Stay Free - Russel Brand - Martin Gurri (The Political Revolution Is Now!)

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand, an in-depth conversation with free thinkers who awaken us to the glorious world around us.

00:00:07.000 Previously, I've spoken to Tim Robbins, Vandana Shiva, Maya, Graham Hancock.

00:00:11.000 These are all available right now on Rumble or by downloading the podcast.

00:00:16.000 Joining me for this episode is Martin Goury, a former CIA analyst and author.

00:00:21.000 He's done a great deal of research into power and the transformation of the media environment and how that's shaped the entire discourse of the modern world.

00:00:28.000 He's the author of The Revolt of the Public and The Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.

00:00:33.000 I'm very excited about this interview.

00:00:35.000 I think Martin Guru from his unique position as a former CIA insider has understood the dynamics of contemporary power better than almost anyone else.

00:00:45.000 Maybe someone like Adam Curtis is close to understanding how fundamental the changes we're currently experiencing are.

00:00:52.000 The reason that previous terminology is redundant, the most obvious example being left versus right.

00:00:57.000 Why don't these terms make sense anymore?

00:01:00.000 Why is it that there feels like an attempt to assert power in unprecedented ways?

00:01:05.000 Why are we experiencing more censorship, more calls for people to carry digital ID?

00:01:10.000 Why is authoritarianism being masked Particularly in liberal clothing around social justice issues.

00:01:18.000 Martin Gurry, I think, has a unique take on this.

00:01:20.000 And I think that from his work in this book, and presumably elsewhere in his writing, we can get a different understanding on why our world is the way it is today.

00:01:29.000 I'm extremely excited about this interview.

00:01:34.000 Martin, thank you so much for joining me on Stay Free.

00:01:37.000 I'm really excited to speak with you.

00:01:39.000 Good to be here.

00:01:41.000 This is a pretty unique interview for me in that I've actually read the book, which is a rare achievement.

00:01:49.000 That's pretty unique for me too, that people have read the book when they interview me.

00:01:53.000 Yes.

00:01:54.000 I make a point of going into my interviews based purely on trust, blind faith, ignorance, but today I'm actually prepared and the reason I'm prepared is because we were speaking to Michael Schellenberger and he mentioned your name in your book.

00:02:11.000 Rick Rubin, the legendary hip-hop producer, came on the show a little while ago and he sent me like a diagnostic tool a breakdown of why the relationship between centralized

00:02:24.000 authority and the public has shifted in the post-internet age

00:02:29.000 and it offered a series of suggestions of how this would likely play out.

00:02:35.000 I was astonished that something that sounded so avant-garde and anti-establishment

00:02:41.000 had been written by a man who had worked at the establishment's heart,

00:02:46.000 and so that our audience knows this, you are a former CIA operative.

00:02:50.000 Can you tell me how you have come to this position?

00:02:55.000 Please tell us a little bit about your experience with the CIA.

00:02:58.000 Please, can you even touch upon the way that it seems that the deep state is embedded within social media now?

00:03:03.000 One of the revelations of the Twitter files, and we'll get into the sort of broader ideas discussed in your book and your work elsewhere about how even our terminology around left and right and our understanding of power dynamics is breaking down.

00:03:17.000 First, I'd love to get a little biographical understanding of how you've come from being a CIA operative to being a, what appears to me, to be an anti-establishment author, even though I know there are things about the establishment that you revere and respect.

00:03:30.000 Yeah, first of all, to clarify, I was not a CIA operative.

00:03:34.000 I was a, which I'm not sure what that means, honestly, but it sounds like I'm going around with a gun in my hand and sexy ladies on my arm.

00:03:42.000 Sadly, none of that happened.

00:03:44.000 I probably had the least sexy job in the organization, which was, I was an analyst of global media.

00:03:53.000 All right.

00:03:54.000 And if you want to know how I came by the job, it was in the most prosaic way you can imagine.

