Making Sense - Sam Harris - #195 — Social Cohesion is Everything

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris okay well

00:00:28.080 been locked down for about a month here a little over a month on my side this is an increasingly

00:00:35.500 surreal experience anyway i hope you're all staying reasonably sane and healthy i just want

00:00:44.040 to express my gratitude for all of you who can't actually lock down because you're serving some

00:00:51.620 essential function in society health care workers frontline responders those of you who are working

00:00:59.500 in the supply chain delivering packages and food working in markets and pharmacies we're all

00:01:06.640 incredibly lucky to have you and totally dependent on you so thank you for what you're doing

00:01:12.820 this episode of the podcast is yet another psa i think i've had four or five of those in a row

00:01:20.580 so you will not hit a paywall here anything on the pandemic we're putting out in its entirety

00:01:26.740 but just to remind you if you care about getting all of my podcast content the only way to actually

00:01:33.500 do that is to subscribe at samharris.org and also apologies for the sound in this episode it's been

00:01:42.120 my general practice of late to bring people into studios and record them professionally the pandemic

00:01:49.040 has made that impossible we've been sending people microphones so they can record from home but we

00:01:55.340 can't control all the variables in their environment and how all that works out so you'll hear some

00:02:01.000 strange acoustics for one of our speakers today you'll get used to it it's by no means terrible

00:02:06.960 i actually had a podcast recorded a few days before this that we can't release because the audio was

00:02:14.260 that bad one can never be entirely sure what one's going to get under these conditions but today's

00:02:20.620 episode is perfectly fine albeit not perfect okay today i'm speaking with general stanley mccrystal

00:02:29.500 and his colleague chris fussell general mccrystal retired from the u.s army as a four-star general

00:02:35.380 after more than 34 years of service and his last assignment was as the commander of all american and

00:02:41.720 coalition forces in afghanistan he has written several books one of which is a memoir titled

00:02:48.220 my share of the task which was a new york times bestseller he's also a senior fellow at yale

00:02:54.220 university's jackson institute for global affairs and he's the founder of the mccrystal group leadership

00:03:00.260 institute and his colleague on today's episode is chris fussell chris is a partner of the mccrystal

00:03:06.260 group and he's the co-author with stan of team of teams which was also a new york times bestseller

00:03:13.760 chris was a commissioned naval officer and he spent 15 years in the navy seals in various points around

00:03:20.480 the globe he also served as the aide to camp to general mccrystal during his final year commanding

00:03:27.200 the joint special operations task force fighting al-qaeda chris is also on the board of directors of the

00:03:33.360 navy seal foundation and he's a member of the council on foreign relations and he also teaches

00:03:38.360 at the jackson institute at yale university and in this podcast we focus on the covet 19 pandemic

00:03:44.720 we discuss our initial mistakes in responding to it the nature of the ongoing crisis the threat of a

00:03:52.200 breakdown in social order the problem of misinformation the consequences of dishonesty

00:03:58.860 from the government the prospects of a nationwide lockdown the trade-off between personal freedom

00:04:06.340 and safety the possible threat of tyranny concerns about the global supply chain and the price of oil

00:04:14.640 going too low the safeguarding of the 2020 presidential election and other topics so without further delay

00:04:23.500 i bring you stan mccrystal and chris fussell

00:04:26.340 i am here with general stan mccrystal and chris fussell guys thanks for joining me thanks for having

00:04:37.920 us so um stan i will i will drop the general for our conversation but obviously it's a great pleasure

00:04:44.820 to get you on here given your your expertise and you don't need much of an introduction i will have given

00:04:50.320 you one in my opening remarks but perhaps both of you can summarize your experience here that seems

00:04:56.680 relevant to the conversation we're about to have sure i'll start and chris and i shared a lot of it

00:05:02.360 i spent a career in the military but really starting in 2003 when i took command of joint special

00:05:08.640 operations command america's counter-terrorist forces we were mostly focused in iraq but actually spread

00:05:15.400 across the entire mid-east against al-qaeda and eventually against al-qaeda in iraq which emerged

00:05:21.760 starting in 2003 and what happened was we were a purpose-built counter-terrorist force for precision

00:05:29.040 almost elegantly precise operations but not on a very high tempo then we ran into this new entity al-qaeda

00:05:37.680 in iraq that was amorphous viral-like entity that was opportunistic it was wickedly fast it learned

00:05:46.220 constantly adapt adapted to the conditions everywhere it was and it was really lethal and for about two

00:05:52.940 years they were defeating us no matter what we did they were just a different threat that we weren't

00:06:00.020 ready for so what we did is in the middle of the fight we transformed the organization not as much

00:06:06.160 organizationally as culturally we moved to a distributed operation where we operated from 76

00:06:12.180 different bases simultaneously we had to synchronize ourselves every 24 hours because that was the pace

00:06:18.620 of the war we had to change the mindset of how operations were conceived and approved we had to push

00:06:25.380 approval way down close to people close to the action and yet we all had to stay collaborative so that

00:06:33.380 we had a common picture a common shared consciousness of what was happening it feels an

00:06:39.240 awful lot like what is happening with covet 19 right now and so my background really that's the time when

00:06:46.400 my beliefs on leadership started to shift pretty dramatically and then in 2010 when i retired we

00:06:53.460 founded the mccrystal group on the hypothesis that our experience was not really unique to war or

00:07:00.200 counterterrorism it was to the age of complexity and speed which has changed the environment we operate

00:07:06.020 in and sam i joined the military the navy in the late 90s i went straight into the seal teams and spent

00:07:13.480 about a little over 15 years there in that community and in 2003 went through the selection to become part of

00:07:21.580 the counterterrorism task force that stan mccrystal would oversee for about five years during the really the

00:07:27.440 peak years of transforming that organization from top down and linear into distributed network model

00:07:33.940 and so for a few years got to see it on the on the front edge you know forces on the ground outposts

00:07:40.280 around around the world around the fight then spent a year on stan's staff as his aide to camp sort of like

00:07:46.860 a chief of staff you'd find in the civilian world and got to see that from the strategic level watching how

00:07:52.720 really a global enterprise had transformed the way it communicated decentralized decisions i'd been on

00:07:58.700 the receiving end of that but then got to see it from behind the scenes got deeply interested in the

00:08:04.980 network methodology that is again so so pertinent today as well went on to study that in grad school

00:08:10.720 went back to my seal command for for a few more years and then in 2012 came here to be part partnered

00:08:16.880 with stan ever since that time nice nice well so there are many ways we could have this conversation

00:08:25.040 i mean so your expertise with respect to distributed organizations and the resilience that one has to

00:08:32.620 build in by organizing in new new ways that obviously has a there's a positive side to that i mean you're

00:08:39.120 learning from having bumped up against terrorist organizations but all of this is relevant for how

00:08:45.040 businesses now need to proceed under these new and highly disruptive conditions so we can talk about

00:08:52.320 what people can do and should do in the business community to to make themselves more resilient

00:08:58.580 but i want us to focus on the ways in which our fairly inept response thus far to the pandemic in

