TRIGGERnometry - Martin Gurri: "There's No Going Back to Normal"

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

SPONSORED BY: BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at https://betterhelp.com/trigger/ - get 10% off your first month, and get on your way to being your best self.  Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst who writes about the relationship between politics and media. He served at the Director of National Intelligence Open Source Center in various senior positions, including director of research. He is the author of 'The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium'. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro  01:19 Martin Gurri’s Background 05:53 Society’s Distrust in Elites 11:00 The Problems with Our Institutions 14:15 How Long Can the Elites Hold on to their Power? 16:50 Is a Revolution Coming? 20:53 Sponsor Message: ExpressVPN 22:41 The War on Truth 30:02 Living in a Post-Truth Society 32:31 How Do We Fix the Incentivisation of Conflict? 36:08 How to Individually Contribute to Making a Better World 41:09 *Join the TRIGGERnometry Community on Locals* 42:09 Can Our Institutions Be Saved? 46:09 The Role Technology Will Play in the Future 50:30 Is the West Making Itself More Vulnerable? 55:22 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is very, very clear is that there's something systemically wrong with these institutions. They are maladapted. They are a little bit like the dinosaurs that are watching this comet, you know, streak down the sky and are about to, it's about to hit the ground. You at least have no real ideology other than control. And they've gone to identity because it provides control. They have lost their authority, but now they can have control. The chaos is not going to go away.

We're not going to go back to, quote, normal. There's a tremendous stream of politics in the United States. I don't know if it's like that anywhere else. I suspect that it is. That wants to get back to normal. This is crazy stuff. You know, this idea that men aren't men and women are women. God, can we go back to?

Well, we're never going to get back to normal, okay? Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constance and Kisson. And this is a show for you. if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority and the New Millennium. Martin Gurrey, welcome to Trignometry.

Thank you. It's great to have you on the show. Fascinating read, fascinating concepts that you lay out. But before we get into that, tell everybody who are you, how are you where you are? What has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? The journey through life, huh? I mean, look at me. Those of who can't look at me should know that.

am not a young man, so that would be a long answer. I was born in Cuba. Before I was 10, I experienced a right-wing dictator and a left-wing totalitarian dictator. So by the time I came to the United States as a kid, I already understood that democracy at its worst was better than the next alternative. Okay. So I came to the U.S. and I have to say, I know that a lot of ink gets spilled, virtual ink gets spilled about the treatment of immigrants in this country. I can't recall a single instance of anything other than being welcomed, being a Cuban. If anything was an advantage with the girls. It never was a handicap, and I have no memory. I mean, at a very strange moment, my mind flipped, and I went from thinking in Spanish as thinking in English, and I remember my Spanish life in English in a very weird way.

My career was with CIA. I moved to the Washington area, and I was an analyst of global media, and we can talk about that more extensively later if you want. But, I mean, it's a least sexy job in CIA, okay? Like, I did not have my license to kill, and the lady didn't fall madly in love with me, except my wife, thankfully. But it turned out to be the strategically commanding heights to be at when the digital tsunami hit the world. Okay. So while I was there, I watched that tsunami smack. I mean, we were used to very, very small amounts of information, open information, when I was looking at open media across the world, sometimes in original, sometimes in translation. And we had this tiny little trickle we got to play with, and we knew what was authoritative or what wasn't. Suddenly there was this tile wave, this tsunami, they swept over everything, battered everything. What was authoritative in that?

well, beyond that question, which had never been answered, behind that tidal wave, I could see, and several of us could see, ever-increasing levels of sociopolitical turbulence. Things were going haywire in places like Egypt, for example. And I know it sounds kind of naive now, but at the time we were asking ourselves, what does this have to do? You know, a communication device like the Internet with politics. I mean, what, you know, today, of course, we know that the two things are intricately connected. And of course, the book was an attempt to, you know, my book, which I began to think about when I left government, was an attempt to answer that question. What is the connection between information structure and political change? And we can get more deeply into that. The book was first published as an e-book in 2014.

It did okay. Then came 2016. And Brexit happened and Donald Trump happened. And it did really, really well. And then Stripe Press offered to publish a second edition in various formats, like Hardbound and Audible. And that one came out at the end of 2018. And of course, all the madness. I'm sort of like Dr. Doom, you know.

Whenever things go terrible, the books start selling like mad. And of course we had January 6th and the election and all that. So it did fairly well after that. So it's an attempt to explain the madness, the craziness, the sort of like the difference between the way things used to be, what we used to consider to be normal life and what today seems to be bombarding us from every direction, including the hemorrhage of authority of our institutions that seemed to be very feeble and very destructive.

