The Dispatch Podcast - License to Analyze Media

Episode Date: June 19, 2020

Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst, joins Sarah and Steve to discuss our information overload, the loss of trust in institutions and figures of authority, and the role of tech platforms. Show Notes: -Gurri's book The Revolt of The Public -Gurri's piece on post-truth -Vaca Frita recipe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our special Friday Dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes. This podcast is brought to you by The Dispatch. Visit the Dispatch.com to see our full slate of newsletters and podcasts. Make sure you subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. And today's podcast is also brought to you by Gabby Insurance. Today we're joined by Martin Gorey, author of The Revolt of the Public. This is a book about how technology categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great high. hierarchical institutions of the industrial age, government, politics, parties, the media. So today we're talking about the failures of trust and authority figures, the role of tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and the colossal sociopolitical experiment he predicts is coming this summer. Let's dive right in. Joining us today is exciting. Martin Goury is a former CIA analyst. He specializes in the relationship of politics and the global media, as I said. And I mean, before we get into anything about what's going on in current events, which I'm dying to talk to you about, can you tell us what your normal day looked like at the CIA with what you were doing there? Well, I probably had the least sexy job in CIA. I did not have a license to kill. It was a media analyst, a global media analyst.

And I was fortunate enough to have been in that job, which gave me access to the media of the world and when necessary in translation, when what I call this, this gigantic tsunami of digital information hit the world pretty much at the beginning of a century. So my normal day consisted, depending on a part of the world, I was analyzing, obviously, of looking at these masses.

Actually, if you want to transition, my original day was very easy and very straightforward. I would look at a couple of newspapers, say, in France, and you knew exactly what was going on. And then suddenly, a few years later, I'm overwhelmed with these masses of material that are coming out from the digital world and trying to make sense of them.

And everything that I have thought about and written about pretty much flows from that experience. so recently you've been writing about truth and here's a couple lines that you've said that seem to circle around the same idea the crisis of authority has always been at heart a crisis of integrity truth is a function of trust and pertains to the authority of the source you seem to apply this to a lot of things going on in 2020 and lord knows there are a lot of things going on in 2020. How do you view that and what do you, where do we go from here when it comes to the

death of expertise? Yeah, that second question is a bit of a monster, so I'll take the first one. I mean, this is way precedes 2020. I think part of the effect of that digital tsunami was talking about has been a fracturing of opinion by the public. We no longer have to sort of be channeled by political parties or political commentators. And secondly, it has been a collapse in the authority of elites who used to mediate reality for us. Reality hasn't changed. I always try to make sure that I don't talk about some kind of post-modernistic view of life. You know, if you're standing

in the street and the truck is bearing down on you, you still best get out of the way. But there is such a thing as mediated reality, shared reality. That's what we make our personal and our social and our political decisions on. And today, there is an immense and near infinite number of perspectives, often contradictory and conflicting, on every subject and every event, and there is no authority in the room to make sense out of that, to settle the disputes. So to borrow your analogy, the truck is bearing down on you. You should still get out of the way, we're disagreeing on who's driving the truck, what the motives are of that truck heading towards you,

whether you should jump left or right, and that's where there's no consensus and there's no one to say what the answer is. Unfortunately, even where there is a truck bearing down, whether the truck is a good thing. Whether getting hit by a truck is a good thing or a bad thing. I mean, almost everything is in dispute. Every aspect of political, social,

and almost even personal life these days is contested. Steve, you've talked a lot about this, in our conversations. Yeah, I have. I mean, there's a very clear sort of battle taking place. And I think it comes with the profusion of information outlets that you've mentioned. I'm very interested to understand more about the changes that you saw as you watched this unfold in a professional way during your time at the CIA and then in subsequent years. What are the differences between the kinds of news?

