The Dispatch Podcast - Housekeeping and the Apocalypse (w/ Niall Ferguson & Martin Gurri)

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

It's time for a quick round of housekeeping. Adaam has exciting announcements/updates about the multimedia world of The Dispatch, followed by a bonus episode: a conversation with economic historian Niall Ferguson, author of Doom, and Martin Gurri, author of Revolt of the Public. The discussion surveys some of the many ways in which our civilization might implode (...) from bad education to nuclear annihilation. This of course raises the question, could it be Taylor Lorenz was right after all, and we're all just depressed because the world's about to end? Show Notes –Niall on how Cold War II can turn into World War III -Martin’s Revolt of the Public -Niall’s Doom –The original (unabridged) live event with Niall and Martin, co-hosted by Vanessa Quirk for the Uncertain Things podcast –Rand Institute on the “foundations of national competitiveness“ –Our podcasts on YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I thought two English accents in this group was too many, right? I'm not English. I'm Scottish. Be careful. Be very careful. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Adam Levinnerity. I'm in charge of the multimedia team at the Dispatch.

our little skiff within a skiff, and hopefully growing soon. So first of all, a few announcements. As you may know, we are currently in the process of migrating our entire podcast catalog from one platform to another. You won't notice anything, but on our end, it's going to let us do a lot of things that we've been hoping to do for a while, both on the business side and on the editorial and production side. So we're awfully excited about this.

Also, we have a new YouTube channel dedicated to the podcasts, which will contain full episodes and curated video clips. Maybe we'll even get a live, ruminant sermon one day. Who knows, time will tell. If you have any thoughts, suggestions, complaints. Let us know in the comments become a member first, and then let us know in the comments, either myself or Victoria, our associate producer,

will lurk and make sure we'll work. take to heart. Third, we have a new mini-series podcast coming up this week. If you're an attentive listener of the Dispatch Cinematic Universe, you know that Steve and Sarah have a running bet on whether Trump is going to be the nominee or not. And it's a bet over a fancy steak dinner. So as things are starting to get real,

we thought it's time to start checking in more regularly on the state of the bet. These are going to be short episodes. Sarah and Steve, just having at it, they are going to be released primarily to members. So you should join the dispatch to get the full feed. Some episodes will be released publicly, including the first one, which will be posted on the dispatch podcast feed later this week. But if you want to follow the full saga, whether for the political analysis or the soap opera drama of the bed itself, you should become a member. Oh, and of course, members will be invited to ask questions, which our hosts will then explore.

So this is coming very soon. The show is called High Stakes. I'm sorry if I should have given a trigger warning for dad joke slash pun. If you find the pun offensive, you can direct complaints directly to our post-P.A. Ken Goshen, they will definitely not be shredded. And lastly, we did not have a newsy interview for the dispatch podcast this week, in part because our attention was mostly diverted to the migration. So instead, I thought to share this conversation I had with, Neil Ferguson and Martin Gurie. This was part of a live event that I co-hosted

with fellow journalist, urbanist, Vanessa Quirk. It was originally for a sister podcast that I host called Uncertain Things, in which we try to bridge our political disagreements in hopefully interesting ways. But because of the topics, we thought to share it here as a bonus episode for the weekend. Neil, as you probably know, is an economic historian, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute

at Stanford, an author of multiple must-reads, including Doom and The Great Degeneration. Martin Guri is a former CIA analyst who wrote the book Revolt of the Public, describing back in 2012 how social media and generally our current information environment is at risk of destabilizing our current social order and pondered whether or not 20th century liberal democracies are up to the task. If you remember the dispatch podcast episode

with Camille Foster in his conversation with David about the Twitter files, then you probably remember Gurry because his name came up quite a lot. I thought it would be interesting to have them together in a panel to guide us through this menu of horribles, threats that we should or shouldn't be paying attention to.

From the problem of bad information, education, loss of trust in the media, the depression epidemic, and all the way to our Cold War with China and whether it could turn into something much worse. What I loved about having the two of them together is the chance to have them hash out their disagreements on where we should be concerned and how would we even evaluate the different risks. It was a live event, which has been abridged for dispatch consumption, but in lieu of an explainer, I hope you'll enjoy this bonus episode. Next week we have a lot for you.

High stakes is coming out this week, and we have a lot more planned. So keep your eyes on the feed and enjoy. So finally, let's dive belatedly in. Okay, so naval gazing amoebas that we are as journalists. We're going to start by talking about the media. There have been two big stories in the news recently that show how correct Martin was about the inevitable decline of trust in established media. One is the weird cope or five stages of grief that some outlets, are going through in response to agencies

in the Biden administration confirming that the lab leak hypothesis is a credible explanation for the origin of COVID-19. And on the other hand, the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News exposed or confirmed just how willing

many people at Fox are to put things they know to be false on air as pure deceitable fan service. So as we are having a conversation about things we should worry about is the fact that our purported truth

institutions are no longer committed to truth a problem. Well I think there's always a danger in conversations about journalism with journalists because there's a tendency

which is very advanced these days for the news media to think that it's the story and this becomes a somewhat I think circular conversation. I'm not sure that this is really the revolutionary development of our times. I'm in the midst of writing a book in which a great deal of the action takes place in the 1970s.