00:09:07.160 particular in the united states could i don't know if you share that judgment i would love to get your

00:09:12.200 take on just how you think our response has gone so far but however well or ineptly we respond there

00:09:20.060 are downside risks to i mean virus aside an economic collapse that we all need to be mindful of and in

00:09:29.100 particular i'm concerned about social cohesion and again this could be a generic conversation for

00:09:35.740 some future pandemic right let's say this is a covet 19 is a dress rehearsal for something much worse

00:09:42.340 i want to get a sense from you guys about what you're thinking about and watching for and worrying

00:09:49.560 about and the kinds of advice you know you would be giving to the government and to businesses and

00:09:55.800 individuals in light of the the possible knock-on effects of what is on one level an epidemiological

00:10:02.860 problem and on another you know quickly growing and economic one absolutely and sam what i'll do is

00:10:10.360 i'll start and frame up what i think the situation has evolved to and then pass it to chris because

00:10:15.980 he and i've spent a lot of time talking about the social cohesion part if we think about the threat

00:10:20.960 right now this amorphous viral frightening threat of a pandemic mixed with literally a shutdown or a

00:10:30.860 seizing up of the world's economy on a short-term basis has us frightened by something we can't

00:10:37.000 touch or feel but we know is deadly and it also has us terrified because our economic well-being

00:10:42.940 our security of our future is in doubt if we look at the united states as the pandemic started to appear

00:10:51.360 first in china and then little places elsewhere our first response was not to be as candid with the

00:10:57.980 american people as we should have been and i think several things came out of that by not laying out

00:11:04.260 the situation very clearly like a leader at the beginning of a war might do we created misperceptions

00:11:11.780 about the level of threat and the level of activity that would be needed to defeat this maybe that was to

00:11:17.080 make people feel better in the moment but the reality is what it did was it caused a lot of organizations

00:11:22.480 to be slower to respond than they needed to be as we did that and we reacted slowly we started to

00:11:31.160 suddenly see the effects of the virus on the united states which of course accelerated the economic

00:11:37.400 shutdown and then what we've been doing since is largely fighting this as 50 separate state battles

00:11:44.760 as though each state and really each municipality is on their own to fight this virus but the very

00:11:52.760 nature of an opportunistic threat like this is that you must be united if you want to win a war the way

00:12:00.280 you do it is you break your enemy into pieces and then you defeat them in detail if you want to lose a

00:12:06.220 war you do the opposite you get divided up and then each organization is trying to defend itself and they

00:12:12.500 can't so what we've done is we've set up a mindset in the united states that says to a degree every man

00:12:20.060 and woman for themselves and you know i break that to the state or municipal level when they lack the

00:12:27.660 confidence the expertise the resources to do that then suddenly you see society under pressure but it's

00:12:34.220 not linked arms let me pass to chris because that pressure can produce some frightening effects yeah

00:12:40.980 maybe starting at a pretty high level of what we've seen in other parts of the world that we may think we're

00:12:49.760 far away from but in reality this is part of our sort of human dna the tribalism sort of local focus that can

00:12:56.860 kick in as we start to lose the those things that we take for granted that do keep us cohesive enough so that you

00:13:04.360 don't separate as a society there's a there's a thing called the social cohesion cohesion curve

00:13:10.100 that i'm a big believer in it's just a simple sort of x y axis that says you have a everywhere if a

00:13:16.880 country is not you know in civil war it has it's crossed some level to maintain sort of daily peace

00:13:23.460 around society some of that you get for free based on the sort of the homogeneity and the similarities

00:13:29.740 inside the so think like norway for example would be pretty high just on the natural level of cohesion

00:13:35.400 and then you have to you have to cover the difference with sort of rule of of law and order

00:13:40.500 and and sometimes if that natural order is pretty low like we found in a place like iraq for example

00:13:46.720 from the outside pre-2003 it looks like okay this is a relatively stable place the natural cohesion

00:13:53.460 was much lower than we would have assumed and saddam hussein and the baithist had covered the gap with

00:13:58.880 all sorts of massive suppression behind the scenes violence some of which we knew about but some of

00:14:03.540 which we didn't right and so when that gets removed and the baithists get removed then suddenly that gap

00:14:08.440 is wide open and that tribalism kicks in very quickly and you know in a matter of months society

00:14:14.320 decayed into civil war and then it comes al-qaeda and throws a grenade in the middle of it right so

00:14:19.460 that and we've seen that other places in that afghanistan when the taliban came in and separated the

00:14:26.480 society through a very very violent methodology obviously but turned what you know just 15 years

00:14:33.240 prior had been a vacation mecca post-soviet and warlord situation where the violence was untenable

00:14:40.920 the taliban then separates people down to the lowest and isolated level and we've it'll be generations if

00:14:48.380 that's ever able to recover to the afghanistan once new balkanization in the 90s etc etc so we've seen

00:14:55.020 examples of this we have to be uh and to stan's point as things get separated down to the state

00:15:01.580 and local level that will further decay potentially down into socioeconomic lines some of which you

00:15:06.720 already seem to start to trickle up in the news whether it's between health care food shortages those

00:15:11.240 sorts of things there's there's a real potential under the surface that we can fractionalize i think

00:15:19.320 we're we're far distance from sort of levels of violence we've seen in other places but the social

00:15:25.320 repair in an already very polarized society could take much longer than we imagine it would if we

00:15:31.960 don't get aggressive right now as leaders at every level to keep those communities states etc tied

00:15:38.860 together under some some common banner right well so i think many people listening to this conversation

00:15:44.920 will find it frankly alarming that i'm even inclined to talk to two military guys however well qualified

00:15:55.960 and view the current situation through that lens to talk about the possibility of a breakdown in social

00:16:03.720 order is to paint an unnecessarily scary picture and there's just something inflammatory about even

00:16:09.960 entertaining this possibility but i think one lesson to draw from this experience is you know if you

00:16:18.120 haven't thought about how quickly the world can change and once it changes there is this kind of

00:16:24.920 ratcheting effect where you it seems to move in one direction and it's very hard to get it to move

00:16:30.140 back to where you came from you're not drawing the obvious lesson most of humanity at this point is

00:16:36.080 now told to stay home and various places are enforcing that recommendation with greater lesser heavy-handedness

00:16:46.020 and it really seems to me fairly obvious that if our response to the economic emergency isn't really

00:16:55.000 effective we run a risk of many things going haywire that again this is standing completely aside from the

00:17:05.200 very obvious stressor of the epidemic which could break our health care system and make this parallel

00:17:11.360 theme of tragedy just what is beginning to happen economically poses a threat of of a breakdown in social

00:17:18.740 order so i just want to frame this discussion by saying that i'm not expecting a breakdown in social order but it just it would seem

00:17:27.860 irresponsible to not have experts of your sort at least talk us through the kinds of things we should be

00:17:36.240 looking for responding to preempting in advance i'll give you one example so like in los angeles it was just

00:17:43.900 recently advertised that some very nice stores on rodeo drive and beverly hills had boarded up their windows with

00:17:51.980 plywood obviously anticipating the problem of looting and when i saw that on the one hand that could you

