundamentals. There's still a woman like on a factory floor somewhere with like her boss, like whispering in her ear about what he wants from her. And that doesn't change that reality. And if your objective is to change that reality, then you need to kind of stop and maybe get off social

media hamster wheel and think more strategically about laws, about lobbying, about all kinds of old school things that we've, we sort of have been led. And this is the bigger point I think I'm trying to make is that we've been like seduced by social media in a way to think that this is the only thing you need to make change, just have these big dramatic moments and everybody's minds will change. And I think it's sort of distracting us from the work that needs to be done on a lot of these. Unfortunately, the one time I have to listen to Fox News is when I go to the gym. And at my gym in our locker room, they have a playing, blasting. And it's about the only time I have to put up with that crap.

And it's been interesting in the times that I go in there every other night that they've somehow taken the Black Lives Matter people and they're trying to use them as what's the scapegoat? I forget the term I'm looking for. But they're trying to use them as basically you don't hear about Trump's problems recently with his courts. You hear about Black Lives Matter by saying that, I guess, some of the people who got money from Black Lives Matter that were supposed to use it for organization purposes maybe spent it a little on the side. And maybe this is, if that's true, maybe this is a good example of where maybe, like you say, the organization should have been better in the beginning. And, of course, that money probably would have been better spent on lobbying because that's how you really get laws passed in this country and stuff. So yeah.

Yeah. And here it's backfired on them and they're using it to demonize them. Yeah, no, I think it also is the problem that happens when you get like when a movement has kind of social media celebrities or like the things get to like things get too concentrated, like in a small number of people who kind of become the face of it.

That was something that a lot of the, a lot of the organizers that I talked to who were working on these issues, like they're not on Twitter or they're not big on Twitter or whatever. And they would, it drove them crazy that there were moments in the life of this movement where for like national media, they would list the top most effective activists in the country and use Twitter accounts.

Twitter follower counts is a way of measuring that, right? And so if you're like on the ground going door to door trying to actually like figure out what real policy change looks like, and you see that, it's incredibly demoralizing. In a way that I think this story has been very demoralizing for a lot of people who don't want to be associated with sort of the worst, you know, not the worst elements, but maybe elements in the movement that maybe weren't thinking grassroots enough. Yeah. And then you have bad actors that hijack onto it, right? Sure.

I mean, that happens in every, that happens all the time. I mean, there's a lot of people that, I'm trying to think of some people that stood out from Black Lives Matter. I think there was one or two people that really ended up kind of jumping on. I know Sean King is somebody who tends to jump on to everything. And I used to like Sean King. And then somebody sent me a lot of data on a lot of different things he's jumped on to and a lot of money that disappears into charities. And I'm not going to say whether that happened intentionally or not or what happened to that money.

I don't really know. But there seems to be a lot of money raising by Sean King and other people. And that's kind of an example of, like you say, where people can jump on and do a thing. And since there's no real organization, it's kind of a free-for-all, like the same thing I saw with Me Too, where just like everybody started jumping on and was going to try to be this. I'm working on something right now. And again, I don't know if Sean King is good or bad. But it is interesting how many things he's in. And he always seems to be jumping on the latest thing and then raising money from it.

And I guess there's even questions about his background and true race. So it's interesting to me. And he's gotten a lot of stuff for it. One other thing that seems to be interesting to me, and I don't know if this plays in your book, but in looking at, and I've been working on a podcast about this, but in looking at what Whoopi Goldberg said about the Jews and the Holocaust, and there almost seems to be that we live in this victim mindset world. This is my theory I'm going on, where everybody's a victim.

And instead of going, well, okay, we're both victims of some sort of repression or some sort of assault, it's almost like become a contest of who can be the bigger victim. And, like, I think that's what B i think that's what whoopi goldberg was trying to say is that yeah well the jewish people and i'm using her paraphrase here the jewish people yeah it was just a war between people which it was not because jewish people are race and i think she was leading into but we're the black people and we've suffered more because we're more racially profiled and and she was clearly making a point in her mind that the Jews were not. And it's almost like this contest to like,

especially on social media of like who can be the biggest victim. And I saw that with me too, too, where it was like everybody was coming out trying to come up with the best spin on a story. I had friends that, that weren't, that didn't do me too.