And one of the most interesting concepts, when you talk about the digital tsunami, you're talking about the fact that there's a huge amount of information that is now available to the public that in the past wouldn't have been. And that's combined or maybe even caused the fact that you now have a rise of populism, which is in your conception essentially people wanting revenge or some kind of, they want to punish perhaps the elites that they now increasingly distrust. and the elites themselves have no idea what to do. They don't have the protection. They used to have one, you know, if you were a member of the elite and you were having affairs and whatever, that wouldn't really get into the press most of the time, and you'd kind of be covered.

But now every mistake you make as a member of the elite gets exposed, people find out about it. And so you have this crumbling of trust in the elites from people who already don't like the elites and the information flows that we now have are increasingly amplifying that. So how is it? all impacting our world?

Well, I mean, basically you have to go back. Again, I reluctantly harked back to the fact that I am not a young man. I lived in the 20th century a chunk of my life, okay? A considerable chunk. And it was a different world. It was a different world. It dealt with that scarcity of information that I was talking about that was so comfy when I was a global media analyst.

And all our institutions. including our institutions of politics and democracy, but also media and also the entertainment world, also the scientific establishment, the academia, all of them basically were resting on the fact that we had no alternative sources of information. So they had authority because they did have, each institution had sort of a semi-monopoly on a stream of information. So, you know, Walter Kronkite stood.

and looked us in the eye, and he was a very imposing man, looked like your rich uncle or something, and deep voice, and he would say that's the way it is for February 2nd, 2023. You didn't think about the fact that he had given you like 23 minutes of two or three visual stories, and that's supposed to cover what happened in the world that entire day, right? You just thought, well, that's all I got, right? That entire world was swept away by the day,

by the digital tsunami. Now we have massive amounts of alternative information that works both inside and outside the institutions. The president, for example, in the olden days, relied heavily in CIA, but increasingly would say, wait, I'm reading this thing that's contrary to what you say, CIA. So the authority of the CIA was kind of like the president's newspaper, but like all newspapers, it's kind of losing authority and credibility. Why? Because there are so many alternative sources. sources. Plus, where do these sources come from? They don't come from the top. They come from the bottom. It's an eruption from the bottom of information that it's essentially represents a public that is very angry as what it has seen. The old 20th century world promised a lot. When things were not delivered, it could sort of put a lot of dirt under the carpet, but also you know, it could sacrifice an individual, a Richard Nixon say, but say, you know, the system worked.

We save the system. What is very, very clear is that there's something systemically wrong with these institutions. They are maladapted. And the elites, as you say, who are on top of these systems, who basically manage them. And all the institutions that make modern life possible are, they are not looking forward. They're looking backwards.

They're very reactionary. That world you described where you could have, you could be JFK. And apparently this is a man who had more affairs than a person like me can even conceive of, all right? And yet, and I guess everybody knew it in the inside circle of elite, the magic circle, everybody knew this was going on. But those of us who were outside that magic circle had no idea because he was protected. all right and that is what our current elites still well there's still too many boomers like me too many people who remember or are nostalgic for the 20th century and they want to drag us there they want to drag us back there and yes they are very terrified they're very panicked but they are working to get us

back there and if you look at twitter files and all the information has been coming out there there's a pretty concerted effort to turn the information sphere, the current turning digital information sphere into something that looks something like, or the front page of the New York Times circa 1985 or something like that. Martin, so what are the problems with these institutions? Well, the problems basically are, they are, they are a little bit like the dinosaurs that are watching this comet, you know, streak down the sky and are about to, it's about to hit the ground. They are, they were these great big, lumbering hierarchical things, you know, mostly immobile,

that they just find in the era of like mass production, mass audiences, everything was top down, the masses were included in these institutions, but at the bottom and as basically passive recipients of what the top was delivering, right? And in the digital age, that's basically you're dealing with a very, very chaotic environment. That digital tsunami is very unforgiving of these institutions. Unforgiving of the people who run them shows every mistake they make. That didn't seem to come out so much. Shows that they're promising things and remembers what they promise,

and it brings it back up in the olden days. there was a big memory hole you put the things that you said you were going to do and didn't get around to. And what could we do? We had no way of remembering. We had no way of bringing it up if we did. And essentially, we are, as public, we live in a world that's fairly flat, relatively flat. It moves at the speed of light. So that, for example, if I wanted something from Amazon, just push a button, you know, just push a button, you know, a key and it's on my doorstep on the next day. But if I deal with my government, it takes months and months to get things done. It may sometimes years, sometimes never, okay, depending on