00:17:59.320 could interpret that as a signal of you know heightened risk or but you know conversely it's also just a

00:18:05.760 message sent to it's almost like broken windows policing running in reverse it's just a bad message of

00:18:12.820 social distrust sent to all of society but when you start to see things like that i see it kind of

00:18:21.380 unraveling beginning which we should want to figure out how to arrest and you know the other rumors that

00:18:30.160 i don't know if this is official but i have this unfairly good authority that police departments are

00:18:34.340 policing quite differently now because they don't want to be up close and personal with people when they

00:18:38.280 don't have to they don't want to be putting people into jails where this contagion could be exploding

00:18:42.600 the courts they're not impaneling juries our justice system is grinding to a halt as well and

00:18:49.920 therefore there are crimes that are not being prosecuted and crimes that are not being even

00:18:54.660 responded to at the level of policing so i mean this is the kind of thing that again is moving in the

00:19:01.140 wrong direction when you're talking about social order so i just wanted to put that out to both of you

00:19:06.200 and i think it's only responsible for leaders at every level to recognize you know what what is

00:19:12.180 similar about a current problem or crisis and what's different and there are variables here that

00:19:16.500 we've never we've never dealt with we've certainly seen you know natural disaster hurricane sandy type

00:19:22.540 stuff that's when the gritty nature of our society comes out but the variable that's different there is

00:19:28.660 and we we all love seeing this right neighbors support neighbors they come out they rebuild a house

00:19:33.820 they they go to the hospital and volunteer their time etc we can't do that in this situation

00:19:38.400 like it only makes the problem worse if you try to play to your you know your your strongest side of

00:19:44.500 your nature and help one another out so we have to separate and that adds fuel potentially to to the

00:19:50.580 fire that you're you're talking about and i think one of the things in a good way you know like i like to

00:19:58.340 say society is the thing you don't notice it lives in the background if you live in a good society right

00:20:02.840 but if you've been to places where that was the truth and then very quickly it's not the truth

00:20:07.220 my first experience with this was pre-2001 spending time in croatia training with units there and got to

00:20:14.200 be good friends with a croatian their special operations units and an officer there who had been

00:20:19.780 married to a serbian woman they still were and when the war started they had 12 hours to make a decision

00:20:25.460 were they going to go back to her village or were they going to stay in croatia they decided to stay in croatia

00:20:29.340 and he told me this whole story as we got to know each other his unit went back and fought in the

00:20:33.960 village where his wife was from and his children's grandparents had lived there and then it happened

00:20:39.320 in a matter of you know 18 24 months and lasted a generation right and and there that was a level

00:20:46.440 of intermarrying common language common culture that would have seemed absolutely seamless to an

00:20:51.720 outsider and so yeah you have to think through how we you can fight it you can get ahead of it but

00:20:57.000 leaders have to be very deliberate about how are we going to hold these social ties during together

00:21:01.620 together when we're when we have to be physically apart yeah i just want to echo the point you made

00:21:07.700 about how bizarre and unnatural this problem is and this is not at all like any other sort of natural

00:21:15.940 disaster because keeping people apart is the the first and only remedy at this moment and that's the

00:21:23.800 antithesis of all of the ethical and political silver linings societies can tend to find when

00:21:32.320 everyone has to respond to a crisis it really is almost engineered for a bad outcome so how do you think

00:21:42.260 we should be messaging around this because one of the the things that is especially insidious about

00:21:50.260 the current crisis is there's a political overlay to everything or at least people have to burn a lot

00:21:57.960 of fuel trying to fight themselves free of it and so the messaging around this being a problem is you

00:22:05.720 know balkanized with respect to politics you know there are many people who for the longest time seem

00:22:11.820 to think this was all a hoax it's a media-driven narrative designed to harm the president's re-election

00:22:19.380 prospects and many people seem to have recovered from that but certainly not everybody and i don't

00:22:26.400 know how much time you guys spend on social media but i'm encountering you know pizzagate level conspiracy

00:22:32.660 theories around basic terrestrial facts of epidemiology and it's it's pretty weird out there

00:22:39.500 in the information space we can take any piece of this you want but just in terms of what is being

00:22:45.080 communicated how it's being communicated how we get on the same page with respect to this now two crises

00:22:52.020 again covid and the economy what are your thoughts there let me start first with the idea of what

00:22:59.500 keeps people believing and operating according to the rules of a society and i think it's based on

00:23:05.660 confidence you know the value of money is based on the confidence that someone else will accept that

00:23:11.240 money for for what you need the reason many people follow laws is because they believe there's a law

00:23:17.960 and order system that it's in their interest to follow laws because other people will then as well

00:23:23.160 once you start to have a dearth of information if we did a thought experiment we said covid 19 was

00:23:29.480 approaching and suddenly all digital communications were cut off television phones everything

00:23:35.860 suddenly people would fill their heads with whatever the idea of the potential threat is you know we

00:23:43.520 already see hoarding we see increased sales of firearms recently during this and that's that is those

00:23:50.940 are glimmers of people losing confidence that the system is going to work so now if you say well we

00:23:57.940 haven't lost all communications but our communications have become corrupted they've been corrupted by politics

00:24:03.380 and they've been corrupted by dishonesty as well people just putting absolute disinformation out

00:24:08.240 and so people start to discount the truth they start to act in a way that that says i am i'm not confident

00:24:19.640 that society is going to work in the way that it was advertised and that i experienced before and so now

00:24:25.600 i've got to draw into my tribal group whether it's my family or or religion or race or whatever it is

00:24:33.380 draw together which causes society to atomize more you see that whenever a society is under huge

00:24:40.760 pressure again we saw it in iraq you see it during riots where people sort of go to the place they feel

00:24:45.900 safest but a modern society can't function that way very long because our systems are built on

00:24:52.120 things having to connect deliveries having to be made for supply chain for food that the delivery of

00:24:59.420 services i think it's a more fragile apparatus infrastructure than we sometimes think it is and that's why i think the

00:25:08.240 importance of really clear accurate information to build people's confidence it may not be the story that they want it

00:25:16.840 may be paint a pretty challenging picture but the accuracy is essential because people make decisions based upon their

00:25:25.060 perceptions and people will again they'll as we'd say they'll go high right and and sort of drift out of

00:25:32.700 where common sense should take them and that really threatens society

00:25:36.880 that's something i've worried about frankly ever since trump became president because whatever you may

00:25:45.860 you know one may like or not like about him i think it is uncontroversial to say that his relationship

00:25:53.580 to the truth to a truly fact-based discussion about anything is about as precarious as we have ever seen

00:26:01.180 in not just politics really just anywhere in public life i'm sure there are still people out there who will

00:26:08.300 not admit that the president lies to an unnatural degree but it's objectively true to say that he does

00:26:16.160 right that's not a partisan statement and i've always viewed this as just a horrific liability because if we

00:26:24.160 have someone who will lie reflexively even when it doesn't serve his interests he will contradict himself

00:26:32.980 in a way that certainly doesn't make him look good and there's no apparent advantage and he does it

00:26:38.580 just relentlessly and with a velocity that we've never seen before and it's sort of good fun when