In fact, some of them were hit jobs because people just figured out a way to make money off of it and figured out it was a way to maybe get famous. So I don't know. What do you think about my theory there? I mean, I do think one of the things that I'm trying to bring up in the book is this question of how the medium that we use affects the kind of conversations we can have affects even the way that we think and the and sort of biases us one way or another and it's that there are certain things baked into say the architecture of every medium you know that so so another expression

that's become popular lately is what is the incentive structure of of a particular medium so what's the incentive structure on on Twitter or Facebook or any of these big public social media platforms? It's to increase the number of people who are liking what you say, giving you thumbs up, favoring you, upvoting you. It's a very performative sort of space where you're trying to draw attention to yourself and sometimes that means not sometimes it often operating in a kind of a zero-sum game that like there's no room for a lot of nuance and a lot of sort of you know both these things could be true you could have two people who have been victimized by enormous ways and i i don't i don't i didn't even occur

to me to think about how the whoopee global phenomenon is like part of the social media thing but but but it is does go to the bigger point of when you start to operate when our public space our public sphere become one that exists on those platforms which it kind of is you know it really molds and shapes the kind of conversations we can have and it limits in a big way sort shapes the kind of conversations we can have. And it limits in a big way the range of complexity that can exist. And to me, that's really the unfortunate thing is that we've medium is the message that whatever it is that you use to communicate on ends up shaping the kind of communication that you can have. That's really interesting. I like that. That should be in our shirt because that probably defines what social media has done right there. I mean, it's shaped us.

I mean, I think in a lot of ways it has. And look, I think when it comes to, I don't think that's like a big headline because we all know it from our personal lives, right? We all know the way we feel like kind of understand how that works personally, if we understand how that works even for democracy, the ways that it's been negative in terms of increasing outrage and indivision and that sense of a zero-sum game, what does it mean for movements? Which I think, unlike with our personal lives and with democracy, where we're very self-aware at this point that social media has a lot of negative implications, with movements, we're very self-aware at this point that social media has a lot of negative implications. With movements, we still have this sort of romantic idea that if you just get that hashtag to go viral, then you can change the world. And it's just not true. There's the illusion

of the world changing because everybody is sharing the one very sticky thing that you sent out into the world. But at the end of the day, like you're back to square one a little bit. Yeah. It's very interesting. And like the virtue signaling, trying to make things go viral. You see some people really stretching the virtue signaling. Maybe you can say Whoopi Goldberg was trying to do virtual signaling a little too far and she pushed it.

And sometimes you see that when people step over the line or get called out for stuff is they're kind of overreaching and trying to push whatever that movement is maybe a little too far and people go, hey, you're getting out of the lines there or something. I don't know. That's kind of interesting. I think it's all part of that same dynamic of just how we communicate on those platforms that we sort of stopped being self-aware about. Now you mentioned that these public platforms are really more of a public space. Do you think we need to enact regulation and really make these guys more of like the news,

the press, the, I know the hard parts of, or was it section 230 and trying to make that happen where you're not a publisher, but in some ways you kind of are. And I mean, you're a bullhorn, really. So, I mean, if you're not on the front page of, you're on the front page of the newspaper if you go viral. Do you think there should be something that says, look, this is a public space and it needs to be regulated as such a little bit? Much like, maybe not to the extent that newspapers and agencies aren't, but maybe somewhat? Yeah, I struggle with this question a lot because I believe in the value of free speech. I think that there has been something incredibly powerful about people who would not have had access to that bullhorn suddenly having

access to it. And I worry that once we start regulating, it's hard to see how you slice it and dice it and decide where the red lines are and who gets to decide that. And in some ways, it's complicated. In some ways, what I would suggest is that we need to fully appreciate the nature of what social media is, that it is a private, that these are private companies that are trying to make money, that have their own incentives, that have built in sort of architecture that push us and pull us in different directions. I want us to sort of appreciate social media the way we do, look at the side when we buy food and look at that warning on the side. It's not a warning, but it tells us how much fat is in it and how much,

just to become better consumers, to appreciate that we are the product being sold in a way. And that, I think, to me, seems sort of a more productive use of our energy than figuring out exactly the right way to regulate those companies. But what about regulating? Because like I mentioned earlier in the show, when I first got on social media in the first few, it seemed like four or five years, it was a kumbaya moment. Everybody was together and blah, blah, blah. And then it started being used with, especially with algorithms that really came into play. They started gaming us against each other. Like if you're liking a certain thing, it just feeds you that news.