which side of the government you're dealing with. And the attitudes are very different. We're used to personalization in the digital world. Well, no, the government treats you, and all these institutions, academia, for example, treat you as, so you come to us and then we kind of, we kind of to talk to you in our own terms, and then you will, you know, applaud us because it's what we deserve. And I think that method, which is a combination of structural problems within the institutions, and of rhetorical and also almost moral problems with the elite class that runs the institutions, I think it's made for a tremendous collision between that group and the rest of us, many of the rest of us anyway, who are fed up. They're just not happy with

the situation of want to change. Want government to look more like Amazon. I mean, Amazon is a great big institution. It's a great big hierarchy. But that's not what you encounter. You encounter service. Government gives you service, but that's not what you encounter. You encounter bureaucracy. You encounter condescension, arrogance. So we want one thing to be more like the other. I think it's perfectly doable. I don't think the elites want to do it. That's a really, really interesting point. And Martin, how long do you think the elites are going to be able to hold on to this power for? Because we're seeing in the UK, they're currently debating in the House of Lords the online safety bill about what people should and shouldn't be allowed to say online. And to me,

this looks like another paragraph, if I'm putting it bluntly. So how long do you think they're going to be able to hold on for? That's a really good question. And I have no answer. I don't make predictions. You want to be wrong, make a prediction, right? CIA, that was the CIA's entire business model was prediction for the precedent. And, you know, as long as tomorrow looks like yesterday, you're good, man. That's most of the time, believe it or not.

But, of course, what people want to know, clearly the precedent is, you know, discontinuities. And we can't predict those. I don't know. I've been surprised, I think, because nobody predicted COVID, which was the trigger where the public, was so afraid that they actually wanted the elites to be what the elites had been claiming to be from the 20th century on, which is we are the experts, we know, we have solutions to problems so that's almost a mathematical mindset to what are very squishy and difficult circumstances, not problems. But I think the public wanted desperately for this to be a mathematical problem

that could be solved right away by these wise people that were telling us they could do it. And I think so then nobody complained too loudly when social media was essentially censored so that non-institutional opinions about COVID were either muted or just blocked out from the information sphere. And of course, that took about five seconds before it tipped over into politics. And it was more a question of, well, we need to protect our democracy. to protect our elections and this Russian hacking. And suddenly everything that a certain side, you know, the progressive side found offensive, had become necessary to essentially censor.

And so how long can that last? I'm one who believes that the Internet is too big an area. It says it's virtually infinite. For human purposes, it's infinite. If you see how much gets ingested by YouTube in every minute, you go like, well, you can't put a fact. checker on every corner of this enormous territory. So I don't think it can be, it can be controlled, but I don't know. I mean, that's my guess. Well, Martin, what you're describing, sorry to interrupt, loath as I am to quote Vladimir Lenin, but he said that you know a revolution is coming when

those at the bottom can't take it anymore and those of the top don't want to give up what they have. And it sounds to me like that is exactly the situation that you're describing. Well, let's put it this way. Coming from Cuba, I'm not a real fan of revolutions, all right? Yeah, sure. Coming from Russia, I'm also not a big fan of revolution. Live it a revolution, Martin. Yeah, so I, and what you said is, has a big caveat attached to it, okay? I think the short answer is it depends on us, all right? Where this heads depends on us.

And if we're passive, then the elites will have what they had before in a very ramshackle, much more ramshackle and spotty way, or they had some sort of control because we just kind of passively allowed it to happen as we did during COVID. But the difference with the Lenin quote and now is that Lenin was a head. of what was a typical 20th century revolutionary organization, which was, when you looked at that, the Bolshevik Party, was a tiny little hierarchy that longed and lusted to take power and become government, the state itself, right? And had a very powerful ideology that it followed, and attaching or flowing from that ideology,

had any number of programs that would be imposed if you took over the state. because the ideologies suggested or mandated that. The public today has, oh, and you had a leader at the top of the organization that could just say, and Lenin himself could say, okay, this is always going to happen. I mean, when Lenin arrived at the Finland station, he said, we're going to have a revolution. And his entire group said, no, we're not. And he said, yes, we are, and they did, okay? And he was right.

He called that situation much more clearly than they did. Today, when you look at the revolt to the public in places like Chile, places like Spain with the indignados, the U.S. with the occupier, Black Lives Matter, there are no leaders. Not only is there no ideology, it's almost anti-ideology. There are no programs, okay? There is no coherent set of, and there is no wish. There is no wish to take over power by any of these groups. It is a very, very paradoxical thing. They attack, they loathe the institution, they loathe the elites, they loathe the government.

