The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 100 | Why the Elites Have Lost Control | Martin Gurri | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Episode Date: March 6, 2021

The internet is brutal. Martin Gurri calls it a “great mutilator.” Gurri was a global media analyst at the CIA in 2001, right as the internet erupted with what he describes as an “Information Tsunami.” That year, more information was produced than all information before it. The next year, double. Then double that, and it threw the leadership structure of the world into a “state of crisis.” Gurri wrote about it in his book, “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium,” and he joins Glenn to discuss the main issue it created, which we’re still feeling now: The old school elites aren’t the only loud voice in the room anymore. Gurri explains how many of America’s most divisive issues are all connected: cancel culture, corruption in media, nihilism, why people see white supremacists or Antifas everywhere lately. The internet created America’s great divide. But can it also bring us back together? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Believe it or not, and I think you will, we're in the middle of a revolution, a global revolution, technological, information revolution. And a lot of really powerful people don't like it one bit. We have witnessed the collapse of state and institutions from corporations to systems of government. The elites have lost control. Journalists have lost power. Academics have lost power and control. The old status quo is under attack or destroyed. And it's happening all over the world.

And the new status quo is chaotic and aggressive. Every day, it seems like there's another battle being fought. The public revolt against the elite class has shattered every domain of authority. We don't trust. any institution anymore. And that's not just an American thing. Now the elites are scrambling to maintain power. They flourished under the industrial society.

But now as a result of the information revolution, it has been gutted of its legitimacy, with no signs of recovery, only a power grab or something else that is yet to be defined. The elites want us to believe that our issues are economic. Better yet, socioeconomic, because that's even more divisive, a better diversion. But the real issues is with the elites themselves. The real problem is corruption. And all of it has happened as a result of

the internet. Not the corruption, but the exposure and the networking with one another. Elites can no longer hide their failures and their corruption, nor can they silence people easily. When we finally saw the elites for who they really are, we were really kind of disgusted, both the Republicans and the Democrats by their lack of morality. It's why 50% of the public says, I don't belong to either party. The public has become ungovernable, at least from the elites perspective. Martin Gurry was a media analyst. for the CIA, as all of this was unfolding early in the 21st century, he saw this shift up close,

and he understands media theory, I think, at a higher level than most academics. He bests them in practical knowledge. And he has the perfect message that America needs to understand the understanding the new American oligarchy or whatever it. is that is on the other side of this thing. I found him by reading his book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. It foreshadowed all of this.

It was written in 2016, but I find it extraordinarily timely. It is a very fair book, a balanced book, and one that I think everyone who's trying to figure out what's coming, that you read it. I wanted to go through a little bit of the book with him, but also expand and go beyond that. I think this book is really crucial for everyone to read. He was way ahead of his time. And you don't want to miss a minute of this podcast because we talk about the reasons why all the chaos is unfolding around us. What Martin says relates directly to what's happening in your life.

And his greatest concern for the future of liberal democracy is something. that should concern all of us. In fact, it should make all of us break out in a cold sweat because it's real. We're seeing it now. And if it grows to an uncontrollable strength, God help us all. Please welcome Martin Gurry. Martin, it is rare for me to read a book that I can't sense the political agenda, because I don't think there is one with you.

I don't know much about the author except he really seems open to being wrong and open to just learn. That is rare today, and I can't thank you enough. I wish I would have read your book in 2016 when it first came out because it has answered so many questions on what's happening in our world right now. So first, welcome. Thank you. Let me, let me, I want to first get you to start with the premise of the book. So describe it for anybody who hasn't read it yet. Well, the book was kind of a journey.

So let me just got to tell you a story about how the book came to be because it pretty much encapsulate sad. I was an analyst of global media at CIA, possibly the least sexy job, you could have a CIA, right? But at that moment, it turned out to be the most significant perch, probably in the world to be sitting at. Because I had been, obviously, dealing with very, very small volumes of information. At those days, open media was a tiny, tiny trickle. And I was there when suddenly this digital earthquake epicenter, say, Palo Alto. suddenly propelled this tsunami of information in volumes that were unprecedented in human history.