What was the equivalent disaster which everybody was thinking about then. The answer is the Vietnam War. I hardly need to tell Martin this. And there was an official narrative, which was that domino theory required the United States to shore up the government of Vietnam. And then it became clear that that was not entirely true.

And with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the public was suddenly treated to an inside, accounts of what, in fact, had happened in the 1960s and the reasons for the escalation in Vietnam under Lyndon Johnson. There then was an attempt to shut that door, disastrously unsuccessful attempt, that then contributed to the crisis of the legitimacy of Richard Nixon's administration. If one goes back through the news coverage of Vietnam and then of Watergate, it's striking to me how familiar

the discussions are. On one side, there's an administration that's abusing its power and seeking to exert pressure not only on its political opponents, but on its opponents in the press, ultimately

resorting to the legal means to do that. On the other side, you have a public that is increasingly polarized on the issue and there are indeed outbreaks of violence in the period, as well as a general sense of disenchantment with the system. So whenever people tell me that there's something very special about our situation in 2023, I say, did I introduce you to 1973?

And you won't find that our position is a whole lot worse. In fact, it's very similar. The Trump presidency ended with a massive crisis of legitimacy at January the 6th. And the Nixon presidency, of course, ended in Watergate impeachment played a part in both cases. And the media became a story, which is what the media really loves. The New York Times loves nothing better than reporting on the New York Times. And I think that's all pretty familiar. The novel thing, and here, Martin, you may disagree with,

or you may agree wholeheartedly. The novel thing is clearly the internet and the advent of social media to use the term casually, because ultimately traditional media have become quite reliant on social media for raw content. And the novel thing is really the way

in which news has become structurally different in the age of the internet. If the old institutions play their old game, Governments try to manipulate the media, the newspapers want to write about themselves. That's all old hat. But what's novel is platforms such as Twitter, but also increasingly a TikTok, in which a considerable amount of power is given to the user, to ordinary people who aren't journalists, to generate news and commentary.

And of course, both Martin and I have written about this, the ecosystem of the internet went from being very decentralized to being quite centralized around network platform was very fast. It became monetized through ad sales. It became corrupted by bots. It's continuing to be corrupted. The corruption will not stop,

and it will get worse with artificial intelligence. And that's what's new. Not the stuff about traditional media, not the ways in which government tried to manipulate it, but the complete transformation of the nature of news and our perception of the news by the internet and the network platforms. Well, I would say I probably have an advantage over you, Neil.

You look very distinguished and graying, but I am way older than you are. I was there in the 70s, okay? And my sense is there were many similarities. There were profound differences, profound differences. I think at the core, the Vietnam era, Vietnam controversy was about shared values who was right and who was wrong, all right?

And I think once it became, it took a long time for the American public, actually took years and years. And I was a young man, waiting to see whether it was going to be drafted or not at that time. It took years to tip over into a majority of the public being against the war. It took a lot of television theater in the Senate

to persuade people that what Nixon had done made it impossible with him to stay precedent. But we were debating more or less within a single moral structure, within a single belief about facts, all right? I think the place right right now is extraordinarily different. I think the causes are what you mentioned. I think this gigantic upsurge of information,

this gigantic babble of voices that Jonathan Haidt calls a Tower of Babel. And what we are debating today, what is in dispute, on almost every occasion, is not the facts, but the frameworks that constitute the facts. So there's a battle of frameworks that goes back and forth. And the framework seems to shift in the, the strangest ways since there's no authority

from the top and I guess we can start with that to see the elites have lost trust and they're the ones who

interpret the world for us I mean when Nixon was was basically forced to resign poor Ford stepped in I mean

this is a guy who'd been in Congress all his life and I mean pretty much everybody rallied behind him

it's not like we were cheer but everybody rallied behind him he had at least our best wishes. Right now, there is no trust. There is no ability to gather trust because unless you can live in the same framework,

you can't persuade people of anything. And I think that is a profound consequence of the tsunami of information that has bashed institutions that simply were not adapted for it. It seems to me that we're not that far apart. I mean, in the end, I think if one asks how big a disruption

has there been in our time you could say much as Martin has said, well Trump went so far as to instigate insurrection and that was one of the

great bungled coup attempts of modern times but actually the system withstood that Joe Biden himself in 1970s figure became president Sure, but in part that's because of the incompetence of the planning. In part, I mean, it's hard to dignify it with the word planning,

but the point is the continuity of the system striking Joe Biden's sworn in embarks on an entirely classic progressive democratic governmental course. We're going to spend more money. We're going to grow the government. Progressive in the original 20th century sense. In the original sense of Roosevelt and Johnson. quietly retains a number of Trump's policies. And so we had a very shocking event. But what's really interesting to me is how very quickly we moved on.