00:26:46.140 you're when there's nothing at stake and the dow is hitting 30 000 and we're not in a war and everyone

00:26:53.600 in trump's base can just laugh that he's winding up the libtards but now we really need leadership and we

00:27:02.140 really need to be able to trust the information we're getting from the white house and you know

00:27:08.920 honestly it just seems like something that cannot be corrected for apart from the experts with their

00:27:15.180 own reputations to maintain however difficult that project is messaging around him you know whether

00:27:22.020 they're standing within six feet of him or not there's no way that trump becomes someone who can

00:27:28.320 actually be trusted not to shade the truth i know you guys have a it's somewhat taboo for you to

00:27:35.320 strike what seems to be a hard political note one way or the other but i'm just wondering what your

00:27:40.700 your senses of that and and what to do in light of that because to my eye and you know at least 60

00:27:48.280 percent of the country's eye this is a man who will lie about anything all the time for reasons far less

00:27:54.920 grave than the kinds of reasons he's confronting now so how do we reboot from there i think there's

00:28:01.840 two ways to to tackle that even trying to to stay uh you know this thing as it turns into a political

00:28:08.840 conversation that it only exacerbates some of the problems that that run against logic right people

00:28:14.240 just saying well i'm on this side therefore i believe or don't believe in in epidemiologists right

00:28:19.340 yeah yeah let me just respond to that concern just to try to close the door to there because

00:28:26.080 it really is not a political point i'm making i mean i would never say this about someone like

00:28:31.140 mit romney right this is not an anti-republican point and it's just not political to point out

00:28:37.040 that someone is not speaking factually and is either ignorant of certain facts or consciously

00:28:42.980 misrepresenting them and you just you can catch trump doing that so often that i mean you can set

00:28:49.580 your watch by it and again that's just not i don't view that as a partisan statement although it will be

00:28:54.100 heard as a partisan statement by the president's defenders i hear you making it as you often do it

00:29:00.040 a sound argument about the importance of verifiable truth and that's more important now than than ever

00:29:06.360 one of the things there's kind of there's two two thoughts that that teases up one is at what level

00:29:12.580 would this be fought and i'll i'll turn that over to stan and sort of because this is exactly what he

00:29:17.340 had to do inside of our force to fight a distributed problem right governors and mayors and local leaders

00:29:22.520 are now our new frontline you know colonels the other though is the interplay between these types of

00:29:28.900 systems and this is one that stan i've been staring at this problem for 20 years um and so it's just

00:29:33.960 painfully obvious when you see it happening the the way that a traditional top-down system works and if

00:29:41.400 if you have a very sort of corner office bureaucratic leader who always wants to receive information and

00:29:47.740 walk out and and share it as his or her own which is not uncommon in big big enterprise government

00:29:53.580 military etc that tendency trickles down very quickly and the whole system will snap into that sort of

00:29:59.300 behavior and it's the exact opposite of what you need to do when you're fighting a network spread

00:30:03.940 networks and traditional bureaucracies or hierarchies are or their governing dynamics are

00:30:09.520 fundamentally opposite right one only cares about how how quick can i grow and i'm going to find new

00:30:16.580 opportunity wherever it exists that's how al-qaeda spread and that's how this is spreading obviously

00:30:21.420 different different problems but the variables that allow them to do that in a interconnected world are

00:30:26.260 very similar and so if you are a leader like if stan mccrystal had rolled into the the joint

00:30:32.540 counterterrorism community and said i want to know everything and then i'll tell you what to do next

00:30:36.540 we would have done every single thing we did correctly and we would have gotten praise for it

00:30:41.120 and we would have been orders of magnitude too slow to keep up with the problem we'd have fought a bunch

00:30:45.520 of localized fights all looked good in our own little world and the problem would have spread

00:30:49.940 multiple times faster than we could keep up with it and the real problem is if you had a caustic

00:30:55.340 leader sitting on top of the system like that he could have said well all the other things happening

00:30:59.180 aren't my problem because everything i say to do gets done right so my units are are great this is

00:31:03.960 everybody else's problem so that at every level these two stack up against each other in in opposite

00:31:11.160 and very dangerous ways leaders in this sort of situation need to quickly create the copper wire for

00:31:18.420 connectivity get ground truth because that's where the truth sits up and through the system and then be

00:31:25.280 the ultimate network connector and say i don't i don't know the answers this is changing too fast

00:31:29.380 but i bet the mayor in this city has a good some good insights what does she know what can we learn

00:31:35.000 from it and how quickly can others be informed by that so i just want to be the the network conduit

00:31:40.960 and i will never be able to walk out on stage and look like the brilliant know-it-all like i could

00:31:45.480 have in a traditional hierarchical model and that's a hard behavior for leaders to shift towards so

00:31:52.060 that's that's one there's not a solution there that's highlighting the problem of the balance in

00:31:57.020 those those personalities i think the thing that i had hoped for 20 years ago was that the wikipedia

00:32:04.260 effect would bring truth out and so i really sort of had a pollyanna view that said if you get enough

00:32:11.760 sources in unfettered from providing ground truth that the truth would win out because it's the truth

00:32:18.680 that has not proven correct so far and so one of the dangerous parts about this is because that's

00:32:26.380 not proven true if you look at our political environment people discount everybody i had a

00:32:32.600 pretty intelligent friend of mine the other day say that he was not happy with what the president

00:32:40.200 said but he thought that all politicians lie so what the president says doesn't matter

00:32:46.480 right and we've discounted it and then there's the idea that all news media is flawed and so we've

00:32:55.380 discounted all sources of information that that we used to be reliant on it really does matter how you

00:33:03.000 respond to an error right so like you know when the new york times makes a mistake you know if they

00:33:10.000 doubled down on it every time it was pointed out well then they're just torching their reputation

00:33:16.460 and it doesn't take too much of that before you've made what many perceive to be an unrecoverable

00:33:22.980 error and so insofar as they're they're reliable channels of information and unreliable ones it

00:33:28.580 really does often come down to what any organization or any individual does when it becomes clear that

00:33:37.480 they made a mistake but one of the things that's so toxic about our information ecosystem right now is

00:33:45.080 because everyone can essentially silo themselves without even knowing they're doing it but everyone

00:33:50.520 can create enough of an echo chamber based on the kinds of news they like to hear it just seems that

00:33:58.220 many people become unreachable right there's always a conspiratorial rejoinder to a fact that is

00:34:05.180 impossible to assimilate within your cherished conspiracy theory or worldview and people can just stay

00:34:13.000 stuck there and then you're then you're dealing with people who for whom the sky is the limit based

00:34:18.480 on allegations of the most insane intent behind any i mean like you know i'm talking to people

00:34:25.720 not publicly at the moment but privately but people who have immense social media platforms who think

00:34:33.080 that the problem is all made up that covid 19 is not even as bad as the flu and that all the noise

00:34:42.720 we're hearing from hospitals and governors is just an attempt to get more money out of the federal

00:34:49.540 government that is perhaps married to some kind of social panic and there's literally no there there