Okay, I want to stop here because I want to read what you actually write because it is profound the way you put this. More information was generated in 2001 than all of the previous existence of our species on Earth. In fact, 2001 doubled the previous total. and 2002 doubled the amount present in 2001. That is astounding. Correct. So what we're going through, I've been saying for a while that we're going through a revolution like the industrial revolution,

except this one is just compressed, not over a hundred years, but a period of like 10 or 20 years. And everything seems like it's coming apart at the seams. This was a really important. place to start. Talk about that and then continue with your story. Talk about what this information explosion means. Right. And I mean, it's that doubling every year has continued. So if you charted, it really looks like a gigantic wave. It looks like a tsunami. So I speak a lot about the information

tsunami. That's a metaphor in a way. But when you look at the chart, it looks like a tsunami, like this thing that just keeps rising. I don't necessarily agree with you in the sense that it's being compressed. I think we are in the very early stages of it. In other words, I think we're only seeing the very initial shock, I guess, trauma, the collision of this old hierarchical 20th century top-down, I talk you, listen, the world with this enormous information tsunami. and the implications that it has for the legitimacy and the authority of every institution,

including all our democratic institutions. So I was sitting there watching this happen with many others as CIA. And of the first thing that we responded to was what you responded to, which was, holy mackerel, this is vast. We're used to looking at France as being mainly. two newspapers. Suddenly, it's like this enormous range of stuff, all of it very original. But who are these people? How could we even cite them in the Arab world in Egypt? I mean, the Egyptian media was a tiny little thing, Al-Mubarak all the time, right?

Suddenly you get all the, and serious, boring, suddenly you get these bloggers. Bloggers who blogged it English because at that time, there wasn't any software for Arabic in blogging, and we're hilarious and we're all against the system. I mean, and you were reading this and going, what is this, right? So at first, we were just overtaken by the size of tsunami, but something most people don't really think about much. It's the effects that have mattered. Information has effects.

It changes the furniture for the drama of society. So the behavior is going to be different because your stage settings are different. So, well, I mean, isn't that the, isn't that the, really the driving force of having a CIA knowledge and information is power? I mean, information can can free. And in some ways, it feels like it can also enslave you if you're, if you're just, you're hit by a tsunami of it. Well, I mean, I think it orientes you. And I think it can disorient you.

Yes. We're in a very disorienting moment. Right. And I think CIA, my experience of it was, is very tactical. And what I'm talking about is global and strategic. I mean, this is just happening all over the world all the time. Every institution, practically, practically every human life today has been transformed. Okay.

So behind that tsunami, we suddenly saw massive increases in social and political turbulence. And it all sounds very naive. today because it all seems like it's intuitive. But at the time, we asked, what's one thing got to do with the other? You know, you have the internet. We have the internet a communications device and we have those political turmoil. Why the two? Right. So that's become much clearer. When I left government, I dedicated myself to research the subject. And what became clear to me was that our institutions of the great institutions of the 21st century, including our political or democratic institutions, were set up, received their shape, their form, their substance,

their legitimacy, and their authority in the 20th. And the 20th century was the heyday of, I talk, you listen, top down, I'm legitimate because, you know, these sets of institutions that we are, because I have reached this particular place in institution, you must listen to me. Informationally, it was a moment of information scarcity. These institutions possessed each of them a little semi-monopoly over the information in their own domains. That gave them authority. What the tsunami did was blow all that away. The moment the tsunami hit each one of those institutions, including our government and including our political parties, all our political and governmental institutions lapsed into a state of crisis. That's where we are today. It

began longer. I wrote the book because several of us were seeing this. And part of the effect that I think this disorienting moment has had is a lot of the political categories don't really make a whole lot of sense. And I can people talk about Republican and Democrat and conservative and liberal. These terms that honestly, you know, are at least 19th century. Some of them are 18th century. And while they brought brush explained some things, they completely miss the big divide of our moment, which I think is between a public that used to be a silent audience and now is vociferous, it's very loud and very angry. And the elites who are still clinging to these old 20-century type institutions are terribly demoralized and don't particularly care much about the public. the feeling that if they could disband the public and summon a whole new version of it, that was a little more obedient, they would do it in a second.

So there seems to be two choices. If you're looking at this, you see how the elites are kind of now banning together because they kind of all need each other. I feel like it's, you know, King Louis. And they learn their lesson. Don't say let them eat cake until you. you have all of the reinforcements and the fences up. But screw the public.

We've got our own little world and we do not want it to change. And it's been fed for a long time by electing people and they don't really do what they say they're going to do. Now we have this ability to connect with one another, to network with one another, to see that we're not alone. it's not just us that feels this way or me that just feels this way there's a lot of people and so what's seemingly happening is what might have started out as hey hope and change or the tea party hey we want to we want some some restraint here on our government has now turned into burn it all down or total control yeah i don't see anybody asking for total control And I think the elites that would love to have total control, but are far from it, are far from it.

And every day, I think if you inhabit their heads and read their writings, you realize that these are people who are very scared. And they know that the world is slipping from them. They are not adapted to the digital era. Their institutions are totally maladapted to it. And then they're watching outside their windows, and there are all these people out there yelling and screaming. and they're going, who are they? Why are they there? What can I do?

And there are no real answers. I think there are two sides to this issue. I started writing the book thinking that I had a side, that I was a member of the public, so I felt like that was my side. But honestly, the public has its own pathologies, all right? The public, and I'm talking globally now, I know we love to talk about the United States,

just if there was no world, but this actually happens all over the world. Everywhere. And in fact began that the first manifestations were not in the United States. But the public is not one. It's many. It's fractured. It's the old passive mass audience, which was like, I always like to say, a gigantic mirror. I mean, I'm an old guy.

