Transcript
Speaker: Thanks for tuning in to CARP Radio, the official podcast of George Mason University's Character Assassination and Reputation Politics Research Lab.
Speaker: Every month, we bring on new guests to explore the science of scandal, public character, and reputation management.
Speaker: My name is Deirdre Jane Praga, and I'm a student at George Mason University and the media coordinator for the CARP Lab.
Speaker: We are a team of international scholars studying character assassination in politics, entertainment, and science.
Speaker: You can learn more about our mission at carpresearchlab.org.
Speaker: In the coming months, we'll be releasing conversations with authors, journalists, scholars, and other experts with valuable insights about reputation and character assassination.
Speaker: For updates on our work, make sure to follow us on Twitter at carp underscore lab.
Speaker: If you like what you hear or have any suggestions for future episodes, please leave us a comment and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker: In 1962, media theorist Marshall McLuhan described the future as a global village, a world in which the communication of knowledge would no longer be limited by the constraints of geography.
Speaker: More pessimistically, he also described this global village as one that absolutely ensures maximal disagreement on all points.
Speaker: In the 59 years since McLuhan coined the term, the global village has become a reality and the public's distrust in the institutions that used to tell us what was true and false is only growing.
Speaker: This institutional legitimacy crisis has created a great demand for new authorities to trust, providing opportunities for charismatic opinion leaders to step in and fill the void.
Speaker: Their bombastic and often outrageous personalities are perfectly suited for a media ecosystem that profits from clickbait content,
Speaker: leading to the proliferation of falsehoods, unwarranted ad hominem attacks, and belligerent rhetoric.
Speaker: This destructive cycle normalizes a culture of incivility with negative consequences for civil debate and well-functioning democracy.
Speaker: That's why I'm so excited to welcome my guest today, who literally wrote the book on the ongoing struggle between elite institutions and the insurgent public.
Speaker: My guest, Martin Gorey, is a former CIA analyst specializing in the relationship between politics and global media.
Speaker: His book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, first published in 2014 and updated in 2018, has been praised for foreshadowing the political shocks of Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump.
Speaker: Mr. Goury has contributed numerous articles on geopolitical and media related topics for sites like City Journal and Discourse Magazine, and his blog, The Fifth Wave, pursues the themes first elaborated in the revolt of the public.
Speaker: Mr. Goury is also a visiting research fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, where you can find links to all of his work.
Speaker: Hi, it's so wonderful to have you.
Speaker: Great to be here.
Speaker: I want to start with your book's title because I think it sums up your thesis really elegantly.
Speaker: When I first heard the name of the book, I immediately assumed it was a reference to the Revolt of the Elites by Christopher Lash.
Speaker: However, it's not.
Speaker: It's a reference to a work by the early 20th century Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega Igase.
Speaker: Hope I got that name right.
Speaker: Can you discuss why you chose this title and, um,
Speaker: what Ortega's ideas can tell us about the moment we're in today?
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: I actually had never read Lasher's book.
Speaker: When I wrote mine, it's been paired, so I felt like I had to go back and read it.
Speaker: I have read it since, but I had not read it when I wrote The Revolt to the Public.
Speaker: Ortega Gasset tried to explain the world as it was in the 1930s, where you had these democracies that seemed to be collapsing into totalitarian governments.
Speaker: And he proposed that there was such a thing as a masked m an, a person who basically had been given all the privileges of modern democratic life, but seemed to take all of those for granted and to feel that
Speaker: that they were kind of like as natural as the air he breathed.
Speaker: However, everything that person did not have, he raged about.
Speaker: So he was basically given far more than his ancestors.
Speaker: He had education, he had affluence, he had a shelter, he had clothing, he had food on the table.
Speaker: But he wanted more.
Speaker: He wanted meaning in life.
Speaker: He wanted things that were probably unattainable.
Speaker: And he named this person Masked Man and he wrote a book that was, I thought,
Speaker: brilliant, a brilliant analysis, because it was in the 30s before the war, of what was happening, even as he was describing it, as that whole system was tumbling into that terrible conflict.
Speaker: Well, when I looked at the world when I was in CIA, at that moment when what I call the
Speaker: tsunami of digital information smashed into the 20th century institutions.
Speaker: There seemed to be something very similar to that.
Speaker: The masses, that's a very 20th century, I would say, term.
Speaker: It assumes that you're just this passive thing that somebody comes in and then takes advantage of your thinking and rides your faith of utopia.
Speaker: into becoming a dictator or a populist president or whatever.
Speaker: Whereas the publics are very active, very active.
Speaker: The mass audience was a very passive entity.
Speaker: The public is hyperactive, politically hyperactive.
Speaker: The public has leaped on the political stage and has become the leading actor or a leading actor there.
Speaker: And it has done that, of course, through the magic of the digital universe.
Speaker: It can basically create the framework for a tremendous protest on the streets or for any number of things, including electing a populist, without ever actually getting itself organized the way that a radical group, right or left, would have had to do in the 20th century.
Speaker: So the revolt of the public is...
Speaker: I borrowed the title very consciously from Ortega, who I consider to be a towering figure.
Speaker: And at the time that I was looking at this, it seemed that people weren't noticing it, right?
Speaker: It was something that was happening.
Speaker: I saw it, it wasn't that I've been accused of prophecy or prediction.
Speaker: I never do that.
Speaker: I don't believe it's possible, right?
Speaker: Having lived in CIA for many, many years, and that's the business model of CIA is prophecy.
Speaker: And as I always say,
Speaker: When tomorrow looks just like yesterday, CIA got it right.
Speaker: When tomorrow is completely different from yesterday, when you have a discontinuity, which is actually what the president wants to hear about, invariably, CIA got it wrong.
Speaker: So I wasn't predicting anything.
Speaker: I was seeing it.
Speaker: I guess I was in a very high place.
Speaker: at CIA because I was an analyst of global media, so I had a view of the entire world of media.
Speaker: And I could see, and many of us could, it wasn't just me, this thing happening.
Speaker: And it was astonishing to me that nobody was paying attention.
Speaker: Well, Donald Trump and Brexit kind of fixed that, right?