And this may be a big difference between then and now. New cycles have become much shorter. I was looking at some interesting data on that this week. The average story has a three-week lifespan. If you had told me even a year ago that the US government would announce that it had shot down unidentified flying objects over the United States, I would have said, man, that would be the biggest story of 2023 and maybe of the 2020s. The UFO, I mean, they called them unidentified flying objects,

and that story was gone in even less than three weeks. So I think what's fascinating to me is this extraordinary attention deficit disorder It means that news is news, even a coup, even our UFOs over America. It's like, yeah, that was interesting for two weeks, but week three, it's like next. That I think is different because in the 70s, Watergate was a story for three years. And it was really amazing how long that story kept going. And the journalists unceasingly drummed it into people, even when there was view of and reader of fatigue.

So maybe that's the thing that is interesting here. It's not just there's a legitimacy crisis. I think there was a pretty big legitimacy crisis for the elite at the end of Vietnam and at the time of Watergate. What I'm really struck by is we just have such in a short attention span.

It'd be impossible to do anything like Watergate now. So here's why I think the Lablick actually is interesting. It's not just that established media seems incapable of moving on because they were so attached to the idea that the lab leak is nothing but a conspiracy theory that they're no incentivized by covering their asses and are resistant of admitting a mistake.

What's fascinating is the total lack of curiosity from people in the media industry. That's the thing that really draws my attention is you get confirmation from government agencies from the quote-unquote establishment that the Lablick theory has some grounding, if not high likelihood of being correct. But still, the way that people who you would expect

to show a modicum of curiosity seem to be actively looking for ways to resist and reject any kind of evidence that supports the hypothesis. And it shows up with real journalists and it shows up with people in the entertainment industry like Colbert and The Daily Show. People who you'd assume have no actual horse in the race

joking about, oh, the Department of Energy says, so I'm going to wait for the DMB to weigh in. What is that? Read paragraph 3 in the original Wall Street Journal article about the Department of Energy and you'll understand why the agency you weighed in, are they being intentionally thick? I just think that this aggressive in curiosity, aggressive in curiosity, is something new.

I feel like it has to do with ideological capture and a clinging to overarching narratives. Like what else would shut down your curiosity to that extent, if not that, right? And I think it's related to what Neil was saying in terms of the news cycle being so short. if no one event can hold your attention, then you've got to map an event onto a broader ideological narrative in order to make it more interesting and essentially stickier. But that's just the thing. What ideology exactly is being served or bolstered by denying the lab leak theory?

I mean, the latest reports came from the Biden administration, even though there was still ongoing debates internally about it, But that's fine. But what I'm seeing from the information industry, from the knowledge industry, is nihilism, or at least a complete loss of the ability to be curious and ask what's going on here. Well, rational debate is very difficult. If your first question to yourself is, what's the other side's position on this? Because mine can't be that.

Now, this, I think, is part of Trump derangement syndrome, that in the wake of Trump's election, many people, including in the universities as well as in comedy shows and on mainstream liberal media, would tend to simply ask the question, if Trump's in favor of this, if that's Trump's position, then it must be wrong. Now, if you remember the way that the,

a COVID-19 pandemic began in the United States. Initially, the left were the skeptics. They were more likely to say that it was just influenza and that Trump, by referring to the Wuhan flu, was of course just engaged in racism. I can remember the pieces that appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post, which made it seem as if the most significant thing about the pandemic was what it might do to race relations in the United States. Because, Because Trump had states out a fairly anti-Chinese position from the outset of his campaign, there was a reflexive tendency to think that anything that was negative about China couldn't possibly be right because it fit into Trump's narrative. Therefore, you couldn't possibly endorse it.

Now, I was writing Doom in 2020, and it was very clear then that there were problems with the wet market hypothesis about the origins of COVID. It was distinctly plausible that there had been a lab leak, it was also already obvious that gain of function research had been going on into bat viruses and that the US had supported that research. All of that was quite obvious in 2020. You're right, Adam, that in curiosity and willingness to censor the story, not only by mainstream media, but also by people in epidemiological circles. Think of the kind of mood that prevailed in some universities on this issue. The really remarkable thing is that ideological commitments, partisan affiliations transcended the basic curiosity that I still felt, and I'd still feel

about the origins of the pandemic. We're not even curious enough to have a proper inquest into what happened. Why did the United States handle this so badly? Lots of lockdown, lots of disruption, and still lots of deaths. There is no desire to answer that question. There won't be anything like the 9-11 Commission. I know that Philip Selik has tried to make it happen and been defeated because ultimately there's much more interest in partisan validation than in finding out what the hell happened. And that's disturbing.

I would add to that. My friend Andre Meir, whose book Post-Journalism, I recommend to everyone, talks about how the ideological narrative, of anchoring of the media leads to what it calls discourse narrowing. I mean, there are suddenly there are all kinds of subjects that nobody pays attention to and then a handful of subjects that everybody hammers on. So you have this enormous at the moment, this is an enormous flow of information as never in history.