I'm talking about the substance and the quality of information, and we should distinguish between news and information, that you saw coming through news when it was more heavily mediated, as you explain, versus what you're seeing now. What kinds of substantive differences do you see? Well, first of all, the whole subject of what is news is an interesting question. that we maybe can tackle later. I don't make much of a distinction between news and any other kind of information. Secondly, it has to do with volume. It really is not a question of

quality, it's a question of quantity. What we watched was a very contained trickle of open information become this huge, I mean, for the perspective of a human brain, might as well be an infinite amount. You can't ever get from one end of it to the other, ever, okay? If you spend the rest of your life doing it, every waking moment. So what that gigantic amount of information has done is it has undermined the institutions that mediated our reality to those of us who can't be everywhere at all times and want to find out what's going on in the world. I think what's happening now is that fracturing. And I think that fracturing, basically has, I mean, it's, again, a gigantic number of opinions, but they tend to coalesce

in what I call war bands. There are these political war bands that basically take one stake. And instead of arguing, of course, if you are debating the truth, you're not going to argue to persuade another person. You're arguing that your facts are truth and the other person's facts are lies. So it becomes sort of like a holy war. It's, it's, it's, It's not, the olden days, people tried to persuade the 20th century. It was very limited. It was very elitist. And it was not particularly a democratic model of information, but there was an attempt

to persuade. Today, there's an attempt to kind of just impose, impose your facts. It doesn't work because nobody owns that sphere, that information sphere. So it's a gigantic battleground in which the uproar kind of leaves you dazed and confused that day. So is the net, is the net effect of that poor information? I mean, it is a, of course, it's a quantity issue, but it is also a quality issue, right? I mean, if you look back, just to look at the U.S. media, you know, look back at these pre-internet days. And you can make an argument that the information was, was in some ways better and more authoritative. There was a collective sense of what

the news was, the basic facts of things were. But on the other hand, as you suggest, that it came to us largely through these elites, I would say largely in New York City, working at the New York Times and the networks, telling us what was important and what mattered. Now, on the other hand, you have this mad cacophony of disparate voices, in many ways, adding voices to the information streams that we're getting is a good thing. But it's also the case that to be heard over those, over the, you know, to stand out among all of the many voices, it incentivizes certain kinds of behavior. Many of those behaviors, I would argue, are, are a net negative. Is that fair? Um, yeah. But two things. Okay. I'm not a...

I'm not a young man, for those those who can't see my face, that would be obvious if you could. And I'm old enough to remember when the upper left-hand corner of the op-ed page of the Washington Post, I live in the outside of Washington, had Walter Lipman as a columnist. So I think about that and I weep a little bit, but I think about his successors, okay? So yes. But that was a very narrow world. It was a very controlled world. And everything that is bad about the present moment,

you say about incentivize. All it has done is open doors, right? So in a way, if you want to blame anything, you have to point the finger back at us. And this problem at some weird moment, I feel, and I'm very uncomfortable talking about it, but why not, becomes a moral problem.

You and I and everyone, we support just by giving our attention primarily, by giving our money, giving our endorsements, this system. It would not be so unless the public supported it, okay? So at a certain moment, we each have to kind of go deep inside ourselves and say, what can we do to disincentivize this? it's not you've talked about the role that these digital platforms facebook twitter google play in this and you noted recently lease comment on but possibly of greatest significance the most disruptive forces in democratic political life these platforms have actually been pointing users to established institutions and blocking non-credentialed voices and as you put it once that line is crossed, opportunities for dispensing authorized knowledge can only multiply.

Information controls justified by concerns about health and safety have already been applied to public opinion. Politicians and bureaucrats, citing the noblest ideas, will push hard to expand this trend, meaning to go back to a system of more controlled opinion voices. Yeah. I mean, ever since Trump won in 2016, there has been, so basically the forces of disruption and gathered force that I described in my book. I always call myself a Trump profiteer.

Once Trump won, everybody kind of got the book. And one effect of that was a massive reaction. People who did get it finally, what I was saying, that this new information environment had created a new political environment in which something like Trump's election was possible. And their response, unfortunately, has been led by the elites and the elites in both parties and the elites in all institutions, not just politics.

And to me, it's reactionary in the sense that they look at the 20th century as the golden era, Steve. I think you were just kind of alluding to that. And they say, well, why can we go back to that? In those days, man, I used to tell people what was right and what was wrong. and some other elite might dispute with me but it was so polite and it was so nice and we each had our guaranteed audience because we were all a mass audience

and we couldn't talk back and those people who are now yelling back at us would be silenced and I think this kind of turning of the platforms in that direction follows that pattern is let's not have the uproar from below

let's have authorized knowledge I think, obviously, the trigger for that was the pandemic. It made perfect sense to turn information towards authoritative sources, though I have to say those sources did not cover themselves in glory in the crisis either. But at least you weren't saying people should drink bleach or something and killing themselves. So you were funneling searches towards people who were at least educated. and authoritative and had institutions that they could use for their authority.