And then they say, we hate this thing about you. Fix it. They basically, they then cede to the government the duty of reform or revolution or whatever you want to call it, right? Which, of course, it never works. Never works. So you have, for example, in Egypt, this crowd, this revolt in Tari Resort. square, that probably was the determining factor in getting the dictator, the Hosnamu Barak, 30 years had been in the power out of there. He got overthrown. Then what happens? Well, who knows? The crowd had nothing to do with what happened afterwards. Two old-fashioned hierarchical

institutions, the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood slugged it out for the next few years, the military won. But the public had nothing to do with that because they had no ideology. no program, no leaders, no organization. So, yes, you can say that we can't take it anymore, but what do we put in this place? What do we put in place? And even January 6th is in some ways an example of that. People quote unquote storm the capital,

but they don't have a plan or a program to do anything, right? It's an interesting point that you make. I suppose the big question that bothers me in all of this is, If we accept the framing that in the past, let's say, elite institutions dictated to the public what the truth was. And there was general consensus, more or less, about what the truth was. And of course, people would argue, you know, do we need communism or do we need capitalism or do we need socialism? But it was still from a common shared set of beliefs about the world. Now we've got to a point where I think the real problem is we're getting to the stage where,

it's hard to know what the truth is anymore. Yeah. I mean, we're a moment of post-truth, and I don't mean that in the way that many liberal and progressive thinkers portray that that phrase, which is post-truth is what Trump does, for example, or what, you know, with people who clearly lie and yet seem to have the fact that they're telling something that's not factually correct seems to have no effect on their popularity. That's only one aspect of it. I think it cuts it every way. The digital dispensation has fractured us. That is what it does. And a case can be made. That's the way the public really is. In other words, what we were before, a mass audience was a very artificial

construct that kind of served the people that were manufacturing to us and were entertaining us on television. So you had two or three, you know, varieties of everything. And we were happy with that. No, I don't think so. We would have wanted much more. And so from personalization on out, we're very fractured.

I think that we're kind of like a mirror that has fallen. and the public lives on the broken shards, and each shard has a perspective on reality. I'm not a postmodernist, okay? If you stand, if I'm standing in the middle of a street and I see a truck coming at me, I can't postmodern my way out of being run over, all right? I'm going to just jump and get out of the way. But most of what we deal with in our society today, most of the facts, most of the reality, most of the truth that we deal with our society are mediated.

They're given to us by someone, starting with your teachers and then all the way out with authorities that you trust, the media, and so forth. And I think that is what's also fractured. And so post-truth is the idea that in certain quarters, people still believe that Donald Trump was colluding with the Russians. That's been pretty much refuted, you know, with deep, deep investigations. the Q&N people that stormed the capital building believed that our government was run by a pedophile ring, right? So, I mean, these are, so the dangerous side of that is that at some point we disintegrate into the Tower of Babel.

We're all speaking different languages and we're kind of yelling at each other. and Jonathan Haidt has a very interesting article at that point. He stole the metaphor from me, though. I want to know. We'll take it up with him when we have him on the show. And he acknowledged it. He acknowledged it. So my point,

yeah, just two more things. It is that there is a point at which you have to somehow act and you have to act on the reality that you understand to be, right? And that's hard under these conditions. That's the dangerous side. the plus side, science tells us that we don't have a firm grasp on truth. I mean, the whole idea of science is not that it grants us truth, is that we don't know truth. And I think maybe there's a healthy aspect to realizing that there are different perspectives on truth. Truth is

perspectable. It's not, it's the postmodern thing that it's not constructed. It's perspectable. And I can, you know, if you are at the top of the Empire State building, New York looks like the heavenly city. If you're at the bottom of the Empire State building, you know, and there's a, you know, homeless person, retching on the sidewalk and traffic and pollution, it looks like hell. Well, it's the same New York City. It just depends on your perspective. And I think it's maybe it's good to have our sense, our perspectives questioned by others. Yeah, I completely agree with you, Martin. To me, and one of the questions I wanted to ask you is that you talked about a lack of ideology within these kind of rebel movements, so we just call them, for the sake of argument.

But there also seems to be a lack of ideology in our elites as well, doesn't there? There doesn't seem to be a consistent way of thinking that they have. Yeah, I would say that's true to a certain extent. But certainly in America, the United States, the elites have converted. It's mass conversion. I mean, it's something that I think anything has happened to the age of Emperor Constantine, right? The entire institutional set.

And I'm talking from like, you know, crusty old corporations like Coca-Cola all the way to the government, to academia, to entertainment, to. scientific establishment, everybody has converted to the cult of identities. I call it the established church, right? So now, identity is not an ideology.

Identity is sort of like a perpetual conflict machine. An ideology reconciles contradictions and provides a context for a path to justice defining a specific way, right? This is not like that.