I mean, many times, many levels of magnitude as never in history. and this conformity in the very poverty of subjects that actually get discussed with any kind of depth. Well, not to bring in the C-word into the conversation, but Chomsky's manufactured consent is also very much around that idea, which interestingly was about Vietnam originally. I thought the C-word was China. I thought you were about to segue, Esedom.

No, that would have been too smooth. All right, then I'm going to take us there. So we've already touched on it a little bit with UFOs and the lab leak, but I do want to talk about China more fully. So Neil, you wrote a Bloomberg piece recently, which cited a Rand Corporation study, what makes a power great. And in it they say it's namely economic productivity,

technological innovation, social cohesion, and national will. So I want to ask you about these last two social cohesion and national will because both seem in short supply these days in the U.S. So, Neil, what's your take on the lack of a strong, cohesive, optimistic narrative about who we are as a superpower? Like, does this lack of a narrative inevitably set us up to seed power and influence to China? Well, the RAND study was interesting, although I went on to point out that if you really want to define national power, the ability to manufacture weapons and ammunition for a

sustained period is probably somewhat more important when push comes to shove. And, you know, in any case, you can feel very lacking in social cohesion until someone attacks your territory and kills your people. And lo and behold, your national cohesion comes back. I mean, Ukraine was a deeply divided country. I know it well. I visited it almost every year over the last decade. Nothing has united that country, perhaps in its entire history, quite the way that the Russian invasion of last February did. So I think these sorts of worry tend to get overdone, and it's a somewhat academic view of power. In my view, the real problem the United States has at the moment is that it is in a Cold War. It's in a new Cold War with China. It's been in

that Cold War for at least four or five years. The Chinese have probably been in it in their own minds for longer than that. And we do not have the kind of capabilities that we had in the first Cold War. And the opposition, the rival superpower, is significantly more technologically capable than the Soviet Union was. And that's really concerning. the thing that stunned me when I delved into it was just how quickly the United States would run out of hardware of precision missiles if it went to war with China over Taiwan today. It's already struggling to provide to Ukraine, right?

Our stocks of certain categories of weapon have essentially being exhausted or are close to being exhausted by one effect is a proxy war that we're waging against Russia with Ukrainian troops. So that's the big story in my view We don't have the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower worried about because we are really no longer the world's dominant manufacturing power. China now occupies that position, and China certainly could turn out a lot more weapons than the United States, where it's to be involved in that kind of war. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important.

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Learn more at amex.ca. slash Y-Anex. Okay, so Neil, we're going to get back to your point about capabilities, but first I want to get your thoughts on something, both of you, and especially Martin, actually, because I still think that there's something different. about what's going on here that does have something to do with social media and the way that it colors our engagement with the world.

So here's my totally, totally unscientific survey of this question. But I've been having conversations with my Israeli friends for, oh, it wasn't over seven years since the Trump phenom has a reason in the US about why things seem to have disintegrated so terribly in this country in terms of the political discourse. And my working theory for a while was that Israel just still has, as Martin said, a shared set of values.

We work on a framework of familiarity. And while we may disagree about who's right and who's wrong, we're at least having the same conversation. And I thought this had everything to do with how small Israel is, the cultural similarity, the scale, and the fact that we had the experience of being under threat as, you know, is a unifier. But then a friend of mine suggested that maybe the problem here is actually a lot more Martin Goury-esque.

Maybe it's about the fact that social media and specifically Twitter has had low penetration in Israel at the time in contrast to the U.S. And I said, okay, that's interesting. If that's the case, let's see what happens if and when Twitter starts taking over the Israeli conversation. And sure enough, five, six years later, Twitter is the public square in Israel as well. And the tone of the conversation is completely changed. In fact, the fractiousness that's going on in the Israeli conversation reminds me of the American political discourse during the Trump years, much more siloed, much more heated, and

not at all conversational. In fact, everything has become more American, as I often complain, there's been an adoption of American memes into the Israeli polity, many of which don't make sense at all. You sometimes hear people talking about the Second Amendment in the context of Israeli politics, a country that has no constitution, let alone amendments. But all of this, This is symptomatic of the way that the political conversations around the world seem to have converged into a singular vague mush of international culture war that no longer really makes any sense anywhere and is not really about policies or the realities in which people live, but it's about showing allegiance to an abstract tribe that all. only exists online. And as a result, there's a loss of solidarity and connection to people who live next door,

who are your neighbors, who share your immediate concerns and experiences, but who technically belong to the wrong tribe in this global culture war. Yeah, let's put the people next door issue to later because I think it's an important one. But I think part of the difference between my youthful days in the 70s and the 60s, alas.