But then, of course, you're using those same protocols, for example, to fact-check Trump, basically to now you're erupting into political opinion. So go ahead. So where did those digital platforms go from here? Because I think the most interesting part of this is that they were seen as what opened up the conversation to all the non-elites.

Yes. And now you're predicting, I think, a future where actually that's about to contract using the same platforms. A, if you ever read anything I have written, I never predict the thing. You want to be... That's not true. Just the week.

You said, I'll stand by my one prediction. We're going to get to that. You know, and I kind of held my breath and said, I have never said that before. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yep, I... You want to be wrong? Make a forecast.

So, no. I think the platforms are just the obvious battleground between this restless public that has had the upper hands over the last 20 years in a way that the elites, I mean, the thing that's kind of fascinating is when these protests erupt and as they have erupted in different places under different political systems. But when you think about it, modern society is organized very similarly. So if you have a dictatorship or if you have a democracy, you still have a modern style of government with very hierarchical ministries and so forth. Every time, every time these things happen, governments are clueless.

They go, where do these people come from? We haven't given them permission to do this. Where are their platforms? Where are their positions? Where are their organizations? Who are their leaders? None of those things apply. None of those things apply.

So I think now, finally, there is a pushback on that. They're realizing that, no, it's not the people in the street that matter. it's these platforms that allow these people to organize and show up in the streets. And they're a battleground. I am not predicting anything. I actually am skeptical that they can be controlled. And if they are, something else will come up that will funnel all that disruption. I think one of the challenges, you look back and just to look at the most recent example inside the pandemic, you look back at the attempts to direct people to what were

regarded as authoritative sources like the WHO. And you see that the information provided by the WHO in several cases was not accurate, was bad information, which further erodes, I think, the sort of general sense or the what was decades ago the deference to authority because people say, wait, the WHO was telling us that they had this information from China. The information turns out to be bad. The WHO was not recommending wearing masks and masks, it turns out, are positive influence. The pandemic in particular, I think, is worth a deeper look. You look at public health experts and epidemiologists in the United States who, you know, I think largely on their authority directed our response, directed the federal government to advise

shutdowns, you had the CDC guidelines, you had the state guidelines, basically saying we can't allow people to freely associate. We can't allow families to gather for funerals. Weddings have to be called off. And then you have what we've seen over the past several weeks with these protests. Gatherings, literally in some cases, hundreds of thousands of people. And not only do you not have warnings from many of the very same public health experts and epidemiologists who had said you can't gather in groups more than 10. You have them cheering on these mass gatherings that weeks earlier they had condemned as potentially deadly. Does this, obviously you can tell from the way I'm framing this, that it bothers me. Is this likely to have longer term effects

or is this something that goes away in six weeks or six months? These particular protests, you're talking about? The erosion of authority. Does this affect the way that we think, not just about epidemiologists, but broadly about whether we should believe people who are regarded as experts? Pick an institution. Yes, of course, it's been happening for at least 20 years, and it's going to continue. And I think, and I keep saying this and sound a little bit like, I mean, it sounds so,

abstract. But the great political question of our day, it's not left versus right. It's not Republicans versus Democrats. It's not this policy versus that policy, immigration. It's how do we restore authority to democratic institutions? In the end, these are democratic institutions. We are part of them. We are them. So they are not, they have lost their bleeding authority. They're bleeding authority, they're practically prone on the ground. Nobody trusts them. You can read the surveys. Nobody trusts them. And yet they are ours. We elect these people. They are the result of what we do. How do we restore authority to some degree? And what's the answer to your own question? How is that possible? I mean, you wrote in your late May article about the post-truth

world and a way out of the post-truth world. The headline itself suggesting some level of optimism from you. You think there is a way out. What does it look like? Well, I mean, part of what has to happen, which is not happening, is there has to be an acceptance that the world has changed, an acceptance by the elites. And by elites, I mean, specifically people who are scons and in the big institutions. It doesn't have to be politics. If you are in a university, you're a professor, that counts. But there has to be an acceptance of the tidy old world of I write and I get published

in a journal and my buddies peer review me and so forth, as happens in science. That doesn't work anymore. It just doesn't work anymore. So we have to come up with protocols. I have to come up with rhetoric. I mean, part of what has to change is we, we, We have a rhetoric that we have through a legacy from the industrial age where you are supposed to know, if you're a politician, you're supposed to give answers to questions that nobody has answers for.