Speaker: So everybody now knows how they revolve to the public.
Speaker: The crisis of authority is probably the most important part of this, okay, which is that tsunami, and it links to your subject, I think, that tsunami of information stripped away the authority of institutions and individuals who basically had had that authority because they had been able to
Speaker: have a semi-monopoly, if it was at the time, and I'm old enough to have spent most of my life in that time, a very small trickle of information.
Speaker: Suddenly, these institutions that had a claim to know things were shown as not knowing them.
Speaker: These people who claimed they could do things were shown as incapable of doing them.
Speaker: And so part of the anger of the public, part of its negation, its repudiation of institutions has to do with this loss of authority.
Speaker: Our institutions are basically totally maladapted to this information environment.
Speaker: And liberal democracy is among those institutions.
Speaker: Everything that is part of our political life,
Speaker: has been designed by the 20th century.
Speaker: It's very steep, very pyramidal, very different from the way you and I live our normal everyday lives, which is in this flat internet world where I can be sitting right next to the president on a queue of tweets, for example, and I can be yelling at him if I want to, or I can press a button and at the speed of light, I have food at my doorstep a day later or something like that.
Speaker: Whereas the institutions are ponderous.
Speaker: I was just talking to somebody who the businessman had a tremendous need to travel.
Speaker: His passport had expired and there is a three day passport thing you can do where you get it that fast.
Speaker: It took six weeks.
Speaker: He almost had to cancel his trip.
Speaker: I mean, why does it take...
Speaker: you know, a day to get something delivered by Amazon, but six weeks to get a simple passport by somebody who's already had a passport.
Speaker: So it's not like this person is a terrorist or an unknown entity.
Speaker: So the crisis of authority has to do with that.
Speaker: And there probably are very many small humiliations like that one that are just as important as the big ones having to do with, you know, the crisis of 2008 when the economy went belly up and stuff like that.
Speaker: I think there are as many little
Speaker: you know, humiliations where you approach this entity being used to being treated with speed and dexterity.
Speaker: And they don't care.
Speaker: They don't care.
Speaker: They seem not to care.
Speaker: The system is such that you have to basically genuflect and beg and plead.
Speaker: And maybe you'll get it in six weeks when they promised it in three days.
Speaker: So the crisis of authority is something we had.
Speaker: I think everybody now knows
Speaker: the revolt of the public is happening.
Speaker: I think people need to wake up to the fact that there is a crisis of authority.
Speaker: In my opinion, it is the greatest and most serious political issue of our moment, far more so than any policy question.
Speaker: And it relates a little bit to your
Speaker: your idea of character assassination, of course, because most people today have a, the public has a very, very negative view of the elites.
Speaker: They start out, the default position is these people are crooks.
Speaker: They probably have
Speaker: They're running around with men or women, depending on whether they're not their spouses.
Speaker: They're using their position to basically engage their desires rather than promote the national interest and certainly not to help me, the ordinary person.
Speaker: So anybody who makes an accusation against anybody in authority is bound to be listened.
Speaker: And structurally,
Speaker: Because there's so much information, the best way to be heard is to yell and scream at somebody, right?
Speaker: And to call people names.
Speaker: There is a sort of a rhetorical war of all against all in this gigantic information sphere that promotes information.
Speaker: what you might call character assassination to me sounds very 20th century and old fashioned because I mean, in the internet, every discussion in the internet ends with death threats.
Speaker: And if you're a woman, it's probably rape threats.
Speaker: I mean, it's just completely out of control.
Speaker: I also wanted to address one thing you mentioned.
Speaker: You weren't predicting anything special when you saw what was going on in the information landscape.
Speaker: But a lot of people, especially people you might call elites, were very blindsided, especially after Brexit and the Trump election, I would say, was the high water point.
Speaker: they never predicted that these things would happen.
Speaker: In fact, there were some predictions made, oh, 99% Trump will not be elected.
Speaker: And then when it happened, they started to go look for explanations that might explain what they were seeing.
Speaker: Why do you think that they missed out on what you were seeing?
Speaker: Do you think they just couldn't see the trends because they weren't analyzing media like you were?
Speaker: Do you think there's a little bit of people don't want to believe things they don't want to hear?
Speaker: What do you think the reasons for that were?
Speaker: Deirdre, that is the million dollar question, I think.
Speaker: And it goes far beyond what you described.
Speaker: It is remarkable.
Speaker: I mean, I follow these things.
Speaker: It is remarkable.
Speaker: Every time, every time, there is a street protest that erupts from below.
Speaker: And I mean, there have been literally dozens of these in the year.
Speaker: 2019 alone, there were 25 major protests.
Speaker: street protests, street uprisings, not even counting the populace that got elected to office.
Speaker: Every time the elites of this global because we tend in America to speak of ourselves as we were the only
Speaker: game in town, but this is the world.
Speaker: This is the world, right?
Speaker: So this is not an American problem.
Speaker: This is a global problem.
Speaker: This is not an American transition to something new.
Speaker: This is a global kind of collapse of an old way.
Speaker: And every time, every time the elites, the first thing that happens is they look at each other and go, who are these people?
Speaker: Where do they come from?
Speaker: Because they never I mean, and I mean, not once that I can think of came from an organized entity that their, say, security agencies or their police departments might have been monitoring.
Speaker: These were people who were sitting around.
Speaker: Originally, it was Facebook.
Speaker: They said that still happens on Facebook now and then.
Speaker: But now they've transitioned to encrypted apps, you know, like Telegraph or WhatsApp or whatever.
Speaker: And so they're sitting there talking for sometimes.
Speaker: for like a year, the yellow vest thing in France, where people suddenly in the hundreds of thousands erupted in the streets of Paris and other cities, had been going on in what they call groups de coller, anger groups, on Facebook.
Speaker: So all you had to do was go in one of those groups and realize that Macron was in deep trouble with this crowd, and yet...
Speaker: I mean, I became kind of a I'm sort of a hero in France because when that happened, they turned to the book and I got invited to France, which is great.
Speaker: A bunch of times to explain, no, this is what's going on in your country, by the way.