And now is we do spend, I think the average Americans spend something like seven hours online, right? Okay, we plunge into this thing and we are, it's like the CD subconscious of the human race, like the reptile brain of the human race, okay?

and things that are usually not said out loud are screamed out loud. The discourse is, I mean, I remember in the old days the Vietnam protest, of which I was an honorable attendant, when you use the word fuck, it was like, whoa, we are really being edgy here, you know? Now, I mean, I can't go to screaming television without three or four words, that's the one. So you plunge into this medium,

everything is coarsent everything is kind of like what Freud would have called we're living in the end of the human race and I think that reflects back out

when because the battles are fought in that medium seven hours you live in there if you're an American and you're not there's no incentive to come to arrangements and the incentive has to strike a pose

to get a following to be the loudest voice to be the edges yet. So I think there is something in there. And there is also, one last thing, there is the person you are when you go in there. And I think we talk about that enough, right? Because when you go into this medium that we're now sharing,

okay, you're you in a sense, but you kind of radically transformed. The digital self is flat, it's a historical, it's decontextualized it's almost infantile and you know infants have what they call a grasping reflex you know i think people just want to grasp to something right so you know if you want for example you know you want community it mob behavior feels like community so you get that gets perverted into mob behavior and many other kind of similar things like that where where you are reaching for something, meaning, you're reaching for meaning, you're reaching for certainty

and ending up almost at its opposite because you're just clinging to something or someone. I think the other point, Adam, which you've raised is that on global platforms, there is convergence. And so it's not just that Israel developed a Trumpy style of politics or or American-style polarization between bien-pinsins, secular, liberal types, and populist nationalists. The same happened in Brazil, the same, it seems, has happened in almost any

a country that has exposure to these platforms. So that's not entirely surprising. If you create global, giant global networks, then the things that go viral will go viral everywhere. like the SARS-B2 virus. The question is, how permanent is this transformation? It seems to me that one possibility exists that we may be underestimating

because we are who we are, we do what we do. We may fail to realize that, for many people, those hours online are mostly spent consuming sports, videos of animals, you know, the dancing ferrets, they're not actually consuming toxic political content all the time. And that's really quite a minority activity. It's always been a mistake to infer reality from Twitter. And that's, I think that's something that I've become very conscious of.

You might as well infer it from TikTok, and that might actually be a better guide. The other thing which I would emphasize is, to paraphrase, you know, Mike Tyson, every society's polarized until it gets smacked in the mouth. And let's remember, 9-11's not that long ago. It's a lot more recent than Vietnam. And it was remarkable how very quickly, after the terrorist attacks of 2001, American unity surged. and it remained quite durable through that 12 or 24-month period until things began to go wrong in Iraq. So my sense is that all of these polarized societies,

including Israel, would still react somewhat as Ukraine did. Were they to suffer a really lethal blow by a foreign aggressor? This just hasn't happened to the United States for a while. A balloon over Montana doesn't come close. But were there to be a conflict, let's imagine the U.S.-China relationship deteriorate's very rapidly, which is perfectly plausible in my view. We're at that stage of the Cold War where you go from Korea to Cuba, only much more rapidly than happen in Cold War I.

If the United States and China go eyeball to eyeball over Taiwan, I would predict a significant decline of that polarization. There's already a bipartisan consensus on China. It's about the only bipartisan issue in Americans today. And I'm struck by how both sides are competing to see who can be most hawkish on China. I think the American public is not that far behind. Polling shows really big shifts towards hostility towards China over the last few years. And in that sense, I think the polarization is a phenomenon of peacetime,

just in the way that Britain was highly polarized in the 19th. the debates that at Oxford's union about would you fight for king and country divided the elites and I think that reflected a broader division that was all gone by 1940 I definitely take your point that this type of polarization requires a degree of peace and this is actually something that I have been referring to often as peace privilege that you get to occupy yourself in this amorphous culture war as opposed to worrying about existential threats. In fact, you can even argue that the reason

that American-style polarization has entered the Israeli bloodstream is because Israel has experienced a decade of relative quiet and prosperity. Despite everything, Israel, too, has experienced a moment of peace privilege. Martin makes the point in his book that a lot of this energy towards rebellion that has been bubbling up over the past 10 years has a lot to do with boredom. That's the Fukuyama point that once the liberal democratic project has won, the public is going to rebel against it, precisely out of something between Anui and boredom. But that doesn't mean that the ensuing Sunni Shiite devoid. divide that is now playing out in the U.S., this religious war between right and left, won't outlive this moment of peace and prosperity.

And in fact, there are signs that these divisions persist and even heightened during moments of real threat. Think natural disasters like the blizzard in Texas or the fires in California or accidents like the train derailment in Ohio. I don't recall any sense of unity emerging from those moments. Yeah, but I think Neil just phrase it as a question. And I think that's probably the most important question right now, right? Is to what extent is this a permanent structural horror that we're living through?