00:34:57.440 we're going to wake up and realize that basically only 75 year olds died from covid 19 and there were

00:35:04.920 most of them were going to die anyway from other conditions i'm talking about people have millions of

00:35:10.120 followers on twitter and they're messaging this kind of contrarian attitude with respect to this

00:35:16.980 that is it's incredibly harmful and one irony here is that this has hit the blue counties first

00:35:24.140 i.e the big cities and so it's only now beginning to make itself known in rural america and throughout

00:35:32.680 the south and and we're just at the beginning of this thing both epidemiologically and economically

00:35:39.260 where do you think this goes once the difference between new york city and every other place in the

00:35:46.540 country is no longer so stark you know it's i'm trying to as you're talking trying to there's some

00:35:52.280 parallels to the tribal viewpoints that that we experienced in previous life with the al-qaeda

00:36:00.920 fight that i think may start to manifest here and there's a there's a glimmer of hope here as well

00:36:07.400 one of the things we found again back to this interplay of traditional systems and and and networks

00:36:13.480 that really have no emotion they just want to get big fast one of the ways that'll play out is we'll pat

00:36:18.920 ourselves in the back for seeing our numbers go down in uh new york which is the the end product

00:36:24.780 of you know people literally putting their lives on the line and working around the clock that's a

00:36:28.860 good story covet doesn't care it's just going to leave that very hard access point and go somewhere

00:36:34.920 else it'll drift into these other communities as you're as you're laying out so that's not that's not

00:36:39.900 up to us what you what when we went into that fight we all showed up with our our organizational

00:36:45.760 biases which are similar in some ways to these political lines geographic lines etc that are going

00:36:51.920 to be a challenge here so if i came from this started inside the military units i came from the seal teams

00:36:57.260 and i had grown up in a culture that said we don't get along with this army unit or that unit over

00:37:03.020 there etc etc and you don't know better you just grow up believing that to be the truth and it

00:37:07.640 that's based on sort of cultural lore and they thought the same thing in reverse right so as

00:37:12.360 as we got distributed one of the first things that mccrystal did was we're going to send you out

00:37:18.480 closest to the fight and we got in these small pockets next to each other we you know when the

00:37:22.980 bullets are flying those old sort of cultural biases go out the window pretty quickly right so you

00:37:28.100 figure out a way to become a cohesive team on the ground there were certainly some forcing functions

00:37:32.420 and that that was not a flick of the switch once that started to take hold inside these very very alpha

00:37:38.460 military units and you know those personalities sam you spend time around those that part of the

00:37:44.320 military then it was able to expand out into civilian organizations as well so we had a collective bias

00:37:50.320 against intelligence organizations or against diplomatic organizations etc etc and as these members of those

00:37:58.040 different tribes clustered in small groups close to the fight we used to call it the star wars bar right

00:38:03.720 you walked in and it was all different colored aliens but we were we were locked in one localized fight

00:38:08.360 which made it very serious and and traditional tribal norms could be overcome by sort of a common bond on

00:38:15.640 solving your local issue then when those networks were tied together into a bigger system you started to get

00:38:21.560 ground truth right and you got a clear picture across these boundaries that had an interagency feel to

00:38:28.240 them because those local groups that said look we're all on the same page here's why we're interpreting

00:38:32.660 this and then you connect that around the world and the leaders were given an honest picture of what was

00:38:37.660 happening inside this network threat and of course that goes back to the previous discussion it was

00:38:42.900 dependent on leaders that were really willing to put in place a network methodology that allowed and in fact

00:38:50.480 forced the sort of you know truth to power sort of paradigm that everybody likes to talk about but it's

00:38:56.180 very very hard to put in place they created a system very deliberately where those closest to the fight

00:39:02.060 had a daily platform where they could talk about what was happening and at a certain point

00:39:06.880 that no one could deny that truth the problem's bigger here it's shrinking here we need helicopters over

00:39:12.820 here we need predator assets to go to the north and those were decisions that were coming up from the

00:39:17.920 ground based on that interagency cross tribal boundary realistic picture we can do the same thing here

00:39:24.920 it's those local leaders creating a network connection model between mayors hospital systems first

00:39:32.320 responder governors even so that they can become the ground eye view and truth if they're given the

00:39:39.680 platform that can become a very very powerful tool but it that will take intentionality and all of us will

00:39:46.060 default to my down and in view just like i would have been the seal teams i wasn't going to suddenly

00:39:51.380 say i'm going to forego all of my seal team tribal norms walk across the street and try to become

00:39:58.040 buddies with this army ranger over here because my tribe would have said what the heck are you doing

00:40:01.800 right we had a we had leadership on top of us that said this is the only way we win and i'm going to

00:40:06.900 put forcing functions in place and and make you all get along and i i believe there was no sort of book

00:40:13.060 written about this beforehand i believe that will make us as interconnected as this al-qaeda threat

00:40:18.100 and the same thing i think can hold true here what do you think the prospects are that we'll have a

00:40:24.680 national lockdown i i think it's inevitable i think it'll be late to need but at a certain point what

00:40:32.720 we've seen so far is instead of being ahead of the problem we're we are responding as a nation

00:40:39.760 to sort of that you know the uh the facts being right in front of us and and having to do it and so

00:40:47.580 i think a national lockdown comes pretty soon i'm not sure how much it will have cost us to be this late

00:40:55.000 but i'm but i believe it's significant and this opens the door to another strand of concerns which

00:41:04.580 is the the ways in which arguably a necessary response to a a biological and economic emergency

00:41:12.720 can be viewed as the the aggregation of power and even the looming threat of tyranny right so it will

00:41:21.220 have a government that by definition will have more and more power both overt which is in this case

00:41:31.740 imposing a lockdown and you know how it's imposed the details there will matter but also just we're

00:41:38.820 seeing really a hunger for increased surveillance right we want to be able to track the spread of this

00:41:45.940 thing we want to be able to track the efficacy of social distancing most people will have seen the

00:41:50.740 video of all those cell phones leaving the beach in fort lauderdale and spreading out throughout the

00:41:56.540 country and these are now digital surveillance tools that the government will have more and more access to

00:42:02.020 and on some level we have a a scared population that will be eager to give away its privacy and some

00:42:11.560 amount of freedom with both hands if it could possibly do some good here and again this is more of a

00:42:19.080 ratcheting effect where you know you keep turning the wheel in one direction and it becomes or one

00:42:25.000 could fear that it becomes very difficult to turn it back and to reset so how do you think about the

00:42:31.640 threat of tyranny or the perceived threat of tyranny as we enact a more comprehensive response to the

00:42:39.320 problem yeah sam i'm not as worried about it as some people are if you go back in our history

00:42:45.640 we've always imposed measures we had to whether it's passports to get in and out of the nation

00:42:51.940 whether it is tsa to protect airlines from terrorism whether it's things we do it policing

00:43:00.440 wise just to to make sure that people are safe on the streets i think every nation the society makes a

00:43:07.840 trade-off between certain personal freedoms and then what's what's needed to keep the society from

00:43:14.240 destroying itself i think the technology has been growing so it just makes it easier to have