Speaker: And it's going against it's not particularly French anymore than it's American.
Speaker: It's going on around the world.
Speaker: They had no clue.
Speaker: They literally had no clue.
Speaker: They're looking at these people who had no leadership, no organization, no programs, no ideology.
Speaker: And yet there they were on the street yelling and screaming and burning, trying to burn down banks and vandalizing monuments.
Speaker: And who are these people?
Speaker: What do they want?
Speaker: Where did they come from?
Speaker: Every time, every time.
Speaker: The reason I can speculate, I honestly, if I were to be sincere with you, I wish I knew I can speculate.
Speaker: I think the elite world, and I mean globally again, not just in the United States, but ours too, lives in the 20th century.
Speaker: And they live in the 20th century because it was real comfy.
Speaker: In those days, the institution, it doesn't matter what kind of a clown you were, your institution that you sat on top of gave you authority.
Speaker: And so you could speak to the masses and say,
Speaker: well, this is what the world is, or this is what I'm going to do to end unemployment.
Speaker: And the masses passively sat there.
Speaker: The worst they could do was switch you out, switch out the set, right?
Speaker: I mean, they couldn't yell back.
Speaker: And that was a great world.
Speaker: And the elites,
Speaker: are very reactionary across the world.
Speaker: They're very reactionary.
Speaker: They look at the institutions, they look at themselves, and they're totally caught in a 20th century model.
Speaker: So essentially, there's no way until we get a class of elites that understands the digital world, this is going to continue.
Speaker: It's going to continue.
Speaker: They simply don't want to
Speaker: They don't want to live in the world that you and I live in.
Speaker: They're literally succeeding from it.
Speaker: And I have been to elite conferences.
Speaker: Oh my gosh.
Speaker: You know, obviously I would joke about this.
Speaker: I never get invited by the public to conferences.
Speaker: It's always the elites that invite me to conferences.
Speaker: So I wag my finger at them.
Speaker: They always think, well, the public is in an information bubble.
Speaker: If they only understood reality, they would realize that they must listen to us.
Speaker: And then at this conference, they talked about like 2,000 people.
Speaker: I'm not even going to say where or who they were, but they were highly elite, highly educated.
Speaker: all wanted to do well.
Speaker: They were good people, good human beings.
Speaker: These were not corrupt individuals, at least as far as I could tell.
Speaker: And yet you couldn't find in those 2000 people, a single person whose face didn't absolutely go crazy when the word Trump was mentioned or who approved or even understood the reasons for Brexit.
Speaker: And this was in Europe.
Speaker: And they talked about the public being in an information bubble and they talked themselves about like three things.
Speaker: How do we control the internet?
Speaker: What do we do about climate change?
Speaker: What do we do about social media?
Speaker: I mean, they themselves were caught in the tiniest bubble, the thematic bubble that you could possibly imagine.
Speaker: And yet they looked down at the public and said, they only understood the world the way we do, right?
Speaker: I despair a little bit of our elites.
Speaker: I feel like, honestly, I'm not a revolutionary.
Speaker: I come from Cuba, so the last thing I want is revolution.
Speaker: So I feel like, but still in all, we need to get rid of this elite class.
Speaker: I don't think the elite class we have right now is going to do what it takes to reconfigure institutions.
Speaker: I love the example of the Yellow Vests and their anger groups because I think it's such a pure distillation of what the revolt of the public is.
Speaker: They just sat around being angry for months and then they said, we're going to go out and be mad.
Speaker: That leads me into another question.
Speaker: We're talking about the elites and the public.
Speaker: Can you explain who these groups are and kind of what they're feeling and maybe even what their grievances are?
Speaker: I think we've already touched on that.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I use the two words fairly technically.
Speaker: I have a very clear definition of what each means.
Speaker: There's always, when you deal in these kinds of categories, there's some fuzziness.
Speaker: These are just categories that help us think about what's happening.
Speaker: Elites are the people in the institutions.
Speaker: And it's a large number.
Speaker: And they are, by the way, followed by a considerable number of people who are not necessarily...
Speaker: institution bound, but who still follow the old tradition that, well, there are elites and we need to follow them.
Speaker: And the institutions, I don't mean necessarily political, it doesn't have to be the president, it doesn't have to be a congressman, but George Mason University, where, by the way, I graduated, was, it's an institution.
Speaker: And insofar as you are part of that institution and you're as a student, you're kind of like at a funky level,
Speaker: in between place.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: But for example, a professor, you are definitely an elite because you are speaking not just on behalf of yourself, but on behalf of your institution.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So
Speaker: The grievance of the elites is that the public exists and the information world is confusing to them and that lies are taken to be truth.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: However, the elites themselves engage the same kind of confusion about what the reality of the world is.
Speaker: So you have both sides kind of losing touch a little bit with reality.
Speaker: The public, you have to think about what that means.
Speaker: It is not the people.
Speaker: The people are
Speaker: basically a category in political philosophy.
Speaker: They don't exist.
Speaker: They're not the masses.
Speaker: We've talked about them already.
Speaker: Not really even the crowd on the street exactly, but because of the cell phone and the speed of digital communication, there is a very passionate embrace between the crowd and the public nowadays, in real time.
Speaker: The public, I took my definition from Walter Lippmann,
Speaker: who's a brilliant guy who wrote a book called public opinion that I recommend to anybody who's interested in media, even today, is any group of people who are interested in a particular affair.
Speaker: That's what Libman said.
Speaker: So if you are a yellow vest or a pre yellow vest person in your anger groups, and you're interested in the affair that the government is spending all this money trying to, um,
Speaker: accommodate the children of immigrants and to make the metropolitan types in Paris have good transportation, and yet you are living outside of that and all you're doing is getting taxed more and more.
Speaker: You are interested in that affair.
Speaker: You can be anybody, but you're not attached to an institution.
Speaker: You're not, as I said before, these groups follow a very
Speaker: a very digital form of behavior, which is equality is super important, super important.
Speaker: So it's a sectarian attitude that says we have no leaders, we have no structure, we have no programs that we're advocating, we have no ideology that we all believe in,
Speaker: as you said.