To what extent is that we're living in this crazy world of fumes inside the internet and that takes us back to the neighbors right and I very firmly have this principle which is you know I go online and go famous people like Trump and and Biden are yelling at me online and people want me to do this and do that and the horrible things are being said of each other then I then I despair and then I lift my eyes and you guys can't see it but there's my window out there and well where all these horrors are happening in my screen. There's my neighbors. They're walking their dogs. They're jogging. They're clipping their, you know, their bushes. And they have no notion, because I'm Cuban. I can tell you

what a society is really broken. I came from one, okay? You know, they have no notion of how amazing it is to watch that and how unaware they are of their own freedom and their own security, right? So which is real and which is not. That is the most profound question right now, I think. Okay, before we turn to the question of mental health, I want to get back to Neil's point about the possibility of the Cold War turning hot. Is this a threat you feel we're not taking seriously enough? Well, I mean, Martin can comment on this too, I'm sure. The United States defense establishment is a very, very expensive operation.

we spend an awful lot of money on projects to produce the next generation Pfizer plane or the next generation submarine and the reality is that as we can see in Ukraine 21st century warfare will still require lots of tanks artillery pieces, shells and for that matter the 21st century piece drones, unmanned vehicles of varying kinds. And it's just hard to mass produce those with the industrial base that we have today. And I think that's important because latent in any cold war is the possibility of the hot war.

And not just proxy wars, we need to bear in mind that if there's a war over Taiwan, it has clearly the possibility to escalate into a large-scale conflict, regional, if not global. Japan would be a combatant without question. There's no way the United States could fight a war to defend or liberate Taiwan without Japan's involvement. And the scale of such a conflict, Jim Strait is trying to visualize it in their recent book, would be absolutely cataclysmic, much, much larger than the war in Ukraine. And I do think this would focus minds like nothing else. I think quite like a sinking aircraft carrier to put aside the petty disputes of the Internet.

And this is the difference between war and natural disaster, Adam. I'm a natural disaster like a pandemic or an earthquake or whatever. You know, you can turn that into retail politics. You can make that partisan issue. But an attack on U.S. forces or U.S. civilians is a completely different thing. Particularly if there's... Because of the agency? Yeah.

war is different because we think of it as a man-made disaster and we regard not unreasonably there as being malice at work. So that would drastically alter the landscape. And I do think the seeds of national unity have already been planted in the debate so for Chinese economic, the Chinese economic challenge, China's responsibility for the pandemic. You know, we've got a measure taking shape at the moment to ban TikTok in the United States. The US Congress is on the war path, the U.S. Commerce Department's imposed really quite stringent sanctions on the Chinese economy in the last year. To an extent that people underestimate, we are on the road to war with China. The Chinese see that. Listen to what Xi Jinping just said in Beijing.

And this makes all of our kind of meme battles, the endless and ultimately tedious debates, about, but it all will pale into utter insignificance if there's a war over Taiwan. So with that in mind, is the campaign that we're supporting in Ukraine, do you see that as a distraction or as good signaling that the U.S. will stand by its proxies? It plays exactly the same role in Cold War II that the Korean War played in Cold War I. It's the first hot war that makes you realize the new geopolitical landscape. And that's why it's so important that last month, Anthony Blinken said, we think the Chinese are thinking of providing lethal aid to Russia.

They must not do that. I mean, of course, we're providing any amount of lethal aid to Ukraine. If the warning against China's supporting Russia with lethal aid, I mean, China's already exporting all kinds of non-lethal and dual-use stuff to China, to Russia, that's the classic Cold War paradigm where both sides end up arming their proxies. But we'll get to the Cuban Missaq, right?

which was, of course, the most dangerous moment of Cold War I, I think much more quickly than we did in the 1950s and 60s. I think we'll get to our Taiwan crisis quite quickly. And that will be an absolutely decisive moment in world history. Because if there's a war, it would be disastrous economically and in other ways. If the US folds, that will be the end of US predominance. If the US succeeds in defeating China, that will reassert US predominance. these are the big issues that are coming down the pike fast.

It could be next year if the Taiwanese election produces a result that Beijing really doesn't like. Martin, does that keep you up at night? I am much more sanguine about China than Neil is. I do not believe, I mean, what do I know? Having lived through the old Cold War, this one doesn't feel like one to me yet. It's missing a powerful, powerful ideological element, which was really what gave the Cold War its salience. I feel like we are, as the moment when the printing press was assembled

and within 100 years, Europe was plunged into the 30 years' war, we are in a moment of informational transformation in our structure. And many things happen that we think we're doing one thing, but there's a knock-off effect and something else happens. like in the printing press you print a hymnal with three words that are different from mine

now I have to kill you right so that's a 30 years war and I'm sure if you went to the 30 years war and asked what do you think of the printing press any sane person would say that's the most horrible

destructive innovation get rid of it please and it turned out to be of course the most liberating innovation ever but we're in that early moment today and it's a bumpy right for democracy

and I'm a pretty simple believer in democracy I don't have a whole lot of nuance to it. And what keeps me up at night is I'm going to end up in Cuba again. In terms of censorship or what specifically? In terms of any number of things. But that being one of them, another one being a loss of faith in democracy. So we go to a strong man or we disintegrate, which I think is actually more likely,

we disintegrate into a bunch of war bands and are incapable of organizing anything on a national level. It can happen many number of ways. I don't pretend to be a profit, but that's what keeps me up at night. It's a loss of democracy, the end of democracy. Hard for me to disagree with what Martin said, because the book, The Square and the Tar basically is based on that analogy with the 17th century and the idea of the great-las-printing press.