00:43:20.240 surveillance cameras or cell phone tracking or any number of these things and i think society

00:43:25.380 will make decisions it will like it has with the use of mobile devices many of us have traded off a lot

00:43:34.040 of our security for convenience and i think people will be only too happy to trade off some of their

00:43:41.340 convenience for you know security from a pandemic or other threats so i don't think it'll it'll be as

00:43:51.180 bad as we think in fact i think the population will sign up for it pretty easily i think we'll have to

00:43:57.220 keep watching it because the problem is it tends to get ahead of us now the technology what we can do

00:44:04.060 with cell phones what we can do with tracking is more than the average person appreciates so they will

00:44:09.320 have given up more of their personal privacy than than they know and so we do need to watch that if

00:44:16.440 you watch what not just is being done by governments but what's being done by marketers

00:44:20.680 what's being done by political campaigns you know there's an extraordinary ability to target voters or

00:44:27.000 customers or whatever using data that most of us don't really think about when we log into a website or

00:44:35.320 or use our cell phone i would um build on that just a little bit sam the had a conversation before this

00:44:43.000 all hit with a few folks in in your world just around the idea that this concept of being unknown

00:44:56.440 right is is really a a unique on the grand scope of history my sense of individual autonomy and and

00:45:04.520 people not knowing what i'm up to is maybe going to be just this brief cute little moment of a hundred

00:45:12.200 years or so because if you think about you know in in a tribal culture obviously everybody knows

00:45:17.160 everybody that's how you survive even going back just to my grandparent generation growing up in small

00:45:22.920 town everyone was in your business all the time it's only in recent history that you've been able

00:45:27.960 able to move away you know being from middle class community you could you could go to school you get

00:45:34.600 a job in a city where no one knows you and you can great create a sense of autonomy and independence and

00:45:39.880 and you can choose how known you are to that local community technology has already usurped that

00:45:45.080 right and this may be the wake-up call that says no to stan's point collectively we're going to trade

00:45:51.320 off that that sense of autonomy for collective protection like we've done throughout the vast

00:45:58.280 99.9 of our of our history and i think there this will be as all the on the back side of this all the

00:46:05.480 data that will be collected the arguments will be quite sound to be able to trace this sort of thing

00:46:10.040 and to your earlier point i know you've discussed this with others on your show this probably is the

00:46:15.720 warm-up right anyone that knows this space far better than than we do will say yeah this is this is

00:46:20.360 this is round one this is the easy warning for what could happen down the road and so those things

00:46:25.400 should couple together and we will learn out of this probably hey the only one of the ways we have

00:46:31.640 to uh position ourselves to be ready for this when it when it's a 40 kill rate and a easier transfer

00:46:38.040 methodology is to sacrifice some of these liberties right the knock-on effects of that's a long

00:46:44.200 conversation but we're going to be having this conversation pretty quickly yeah that's one thing

00:46:49.720 to be hoped for if it's possible to learn these lessons so clearly that we could have a kind of

00:46:57.000 turnkey solution to the next pandemic because it it really does seem like this isn't the last time

00:47:04.280 we're going to be faced with something for which we have zero immunity and as you say it could be much

00:47:09.800 worse and a national or global shelter in place order could be responded to with with real alacrity

00:47:18.920 and something like finesse if we just knew how we unrolled it everyone understood the need for it

00:47:27.240 and we know how to stall our economy and then to restart it and we know how much money to pump in or

00:47:34.760 what percentage of gdp to pump in and it just it seems like there's a machine the workings of which

00:47:40.200 we're understanding more and more and now we're you know we're stress testing it but again the leadership

00:47:45.880 has been such and the public debate about in many cases undebatable facts has been such that it's not

00:47:52.840 yet inspiring much confidence that we're learning the lessons in a way that'll be indelible

00:47:57.880 yeah but it it's an interesting thing to to to consider sort of the guns of august uh argument

00:48:04.840 in the in the military we always fighting the last thing because it was so hard you learn the wrong

00:48:07.960 lessons for the next war there wasn't a uh there wasn't an easier al-qaeda that was fought before

00:48:14.440 this this generation right and it it learns and it grows etc if there is a bigger thing on the

00:48:19.880 backside of that of this that could come in 10 years sometime in our lifetime or certainly probably

00:48:26.360 waves of this current one one of the things we are trying to talk very directly with leaders

00:48:31.800 across all different parts of industry and government etc is everybody gets a pass right

00:48:35.720 now because we're all trying to figure this out we need to move faster no one gets a pass in the fall

00:48:39.800 no one gets a pass in the spring and certainly as a society we don't get another pass on this once

00:48:44.760 we figure this one out exactly like you're saying what are the what are the things we have to have in

00:48:49.000 our routine to be able to go in and out of this if it happens again in five years or if it happens again in

00:48:54.760 the fall and so a lot of leaders understandably organizations are thinking how do i get through

00:49:00.200 this quarter that's that's fine we got to you know baseline ourselves but how do i create the

00:49:06.120 organization of the future that's going to be able to survive through these things or the nation of the

00:49:09.640 future that can deal with this sort of pandemic when it's even worse and it could be orders of magnitude

00:49:14.200 worse how do you guys think about the tension between what is rational for individuals or even

00:49:21.400 individual businesses to do versus what is collectively beneficial i mean there are zero-sum or apparent

00:49:30.760 zero-sum trade-offs here i mean take something like you know whether to buy ppe right you know the

00:49:37.480 hoarding of masks or anything else the hoarding of food being early to stock up and you know how

00:49:44.120 much to stock up when if there's a run on the market or a run on the bank or run on anything

00:49:49.320 you know you get this breakdown of the system and supply chain and in many cases a breakdown of

00:49:56.520 confidence in our our institutions and and norms and you're obviously there are kind of tipping points

00:50:02.360 there where those tensions can be resolved up until the point and then then you've got people boarding up

00:50:09.000 their windows and trying to sell thousands of bottles of purel out of public storage and then

00:50:15.400 being vilified online for it how do you think about those trade-offs between the the individual and and

00:50:21.480 the group i think it's when you lose confidence that society is going to work in your favor and our

00:50:28.760 collective favor that law and order that supply chains are going to work then you start to have the case

00:50:34.200 where people or small groups are incentivized to do what's best for them because the good of the

00:50:39.240 society no longer applies to them i don't think it would take very much to see that behavior kick up

00:50:46.040 more than we have we've seen some hoarding and things we've seen a couple of communities that i read

00:50:51.560 about basically say we don't want any outsiders coming in i could see three weeks from now small towns

00:50:59.320 with checkpoints outside the towns with people with shotguns saying no strangers can come through

00:51:05.320 these checkpoints into our town and from their standpoint it would look like very rational behavior

00:51:13.240 from anything six months if we went back six months and we predicted this kind of thing we'd say it was

00:51:20.040 sort of a post-apocalyptic zombie land behavior but but i can see that happening and people justifying to

00:51:27.160 themselves that in that particular case it works the problem is the more those things happen the

00:51:31.880 more it speeds up the deterioration of society the more you break things apart the less this globalized