I remember those days, right? Where we all saw ourselves reflected. we all bought the same cars, we all watched the same TV show, they all were all worked. That mirror has toppled and fallen and shattered. And the public now lives in all the broken pieces, and they're mutually hostile. They don't like each other much.

Even within what it's considered to be their right wing, the conservative side, the Republican side, the left wing, the Democratic side, progressive side, the people inside those groups hate each other almost more than they hate the other side, right? So how do you unify and mobilize? The one unifying force, both sides everywhere, is they absolutely loathed the established order, the system.

So everything is kind of focused against. You can't, the second you say, well, let's be for this thing or for that, let's have a little program about this. The public disintegrates its component barge. So to get it mobilized, you need to be against. Now, if you are against, if you repudiate, if you negate and you don't provide an alternative in the end that becomes nihilism, right, which is the belief that destruction is a form of progress.

So that has been a mantra of mine since hope and change. I felt the same way as many people who were voting for Obama felt. I wanted change of the system. I wanted hope and belief in something. I didn't vote for him, but I thought that was such an effective thing. but the thing I kept asking was change to what? And no one is providing that. So that is the answer of why we're not hearing any new solutions

because there is nothing to unite on? Well, the smart politicians will give you just that. They will say something that sounds like it has content in it. But when you start, you know, analyzing a little bit, you realize that, well, this could fit almost anything, right? So you could have hope and change. That's a very good one. And it got Obama elected.

Or you can say, make America great again. And what does that mean? You could put any kind of content into that little slogan. I think, therefore, when they are elected, two things happen. They feel like they've escaped because they got elected without actually promising a program. But actually, the opposite is the case for the public. The public listens to these slogans and builds up these enormous expectations. or make America great again, hope and change.

And it's almost impossible for these politicians to deliver in those. So I think. I don't want to make this about politics at all. But if you're going to do it, I'd prefer that you do it to both side because I don't want you to, I think you did a really good job in your book of not playing politics. But you do excoriate hope and change. You do excoriate President Obama. And in fairness, this was written before Donald Trump, and I'm sure you can excoriate him. But can you go on why that was important to put in the book?

Yeah, I mean, I honestly didn't consider it excoriating, and you're 100% right. I am an analyst, and if you can tell what my political opinions are, then I probably failed you, right? So I thought that Obama, I think that the public as a whole in these digital networks has what I call a sectarian mindset. The sectarian mindset is very defined. Sociologists have talked about this. It was very egalitarian. It doesn't accept leaders. It doesn't accept programs.

It stands against the center, the institutions, which are considered sinful, right? And rather than provide an alternative in terms of programs, they model behavior. In other words, I am in my virtuous behavior countering this, the sinful world, right? And that is what you get from a lot of these protests and a lot of these movements. And I think President Obama was the first sectarian in powers of his sectarian in office, all right? You could, and I found that fascinating, it was just a product of my research. I mean, I started reading his speeches, and I was just amazed. Your typical American president, almost invariably, every American president up to that moment,

was supposed to be a man of action who said, This is what's wrong. He has a problem. And I don't have a solution. I'm going to fix it. President Obama, after he lost his governing majority in, I guess it was 2010, resumed what I think was his actual natural state, which he was like a profit in the wilderness who was kind of like an accuser in chief, right?

He would point to, for example, economic inequality, give a long speech of a economic inequality, how terrible it was in America, even in comparison with third world countries, it was bad. And he would, that was it. That was all you heard. No solutions, no fixes. Many of the fixes in the olden days were bogus. So maybe it's better if you don't have a fix, not to say it, but that was not what he was interested in. He was interested in being precedent. He presided over the country and yet he rejected the system over which he was presided. He was telling us all the time how that system was corrupt and unjust. And Trump did the same thing.

Yes. Yeah. I don't give myself credit for much, but I watched Obama and I wrote in the book, I said, he was so successful at this, there's bound to be imitators. Yeah. People, you know, blame Trump on a lot of things, you know, the reason why Donald Trump came to his X, Y, Z. I think it was a lot of things that brought. Donald Trump to it, but the one thing that surprised me, listening to people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, was the burn it all down kind of thing, that it was a, we have tried

to work within the system. The system is so far gone, burn it down. And that's what you're hearing now. And you go into nihilism a lot. Can you explain, for instance, is nihilism what we saw on January 6th Capitol? Is it what we saw over the summer, the summer of love, which is oddly titled? Is it both? Is it more?