Speaker: Each of them probably believes in some form of all of that, but the thing that unites them, if you were to say, what are you for?
Speaker: The yellow vest, just like every one of these groups, starting with a Tahrir square crowd in Egypt, every one of these groups would disintegrate into a babble of hostility.
Speaker: What are you for?
Speaker: So they concentrate.
Speaker: What unites them, what mobilizes them, is what they're against, and they're against
Speaker: in a very powerful and borderline and sometimes more than borderline nihilistic way.
Speaker: So that's the two groups as I define them.
Speaker: One thing that strikes me about the public is they're driven more by emotion and instinct than planning.
Speaker: They often don't have the concrete goals or
Speaker: plans to achieve those goals.
Speaker: They might have short-term goals or slogans, but it's not like they are writing out 12-point manifestos with the demands for the release of political prisoners.
Speaker: That's not how these groups work these days.
Speaker: What this made me think of was, as you mentioned, we live in this mediated environment that's very flat, very immediate, and it's all based on photos and videos.
Speaker: And photos and videos just trigger very deep emotional reactions.
Speaker: Do you think that the media environment, cable news, social media, inherently promotes the kind of emotional or effective revolt that you describe?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, first of all, if I'm to be honest, I would say all of human behavior is emotional and instinctive.
Speaker: And then afterwards, after we have engaged our emotions and our instincts, we go back and give it all a very rational explanation after the fact.
Speaker: But what you say actually touches on one of my very few points of actual expertise.
Speaker: I'm really not an expert in much of anything.
Speaker: But when I was at the agency, I headed up...
Speaker: a project to kind of decode the visual rhetoric of persuasion, right?
Speaker: And yes, okay, number one, what we call digital information is, if you look at it real closely, the triumph of the image over the printed word, okay?
Speaker: Number two, you and I,
Speaker: because we were trained, you're in school now, and I'm willing to bet that even today with our enlightened ways, you have to write a ton of papers.
Speaker: Is that right?
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: OK, well, we have we have all been trained to please our teachers and our bosses with rhetoric that as we write textually, that that is a training that is a very 20th century way of being.
Speaker: The image bypasses that and goes straight into a reptile brain.
Speaker: I mean, it doesn't really matter.
Speaker: I mean, to me, I'm looking at you through a window.
Speaker: I mean, actually, there's a little laptop and you're some little square in that laptop, but my brain doesn't perceive that.
Speaker: So the most preposterous image, doesn't matter what,
Speaker: the brain perceives it as a window to reality.
Speaker: So it persuades almost immediately.
Speaker: I mean, we had a little experiment that we did where there was this young woman who was kind of wired up with electrodes and stuff like that.
Speaker: And she was being shown a very emotive piece.
Speaker: And she said, you know, I don't react to that kind of stuff.
Speaker: And she was looking and saying,
Speaker: Yes, okay, I get what they're trying to do, but it's not happening.
Speaker: And we were looking at her brain waves, and they were going crazy.
Speaker: Not only was she being persuaded, she had no clue.
Speaker: So images are very powerful because we're seeing it as through a window, as if we actually were there.
Speaker: And our brain is wired to respond very powerfully to that.
Speaker: You've written very interesting pieces on how elite or institutional news sources feed the public's agitation.
Speaker: Obviously, news outlets get a lot of clicks and engagement when they share shocking viral images and videos.
Speaker: You've also mentioned how protest movements take notice of that and they begin to tailor their protests to fit the demand.
Speaker: For example, the yellow vests, like when they burn down buildings or vandalized statues, they think, well, that's the only way we're going to get noticed.
Speaker: What do you think about that feedback loop?
Speaker: And do you see that going on indefinitely where we have our elite and our public, even though they're often at loggerheads, feed into each other and kind of rely on each other?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I...
Speaker: I hope not, is my answer.
Speaker: I think it definitely today it's happening.
Speaker: I think the old media, it has been along with the other institutions that the elites
Speaker: manage, very complicit in this turn towards negation, this turn towards everything being against.
Speaker: I mean, the media world is a world inhabited entirely by villains.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: There are no heroes in that media world.
Speaker: If you're a hero, you're invisible.
Speaker: And it is inhabited by only incompetent and corrupt individuals.
Speaker: There are no competent or honest persons in there.
Speaker: They're not of interest, they're invisible.
Speaker: So when you present that kind of a distorted view of the world, and that's what the digital world is,
Speaker: inherited, right?
Speaker: I mean, I have always thought it against speculation.
Speaker: I haven't done the analysis.
Speaker: But part of the reason that the public landed on that political stage already in a state of rage and repudiation was because that was the way you're supposed to talk in public about events.
Speaker: That's the way the media treated events.
Speaker: So
Speaker: Yeah, I think will this happen forever?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: I think if it happens forever, democracy will crack apart.
Speaker: I think we're just at a moment.
Speaker: We're just in a moment.
Speaker: And because, of course, the old media is not going to give you the story about the institutions that are sprouting up around them and of the heroes and of the honest people and of the builders versus the destroyers, then
Speaker: The awareness of that is not as high as it is of the other side, but it's happening.
Speaker: Every extinction event is also a speciation event, right?
Speaker: When the dinosaurs died out, little rats that were crawling under their feet suddenly took over the world and evolved into us.
Speaker: whether that was a gain or not, I mean, we can dispute that.
Speaker: But I mean, it was a speciation event.
Speaker: And so we have an extinction event right now, an institutional extinction event.
Speaker: And I think it's going to be a speciation of a new institution is going to sprout up.
Speaker: And the old ones will probably not look anything like what they do today, even 30 or 40 years from now.
Speaker: Who do you think, as these older institutions are dying out, for example, the older media institutions that used to have such a monopoly, what new kind of agenda setters are rising up in their place?
Speaker: Do you think there are any major ones that are already growing right now?
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: I mean, I'll just name one name, Barry Weiss.
Speaker: There is, and she's not alone.
Speaker: So she's part of that sprouting of new institutions.
Speaker: There are several new structures that people can use to get around media institutions.
Speaker: Substack is one of them, for example.
Speaker: Barry Wise, I mean, she had a, she podcasted me, so she and I talked.