And the only thing I would add is that the difference between now and the 17th century is nuclear weapons. And I think we decided to stop worrying. about them after 1991, and that was a mistake because they're there, and they are the thing that really would keep me awake at night if I had trouble sleeping. I mean, logically, that's just the thing that makes the 21st century and the second half of the 20th century scarier than previous centuries. We do have the capacity to destroy vast numbers of people very, very quickly with those weapons. But I actually have a terrible confession.

I know I should worry about nuclear war, or indeed the 30 years' war, but in practice, because I belong to the generation that was born in the 1960s, I worry much more about Manchester City overtaking Arsenal and winning the Premier League, but I genuinely worry much more about that than it's probably entirely healthy. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place.

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Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit tellus.com slash total security to learn more. Conditions apply. Okay, we said we're going to talk about the mental health. health epidemic. So with the granted possibility of a nuclear standoff, are we society, not just Vanessa and I, being too much or too little catastrophic in our mindset? Seeing the state of depression, white spread depression in the U.S., you've made a point, Neil, in one of your articles that we have been so focused on teen depression that we've myopically missed the point

that this is actually a society-wide problem. Deaths of despair going up all of the country, opiate epidemic, fentanyl epidemics, suicides. We are a sad and lonely country at this moment. Is our depression the cause or the result of our miserable politics? I mean, the one question I would ask is, with those kind of

pathologies and the younger you get, the more severe they become. I was just thinking about that, because, I mean, the first thing you need, if you're going to go to war, is unfortunately, a goodly supply of young men,

all right? And I look at the generation just coming up, the zoomers, and it is the most fragile and sort of unrealistic, I would say, generation. I think boomers are pretty damn unrealistic, but what's coming up with the Zoomers is the idea that words mean harm and that we were supposed to somehow not say certain things,

not believe certain things, be given safe space. Now, the question, as I was listening to Neil is, Is this a generation? Even if we rally together, by the way, I am not 100% sure that's going to happen. It might. I would hope that we would. But I'm not sure that we will. But even if we rally together, do we have the human material? Forget about the factories, the human material that would win a war.

Well, the answer to the question, if you believe the Youth Risk Behavior Survey that was just published by CDC is no chance. I'll just give you some examples. 30% of high school goals considered attempting suicide during the past year. 24% made a suicide plan during the past year. That's what they say. Now, that translates, it seems to me,

probably into a rather implausibly large number of suicide attempts. And I think we must acknowledge here that some of what's going on is almost a social competition to see who has the most trauma it's not really the teenagers who are committing suicide and this was the key point of the piece. It's actually the middle-aged

and interestingly predominantly white Americans who are succumbing to what Angus Dayton called deaths of despair. These deaths of despair include alcohol, drug, and other overdoses as well as suicide with firearms. I'm more worried actually about those deaths of despair than I am about the the suicidal fantasies or broodings of teenagers.

But I think if you add it all together, there's no way you can avoid concluding that something's very wrong with the mental health of Americans at all, pretty much all ages, maybe the boomers are the least affected by this. And I delved into this out of a kind of sense of shock that things have got this bad. One can't blame this all in the pandemic.

The pandemic certainly made it worse, but the deaths of despair were there before de-date and trades, at least some of them back to the financial crisis. But this is a remarkable phenomenon. And to go to your question, Martin, it could be that our society is just too sick, as well as too divided, to withstand the challenge of a conflict. Then it would be France 1940. And I do find myself going back to Sartre more and more. and the great trilogy that he wrote around the debacle of French defeat

and asking myself, are we that bad and would we fold that easily? I think not, because I think if one like you looks out the window or if one travels around the country, if one gets away from the capitals of neurosis in the coastal cities, it doesn't look like France on the eve of the debacle. But it's striking, and I think if one were to get comparable data, survey data from, or suicide data from European countries would not look as bad, I'm pretty sure. Also, to speak in defense of the neurosis on the coasts, living in a place that has experienced several psychic breaks over the past several years, New York City, I think that as long as you step outside of a few neighborhoods in Brooklyn where people, really do perpetually live in search of the next reason to despair and maybe get angry, you'll find that most people just want to live and spend time with people that

they care about. It's shocking. I think that's why I agree with the person next door hypothesis and why I'm not as pessimistic as my questions may suggest. Well, the media consumption habits of our fellow liberal elites, I think is far more damaging to our psyches and the actual people around us in our liberal cities. What interesting point to add, Vanessa, is when teenagers are asked why they're so gloomy or depressed or suicidal, they do often cite climate change. And I think it's at least arguable that the constant repetition of alarmist accounts of the imminent end of the world due to climate change has added to the sense of despondency amongst young people. They get a

lot of this at school as well as on social media, as well as on mainstream media. Greta Toonberg's become the personification of this mood. And it's always worth reiterating that when talking about things like teen anxiety, the problem is never the teenagers. It's almost always the adults and the information they're feeding the kids or the behavioral patterns that they are cultivating. And climate change is a good example because it shows how arguably good intentions can lead to generational anxiety that don't even end up advancing the purported cause of addressing environmental concerns. Yeah, and I don't know how good the intentions are.