So invariably, you get elected on something that you have no idea how to resolve, and invariably, at the end of four years, you get treated like a failure, and mostly you are. Now, maybe you have actually succeeded to some degree, and maybe if you had said, we will try and turn this around and let's do trial and error, you would not now be in the position of having said something that you can be held accountable against. But no politician today is going to get elected unless he says, I'm going to make you happy. I'm going to solve your problem. I'm not going to give you a job. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. We, again, are, it's easy to look. And people do that endlessly today and point the finger

and blame that and blame the other. It's us. It's the public. We elect these people because they tell us that. Then they get there and they can't do it. So I think part of what has to do, you want to detoxify that. We have to, I mean, if a politician said, I don't know to unanswer no question, I'd vote for that person. I don't care if he's a communist, okay? I'll vote for that person, okay?

Because having a politician admit to ignorance is reality. That's true reality. It's not the old mediated reality of the 20th century. It's the reality of the world. We are very ignorant. The pandemic was exposed the degree to which human knowledge is shallow and to which we really don't understand the world. So the experts, the people who knew them most, didn't know that much, but they had to pretend that they did. And that's where you get in trouble. You've talked about humility in the news context as well. How do you apply what you just said to the New York Times, the Washington, and post, Fox News? Yeah. I mean, the problem there is they have to make money, right? So it's not like they're in it for the virtue or

all the things that they claim to be informing the public or producing objective information or anything like that. They're in for the money. So to get the money, they carve out a niche audience and then they pitch to that. So I think honestly, fixing Fox News

or fixing New York Times shouldn't be our job. Our job should be to put those streams of information in their proper perspective, which is, among other streams of information. They have no privilege. They are not, in any sense, more complete, more objective, more important than many other streams. I come up with a point to the dispatch as one. I had not quite been – I knew about it, but I had not quite been aware of in detail what you guys are doing. I think that's an interesting experiment.

I would hope that you succeed. There are many little experiments that are going on that deserve our attention way more than Fox News or the New York Times. You know, one person that you signaled out for criticism is Anthony Fauci. You've talked about the mask situation. You've also talked about his flip-on lockdowns. As of late February, he saw no reason to lock down the country. Six weeks later, he opposed ending the lockdowns because it would backfire. And you've used that as an example of.

of an authority figure undermining their own trust in authority, what advice do you have to experts to build that authority back? And what happens when, you know, in the Anthony Fauci case, for instance, what happens when you said something wrong and now you need to fix it? Yeah, I mean, come on, this is what happens to us every day of our lives. I mean, how many of us are correct 100% of the time? But we expect that of experts. We want them to be correct 100% of the time.

Well, if we expect that, then we're all going to be shocked by the fact that they're not. I actually was, and I'm sorry that it came across as critical of Fauci. I was really being critical to the people who sort of deified him as some sort of Oracle that we could go to for truth with a capital T when it came to the pandemic. The poor man got put up there and he started talking, and he gave us the best he had in any particular moment and contradicted himself all over the points, okay? As we all do, and maybe, maybe, he like I am, is not a young man. Maybe he was raised in that era where you were not supposed to say, well, we don't really know, but this is what we think now. And maybe don't hold me accountable.

We'll explore that possibility. And if it changes, we'll let you know. that's really a scientific method. You know, scientific method never ends. You never close it, you know, there's never a consensus. There's a, it is open, it's open. And when you have a fast-moving, a brand-new threat like the COVID-19 pandemic, well, I mean, mostly on that knowledge sheet, it's blank.