What is nihilism? I mean, the ultimate expression of nihilism today is when a person picks up a gun and walks into a room full of innocent strangers and start shooting them. Sometimes for a reason because they are jihadis or because they are white supremacists. Sometimes for no reason at all because you represent

an impure society and I am an exterminating angel all right. I am the internet rant made flesh and I'm going to exterminate you. Basically when you read these people who do these terrible things online

They sound just like everybody else online. They're ranters, except these people actually take it a further step. I think institutionally, when you start bashing at our existing institutions, which, like I said before, have many reasons to be criticized, but don't offer a solution or an alternative, then you are engaging in essentially a nihilistic exercise, whether you're a nihilist or not. I think the Black Lives Matter movement and the crazy Q&N people on January 6 have a lot more in common that it's given credit for. They were basically angry. They basically want to change.

They had no idea inside their heads what that change would be. And then they had no organization, no leaders, no programs. So that in that moment when they said, I mean, Black Lives Matter, they took over a couple of autonomous zones out west. And the protesters of January 6th, you know, basically violated a capital building. But once you do that, it's like you can see, you know, the deer and the headlights. It's like, now what? And then what the what is, they kind of model their superiority and then they go away because they have nothing to offer. So I have described this in the past.

And I'd like you to correct me. Show me what, where I have this wrong. I've described the climate in America that there is, if you look at a football field, from the five-yard line, maybe 10-yard line of each end zone, there are these absolutely bat-crap crazy people who just are, they're just angry and they don't care what happens next. They just want an end to this. then you have everybody else kind of, you know, in the 40, you know, yard line that is like,

no, you know, this is all kind of good. I agree it's not working, but, you know, let's not be crazy here. But everyone is focusing attention on those two end zones. And so they're controlling, they're pushing us into a place that the rest of the public doesn't really want to go. is that accurate or is the people in the center are they nihilistic now too that's a really hard question that's a really hard question and i i'll say a couple of things about it um number one the the um i think the football metaphor is wrong because we're all kind of crunched together um and but i think essentially um the anger is

structural. In other words, in our information environment, in this tsunami that I'm talking about, in this blizzard of voices, right? If you are the calm, moderating force, and you say the reasonable things, you have no audience. Nothing. So if you want to have an audience, the first thing you're going to do is scream. The second thing you want to do is scream angrily. The third thing, and that's where you make the breakthrough, right, is you find somebody in the other side that's now screaming at you. And now the screaming match. begins and then the people on your side start to line up behind you because now the other guys are attacking you and suddenly you build a following and you become somebody, right?

That's structurally how you get attention in this environment. So there's a structural side to it. Where the public stands, the actual majority of the public, that's a really interesting question and it's hard to get at. There are a lot of people who are intermittently angry, I think. But when when we talk about, for example, political polarization, which I keep getting thrown at me as the defining way to look at our political environment, it makes no sense to think that. I mean, Gallup just came out with a poll that said that 50% of Americans identify as independence, a record number. How is that polarizing between parties, right?

Right. Another poll, and I forget who did it, also record numbers saying they wanted a third party. So how is that polarized between Republican and Democrat? So I think there are, part of what we're dealing with, the dysfunction of our information environment, part of it is the dysfunction of the institutions, the fact that at the top of our institutions, it really is everybody kind of glumming together and trying to say, well, it's my side or, or nothing, right? But where the actual majority of the public stands, honest, Glenn, if you ask me my gut feeling, I would agree with you.

People just want to live on their lives. They're not really interested in getting into these scrums. I was in Israel and I spent time with Jews. I spent time with Palestinians. And what I heard from both sides, when the cameras were off and when people were alone, I just want my kids to have a safe school. I just want to be with my family. and I realize when the cameras are off,

everybody wants the same thing. Yeah. And I think that's true about most of America, but we are... That's hard to get it. Go ahead. It's hard to get it empirically. Hard to get data on that.

Right. But I do have a little incident, which kind of sealed that in my head. You know, I was writing, I was one of these back and forth that get published online. where somebody publishes something and you respond. And it was all about how we're an incipient civil war

and our politics have become warlike. And, you know, I'm sitting here in front of my laptop right above that is my window. And I'm reading all this stuff about war. I'm watching my neighbors. Right. Walk around, social distancing, waving at one another. And I'm thinking, well, I'm not seeing it.

I don't see civil war, okay? I think also, one last thing is most people don't, ingest massive amounts of news. And that's probably healthy. I think those of us who ingest too many news tend to have a very distorted idea

of how important even politics are. I think most American lives live very detached from politics and its family and its church and its community and, you know, it's sports league and many things other than who passed the latest law that you did like

or that you were advocating or what. I will tell you I have the same feeling when I'm at work I feel one way when I'm anywhere else in the country except for the coast or the power centers I I see people getting along everybody is fine everybody is kind of back to yeah I don't agree with that person but that's you know that's that's that's kind of cool one thing that is is however I think first frightening sign is the cancel culture that is happening right now. How does this fit into your theories?