Speaker: She had a meteoric career.
Speaker: She was in the Wall Street Journal.
Speaker: Then she was an editor and writer for the New York Times.
Speaker: She rose to the peak of the journalistic profession when she was still a very young woman.
Speaker: And then life became narrower and narrower and narrower because you were not allowed to say hardly anything.
Speaker: It's like I said, that little information bubble that the elites live in.
Speaker: Well, she wouldn't have it.
Speaker: And she left.
Speaker: And what she is trying to do is...
Speaker: create a new information ecology is the way she puts it.
Speaker: And she is working real hard at that.
Speaker: And so far, I mean, what she has done is pretty impressive.
Speaker: we never know which seeds are going to sprout and which seeds are going to wither, which attempts at evolution are going to be dead ends, and which are going to end up going from rat to human.
Speaker: But the fact is, Xi, to me, is a very impressive example of the new institutions that are being built.
Speaker: I will probably have a substantial share of the landscape, of the information landscape and the institutional landscape.
Speaker: in a generation or so.
Speaker: I think a lot of what we saw even on Substack on other alternative media platforms, it was a lot of, for example, someone who had been canceled would go on Substack and write an essay, why I was canceled.
Speaker: But that's not what she's doing.
Speaker: Like she's put out a very interesting round table of
Speaker: people giving their thoughts on Afghanistan and what's going on.
Speaker: And it does supplant, not to supplant, but it fills the role that someone might have gotten from another newspaper.
Speaker: So I do think it's a great example of how we can build respectable institutions.
Speaker: Yeah, one of her writers, I wish you could remember who it was, said, I get fact-checked on Barry's sub-stack way more, as a journalist, way more than I did at my old newspaper.
Speaker: So this is respectable.
Speaker: This is something that is not just somebody throwing out a lot of negative opinions.
Speaker: They are trying to create something that is institutional and that has authority.
Speaker: There is an idea that the reputations of elite institutions are mostly waning because they've been undermined by attacks from kind of saboteurs on the outside.
Speaker: I don't think you disagree that these people are out there attacking the establishment.
Speaker: They definitely are.
Speaker: But you do think that the establishment has a lot to do with its own crisis of authority.
Speaker: What do you think were the turning points in the downfall of these institutions?
Speaker: Well, they haven't fallen yet.
Speaker: So not the, you know what I mean?
Speaker: I mean, and let's hope they don't.
Speaker: The discreditation, discreditation.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I think it was, it was a very sudden thing.
Speaker: There was no one moment where people said, I mean, you can point to the 2008 financial crisis and say, well, the experts after that, forget it.
Speaker: Nobody's going to listen to an expert ever again.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But actually, what struck me as remarkable as I was still in CIA at that very early moment, at the turn of the century, when the digital tsunami suddenly smashed into the world, was how quickly things changed, how quickly things changed.
Speaker: And I think it's because
Speaker: that lack of trust was probably deeper than we knew, even in the 20th century.
Speaker: It just had no voice, right?
Speaker: Why was that deep?
Speaker: We can go into that, and I'm not sure there's a single answer, but I think what suddenly we heard, and I mean, I remember
Speaker: I'll give you the example of Egypt.
Speaker: Egypt was a country whose media, whose open media was, I mean, appallingly boring, all right?
Speaker: First of all, tiny, tiny.
Speaker: A few magazines, a few newspapers,
Speaker: two TV channels that were on for like three hours and for like about 10,000 sets and it was all Mubarak all the time.
Speaker: And we would look at that and go, well, okay, there it is.
Speaker: And suddenly you have this
Speaker: digital eruption of people who are, oh yeah, no humor.
Speaker: You know, the old joke about looking for humor in the Muslim world, there was zero humor.
Speaker: Suddenly the digital world erupts and you're laughing at the things that are being written.
Speaker: They were comical.
Speaker: And it was all making fun of the system, right?
Speaker: They were angry at the system, but they're angry in a funny way.
Speaker: So from the very beginning, you have this sense that the people who erupt, the people who had been silent, had been against.
Speaker: And
Speaker: The interesting thing, of course, and that takes some explaining, is that, well, you can sort of say, well, of course they were angry, it was a dictatorship, right?
Speaker: But then you had the people in Spain, the indignados, who did the same thing, and to them, Terrier Square was the model.
Speaker: So they had a democracy, but they didn't feel that way.
Speaker: In fact, one of their mottos was real democracy now.
Speaker: And then you have Occupy Wall Street in the same year in the United States.
Speaker: And they were looking at Spain and saying, well, they occupied a square, so let's do the same thing.
Speaker: So there seems to be, from the beginning, a complete...
Speaker: distrust of the institutions that was being voiced that has only grown because, as I said before, the elites haven't really addressed it.
Speaker: The elites keep saying things like, if you read my lips and if I speak slowly enough, and if you please get out of your bubble, you will understand how wise and smart and virtuous I am and how magnificent these institutions are.
Speaker: since you mentioned the yellow vest, a top French legislator has said, explain the yellow vest by saying, I think our government policies are just too intelligent, too subtle, and too technical for the public to understand.
Speaker: So as long as that happens, the anger is going to grow.
Speaker: And I think it has kept growing.
Speaker: And I think, by the way,
Speaker: It was a question in my mind whether the COVID parenthesis was going to be a dampener of rage or a promoter of rage.
Speaker: And I think it's going to be the latter.
Speaker: I think we're pretty clear on that.
Speaker: I definitely saw a lot of people talking like that at the beginning of the coronavirus.
Speaker: A lot of people thought, now we have a real challenge.
Speaker: No one will be getting mad about stupid stuff anymore.
Speaker: Oh, no, there's enough anger to go around to be mad at trivial things as well.
Speaker: And, you know, the interesting thing about that is that that was the 20th century institutions at their best.
Speaker: I mean, they really did.
Speaker: Let me tell you, one of the things I've been fortunate as being the author of the book is I get to talk to some really interesting people.
Speaker: And indirectly, I knew what a lot of top scientists felt about vaccine development.
Speaker: And I heard coronavirus said,
Speaker: You're lucky if it happens in three years.