00:51:39.400 system we've created works and a lot of people aren't fully appreciating the fact that there are so

00:51:46.360 many things that are not built not only in their neighborhood but not in their country that they rely on every

00:51:51.800 day that suddenly you say now wait a minute it's in our interest for the global structure to be

00:51:57.240 healthy and to work and in fact it could be to our demise if it doesn't so i think that we we need

00:52:04.520 to spend time educating people on that because if you have a simplistic view you take simple actions

00:52:12.600 yeah one of one of the things that i've heard stan say quite frequently over the last few weeks

00:52:17.160 is to to leaders who have not just industry leaders but any any leaders that sit on top of these

00:52:23.880 networks that keep society together it's time to activate the network how do i think about that and

00:52:29.880 the obvious ones i'm a mayor of a town i'm a i'm a governor etc city manager but there are all these these

00:52:37.160 super nodes inside community networks that we we take for granted because they're just in the background

00:52:41.880 right my school principal my church leader my community group leadership etc any that localized

00:52:50.120 space those leaders there they can be a real part of the solution but it's a new sort of challenge for

00:52:55.720 them so i i'm sure this is happening everywhere across the country but the the school system will say

00:53:00.600 okay we're we're we're at home for the rest of the year we're going to hand out school packets three times

00:53:06.440 a week we're going to do site skype calls so it turns into the kids involved through digital

00:53:12.120 platforms with their teacher but those principals sit on top of these especially in a place like like

00:53:17.160 dc or other larger cities very diverse adult communities and we see each other in passing at

00:53:24.360 the school our kids are on the playground together etc there's a social cohesion that comes from that

00:53:29.160 that could be gone for six 12 months we don't we don't know yet how long and when we couple it with

00:53:36.440 the problems that could be on the back side of this you know i live in in the middle of dc my kid

00:53:41.800 goes to a school with with other kids who i know are know their parents because we spend time after

00:53:46.680 school together some of those kids live in food deserts on the other side of the city when there

00:53:50.200 are shortages that are impacting those communities and the tethers between the adult population have

00:53:55.320 been separated because we're so isolated then you you add in one more risky variable to how

00:54:01.000 you know society can start to unwind in a very unfavorable way so who are those local

00:54:06.280 leaders it might seem unnatural for a principal to step in and say you know what every two weeks

00:54:11.160 i'm going to do a skype call with all the parents in my school because i want them to hear from each

00:54:15.000 other i want it i want those ties to stay in place that's never been part of their job description

00:54:19.640 but those are those invisible networks that we have to find ways to keep strong

00:54:24.120 because we don't know how long this is going to last yeah what what are your

00:54:26.920 expectations there on the time front how long are you preparing yourself for it to last yeah we've

00:54:35.640 talked a fair amount about it i think we're going to see the effects of covet 19 directly meaning waves

00:54:41.560 of of it into uh 2021 probably into the spring of 2021 i think that as society gets a little more

00:54:50.280 prepared for it each time that each one will be a little bit less impactful on us we'll be better

00:54:56.920 at at doing certain things but i think that the requirement to separate is probably likely again

00:55:02.360 in the fall and maybe again in the winter or early spring which is going to affect the economy so i think

00:55:09.480 if we think in that kind of a time horizon we need to think about solutions that are not you know

00:55:15.880 everybody cocooned in their home for two weeks and then we emerge and it's all well i think we're

00:55:20.520 going to have to make organizations work you know the distributed work environment for not just a few

00:55:26.920 but for most organizations are going to have to work we're going to have to figure out how we take care of

00:55:32.680 those people who have to be out physically doing it not just first responders but people in the

00:55:37.480 supply chain and things like that we're going to have to think through those because there's not an

00:55:42.600 alternative we have got to keep those fundamental wheels of society turning and you know i i can

00:55:50.520 remember from the the al-qaeda fight the last time i had a a finish line in my head was the when we were

00:55:59.400 chasing abu musab al-zarkawi in in iraq who was the first you know really well-known leader of aqi

00:56:06.760 al-qaeda 2.0 he was sort of innovative etc and we all and i can remember having these

00:56:12.120 conversations i happened to be forward deployed during that that time window and we knew we were

00:56:17.240 close and the thinking was this will be the finish line when we when we get him this war will start

00:56:22.840 to wind down and we got him and within two three days everybody realized oh wait a second that

00:56:30.280 wasn't a finish line there there's there is no finish line in this thing this is a new type of

00:56:33.880 threat have you met abu bakar al-bagdadi yeah and and because you realize this is an ideology that

00:56:39.480 exists in networks and it will just continue to thrive so our challenge then was a it was a wake

00:56:45.080 up call but b how do we redesign ourselves and of course this is what our leadership have been saying

00:56:48.840 to us for a while uh we're just a little thick-headed at least i was how do we redesign ourselves to be

00:56:53.640 able to survive through these this much longer unending generational infinite war that a network

00:57:00.280 wants to fight and if you if you take it with a rigid we're going to be done by x date then you're

00:57:06.360 only setting yourself up for frustration and probably failure what lesson do you draw around

00:57:13.480 our dependency on a global supply chain here because many people were frankly astonished at how

00:57:23.000 thin our supply was on many fronts i think that the ppe issue has been the most galling for people i

00:57:30.040 mean just the idea that we could so quickly run out of masks and that many of them need to be

00:57:36.040 produced in china and china having the same problem and then when you overlay the prospect of being in

00:57:42.760 conflict with a country like china and you recognize that our most of our medication is coming either in

00:57:50.040 whole or in part is coming from china and india it's just you know one person drew the analogy of

00:57:56.600 outsourcing our ammunition to china knowing full well that we could one day be in a shooting war with them

00:58:03.240 but we're expecting them to supply us with bullets what lesson do you draw about what we actually

00:58:10.840 need to take in-house for emergencies of this kind yeah i think that one thing is the interdependencies

00:58:18.520 between countries are grossly under miss or under miss or misunderstood because as you say there we may say

00:58:29.320 okay we're going to make all of our weapons here all of our ammunition here all of our key things

00:58:34.280 but then you find that key you know basic materials or components of those are required and like we found

00:58:42.440 in our medical supply chain we have interdependencies this came from a focus on trying to be as efficient

00:58:48.760 as possible to reduce our costs as much as possible and if you go to the you know the doctrine of free

00:58:55.640 trade it makes sense people should do that part of economic activity for which they are best suited

00:59:01.800 but it does create this mutual dependency that we are dependent upon the supply chain there and they

00:59:07.400 are dependent upon us for many things therefore you've got to decide whether that's acceptable whether

00:59:14.120 they are a reliable enough partner both politically medically militarily for us to to do that and

00:59:22.360 that's a consciousness that i think america has lacked for quite a while i i think we just don't have a

00:59:30.600 sense for just how many things we don't either make or the raw materials we don't produce yeah it seems like

00:59:40.040 there should just be a comprehensive inventory of everything we wish we had in the current circumstance and

00:59:46.280 didn't and then figure out why that was the case and and also just figure out what the government can

00:59:52.920 only do effectively it just seems like the free market incentives for many of these things are just