What's happening there? Because when I said one side wants total control, there is one side, and I don't even know where it belongs, but there is one side that's like my way or the highway. Yeah. It's as much a generational thing as anything. But I mean, I think you have in the internet a lot of identity and stability.

The internet is a mingler of identity, okay? You have to sort of, your organic, you, the person that you're looking at right here, I have to mingle myself if I want to join Wall Street Betts. If I want to join Black Lives in a world, if I want to join all the, you basically have to join hands with a digital them. You have to mutilate yourself, right? And that creates all kinds of uncertainties and doubts. And the more you do that, the more it gets confusing,

what pronoun do you use? What's the right word? What should I avoid? And the more that that happens, I think, somebody is going to step up and decide, well, I'm the Inquisitioner. Right. And I'm going to gain power of a sort by canceling you, right? By saying you said the wrong word or you used the wrong pronoun or you don't get it right.

And it becomes very intense and very, very dogmatic, even though we're talking about trivial things. I honestly don't think it's, I mean, it's important if you belong to that generation. I guess to an old geezer like me is much less important. I mean, you can cancel me 20 times from Sunday and I don't care, you know. But if you're young, it does matter. And I think what you have is a generation, you know, this Zoomer generation is coming up. It's a generation of conformists who basically keep their nose to the grindstone because they're afraid that if they just lift up their heads and say the wrong thing, they're going to get canceled. So did I misunderstand some of the direction of the book?

because you talked about the media scrambling to try to keep control of things and seeing that Facebook and all of this stuff has unleashed people to make their own networks. And it's the networks that they're afraid of. And as I read that, I'm looking at what Google is doing. I'm looking at what these algorithms are starting to do to. if you say something that is deemed hateful, it's not just you, but they look then at everyone who is liking you, following you, reading you, posting with you. And they are, they're squashing those voices as much as they can. And you talk about this in the book, about a 15%, I can't remember what you called it, dilution or something that they, they're squashing these networks.

and these voices. Can you go into that? Because maybe I misunderstood it. Yeah, I mean, I think we happen to be, every action has reaction, right? So we've spent 10 years of the revolt of the public. And I think certainly here in the United States, this is a moment of reaction. The elites are trying to reassert themselves. They elected Joe Biden, who was basically, that was his one qualification. He was an old elite. And he was safe. And they now want to, turn the great digital platforms into the front page of the New York Times, circa 1980. The thing is, it can't be done. It cannot be done. Basically, they're trying 20th century information control techniques.

But it works in China. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. The Chinese public knows everything that it wants. All right. Now, they keep their heads low and they don't say much. They can get, any person determined to get information in China can get it. So, no, I don't think it does. You cannot cancel the information tsunami.

I think the elites would love to do that somehow to just have kind of, okay, let's go back to the way things were. We went to write little articles to each other and they show up in the New York Times op-ed and we read the front page for the informational news. and that is never going to happen. And I think, I think, honestly, it'll be interesting to watch this moment of reaction. It'll be interesting to see how far that can go. But there will be a lot of pushback. There already has been a lot of pushback.

I think, honestly, the big platforms know that there's a new sheriff in town and the new administration, and they're playing up to it, right? They know they have been threatened with all kinds of, you know, anti-trust action and so forth by government. And they're playing up to the new, the new sheriff in town. We'll see what's going on a year or two down the road. So tell me about the media itself, because that's what you used to, you know, that was your job at the CIA.

So let's talk about American media here. And it's bias or its direction or what's happening with the, The old guard, because the New York Times itself is not even what the New York Times used to be. It's changed direction. So what's happening there? And what does that mean for the future of those, quote, trusted sources, as social media would name them? Yeah. I mean, the New York Times, here's the thing about the news business that most people

don't realize nobody ever made a penny selling news. Okay, that just never happened. Right. Not before, not now. In the olden days, the news, if you're a newspaper, but also the sports page, the comics, the advice of the love lord, the crossword puzzle, all those things bought you a bunch of eyeballs,

a big audience. And you sold that audience to advertisers, right? So that was the old model. the digital tsunami destroyed that. All the advertisers moved online and they're never coming back. That's pretty much the extinction of almost every newspaper that ever was. There's a few, though, that have very prestigious names and histories, like the Times and the Washington Post, and they have tried a new model.

The model is they lured you. You're a digital subscriber and you're lured behind this paywall. The problem with that model is So what's the commodity you're selling? I mean, the world of information that is so overloaded. It's practically an infinite amount of information for practical purposes. The news chases you, Glenn. The older days when I was a young kid, you have to keep up with the news.