And I would add to the climate change, all these ideas associated with identity, which when you turn to race, basically make it seem like their progress is impossible, right? We're a systemically racist country, nothing will ever change. When it comes to gender, it's this massive confusion. It can be 81 of 72 genders. I mean, okay, I was a young man.

man once going through puberty. If somebody had told me you could be one of 72 things, I would have dropped dead on the spot. I mean, it would just would have been too tough. So I think all these ideas weigh on young people. And I think they, I mean, there are people who believe them very, very intently. And mostly there are people who are not, I don't think, happy with our traditional way of life. I mean, they want to change those radicals.

So there's an intent behind all this. I mean, to defend some of those people, there's a trade-off with that, you know, exploration of sexual and gender identity. You know, you get freedom to pursue whatever it is you are or you need or want to be. And the trade-off is the uncertainty, which can have the psychological side effects of depression and anxiety. I don't see it as about freedom, at least not the way that I understand. The word. I see a lot of attempting to belong to groups. I see a lot of lists of prescribed, pseudo-prescribed categories

where you can check your own box. But not so much, be yourself and don't give a crap about how it's perceived. It's the most conformistic moment in my long lifetime, and the young are the most conformistic of all. And I asked a young woman, I said, you know, when I was young, I mean, all people would tell us you're supposed to be this way. This is the way you're, and we would just give it the middle finger. I mean, it was like, you know, no, that's not the way it's going to happen.

And that made us feel free, okay? And she said, yeah, the difference is we don't fight the older generation. The other generation is actually we get along with great. It's somebody among ourselves that if we say the wrong thing, we'll turn on us. So it's this terrible dynamic of not knowing exactly what is the minefield you're going to die on, right, at any given moment. Actually, this takes us into an area that we get a lot of questions about. What are your thoughts on the state of education in this country, especially as it pertains to polarization? I think there's a really serious crisis of American education right now.

And it extends from the elite universities where I've spent much of my career all the way down. down to the most junior public schools, it probably has a lot to do with the way teacher training has become itself a vexer of ideological indoctrination. It has a lot to do with the power of teachers' unions and the peculiar institution of tenure. But whatever the explanation, I have lost confidence in American education

to the point of not wanting to educate my sons here in the belief that not only is the education dangerously close to indoctrination in places, but also that it's just not very good. I mean, Americans are not well trained in the fundamental skills when it comes to mathematics. The literacy numbers are a lousy. You look at the P's of scores if you want data on that. And this is a big problem. Ultimately, the United States rose to power not because of the exceptional geographical location, not because of the natural resources.

It really rose because the United States attracted very talented people from all over the world and educated them better than elsewhere. And the education was better in the 19th century and better in the 20th century than the education available to most people in most of the world. And that's not true anymore. And that's really probably a bigger problem than anything we've talked about so far. I mean, all I would add would be that in many ways that at every level, Neil is right about that.

Education, given these ideological imperatives that I mentioned earlier, has become sort of like a self-lobomizing process, right? It's like, who are we? Well, we are our past, right? That's our communal or shared members. memory. Well, if we live in a systemically evil society, then obviously the past is something to be discarded, not to be studied, right? And literature that was part of that past, and that is to be part of our DNA and cultural DNA for sure, is to be rejected because mostly white males

and who cares what they have to say. So I think the kinds of knowledge that in times of trouble people turn to, which is in the past, they look at this history. look at this, you know, poem. I mean, poetry is what I go to when I am troubled, right? I feel like that's way better than any kind of preaching, any kind of prose. It just reaches your soul. If we discard literature, we are really lobotomized. We are, we lose ourselves in a certain way.

And I think our education today is well in the way to doing that. Let's have Martin and Neil leave us with some. imparting thoughts? If I may, I, yeah, I feel like conversations like this and to talk about tremendous social and political forces and so forth. And I always try to remember and to make people remember that, you know, there's such a thing as human agency

and much of what the future will be like it's not going to be determined by the internet. The internet doesn't have any will. so it's not going to be determined by some vague ideological pronouncements it's going to be determined by a lot of billions of individual choices that get made between now and the indefinite future and I think that needs to be said because we tend to lose sight of that I'll conclude with the following reflection Martin earlier extolled the virtues of poetry but let me extoll the virtues of prose

war and peace one of the great novels is about the individual and the tides of history everybody should read it the thing I've read the most with the most pleasure recently has been the novels of Thomas Hardy

and Hardy constantly hardly reminds us not only of agency but contingency that we as individuals can make one small decision that can have catastrophic or very benign consequences. The real essence of this conversation

is how do we remain sane in an apparently crazy world bent on self-destruction? And the answer is to read Hardy. Fucking of English. You know, Harding in his first description of the heath in return of the native,

I think he says that the landscape suggested tragic possibilities, which I think I think it's a perfect way to wrap up this conversation. Maybe that will end up being our title for this episode. If you have not yet read Doom or Revolt to the Public, shame on you. No, but seriously, thank you all for joining us.

Thank you. Thanks, everybody. You know,