I mean, this is more of an endless jockeying, grinding of who gets what. You know, I'm a victim, I'm a victim, I'm a victim, I'm a victim. But there is no way of basically justifying or ameliorating the conflict between victims, right? So if you're a black person, you get precedence over a white person. but if you were a black woman, you should get proceedings over a black man, but if you're a black lesbian, you should get proceedings over a black cis lady, right? So how do you need some gigantic algorithm here or some kind of thing like that to even work out how it happens? So yes, you at least have no real ideology other than control, and they've gone to identity because it provides control.

their authority, but now they can have control. They can tell you you are not allowed to use that word because it's offensive. It causes harm. And of course, all the words they put in that stack are the words that convey opinions they don't like. Yeah, it's a really, really good point, Martin. And we're talking about this kind of post-truth world, but doesn't it mean that in a post-truth world it's impossible to have a cohesive society? because the most important thing is that we all agree that something is true.

And if we can't do that, then how can we have any type of discussion or debate? Well, at some level, that's true. Well, let's not forget that liberal democracy is an amazing invention, right? And what you're describing is the world of a 30-year-s war, right? where I believe in a certain kind of God, and I believe in a certain kind of Christianity and a certain kind of life that must follow from that. And because you believe in something very slightly different, the kind of thing that, from the perspective of history, seems almost insignificant, right?

But there's a few words difference between what you believe or what I believe. We have to now kill each other, all right? And liberal democracy, which evolved out of that world as a way to solve that dilemma. How do we do that? Allowed for people who believed in radically different religious, cosmic views, sources of meaning, which in the end are the most important things to any human being or to any community, to be side by side with very different ones that believe in very, you know, if you are an atheist, that's not a minor difference anymore.

Or if you're a Muslim or a Jew, that's not a minor difference anymore. And yet we all lived peacefully with each other, although our beliefs about cosmic truth were so different. Something like that can be worked out. You just have to want to work it out. The incentives in the digital world, unfortunately, so far, have all been towards conflict, because we do live in the Tower of,

Babel, people who speak with soft voices are just not heard. You need to scream. And if you can scream with anger in your voice, you catch a little more attention. And you can scream with anger in your voice and you get somebody on the other side to scream back at you. Now you're suddenly a hero. Right. And people start to gather behind you and behind the other person. And you have a sort of heroic battle of barbarians, you know, like they used to happen in the dark ages. That's the incentive so far of the digital world, but it doesn't have to be. So how does this get fixed? Oh, well, of course, if I had the answer to that, I wouldn't be talking to you guys.

I'd be counting my billions. Yeah. I mean, I go back to what I said before. It's all up to us. Nothing is determined. I am not a determinist. I don't believe like the Marxists do that there is a fixed direction of history. I don't believe there is that... But, Martin, hold on. Hold on.

You, I think, would agree with me that human beings, first and foremost respond to incentives. And if you have an incentive structure that incentivizes conflict, you will get conflict. And if you have an incentive structure that doesn't incentivize conflict and incentivizes cooperation, for example, you will get cooperation. So as you say yourself, in this current climate, particularly online, we have an incentive structure that incentivizes people to antagonize each other, to see each other as enemies, to see each other as, you know, almost subhuman.

when I observe people's interactions, it feels like that. So how do we change that incentive structure? Because at this point, it's not just that it's a random accident of the fact that online seems to have created this. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, they're all invested in this. YouTube is invested in this. It benefits them because these are the things that get clicks online. So how does this get fixed?

Well, I mean, how did the 30 years, war end, right? I mean, in the end, there are many, the same structure can be applied differently. So the 30 years war ended with exhaustion, all right, with exhaustion. Look, we're in the early, early days of a colossal transformation that from the industrial age to something that doesn't even have a name yet. Okay. I am not going to see the end of that. You guys, I'm looking at you, you may not see the end of it, all right? You say we're old, mate. We're not going to make it. Well, you can interpret it that way or you can interpret that this is going to be a long, long process. Okay. So what is going to be at the end? Okay, when I say it's up to us, the chaos is not

going to go away. We're not going to go back to, quote, normal. There's a tremendous stream of politics in the United States. I don't know if it's like that anywhere else. I suspect that it is. That wants to get back to normal. This is crazy stuff. You know, this idea that men aren't men and women aren't women. God, can we go back to?