Speaker: It may not happen at all.
Speaker: Coronavirus is tricky.
Speaker: We did it in like eight months or nine months or something, right?
Speaker: So that was the 20th century institution going into production mode and research mode, and we got it done, and we got a large percentage of the population vaccinated.
Speaker: It somehow made no difference on the revolt of the public.
Speaker: I thought it might.
Speaker: It seems to have actually aggravated things because now being vaccinated has become a political act.
Speaker: There is one idea that many members of the elite share, which is that if we try hard enough to get rid of all the bad information, that we can maybe get back to the media environment where people trusted what they saw, and then we will be able to solve our problems.
Speaker: We'll be able to get out of this crisis.
Speaker: Do you think that it's possible that this could further discredit the institutions as even censorship seems to fail?
Speaker: Because I know if I just go and scroll on Twitter and I go to the replies, I can see replies that are saying stuff that clearly is banned on Twitter based on the Twitter terms of service.
Speaker: And I know they ban people all day, but they don't seem to be getting rid of these people.
Speaker: So what do you think about that pursuit, the pursuit of trying to get rid or ban?
Speaker: The ideal of the elites is to turn social media into the front page of the New York Times circa 1980 or so, right?
Speaker: Ain't going to happen.
Speaker: Ain't going to happen.
Speaker: And you're right.
Speaker: I mean, the social media companies like Twitter are totally arbitrary.
Speaker: This is what I say.
Speaker: The current elite class is basically...
Speaker: stuck in a dead-end alley.
Speaker: They want to go back to the 20th century, but they don't have the Wayback Machine to get them there.
Speaker: It's not going to happen, all right?
Speaker: So the idea that you can censor, because even their censorship techniques are 20th century censorship techniques.
Speaker: And when you have an almost infinite amount of information,
Speaker: their censorship techniques make no sense.
Speaker: And you mentioned Marshall McLuhan.
Speaker: Well, he said the medium is a message, right?
Speaker: And I am a complete believer of that.
Speaker: Information structures set the stage for the human drama, okay?
Speaker: When we had a mostly textual, somewhat broadcast structure, we had a special kind of world.
Speaker: Now we have a digital world.
Speaker: It's a different play being performed, all right?
Speaker: That was Hamlet.
Speaker: This is some Marx Brothers comedy, okay?
Speaker: Where everybody's running around crazy.
Speaker: So you can go to Groucho and say to him, say to be or not to be.
Speaker: That's what we want to do.
Speaker: We're gonna censor.
Speaker: You cannot, but it's still gonna be a Marx Brothers comedy.
Speaker: It's Groucho saying to be, it's gonna be funny.
Speaker: It's not going to be Hamlet.
Speaker: So our censorship tries to,
Speaker: control content, whereas the big, big influence of information is structural, is that stage setting.
Speaker: And our elites don't understand that.
Speaker: So they're up a dead-end alley in two different ways.
Speaker: At the CARP Lab, our primary interest is character assassination, both in history and in the present.
Speaker: Do you think character assassination has been changed permanently by this information tsunami effect?
Speaker: And is there any way still that individuals and organizations can try to protect their reputations when entire governments, as you've said, can be brought down by a small group of individuals who have a compelling narrative and the power of social media on their side?
Speaker: That's a good question, and I don't want to give any glib answers because I don't think there are any.
Speaker: I would say for everyone, myself as an analyst included, your reputation is pretty much all you've got, right?
Speaker: I mean, this idea that we look at facts on the table and analyze the facts and go, well, this is true.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: We, this is what the crisis of authority is about.
Speaker: Truth, reality is something we almost entirely absorb from different authorities, right?
Speaker: And those authorities are taken as such because of their reputation.
Speaker: A crisis of authority is obviously a crisis of reputation.
Speaker: So how do you get out of it?
Speaker: Answer, I don't know.
Speaker: But there are ways in which we can start to kind of turn the corner, I think.
Speaker: For example, part of the crisis has to do with the fact that things are said that are no longer believed.
Speaker: If I tell you I can create economic equality by being elected president of the United States, you're going to look at me and say, I mean, it's not going to happen.
Speaker: So I think...
Speaker: our elite class, and to be fair, not to blame the elites entirely on this, the elite class has inherited the 20th century idea that politics is a utopian exercise.
Speaker: That if you apply enough power, science, and money, you can fix whatever's wrong with the human condition, right?
Speaker: Nobody believes that anymore, by the way.
Speaker: Nobody believes that anymore.
Speaker: We haven't really believed that since the Soviet Union went out of business and revolution became something nobody wanted or even understood.
Speaker: But the rhetoric has survived.
Speaker: The political rhetoric has survived.
Speaker: So the rhetoric we hear is, I'm going to fix everything that's wrong.
Speaker: And we, the public, demand it.
Speaker: The thing that has to be done to turn that corner happens, which is,
Speaker: politicians and elites in general start being very humble about the claims that they make.
Speaker: They start to say, we think we can do this, but maybe bear with us.
Speaker: This is what we know, this is where we're going.
Speaker: If you guys know anything more, because another thing is we're the professionals, you guys need to stay out, but half the things that get solved in the world today can bubble up from below, tap into that wisdom of the crowds.
Speaker: I think you can start to do that.
Speaker: And I think obviously there's some very basic old fashioned virtues that kick in as well.
Speaker: You have to have courage because in this world, you can be canceled in a second.
Speaker: And if you allow yourself to be herded into this conformist herd, which right now most of the information environment seems to be, then you have no reputation to defend.
Speaker: You're just basically a herd animal.
Speaker: But if you step out of that herd, they're going to come after you in some way.
Speaker: You need courage.
Speaker: And I think obviously you need honesty.
Speaker: You need to be really careful about what you say.
Speaker: I mean, when I wrote my book, I stared at those words.
Speaker: And the thing that makes me laugh now is the things that I said, words like nihilism struck me as I'm being overdramatic here.
Speaker: You know,
Speaker: They sound so moderate and mild compared to everything that has happened since the words that we're using today.
Speaker: But I mean, I literally thought about those words.
Speaker: I thought of them carefully.