And if you like a different thing, then that feeds you that news. Maybe the algorithms are what need to be regulated so that they feed you everything as opposed to putting you in this thing. Yeah, there used to be laws that Reagan got rid of in the 80s that were about having this kind of even-handedness on television. I'm trying to remember the name of the act, but it was about actually having content that served the greater good of democracy and of the public sphere, so that if you presented one point of view, you had to present another point of of view and a lot of people didn't like that after a certain point because it felt like the government's hand too heavily on on what we could what we could actually be consuming but it also getting rid of it has also led to the like fox msnbc reality of having two different versions of what's happening in the world and how we should understand it. So I think regulation in theory always sounds like a good idea, but it's also very tricky because it's hard to really get right and it's hard not to, and it's very easy to sort

of overstep too and to kill what could be rich sources of expression. Yeah. And the act you're referring to gave rise to Rush Limbaugh and a lot of the right-wing media, Fox News, where it became propaganda news as opposed to some sort of somewhat of balance. And yeah, it was really interesting how these sort of things overturn all this stuff and we go down the rabbit hole. But yeah, I think there needs to be a return. I would at least say the algorithms need to be regulated. Or I don't know, there needs to be maybe some liability. If you contribute to the genocide in Miramar and what's going on,

there has to be some sort of liability. What's her name? The gal who's under Zuck, I think is CFO. She's on, there's one or two news reports where she's on track where they're doing business with another dirty government like Miramar. And they're like, oh, I think that I'm paraphrasing here. So you have to go look it up people, but something about how they knew the government was dirty. They knew they were doing ugly things and using their Facebook account to do ugly things. And they just went, well, I just got to do business with them

because business is business or something to that effect. And and that's that's to me that's intent and liability and there needs to be something of that and what's interesting to me about the whole social media thing is there's this dirty devil in bed with politicians where politicians need social media and facebook to get re-elected And so they don't want to regulate it probably because they want to target their audiences. So they don't want to, they probably don't want to open up the, the AI or whatever the algorithms, because what's the old thing about politics? I can't remember if someone said something effective. Politics is about bringing the new people into the tent that don't vote. It's about just bringing your people out to vote.

Something I don't know. I forget who that quote is from, but so there's kind of like this dirty thing where they don't want to really regulate social media and they should. And it's destroying our country. In my opinion, it's destroying our country. It's destroying our society.

You have people growing up with Instagram that think the good isn't good enough anymore. Somebody wrote this on a tweet the other day. I'll see if we can pull it up. But they wrote, it's broken our society where good isn't good anymore, where people can't settle for just good. Everything has to be perfect because everyone on Instagram is perfect. So women have to have the perfect eye. And that actually shows up in dating apps now where women are chasing on dating apps the top 5% to 10% of men.

They have to have the high-end men, and everybody seems to be living the perfect life, so they have to have a Louis Vuitton and all the best stuff. And it's for men and women, and it's breaking our society because everyone wants the best and isn't willing to sell for average. And they don't realize how unique or small of a percentage some of the stuff they're doing is insane. They see people that are blowing out their budgets to have the latest things, and they're broke. You're like, well, you have a Louis Vuitton bag, but you're living at home with a mom.

So it's really interesting to me. It was Stephen Barth. Instagram's ruined a whole generation. Expectations of relationships, work, and everything in between. It has made perfect look normal, so now good has become disposable. And so everyone's chasing perfect, but no one's

going to find it. So I think something needs to happen with regulation on something. Like something needs to start. Somebody needs to start being accountable for something somewhere. Yeah. And I think in addition to that, I think people, I think in addition to that,

I think people are starting to kind of become self-aware about what it's doing to them. I mean, I have two young kids and I know that the conversations that I have with other parents are very much about sort of how do we, how do we put up our hands and yell stop to like an assault on their minds. I want children who are able to focus and pay attention because anything that they want to do in life is going to demand that. And I feel like they're being given these technologies that are

all built on not actually focusing on any one thing, that are actually pushing them in directions that are incredibly distractible. And like you said, focused on the perfect as opposed to actually kind of lowering the screen and looking out the window and seeing reality with all its imperfections and appreciating that. I worry about that a lot. So I think that what I mean to say is that in addition to the regulation there, I think there's a real kind of growing public desire for change in our relationships to the products of Silicon Valley. I think people are, the illusions aren't there anymore about what it actually is good for and what it's not good for. It's just, our lives have become so entangled with these products and that it's not good for. It's just our lives have become so entangled

with these products and that it feels so hard to step away from them. Yeah. And I think one of the problems with not regulating Facebook in some way, fashion or form or making at least penalties, either financial or criminal, I mean, making penalties or some sort of responsibility. If you're running a Facebook group, and I used to go into the Trump Facebook groups every now and then, the plurals they would call the groups, and just, I mean, I couldn't even believe some of the stuff that was published there was so heinous and ugly.