Well, we're never going to get back to normal, okay? But we can carry to the end of this process those things that are really important to us. For me, it's democracy, for example. Okay. So what happened at 30 years' war was exhaustion, all these, religions fought themselves to a standstill and suddenly something new came up, the nation state that said, hell with this, right? We are now going to impose a way of being that is less destructive. Well, we can't see what's going to be happening in 10, 15, 20 years from now, but the same incentive

structure that today seems to generate a lot of views, may 10, 15, 15 years down the road, make people sick because they've been added for so long and then the incentives will flip all right the incentives will flip it's possible i'm not saying it's going to happen i'm not saying it's not going to happen it's up to us no i think you're right and action always causes some kind of reaction and people will get fed up of this and i already you know one of the conversations we we obviously on this show talked a lot about this progressive the excesses of progressive ideology and how it's infected all sorts of different industries, et cetera. But on the other hand, a lot of people, I think, in our space

are starting to think about, okay, well, we've identified what the problem is, what's the answer? What is a positive vision for the future that people can unite around that actually inspires people? So I suppose my question for you is, if it's up to us, what is a responsible person who's watching or listening to this? What are we to do in our own lives about all of this? Right.

Okay. Start with this. all that anger or all that questioning, let's call it, all that distrust, all that pushiness, let's call it, that you are now aiming at people that you don't even know and at institutions that you have no access to. Start by aiming that at yourself, all right? And I'm almost struck when I look at the Victorians, the English Victorians, okay? I have such a terrible reputation for being smug and being self-righteous. How not like that they were, all right?

Go read Gladstone's diary. This man was, you know, one of the great figures in the world, one of the great prime ministers of Britain. And he was very Christian. And his diary was one gigantic self-questioning. And the answers were he felt very inadequate. He was not yelling at everybody else for not living up to his expectations. He was asking himself, how can I be better? And he did some very strange things trying to do that.

We can't get into that later if you want. But I think we need to start with that. We need to ask ourselves, we need to have a more thoughtful relationship with our elites. the Spanish philosopher Jose Garcia Jose Ortega-Gasette says that we have a mutual selective relationship with our elites

so think about the people that not just that you vote for or the parties that you give money for but who do you what movies do you see you patronize right? What products do you buy? What companies do you give you money to?

You are basically selecting an elite class by doing that. Be more thoughtful about that, okay? And we need a new elite class. I mean, honestly, I think the current class we have just is mired in 20th century reactionary thinking, and we need an elite class. This will not be solved until that changes. Because I am not a radical egalitarian. Nothing gets done without institutions being at it, institutions being hierarchy of some kind, and hierarchies require elites. So they'll have to be shallower, within a class of elites that is more comfortable being far closer to the public than the current elite class is. And we have at least a part of a role in selecting that elite class.

And then be what you would want others to be. Part of the reasons, for example, that I never say make predictions is because it's bullshit. bullshit. I mean, I would be pretending to do something that I cannot do. In principle, we cannot predict the future. I would love for people to think that I can that would make me a very important person. But if I do it and I fail, I have tarnished my integrity. I have tarnished my authority as anybody who knows anything, right? So speak humbly. Speak directly and don't dance around. And have some courage. I think part of what's happening to us now, and this is more in the public side, is people are afraid to speak out because they can lose their jobs.

They can lose their, they can be, you know, silence in social media. They can be demonetized. All kinds of bad things can happen to you. Well, damn it, you know, do it. Do it. If you really believe in what you're doing, you know, speak out. Do what Pope John Paul said. be not afraid, be not afraid.

And that he was talking about the people in places like Poland who were in the communist governments. The punishment there was a lot worse than it is here. So do it. And I think if that trajectory is followed, this entire, you know, churning crazy Tower of Babel's circumstance will start to crystallize in something more manageable. It's a really good point you make. Do you think our institutions can be saved or do you think we need to build?

or do you think we need to build new institutions? I think both. I think both. I think the old institutions certainly can't stay the way they are. You look at political parties, the traditional political parties today, and it's no wonder that they're completely just withered up and they're just shriveled versions of what they used to be.

But there's so many different ways in which you can run a political party. I mean, you can run a political party like a sub-reddit, you know? Like you can just say, what does everybody interested in and the issues that the majority are interested in rise to the top? And then at least the elites that run the party understand what the base is really, really looking at, not the other way around where the elites tell the base, this is what you're interested in, and everybody's shaking their heads and nobody's listening, right? So some institutions, I mean, like the newspaper is gone.

I mean, there are many institutions that are just basically going to be swept away. Some are going to be drastically altered, and I believe our politics are going to be very drastically altered. But all this has happened before. I mean, you can call it reform rather than revolution. Here in the United States, for example, our founders and framers, who were such a brilliant crew, basically created a republic of gentlemen. Then in the early 20th century, that was drastically changed. What was erected was the system that we're not trying to leave behind,

that 20th century mass system that basically incorporated literally tens of millions of people that were just entering history at that time, and at the bottom of these mass structures like mass production, mass parties, mass movements, mass consumerism, mass entertainment. So the system has been changed. The institutions have been changed. They can be changed again. We think of them.