We don't know. What we don't know is immense, but we know it's a little. And he maybe should have said that. So you point to the New York Times and the networks and other big media institutions and suggest that, look, they're just making money. They're, in effect, giving us what we want. So the market's working, right? I mean, if this is what the market is giving us and this is what we collectively are saying

we want by, you know, subscribing to those institutions or watching those channels, Is there even a problem? What's the problem then? Well, I think at a sort of superficial basis, you're 100% right. They're giving us what we want. If you go just like half an inch deep, though, I don't think that's right. I think there are gigantic niches out there that nobody's filling. And if you ask the public, you read the surveys and so forth.

Nobody's happy. Nobody's happy with Fox News. Nobody's happy with the New York Times. They have zero trust. They have zero trust. The collapse in trust for mainstream news since, you know, the late 20th century has been catastrophic. The problem seems to be, a lack of imagination. There are open spaces out there that can be explored.

seems to be exploring. And then B, there is that elite reaction. We don't want to explore those spaces. We want to go back to the way it was. Okay. So I think, yeah, in a status quo sense, we're getting what we're asking for. So in that sense, we go back to the moral dilemma. Why are we supporting these things? Why, even if I support something in terms of my political opinion, why do I choose something that is so clearly distorting of the other side is by doing that, now you're kind of warping, you're going through the looking glass into post-truth. Why not support, you know, a stat publication like what was during the pandemic, this little outfit called stat that was so, I mean, they didn't have half the people that New York Times put on the pandemic.

and they did so much better. So why don't we find out there in this vast universe of information those islands and those explorers that are blazing a new trail to much more balanced, much more civil, much more sane rhetorical and informational styles and support those? But do people want those if they're not taking their, if they're not following their feet, if they're not giving them their dollars?

Do people want that? Or do people want the shouting and the screaming and the rants that you have argued the digital environment so incentivizes? Why should we put it this way? Why should we believe what people tell pollsters instead of believing what people do? Well, people don't do.

I mean, I think the mainstream news as a business has suffered pretty dramatically in the last 20 years. years. So a lot of people walking away from that. Although the New York Times is growing significantly and gaining subscribers, places like The Atlantic, Fox News, others are seeing their stars rise. And they're very different institutions, obviously. Yeah. And when you look at the numbers from the 20th century, and you look at the numbers of those, the ones you've cited, even from the 20th century, when a population was a third lesson it is now.

Those numbers are tiny compared to what, say, CBS News could summon on any given 7 p.m. on any given weekday, all right? With Walter Cronkite stood up and told us that's the way it was. Let's pause right here and talk about our sponsor today. Gabby, we're all looking for ways to save money these days. When's the last time you looked at how much you're spending every month on car insurance? On homeowners insurance, now's the time to check out Gabby and see about getting a lower rate for the exact same coverage

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Take two minutes right now, well, after this podcast, to see how much you can save on your car and homeowners insurance. Go to gabby.com slash dispatch. That's gabby.com.com slash dispatch. You've talked about this summer being a great sociological experiment. And you've said on the one side, you have the reflexive obedience to authority, particularly around the virus. And on the other side, you have a near absolute repudiation of the rules of the system, as you put it. So I want to know for this summer in the sociological, the colossal sociopolitical experiment that you said is your one prediction. What are you looking for? How will you judge the outcome of that experiment? That's a really good question.

That's a really good question. That whole idea, I mean, it was clear to me, okay, that given 2019, which had been, I mean, we'd like to talk about exponential growth. I think what I call the public and revolt, this is political disruption that erupts from below and has happened globally and it has happened to every political system. when it came to 2019, it hits some kind of crazy peak, okay? I mean, I counted like more than two dozen really significant street revolts in 2019, and it doesn't even count the populist elections like Boris Johnson and Britain and so forth. And on that, you suddenly had this pandemic, and you had this very artificial lid being put on,

Basically, you put society on an induced political comma, all right? He's going to put a lid on it and waited three months. And my thought was, it's going to blow and it's going to be crazy. That was my thought. You can't let that pressure build for three months. I was bubbling up in 2019. And all over the world, people have sheltered in a place or lockdown, or whatever you want to call it. And all over the world, the Chilean protesters went home, everybody went home and locked down.