Speaker: Many of them have kind of entered the language, elites, public, you know, negation.
Speaker: That's another I thought about.
Speaker: So if you think about it and you take a stand on them and you go, well, okay, maybe I'm wrong, but this is what I think.
Speaker: And then you defend yourself on the merits and not, well, you know, you're obviously an idiot for even criticizing me.
Speaker: You must be a racist or you must be an elite boob or whatever, you know.
Speaker: Instead of attacking the person, you defend your substance.
Speaker: I think you can start to turn the corner.
Speaker: I don't think that the elite class even begins to understand that.
Speaker: That's why I say we need to start turning those people over.
Speaker: I love that term epistemic humility.
Speaker: I think it's a great term.
Speaker: We need to be more humble,
Speaker: about how we see the world and maybe even try to bring back a little bit of that childlike wonder.
Speaker: When you look at these wonderful scientific phenomena and the wonderful discoveries we can make using the scientific method,
Speaker: We can all be curious, even if we don't have the proper scientific training.
Speaker: It's not something so special that we can't learn it, that we can't try to apprehend.
Speaker: I'm not going to become the developer of a vaccine any time soon, but I can try to understand a little more about how the human body works.
Speaker: So I totally agree with you.
Speaker: If we could maybe get everyone to participate in that system a little bit more and not close it off as if this is only something that the elite can do.
Speaker: Actually, we all have abilities that allow us to access this information.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think that the mediator class has let us down on this one.
Speaker: I mean, I think in the 20th century, that was actually much better.
Speaker: There was a whole raft of people at various levels, right?
Speaker: From the Carl Sagan, which I've put at the bottom, all the way up to people who actually spoke about very technical things.
Speaker: But all addressed to the public, though.
Speaker: All addressed to the public.
Speaker: These are people who knew science, were either themselves scientists or deeply immersed in scientific thinking and could explain it to the public.
Speaker: My favorite example of that has nothing to do with science, but with classical music, which is kind of like a dying art.
Speaker: I was just going to mention that, actually.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, when I was a young person long, long ago, there was a conductor of the New York Philharmonic called Leonard Bernstein.
Speaker: And he would do these young person's concerts, he called them.
Speaker: But they weren't really concerts.
Speaker: They were talks.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: And because they were addressed to young persons,
Speaker: He could be, you know, I know you don't.
Speaker: So he assumed that maybe the adults in the room understood what he was talking about.
Speaker: And he would, for example, I mean, I remember this very distinctly.
Speaker: He would say, now here's this Beatles song, right?
Speaker: And show you the structure of the song.
Speaker: I say, now here is this movement of Beethoven's, from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
Speaker: And he will show you that it's the identical structure, right?
Speaker: And scales fell from my eyes.
Speaker: And, you know,
Speaker: I can't read music.
Speaker: I love classical music, probably in part because of Bernstein, but I understand it so much better because there was a mediator that stood between me and this very technical world of classical music and explained me what was going on in that world.
Speaker: And science, politics, all of that, we need better mediators.
Speaker: If we had people who explained it and explained it with humility, he was not a condescending person.
Speaker: He was clearly brilliant.
Speaker: He was a composer besides being a conductor.
Speaker: And yet he sat down, he was playing Beatle music, and he was treating it totally seriously.
Speaker: So it wasn't like, oh, the public stuff isn't any good.
Speaker: What you have now is they want to...
Speaker: They want to lift us to their world instead of let's meet in the middle.
Speaker: I will explain things to you in the middle.
Speaker: And of course, whenever you are being asked to come to my great magical, you know, I'm the science guy.
Speaker: I'm going to show you things.
Speaker: That's ridiculous.
Speaker: That's a ridiculous, I think, condescending thing.
Speaker: I completely agree with that, especially when you mentioned meeting in the middle.
Speaker: in the 20th century there was this whole world of middle brow entertainment that kind of everyone could come together and enjoy you know the um people who had the high class tastes could enjoy it people that didn't have much experience with that world also could enjoy it kids everyone could come together i don't know if that's harder now just because the media landscape
Speaker: is more fractured, we do have less mass entertainment, but there has to be a role for that because just looking at how much people still love Bob Ross to this day, because he came and said that anyone could paint a nice picture, even if they didn't have any training or experience and people still love the guy.
Speaker: So I think it shows that people want to have someone to trust.
Speaker: They don't just say, I hate all those people.
Speaker: That's a minority.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think, unfortunately today, the people who might be doing that slip into that who do I hate mode.
Speaker: So, for example, if you watch a documentary called The Social Dilemma, which is about social media,
Speaker: It's about people who understand that digital world because many of them are from tech.
Speaker: Many of them are Silicon Valley people.
Speaker: But it's one, I mean, it's one rant.
Speaker: I thought very condescending and shallow, superficial rant about how social media is
Speaker: making the elites unhappy, basically.
Speaker: You people should realize that you're being duped by these companies and that you're being taken advantage of and should essentially just be quiet and listen.
Speaker: And yet, instead of explaining, they're preaching and ranting.
Speaker: Those people should be explaining.
Speaker: I think I get asked a lot, for example,
Speaker: You know, what should we do?
Speaker: You've asked me several times.
Speaker: I try to avoid those answers as much as possible.
Speaker: I feel like describing reality is hard enough today.
Speaker: You know, what the heck is going on out there?
Speaker: And I'd like to think that I have contributed my little drop of water to that
Speaker: that bucket of understanding about what is going on today.
Speaker: But what is going to be done about it?
Speaker: It's really pretty much up to you.
Speaker: I mean, I think part of what we need to realize is that we each need to step up to our own personal sphere of influence in this very fractured world and model the behaviors we would like the bigger world to reflect.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And if enough of us do that, guess what?
Speaker: The entire landscape is gonna change.
Speaker: Instead of me wanting to save the earth,
Speaker: I can't save the earth.
Speaker: I don't even know what that means, honestly.
Speaker: I'm just trying to be the best person that can be in my family, to my friends, to the people that I work with, the waiters that serve me and act like a human to them.
Speaker: Try to be the best person you can in the sphere of influence over which you have influence.