It was like going to, I mean, I don't think Klan rallies got this ugly because, I mean, they put up really disturbing memes of people and stuff. And I think what, I think there has to be some sort of regulation because I think the biggest problem with social media, you correct me if I'm wrong, is that we are the product. And so the companies, in my experience, really don't give a crap about us. They'll shut off your accounts if they don't like you, whatever the case may be. I mean, there are some people that do need to be kicked off these platforms because they are dangerous, but they really don't care because you are the product. We are the product. They're just interested in making money off of

advertising, off of our garbage that we put up and our interests and what we do. And maybe that's what needs to happen with the laws. Maybe they need to be forced to reconcile that, hey, you need to take care of these people you're making all this money off of and have some sort of moral interest towards them and how they're behaving or how you're causing them to behave by manipulating them with your AI and your algorithm. And instead of just trying to figure out, hey, we got these stupid people fired up. How can we figure out how to make money selling them to people? Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, I don't think that's how capitalism works.

I think that having the moral compass that you're asking for is if it goes against the bottom line, I think that's going to be a hard sell. The interest is keeping people on as long as possible, right? Because the more you keep them on, the more you're able to sell their attention to advertisers. And that's the bottom line. That's how you make money in that business. Just like if you had a business, any other kind of business that had its motivation to get people to eat as much of your product

or to buy as much of your product, that's what they're going to do. That's a good point. They can talk a fancy game about how they do have a set of values. If you listen to Zuckerberg, he'll tell you that his product is about connecting people, but it has a wonderful side effect for him, which is the more you connect people, the more money you can make off of those connections. And so I think it's going to come from people's changed relationship with those platforms. I think we need to understand them

for what they are. I think that's starting to happen in a big way. I really do. And again, I don't want to say that they're, and I was saying this earlier, I don't want to say that they're bad for, they're fundamentally, essentially bad. I just think that we need to put them in their box. It's one kind of tool. It's one kind of way of interacting with each other. Look, I get great pleasure from being on Twitter occasionally and being able to connect with people that way and having that little bullhorn when I need to use it to get out what I've done in the world and get feedback from strangers. And it has its value. I think that it's, I wouldn't want to go to the extreme of

saying that like, it's all evil because it's, but it's, it's one thing. And to me, the great tragedy is that we've spent the last 15 years sort of convincing ourselves that it is the revolutionary medium, that it is the thing that matters more than anything else. And once we kind of take a step away from that, I think we'll realize or recognize that actually there are other ways to communicate, even online. I am not, my book and just personally, I'm not a cyber pessimist. I don't think that we should just like shut off the internet, partly because it's not possible anymore, but it's so, it's so embedded in our lives, but also because I truly believe that there are good, it can be used towards good. It's just really not being blind about what it is that you're actually, the way that it's

manipulating you and the way that you think. So it sounds like what you're saying is we need to have more self-responsibility, self-actualization. We need to take responsibility for our lives and the data we're taking in and the motivations behind it. Yeah. I mean, I think that's true in this realm and many others. Definitely. I was reading Robert Green's book and I forget which one this comes from. And I've actually done it most of my life because I grew up with all sorts of different things coming at me growing up in a cult and religion being a part of that and me questioning everything from a very early age. And so I've always looked at stuff that I have to be the center of doing a litmus test on everything that comes at me. And I have to go,

okay, is this true? Where I have to define, and more and more lately, I think his book kind of really honed me into this concept of finding objective truth over subjective truth. And where's the truth? And I've always searched for that all my life without really identifying what it is. Like, where's the truth? Is it this religion? Is it that religion? Is it not religion?

I'm an atheist. If I read something in the Washington Post, is that true? Where does that come from? What is the sourcing? What is the motivation behind the writing of it? And I wish more people on Fox News would understand manipulation and the snake oil illness. Even like vocabulary, look at vocabulary. Like when I sit and come across Fox News in the gym, I hear the vocabulary. I hear the nuances of the spin and the manipulation they put on stuff. And sometimes you'll see people interviewed, and it'll go right by them. But you're like, that doesn't go past the mind of the guy who's watching this.

And sometimes he's adopting tropes or memes or something like that, and they're just tagging them. And they're just doing a middle. So you can see the whole grandmaster thing. But it sounds like what you're saying is more people need to do that they need to start searching out what objective truth is they need to start looking at some of these especially i mean social media is like i think 50 90 memes or something i don't know and tropes and a lot of them people need to look at them and go what is this trying to affect is this trying to have on me a lot of, and I think one of my friends who's a parent put it best,

he has three daughters, and he goes, I have to sit down with my daughters almost daily and go through, okay, here's what you're doing on Instagram. Here's where this is bad. Here's where reality is. Here's how this isn't reality. And he tells me it's a constant battle. Yeah, yeah.