My idea was, so what happens? And I had a conversation with a couple of Europeans who were very firm in thinking that it was going to be the hour of the state, that basically government was going to come out of this looking really good because they had exercises, tremendous, really extraordinary authorities that they don't usually have to protect us from this pandemic. So I thought, well, that's one possibility, and I looked at that. Another one is that we all get back and what we want to do is make money because we've all been losing money and we've all been socially deprived so we want to get out to the office and make a bunch

of bucks and we want to go out to the dance floor and have fun and politics you know so it's like the roaring 20s was my parallel right or if you want if you have a more historical frame of mind it could be restoration in england after the puritans got seen off and suddenly everybody was was acting pretty scandalously and and they didn't care that some some pretty mediocre steward was king It's like, let the elite rule. We'll just have fun. So the Roaring 2020s is a possibility. Or you can have what I had thought all along might happen, which is, you know, revolt on steroids.

This thing is just going to explode. So those are the three possibilities. I'm not making a prediction. As you can see, I sort of lean towards a third. But I have learned that you cannot predict. This environment is very random. You're floating in such a stream of randomness. But I would be very surprised if,

there wasn't massive, massive political turbulence in the next six months, certainly in the summer. And let's turn the focus then away from the United States, because you brought up a lot of this is happening worldwide. This isn't unique to us. You were surprised that the Hungarian parliament ended their extraordinary legal order and is giving back special powers. Because one of the things that you've said is, you know, once that authority is vested and you're not the only one to say this, authority is very unlikely to give away its authority. So what do you think happened in Hungary this week? And where do you see the hotspots worldwide now?

Well, I mean, Hungary, honestly, my knowledge is very shallow of it. And I've been trying for some time to get a grip on Victorubon because everybody, everybody writes him up as some kind of authoritarian. And I read up the things that he says. And, I mean, it's not like he's touchy-feely, but he makes an argument. He makes a case. I mean, the Hungarians are a nation that ethnically are unique in that area, right? They and the Romanians, who at least have other Latin-derived languages that they can point to,

the Hungarians have nobody. They're in this ocean of Slavic humanity, and they are not reproducing. have been under the Soviet boot for years. So nationalism in Hungary is not something that you can, you know, say it's like France or it's like the United States. It's much different, right? And he makes a case based on that history of why he wants to do the things that he's been doing.

On the other hand, he seemed to do certain things that seem to trip over what, you know, normal democratic practice into me. And that moment where he basically said, give me all the authority in the universe. And by the way, it's indefinite. I thought, okay, well, now I know he really is like that. But now he's giving him back. So I'm back to my ignorance. And the answer is, I like to say this a lot.

I don't know. I really don't know. Steve? Yeah, I mean, on the other hand, Orban, even before he asked for and then returned these extraordinary powers had been authoritarian in a number of different ways, particularly with respect to the way that he treated the free press in Hungary. I think was problematic for a while. And I think we can be maybe encouraged by the fact

that he's returned some of the newly accumulated power. But I think there are reasons to still believe that he has these authoritarian tendencies. Just looking forward to the next six months and to what is happening here. In the discussion of the role of these big tech companies and their attempt to, I would say, impose some order on this free flow of information that we discussed.

What's the likelihood that they'll be able to do what they say that they want to do here, that they're going to actually be effective in trying to separate truth from fiction? Well, number one, they're very divided. I mean, again, if you listen to Mark Zuckerberg, who actually, out of that crowd, I find the most interesting person to listen to. But he is like Hamlet.

I mean, it's to be or not to be, right? He goes back one way and back the other. And one day says, you know, no, we're going to let, you know, opinions flow. And the next day you read that Facebook is basically taken down something because it's a false opinion or flagging it because it's a false opinion. So it's a they are themselves very divided. It is, let's face it. not an easy job to, in this fractured environment, in this post-truth environment,

satisfy, what is it, 2 billion people or something that are on Facebook? So I don't think they themselves have a program. I think they're drifting. I think they respond to events. They respond to criticism. Can they do it if they sought to do it? I doubt it seriously. I think we're way past that.

I think the information environment, when you look at the dimensions of it, I mean, it is mind-boggling. This is a case where quantity became quality. It is impossible to block information in this particular environment. We mistake the information sphere for those gigantic platforms, and it's true. They occupy a big chunk of it, but there is space around them. And if they decide they're going to just kind of give us authorize information, that space is going to grow. It's probably going to balloon, in fact.