Right. The news is strange. The news is, you can't bat it away. It's coming at you whether you want to or not, right? So why on earth would you pay money to go into this little magical garden of news that is the New York Times behind a paywall? right? I think accidentally during the 2016 elections, they hit on a new business model. And that business model was, well, we're not selling news and we're not selling eyeballs to advertisers.

We're selling a creed. We're selling, basically. We're selling polarization. We're selling anger, right? You who, and Trump, of course, was the great object of this. You who are terrified of Trump come within our little garden of news. We will give you good words to use. We will give you good arguments to use. You're like a congregation inside the church of anti-Trump.

We all believe in the same thing. They were selling that creed. Well, I mean, it was amazingly successful. Before Trump, the New York Times digital subscriptions were hovering flat below one million. It doubled it a year. By 2016, it was 60. million, which is the most of the world.

So they basically have an open ideological posture with kind of like a hidden business agenda. Now, now comes a moment of truth, though. I mean, let's face it. Trump, I believe, was an effect, not a cause

of this strange information. Big time. But he was, but he was, I think, I mean, he had, he sold. That's by the way. was an outrageous personality. He was a showman. There's a showtime. So he's gone. And you have possibly the most boring politician in my lifetime as president, Joe Biden,

the opposite of all that excitement that you had with Trump. Can the New York Times survive and maintain that growth under those conditions? Wait and see. When you look at what they're saying now in Washington, about there is this vast right-wing white supremacist terror movement out there. And at the same time, you know, calling it the summer of love when horrible riots were going on, what can talk about that a bit? What does this tell you?

And what's really going on? Well, each side sees a moat in its own eye and a beam in the eye of its opponents, right? I think people who are to the left of the spectrum see white supremacists everywhere. People who are to the right of the spectrum see Antifa's everywhere. I think that's to some extent, they're sincere, I'm sure, but also self-serving because then you can pass laws and you can generate that anger. In other words, it's much easier to find yourself railing about white supremacists or antifas that it is to talk about some boring politician in the Senate or something like that. So you want to portray the other side as the most extreme possible version of it. Some of it is

true, much of it is imaginary, a lot of it is just political posturing, I think. Talk to me about the fifth wave, because you talk about that in the book a lot. Explain the fifth wave. Well, I mean, it is a fact that information determines, as I said before, the stage setting of society. So a lot of our behavior, it depends on that. And also that it has not, as one might imagine, information has not increased an easy. even flow. It comes in these waves or pulses and with each one you see how society arranges itself. You know, so with the invention of writing, you had these societies that were ruled by

mandarin and priests like the Egypt or China. The classical republics, you needed the alphabet for. You could not have to have the alphabet. The printing press was, by the way, possibly the most destructive and disorienting of all, including so far the Internet. Including, including the Internet. Yes. Oh, yes. I'll come back to that in a minute if you want. You couldn't have had the scientific revolution.

You couldn't have had the American Revolution. You couldn't have the French Revolution. All these things that determine our life today without the printing press. That's the third wave. The fourth wave was that top-down mass media. that I actually got to experience who was a young person where, you know, we were all kind of brought into the information environment, but in a very authority-driven way. In other words, you weren't participating, you were just being told. And the fifth wave is that tsunami, the digital, the digital madness that occurred around the turn of the century.

That is still very early on, and we don't really know what, what is. It may in the end be more disruptive than the printing press. but the printing press at its day was was horrific horrific and my friend what you mean you mean for the for the hierarchy for the for society as it was structured right i mean my friend uh Antonio Garcia Martinez uh smartest man on Twitter by the way um says if you if you did a thought exercise if you went to the 30 years war right and that was the blood war that had ever been experienced in Europe, millions died, took generations for the population of Germany to reconstitute itself. And the war was fought over tiny little religious differences.

You know, your book had 10 words that my book didn't have, and my book had many words that you should have had. And over these tiny differences that were very clear and crisp in those books, people slaughtered one another. If you went to that time and said, what do you think of a printing press. People who have said, it's the most horrible and destabilizing and destructive invention of our times, right? It was the early moment. So we now know that the printing press, in my opinion, anyway, it was the most liberating invention ever. And it may turn out to be that 50 years from now we say, oh, the internet, that was a great stabilizing, liberating technology. Right now, let's be thankful we're not in a 30 years war we're not slaughtering one another but the but the printing press was the same kind of thing it wasn't necessarily the people that were arguing over that it was the power structures that were arguing over that it was the kings and the churches that were fighting for a their old world or the new world order of the time who would dominate whom it wasn't I'll bet you could go back in those

those times were and the most of the people were like, I don't want this anymore. I just wish this would stop. Well, that was to some extent true. I think to some extent not. I mean, I don't know the period 100% well, but I know for a fact that there was, there were truly sectarian forces that were unleashed. In other words, small groups that suddenly decided, no, no, no, we really know and they would go on the war path and the horrible things would happen. And yes, there was a of them, you know, the powers that be would try and squelch them. But what was happening in Germany in particular was as much people suddenly feeling empowered because here I have this book, I can now read and I have this book. And the book tells me exactly what is right. And those people