00:59:59.080 never going to be there and so recognizing that an ability to produce an antiviral that if all goes well

01:00:07.880 only a tiny percentage of us need to use once in our lives the market doesn't incentivize investing

01:00:16.120 billions of dollars in that but clearly that's the kind of thing we need in these circumstances i don't

01:00:21.960 know if you have thoughts about the division of labor between government and private industry there

01:00:26.360 yeah it said if you go to just medical capability governor cuomo gave a great sort of primer on this the

01:00:34.520 other day and he described we have a privatized hospital system and all of those hospitals can't

01:00:42.360 afford to keep beds that they don't need so they they very carefully calculate what they need and so we

01:00:48.520 don't have excess capacity the military has to have a certain amount of excess capacity like you see with

01:00:54.200 the hospital ships and then field hospitals that they can put up but they have to be prepared for

01:00:59.880 conflict and sudden casualties but the rest of our system just isn't built that way and so when we

01:01:05.560 suddenly want to to have this surge capability we don't have it i think that's a national decision

01:01:12.280 the night the nation has to decide how much surge capability do we want to maintain either keeping

01:01:18.040 mothballs or we'd have to subsidize hospitals to keep it ready yeah and and obviously all the other

01:01:25.720 emergencies and potential emergencies that the world can throw at us have not been canceled just because

01:01:34.600 all of our attention is on this one how do you see the the risks we're running on other fronts yeah i

01:01:41.800 you know i think we've been running this risk for a few years here in in united states for sure in

01:01:47.800 our sort of echo chambers preoccupation which is fast news cycle etc and at strategic costs right and we

01:01:55.560 we've seen examples of that with russia and other other actors that are had been done some pretty

01:02:00.520 sophisticated stuff over the last three four years this is um back to our earlier discussion

01:02:06.920 one of the new variables here that could be proven wrong here but certainly not in my lifetime has

01:02:11.640 there ever been a single story that the whole world's talking about this is literally the only

01:02:16.680 thing any outlet is talking about anywhere in the world right now there may be an exception out

01:02:21.000 there but it's just blanketed right and so those sophisticated actors all the way down to you know

01:02:26.520 violent groups that most folks have never heard of they know when they have a smoke cover right and i am

01:02:32.600 sure that this is being taken advantage of by really bad actors all over the world not just nation state

01:02:38.920 players but localized problems where you know in countries that we would normally pay attention to and

01:02:44.200 be able to put pressure on and use diplomatic uh leverage etc etc that that they know that their

01:02:50.840 actions won't break through no one will care and if it doesn't get into the the media cycle they can

01:02:55.560 get away with whatever with whatever they want that could be violence that could be you know whatever

01:02:59.400 their what their intent is and so it will take us a lot a lot of that will never be unwound but i'm

01:03:05.880 i am willing to bet that some of the stories that will come out of what happened during this blanket

01:03:10.680 coverage will be there'll be some heartbreaking stories in there and some strategic ground that

01:03:17.160 we will have a real challenge ahead of us to make up so everything from the strategic level all the

01:03:23.080 way down to the local sam i would add there's some destabilizing factors that are likely to be

01:03:29.000 second and third order effects the one that jumps out most is the price of oil you know we were

01:03:35.560 already moving away from oil into renewables which i think was a good thing but many economies in the

01:03:43.080 world to include ours to a degree are based on a stable price of oil much higher than it is right

01:03:49.240 now and i think there's every chance that the price of oil could drop down below twenty dollars a

01:03:54.280 barrel if it goes there then many nations aren't economically viable anymore and so their entire economic

01:04:03.080 model is upended and so you almost have to have instability followed from that

01:04:09.720 throw on top of that less mature medical systems and they get hit with covet 19 so you have this

01:04:16.440 combination of factors that produces instability which whenever you have instability nowadays in the

01:04:23.400 world you can export it whether you're trying to export it or not so i think that's just a couple of

01:04:28.840 examples of things that could easily happen in the pretty near future so i know you guys are running

01:04:34.760 out of time over there so i'll bring it into the end zone here do you have any special concerns about

01:04:40.040 the election in november because i mean just on its face asking everyone to turn up and vote in person

01:04:48.200 seems epidemiologically unwise and it would be very easy to see in the paranoid fantasies of his

01:04:56.040 detractors a a concern that trump could just decide you know it's not safe to hold an election i don't

01:05:02.600 know what the constitutionality of that would be but how haywire could the uh presidential election go

01:05:11.640 if covet is still surging on all fronts at that point yeah i think first an election is critical i think

01:05:20.120 for lots of reasons but particularly in the united states right now a presidential election is critical

01:05:24.760 i also think that it's entirely within the capacity for us to go without having to go

01:05:31.560 physically to polling booths i think we've got the ability to trans transition to vote by mail where

01:05:38.120 necessary but vote digitally otherwise there would be growing pains in it but i think we could have

01:05:44.360 already started making that transition i think we also could take a great step forward toward decreasing

01:05:50.840 voter suppression that way there are lots of things i think that technology could help us do this could

01:05:57.240 be the forcing function for us to take it on i'm worried that we can do it fast enough for november

01:06:02.680 but i think we need to make that effort we talk about social unrest or social cohesion i think if this

01:06:09.400 election is not conducted then i think that will be an additional pressure for part of the population

01:06:15.560 with a sense that they have been uh disenfranchised yeah it's just the concern about a hacking of a

01:06:23.160 digital election is so excruciating at the moment and the the crisis of legitimacy that would follow if

01:06:30.680 there was any doubt as to whether or not the result was really the the real result it's hard to see how

01:06:36.280 we get away from paper on some level well i don't think that it could be executed flawlessly and still

01:06:43.400 undermined in the echo chamber world right um which is the real it's it's part of parcel of the core of

01:06:49.160 the problem but i would say it's sort of the dna of of growing up in the world that that we did

01:06:55.480 fighting these complex fights you're you're always sort of manically nervous about the second ridge line

01:07:00.120 out and it makes me nervous that we're not talking at the national level about what this will look like

01:07:06.680 in the fall like there needs to be a plan in place that we're considering and debating right now

01:07:12.440 assume the worst in the fall and don't try to solve it in in october right we need to get ahead

01:07:17.480 of this right now and start warning the american people and prepping for it well um i want to thank

01:07:22.200 you both for the the work you have been doing for many years and the work you'll continue to do

01:07:28.280 it's been great to get your expertise here on the podcast is there any place you would point people

01:07:33.400 if they want to follow your work and understand what you're doing with businesses and

01:07:37.800 give us the relevant websites and social media handles sure all of our stuff is hung on our

01:07:43.800 our corporate website mccrystalgroup.com or team of teams is the first book we wrote together a few

01:07:49.880 years back that's a great primer on sort of theory the case that what we experienced over overseas and

01:07:56.120 then you know quick search away they can find stan and myself on social media platforms great stan chris

01:08:02.440 thank you so much for your time sam thank you for having me thanks

01:08:17.720 you

01:08:19.720 you

Making Sense - Sam Harris - April 06, 2020

#195 — Social Cohesion is Everything

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