So you're not optimistic about what we're likely to see over the next six months. Let's just reduce it to sort of its simplest point. If you're an average news consumer and you want to find out what's going on, and you care about the truth, right? I mean, we shouldn't, I mean, there is, you know, truth exists. There is truth. Or as you say, there is reality. Reality doesn't disappear because we have all these. competing versions of it. If you're an average news consumer and you want to find out what's going

on and you want to invest in the truth, how do you do that these days? I mean, I think you do it the way you always would have. Number one, let's face it. If you want to be an informed person, the news is the last place you'll go to, all right? Read a book. Read a book. Okay. There are many, many better ways. to acquire context and depth and understanding then watching the news. Now, if you want to restrict yourself to the news, do it the way that should be done. Always challenge your perspective. We always stand, I always say, truth is truth. Reality is reality. But if you're standing at the top of the Empire State Building and you're looking at New York City, it looks like

the heavenly city. It looks like, you know, the city of God. If you're standing at the foot of the Empire State Building and there's like a homeless person puking on the sidewalk and there's gigantic traffic choking you. It looks like, you know, some circle of hell. So perspective on reality gives you very different takes on it. So I would try. That's my analytical approach, by the way, is I don't, for example, when I go to these revolts, I don't care what you think of it, Steve, or what I think of it, I say, first of all, what do they think about it? What do they think they're doing in there? And then you start going around the circles, but we're all going to be in the end in case in one perspective. But the more you are aware that there's a difference in

perspective, that everybody does not necessarily see New York as a heavenly city or as a circle of hell. There is kind of like a range, the more of an informed person you will be. This is not that hard. We don't do it because we don't want to. Okay. I'm going to take the prerogative of last question, Steve. So, Martin, you were born in Cuba. You left shortly after Castro came to power, and your career, at least from a complete outsider's perspective, seems to have been informed by a lot of that experience, especially as you're looking at authoritarian disinformation, information, truth.

And I'm wondering how you view that experience on your career and your life's work at this point. And you mentioned earlier that you did not necessarily see it as a positive. Actually, they're positive negatives. It's what I said. It's very Rumsfeldian. Well, he was right. I basically took away from that experience, any number of things, the best of which is food. But I will say intellectually two things, at least. I came away with a kind of an inbred distrust of governments that promised paradise on earth.

Just give me power, and I'll give you paradise on earth. And I believe in democracy, and I love the United States. But if a politician starts promising paradise on earth, I get real nervous, all right? Number two, I try to avoid politics, true politics in my analysis. I mean, in the end, everything is political. But the Cubans were wonderful people, and I'm very proud to be one. But I think we talked before, I mean, you have one Cuban and you have three opinions, okay? I mean, you have two Cubans and you have a civil war.

So basically, it's, and I have said, you know, if you lived in my household, you would hear this a lot. And what I'm watching, I'm looking at my window today, watching the Cubanization of American politics, okay? And I feel like letting what you want to happen colored very deeply what you think you're seeing is a way to post truth, it's a way of getting yourself deluded, all right? So one thing I took away from that experience is, yes, these are passionately important things, and you'd be a fool not to think that. But when you're watching the world and we're trying to analyze it, again, stand back from it and see it from as many perspectives that you disagree with as possible. And then you come up with your synthesis, your consensus idea, and your mind. And don't immediately go to, well, I love this. this should be the way it is

I'm for Trump, therefore you know, this is fake news oh no, no, no, no, you are against Trump, therefore you are fake news. No, stand back from that. Stand back for that. I think also having been raised under two different types of dictatorship, by the time I was

10, I had been in a right-wing dictator but a left-wing dictatorship, and that never grows old, right? That's part of our duty as citizens is to understand that people that we oppose

rather than demonize them. So Cuban politics demonized a lot and I feel like we are slipping into that and there are ways

to avoid that. Again, there are incentives, Steve, you're right about that, but mostly it's us. It's us. Well,

I misled you because I have one more question. If you could only eat one Cuban dish for the rest of your life, What is your favorite Cuban dish that you would eat?

Oh, my God. That's an unfair question. I saved the hardest one for last. I would save Bacafita, which I'm getting for Father's Day. Lovely. Well, happy Father's Day. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been a really fun conversation.

And once again, highly recommend your book, The Revolt of the Public. And we'll talk to you again soon. Yeah, also. Thank you. Thank you.