over there, their book is wrong. And we just have to get rid of them. It's a, I mean, it's a question of heaven and earth, right? It's a question of God and Satan. There's no compromise to be had. And there wasn't. There wasn't. So I think it was a terrible moment that was as much a question of the public participating as it was of the powers that be then coming in and trying to establish order violently. So is the diminishment of religion a good thing or a bad thing to settle things down? I mean, I would imagine if you're looking at the world that way, you would say it was the sex of religion that really kind of edged, you know, egged that on and made things much worse. Is this part of the breaking up of networks or quieting of networks or is this just what we're going through right now,

this diminishment in, you know, in our faith and our churches, is that just part of the natural, that hierarchy doesn't work anymore? Well, I mean, I think that question can only be answered contextually, right? I mean, I think if you are slaughtering one another over religion, my liberal democracy emerged from that. Correct. I served like an arbiter that said, no, though, there are many paths to salvation. This is not just one, and you don't need to kill everybody else. So liberal democracy is kind of a procedural kind of prosaic.

We manage all the different points of view. There are limits. You can't do this. You can't do that. So religion in that case needed to be managed out of fanaticism. I think where we are today is an entirely different context. And I've been thinking about this a lot, a lot later, lately, Glenn, which is not just religion, but okay, where do people get their meaning? Where do people get their sense of dignity and importance? You know, well, they get it from family. that's in trouble. They get it from community that, you know, you look at the old Masonic lodges

and the chambers of commerce. They're gone. And they get it from religion. And attendance is a tremendous decline, right? So a lot of what is happening today, and this is again very hard to prove empirically, but I have a very strong sense that this is true. Is people trying to find meaning in politics. which cannot possibly deliver. So the anger is... I think the critical race theory, you know, the social justice warriors,

the ecological warriors, that has become almost a religion. And I think people are, and they will find it very, very empty, which will only lead to more bad things. But it is becoming a religion, you know? I think many, many of these online groups, And many of these academic, you know, fantasies like the ones you mentioned are, are religion-like, yes.

And I think none of them, none of them can deliver what people are seeking for them, which is, okay. And I think in the olden days, by the way, when people got their sense of who they were, you know, I mean, if you were in a Masonic lodge or not a sports league, you were kind of like a big frog in a tiny little pond, right? You felt important. And if you had religion, you had consolation and you had moral guidance. So that when politics, particularly national politics, came up for discussion, your sense of self, your sense of who you were, was not remotely touched by that. So you could engage in compromises because the stakes were pretty small, right? I think the problem today, when society is kind of hollowing. and when you are sort of told that you are, you're supposed to express yourself and attain some sort of self-expressive, you know, height, and yet it's unclear how that's ever going to happen without any meaning inside your life, then you will put a lot of burden of expectations on a very slender reed, which is, you know, there's the search for justice, a search for political solutions for things that are, that are, that are,

way beyond the scope of politics. And if you ever look at, you know, the young, the young warriors of the autonomous zones in Seattle and Portland, tons and tons of YouTube video, fascinating to watch. You know, they never give you, they never make demands, they never make claims, they never say you have to change this and that and the other. They basically assume the society is unjust and terrible. And then they say, well, look, look how great this is. this moment is, you know, there's this autonomous zone moment.

Everybody's supporting everybody. We're all virtuous. We're, and there's like a tiny little moment of meaning in these people's lives. Yes. And it's very hard to let that go. And it will constantly change as it did in the French Revolution. Yeah. I know you say in the book that you're not a prophet.

I can't tell you. Nobody can tell you how this is going to play out. and I completely agree with that. But can you give us some historic maybe comparisons at all on what are the possibilities that are lying in front of it? What are our choices in front of us? And how do we navigate this? Yeah, I'm really not good at that. I deal with it here and now.

And believe me, I find it puzzling enough. But I think we are, okay, we are a diverse. very early stages of a colossal transformation. And part of the reason I wrote the book is that I think our institutions are going to go through a tremendous reconfiguration crunch. And I want there to be at the end of that what there is now in terms of liberal democracy, personal rights, freedom, right? I am Cuban. I don't know if you know that or not. No.

So before I was 10 years old, I had lived through a right-wing dictatorship and a left-wing dictatorship. And I am here to tell you. Neither are good. Well, the worst, most dysfunctional democracy is infinitely, infinitely superior to the most effective and efficient dictatorship. Yeah. All right. So I would like there to be at the end of all this transformation. those freedoms and those possibilities to vote out your leaders and so forth.