Speaker: Saving the earth is a good way to be, you know, personally repulsive, but morally superior in some way.
Speaker: You mentioned people who, for example, want to save the world and how that doesn't always translate to being a nice or enjoyable person in your everyday life.
Speaker: In class I took on character assassination and cancel culture, which is one of the things the CARP Lob is studying right now, we talked a lot about how online people step into the role of vigilantes almost, trying to police the online space and mete out some form of justice, maybe to make people accountable in an atmosphere where there are no real authorities doing that.
Speaker: Why do you think that cancel culture and what we might call online moral crusaders have emerged at this moment?
Speaker: I mean, you have to ask yourself, what is the purpose of that?
Speaker: Why would anybody do that?
Speaker: And the answer, as for any human action, is infinitely complicated.
Speaker: But part of the answer to me is these are people who derive their meaning from participating in what they consider to be a tremendously important thing.
Speaker: Let's call it Inquisition.
Speaker: I am 100% certain that unlike the Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov, the real inquisitors in Spain thought they were saving the earth, thought they were doing good, and derived deep personal meaning
Speaker: from burning people.
Speaker: So I think these individuals who go online are in a sense, and this is your generation I'm talking about now, okay?
Speaker: This is your generation largely.
Speaker: are basically deprived of religion, most of them, deprived of community, most of them, even family is kind of not so cohesive anymore.
Speaker: There are no elites to explain, provide a model of behavior in society that is meaningful and exciting.
Speaker: And everybody, the human animal can do without a whole lot of things.
Speaker: For some reason, we are symbolic creatures,
Speaker: We can't do without meaning.
Speaker: And I think one form of meaning is to say, well, I am morally superior and you are a heretic and you need to be burned at the stake.
Speaker: This is an old, old thing.
Speaker: This is not just your generation doing it or the digital world doing it.
Speaker: This is an old, old thing.
Speaker: I think what happens in many ways is that lack of courage.
Speaker: I mean, everybody just kind of gets terrified by that and gets herded into that narrow band by these people.
Speaker: I actually don't think, I think,
Speaker: I'm not gonna ask how old you are, but I'm guessing being a college student, your generation, which I call the Zoomers, I think is gonna be the decisive battleground of all the things we have been talking about now, right?
Speaker: Because you guys were born with a smartphone in your hands.
Speaker: And basically there is the distance, the difference between digital reality and what happens on an actual street is very blurry to your generation.
Speaker: And I think some of the social pathologies I was talking about, the loss of religion, the loss of family, the loss of community, have been most acute for you.
Speaker: And if you look at the consequences, there is higher risk averseness.
Speaker: People get their driver's license way later than we used to, have higher degrees of anxiety, depression, suicide, all that.
Speaker: There is a battle inside your generation for what is the world we need to live in, given this monster of information that has erupted around us, that none of these things are going to happen anymore.
Speaker: And I hope I'm around to see how that develops.
Speaker: I do agree.
Speaker: I also think I look at the kids that are younger than me.
Speaker: They're the true generation where they've never known the non-cell phone world.
Speaker: I see all my baby pictures were taken on disposable camera.
Speaker: I see kids out today with their parents and they know how to use YouTube.
Speaker: They're like one or two years old and they can scroll.
Speaker: They press all the buttons.
Speaker: I think about their generation.
Speaker: They are going to be the ones that really grow up online.
Speaker: So I'm a little worried.
Speaker: But I'm also a little excited to see who they grow up and become.
Speaker: And maybe they'll be the true internet savvy elites that can help lead us out of this mess.
Speaker: That's 100% a genuine hope that I subscribe to.
Speaker: So we've talked about a lot of heavy topics today, and I want to end on a lighter note.
Speaker: It seems like there's a huge problem that the public and the elites misunderstand and mistrust each other.
Speaker: They don't know what the other is thinking.
Speaker: If you were talking to one elite and one member of the public right now, and you could recommend them one thing they should read or watch to understand the other, what would those things be?
Speaker: So the elites, I'm trying to remember that I have a terrible memory, but there's a book called...
Speaker: why most things fail.
Speaker: And it's a British economist, Paul Ormerod.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So it shows essentially to my satisfaction, I mean, one can debate the point, that
Speaker: all the claims, that was one of the decisive bits of research I did during the writing of the book, that all the claims that the 20th century makes, all those utopian claims, give me enough science, give me enough power, give me enough money, I will fix all that struggling, the human condition.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: We inherently don't know enough.
Speaker: We don't know anything.
Speaker: Most things fail, all right?
Speaker: We just then turn around and say, well, actually, I intended to do that, you know, or let's not look at the failure if it's too bad, and we move on.
Speaker: But to the elites, I would recommend that.
Speaker: To the public, that's a good one.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know what I would.
Speaker: I would recommend something inspirational, I guess, but I'm not sure what that would be, you know?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I don't feel like I have a good one for the public.
Speaker: That's okay.
Speaker: That's an example of epistemic humility right there.
Speaker: You didn't think you had a good one for the public, so you just said it.
Speaker: Yeah, I think, yeah, the nicest thing anybody ever said about me, honestly, was somebody asked me, what is something you say a lot?
Speaker: And I said, I don't know.
Speaker: And he says, actually, you say that a lot.
Speaker: because the things I don't know are infinite.
Speaker: So yeah, I'm very hesitant.
Speaker: The elites, let's put it this way, they've earned the right for us to tell them what the hell to do.
Speaker: The public, I feel like each of us needs to work out our own situation.
Speaker: And like I say, deal with our own private sphere of influence.
Speaker: And that differs from individual to individual.
Speaker: Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.
Speaker: This has really been an awesome conversation.
Speaker: And I think there's so much in it that we can use going forward in our daily lives and maybe think about when we're watching the news or looking at the latest viral controversy or so on.
Speaker: So I really appreciated it.
Speaker: Well, I always love talking to young people.
Speaker: It makes me feel a tad younger, which I need, as you can tell.
Speaker: So thank you very much.
Speaker: Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of CARP Radio.
Speaker: If you like the podcast, be sure to subscribe, leave us a five-star rating, and share it with your friends and family.
Speaker: We really appreciate it.