We call it the federal government, and we call it, you know, the state governments. And we think of them as if they have been the same from George Washington's day to around. They're very different. If Thomas Jefferson, one of my favorite persons in history, woke up and he's also a Virginia, like I am, and took a look at what was going on with the government today, he would crawl back in his grave and never come out again, okay? It's a very different world, a different, different set of institutional world from the one he expected would be created. So we can change the institutions.

We can move them from the past to the future. It's happened before. Some will wither away, and that's fine. Some will be drastically altered. I don't think any will be unchanged. All of them will be changed in some way or another. Yeah. that's yeah i keep so i keep reiterating that's a good point because the thing that i like about you martin

is that your answers are very measured and it's very easy in these times to be a polemicist to go one way or another because as you said before it gets clicks but what's very so we need you to do more of that if you want this interview to get watched yeah exactly we need the million views martin tell me society's going to crumble but what effect do you think technology is going to play in this? Because it's obviously going to play a major part, and now we're going to see the rise of AI, and I know you don't do predictions, but you can already see things are being shaped by technology. I mean, information structure sets the stage and arranges the props for the human drama. Part of the reason that we cannot go back to the 20th century is because we have a 20th century

stage set and the props are arranged for the 21st century. And the elites, you know, I sometimes I probably shouldn't use this comparison because most young people don't even know what I'm talking about. You guys know what the Marx brothers were? Yeah, of course. Okay. Well, don't say of course. Do you be surprised at a number of young people that I say that to it? And they go, huh? So 21st century stage is set for something like a Marx Brothers comedy. It's kind of slapstick, irreverent, crazy, makes no sense, people falling down, people standing up. The elites desperately want to play Hamlet. It's Shakespeare. It's epic. It's important. But the problem is this, you know, even if you play Hamlet, it's going to be Groucho Marx playing

Hamlet, and he's going to do pratfalls, all right? So it just can't work. It just can't work. So technology is going to play a fundamental part in this. It's already played a fundamental part. Now it comes the human aspect. Now comes the human moment where we take the technology and make it our own in a way, hopefully, if things go right, in a way that sustains democracy and sustains our prosperity and maybe tones down the incentive for conflict. And what gives you reason to hope?

Because a lot of the times when we talk about this, when we talk about these issues, people say, you know, they point out the things that we should worry about. And of course, that's a valid argument. But we don't also talk about the positives as well. Yeah. Okay. Let's go back to the 30 years war, all right? I always like to tell a story that my friend Antonio Garcia Martinez, a fellow Cuban, tells, which is if you went to the 30 years war, which, by the way, was the most devastating war in Europe,

including World War II, ever. I think Germany, it took like three or four generations to even go back to its former population. If you go back to that war and interview the man in the street and ask them, what do you think of the people? printing press. That person would say it's the most destructive, horrible, and evil innovation ever, take it away and destroy it. Because at that time, people were coming out of church with their little hymnals. And my hymnal had those three words that were different from yours. And now I had to kill you. And you had to kill me, right? So the printing press was responsible for this fragmentation, which tends to happen with new information structures. And, and, you know, and And it was, basically, it was represented in hideous, horrible violence.

We're not there. Okay, you want to be optimistic? This is not the 30 years war. Come on. Look around you. Look around you. Yes, we're yelling at each other. But you know what?

It just flipped down the monitor on your laptop. And, okay, I can tell you, I'm looking, if I were to do that, I would be looking at the window of my neighborhood in Vienna, Virginia where people are peacefully walking their dogs and waving at each other as they pass in the streets. And I don't know whether they're pro-Trump or they're pro-woke or they're any, they're just my neighbors, okay? And they're walking their dogs or they're just exercising or whatever. So this is not the 30 years war. Let's not exaggerate the conflict. I think part of what Tower of Babel effect is, it's so loud, it's so uproarious.

And it's so surrounding us, if we're online, just everywhere. But this is not life. We're not shooting at each other. We're not killing each other, mostly, all right? So if you want to be optimistic, we can get past this moment. It took 150 years for the human race to figure out what to do with the printing press. And it probably won't take as long. Things move faster now to figure out the digital information structure.

But it will take a long time. It will take a long time. And we may get there without massive bloodshed. So far there hasn't been any. Well, that is certainly a good thing. Although, of course, I would argue that some of the excesses of what people call the culture war, it does bleed out into real life. I mean, if you look at the trans issue, for example, there are real world impacts of that

particular worldview on young people and women in particular. But of course, you're right. We're not killing each other. And the curious thing for me, speaking of killing each other, is what do you think the impact is of this on the West versus its adversaries, let's put it gently, because we spend a lot of time in the West doing this division and argument and conflict thing in a way that other cultures are not. Are we making ourselves more vulnerable or will the West prevail in this situation? What are your thoughts?