I've got two kids, two girls who are nine and 12, like prime age for being addicted to this stuff. And I'm constantly having those same conversations. Like, what do you think is going on here? Like, why do you think that they're trying to push these particular videos on you? It's a kind of, we used to talk about, I think we should still talk about this, like a media literacy, like being able to actually understand, or a kind of a consumer, being smart as a consumer, understanding like how what's being presented to us is being, where it's coming from, understanding its biases, understanding its sources. And now considering that social media is sort of the main intake we have, we have to apply that same mentality, I think,

of really breaking it down and sort of understanding it in a self-conscious way. And I think we need to not be afraid to correct each other in a constructive way. Like the other day, I was on a a gaming stream of all things and somebody brought up a trope of that there were more there were more irish white slaves than there were black slaves and somebody said that on the feed and i went whoa stop everything well that's i i have enough historians on the issue that's not possible but you know but i looked at it and went let's google that and let's find out if that's true or not But, you know, but I looked at it and went, let's Google that and let's find out if that's true or not. So we did some Googling and looked around and,

and from the top of your head, you should know that's not true. And there's a clear reason that racist trope is there. It's something that's being used to manipulate and spread disinformation and try and say, well, we're bigger victims of whatever, and which is white fragility, that sort of thing. And so I was able to correct it, and we talked about it, and I said, you guys need to realize what is objective truth? Why was that put there? What was the motivation of that racist trope?

What was the thing? And hopefully we had a good discussion about it with the group, and I think people kind of went, wow, I should maybe pay attention to what comes out of my mouth that I learn on social media yeah so there you go yeah well this has been quite interesting anything more you want to tease out on the quiet before no just that i think folks will enjoy reading it's for me what i wanted to be refreshing about this book was to get a chance to read a story that starts like 400 years ago involving media and goes all the way to now. It starts with letters in the 17th century and goes to Twitter in the 21st century. And to be able for themselves, because I do a lot of trusting the reader in this book. I'm basically

presenting them with stories from the past and stories from our contemporary world and saying, you string this together. You see how the things that are different in our reality today and the things that are consistent throughout time. And that was the interesting, for me, project of this book. And I think readers probably will find that enjoyable too, hopefully. Do you think people are more educated in the past? The new civics, they were just more well-read? I mean, it's a hard, it's a very hard question to answer there was a much more limited number of people who had any kind of real education as we would think about it so at one level definitely not but but you know i think there probably was a period of time in this

country not that long ago or at least civics was more sort of inculcated in schools and i don't yeah i mean it's a tricky one yeah Yeah. I've never been able to look, really look this up or substantiate it, but someone had told me from the seventies that most people in the seventies during Nixon's time, they knew their senators, they knew the names of their centers, they knew civics and politics.

And now I don't think you can, you could hold a gun to most people's head and they couldn't name their senator. Well, I think, I mean, what you're saying, something about what you're saying is very true, which is like the way that our politics have become like nationalized.

And so anybody could tell you what the latest battle is between Fox on Fox News. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yeah, or some crazy bombastic congressman from across the country. But they won't be able to tell you about like who's running the sewage system in our city, making sure the water is clean, or our school boards. That, I think, is unfortunate, and it goes very much to what I'm trying to say with this book, which is we need to open your eyes and see what's around you. That kind of nationalizing of politics, I think, is pretty detrimental and leads to a lot of division. Maybe it pushes back

from people from being more interested in politics and doing stuff in the local level. They just give up. They're just like, there's so much noise here. Fuck this. That's it. Which explains why half this country doesn't vote. It's wonderful to have you on the show, Gal. We certainly appreciate it. Thank you very much for coming on.

Thank you. Have a good time. There you go. Great discussion. Could we get your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs, please? Of course. So my website is gallbeckerman.com, G-A-L-B-E-C-K-E-R-M-A-N. And you can find links there to purchase the book from a bunch of different places. There you go. The Quiet Before on the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, out February 15th, 2022. Check that out. Order it up. Go over where fine bookstores are sold.

But remember, don't go into those alleyway bookstores. You never know what's going to happen. You might get shivved in there. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, 4chesschrisfosse, the bell notification. Refer to the show to your family, friends, relatives, dog, cats, all those people. Get them. Leave it on so the cockroaches can listen when you're gone to work during the day.

Those of you in New York and the bed bugs in New York, I guess. I don't know. Why am I picking on New York all of a sudden? That's a horrible way to end the show. I just lost the New York crowd. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.