Part of the reason you can't predict, honestly, is because a lot of that, there's agency involved. A lot of it's going to depend on you, Glenn, and on me and of the people who are watching. We will make decisions. We will, the elites are, in a sense, selected by the public. And if we continue to select elites that are essentially reactionary, this is what we're going to get we're going to get an explosion from below it's really it's really hard because i've thought about this a lot that it's hard at this point because everybody on both sides feel like it is gone so far to the edge that you i've heard this from a lot i feel this way if you voted for donald trump to change the

course of this institutionalized corruption and everything else. He was perfectly suited to kick the walls in. And I think he kicked a lot of walls in that he didn't even know he was kicking in at the time. And if he could be destroyed by this, who else could it be? And I think we haven't seen the last of the, you know, you say Obama did this and then Trump was a reaction. Well, I think, I think, think the Biden policies are a reaction and the coalition that was around Biden is a direct response to Trump. I think you're going to see more and more cancel culture and that's going to drive a response even bigger on the other. At some point, you do end up with a horrible dictator. Somebody just grabs the pendulum and says, it stops here. So how do we, how do we,

ratchet this down? Well, I mean, I think, number one, I guess as an immigrant, I have a tremendous belief in the deep roots of our institutions. There is no question that the current shape, the growth, the outward growth is burned down, but it's got deep roots. It's going to grow back, okay? And number two, I have a deep faith in the common sense of the American people. sometimes it's more apparent than other times. But I think, as you mentioned before, as we discussed before, I think the majority of the public is probably not into,

let's fight to the death over immigration. Let's fight to the death over basically the latest issue that has been made to be some kind of life or death struggle. I mean, I'll tell you something. And maybe this is, nobody's ever accused me being. a romantic and I don't feel like I am. But I just got my first COVID vaccine, right? And it was a line of hundreds of people where I live in Fairfax County, Virginia. And I mean, it was a remarkable moment. It was kind of like a ritual of national renewal that I felt that was in. Okay, Fairfax

County has been voting Democratic for many years, but it has lots of Republicans, lots of trumpets. none of us knew who we were in that line, right? We were basically choosing life. That was real, you know, COVID, that's real life and death, okay? And we were all of us of the same party and of the same tribe on that line. And I found that just strangely moving. And I think that's the American public, right? I mean, we're all, in the end, we just want to move on with life.

And yes, if we press to the wall, we'll say, well, I like Trump or I hate Trump or I'm a Democrat. I don't remember a Republican. But this is not life or death. This is not what our identities are based on, mostly, I think. It will never come. This idea that we're on the edge of a civil war. Again, I look at my neighbors walking by and waving at each other. I go, over what?

Over what? We're going to fight. Civil wars are fought. I hope you're right. I really hope you're right. I go back and forth on the American people. I've always said trust the American people. I've always believed in Jefferson's quote,

trust the American people. They're going to get it wrong, but eventually they'll get it right. But lately, I see the slippage of, you know, our unum, e pluribus unum, used to be the Bill of Rights. I don't know how many people still really believe in the Bill of Rights. And if we lose that, then we lose everything. Right.

Well, Jefferson was a guy who also talked about eternal vigilance, right? I mean, it's always a fight. It's never easy. And this is a particularly hard moment. I'm not denying that. That's what the book is about. Am I concerned? Well, sure I am.

Do I think short term there's going to be probably abuses and warping of democracy? Almost certainly. Long term, do I believe that it's going to emerge possibly even more democratic than before? because that's something that the digital world makes possible. I'm sorry, I'm going to choose to be optimistic. Maybe it's only not an analytic judgment. It's an act of faith. Well, I truly believe that it's going to be the greatest freedom mankind has ever seen

or the greatest police state authoritarianism that the world has ever seen. And it might be both. We might go to authoritarian only to have that. collapse and be free at some point. You know, I don't know. You said at the beginning, I disagree that it'll be a 10-of-20-year, that it's compressed. Why do you say that? I mean, I think the Internet information and the rate of change is happening in a way that

no one has ever experienced in all of human existence. You know, jobs and whole industries can be over overnight. We are not the same country. We were even 10 years ago. Definitely not 20. How long do you see this just grind happening? Well, that part of it is absolutely true. Change is accelerated, and that's demonstrable when you look at how fast innovations are being brought online.

I mean, you should take decades for something new to become acceptable. by the population. And when you look at things that, you know, the iPhones, for example, the smartphone, how fast that was adopted. I always say, because I talk to young people a lot, young people are the best, right? Because their minds are kind of like,

who, what's going on? I tell them, I'm not going to see the end of this. I am not going to see. Glenn, I'm looking at your gray hairs. You may not see the end there. Yeah, I don't think I will. So this is going to go on for quite a while. And my parallel is the printing press.

It took like 150 years for the, for us to figure out, well, what is this thing? What do we do with it? And I think this may be just as long. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on. And thanks for writing the book. I appreciate it.

My pleasure. God bless. Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.