Yeah, what is the West? I mean, that is such an old-fashioned category, right, that you probably get banned on Twitter, you know, before Musk by even using that term. I, look, I intuitively would agree with you, except I'm looking at the world. This is what I do, right? This is what I've been trained to do. I'm looking at the world, and let's talk about the West. Let's talk about liberal democracy, okay? And, okay, what are the right, what are the rivals of liberal democracy. Well, again, back in the 20th century, there was a severe, there were several, there were several major rivals. Liberal democracy at a certain point, that was before my time, was considered to be old-fashioned and useless, right? And the fascists and

the Nazis and the Bolsheviks all had better ways. Well, where are those systems now? Well, they basically have bit the dust. What is the ideological rival? What system is the arrival of liberal democracy today? There is none, right? And what countries are undemocratic and hostile to us because we are democratic? Well, look at Iran, it's a mess. People are shouting from the rooftops. I was watching this video. Shouting from the rooftops of Tehran, you know, Ayatollah, you're a dictator, go away, resign, right? I mean, there's tremendous, tremendous anti-government, anti-regime upsurge of anger. Look at Russia. Russia is a bear that got stuck in its own trap. I mean, it thought it was going to walk over Ukraine, and it's got this army that is so incredibly incompetent that it essentially can't move forward. It's incapable of aggressive maneuver. And it's got a demographic hole that the entire country is falling in so that in another

generation or so Russia being a power won't even be a consideration. Look at China. We would have thought, well, they're the ones. They're the ones that are really kind of pushing us back. Well, not that long ago, people were yelling in the streets of China, you know, Zijiping, you are a dictator, resign, the Communist Party is no good because they had imposed this bizarre zero COVID policy on the public, and you would see videos. This is the information environment.

You can see videos of people yelling from their balconies. You can see videos of somebody whose wives had jumped from a balcony because they have been stuck alone for so long. She's been depressed, and she killed herself. And what happened? Well, the mighty G reverses his zero policy. Zero COVID policy. I mean, on a dime, they must.

Either he was scared and backed away, or there are still people in that very, very opaque regime who can force action policies that he doesn't like because they backed away on a dime. So they're also in some kind of trouble. So we are a mess. Look, starting with the United States, you know, the American people are suffering what I call a psychotic episode. We're a mess. We're a mess. but everything in life, what you learn, is relative.

And I look at, I kindly didn't speak of Europe, but I look at everybody who is not the United States and certainly everybody who's not democratic. And relatively speaking, they're bigger mess than we are. Well, there's a relief. People are even more messed up than we are. Martin, it's been a pleasure speaking with you. We're going to ask you a couple of questions from our supporters that they've already submitted.

But before we do, we always finish with the same question, which is, what is the one thing that we're not talking about as a society that you think we really should be? Yeah, I would say it should be how do we reform ourselves? So that's a moral question, in other words. Morality is very, very, it's hard to talk about. And I tend not to talk about it because I feel like I know a lot about a few little things, but morality is about being, right? And why the heck should you listen to anything I've got to say? You don't know who I am.

I could be a bad person. So we each can only do that from the inside and talked about it briefly before. We need to kind of step back from thinking that people who are online are somehow, have direct influence on our lives. you have influence of your life. What happens on a computer screen doesn't have that much influence on your life. And number two, reform the institutions. I think our politics are very policy-driven, but instead of talking about policies, we just talk about institutional reform. Because whatever policy we settle, for example, on immigration, you, under the current institutional framework, are going to spark a revolt of at least 50% of the public,

probably more, right? So we need to reform those institutions, make them more like Amazon and less like, you know, the great pyramid of Egypt. And it concerns me, honestly, that we keep fighting about the marginalia, the policies instead of getting to the heart of the matter, which is how do we move from the 20th century institutionally to the 21st? Martin, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. If people want to find you online, ironically enough if they want to buy your books where is the best place to do that well amazon of course you can buy the book there i mean i think even in in uh britain these days it's it's in the bookstores or it can be um and online i i am mostly i mean i i write way too much and uh you can find

me at a discourse uh and um at city journal for example there are two of my favorite places to to write for. So that's just pretty much where. And Martin, thank you so much for coming on. Stay with us for the bonus questions. But for now, thank you so much. And thank you guys for watching and listening. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or a

show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. See you on locals. What advice would you give anyone who wants to diminish their digital footprint, particularly with respect to government and big business.