00:04:00.000 I answered what was in a newspaper ad. So that's how romantic and

00:04:07.000 glamorous my my ascent to CIA was.

00:04:10.000 Sadly, sadly, the beautiful ladies never fell in love with me, except my wife, so I mean,

00:04:22.000 I can't complain. But as it turns out, I happened to be in the one perch where I could see

00:04:31.000 I and those with me, I don't want to pretend like this was just me,

00:04:34.000 could we were in the high place where we could see what was coming from pretty far off.

00:04:41.000 And what was coming was, as a young analyst of open media, I can tell you the world of open media in the 20th century was absolutely thin.

00:04:53.000 It was a trickle.

00:04:55.000 If the President wants to know, for example, okay, what are the French saying about my policies?

00:05:00.000 You went to one of two newspapers.

00:05:02.000 One of two newspapers.

00:05:04.000 We consider those authoritative.

00:05:06.000 Those are the good things.

00:05:07.000 Then?

00:05:09.000 Sometimes, sometime around the turn of the century, this digital earthquake, epicenter, let's say, Palo Alto, I don't know, generated this tsunami of information that just literally swept us away.

00:05:28.000 It was in volumes that were utterly unprecedented in the history of the human race, and if you read the book, you saw the chart.

00:05:37.000 The year 2001 produced double the amount of information, double the amount of information to all the previous history of the human race, going back to the cave paintings and the dawn of culture, okay?

00:05:51.000 And in 2002, Double 2001.

00:05:54.000 And we sort of have been writing that chart ever since.

00:05:58.000 And if you do chart it, it looks like this stupendous wave.

00:06:03.000 It looks like a tsunami.

00:06:05.000 So, here I was, looking at this, along with my compadres in CIA, and the first thought we had was, okay, what's authoritative in this massive stuff?

00:06:16.000 Who are these people?

00:06:18.000 How do we now answer a question from the policymakers?

00:06:21.000 You know, what are they thinking about our policy?

00:06:24.000 Who knows, right?

00:06:26.000 But secondly, far more important than that, we noticed that there were effects.

00:06:32.000 Information has effects.

00:06:34.000 The information structure sets the stage and arranges the props for the human drama.

00:06:41.000 So you have to play the way it is, right?

00:06:44.000 You know that if you go into a, you know, Mark's Brother comedy, you can't play Hamlet in that set, all right?

00:06:44.000 You're an actor.

00:06:51.000 It just doesn't work that way.

00:06:52.000 So The information that was flooding the system, you could see behind that tidal wave, as different countries digitized at different rates, ever increasing levels of socio-political turbulence.

00:07:10.000 And, you know, we raised the flag where we were.

00:07:13.000 You know, we were one corner of CIA.

00:07:15.000 We were the open corner of CIA.

00:07:17.000 CIA places a very high value on secrets.

00:07:21.000 We didn't deal in secrets.

00:07:23.000 We dealt in open information.

00:07:25.000 And we jumped up and down, and I'm not sure we were listened to as properly as we should have been.

00:07:29.000 So when I left the government, my little mission to myself was, well, what would you have done if you had been in there and you were to do the analysis of this phenomenon and explain why these changes are happening in terms of the information environment?

00:07:48.000 And by then, You know, because we were told always was, you know, the joke was, OK, you have these bloggers.

00:07:56.000 So secret police comes knocking on their door.

00:07:59.000 What are they going to do?

00:08:00.000 Hit them with their laptops?

00:08:01.000 I mean, I must have heard that joke 10 times.

00:08:03.000 So, OK, no, they didn't couldn't hit them with their laptops.

00:08:06.000 And the fact was, if you look at a country like Egypt, the bloggers had like a little protest there,

00:08:13.000 and it was a charade.

00:08:16.000 These were all educated people.

00:08:17.000 They didn't know what they're doing.

00:08:18.000 About 20 people, there were like 20 cops for every blogger.

00:08:22.000 After I left government, we got the Arab Spring.

00:08:25.000 And the Arab Spring was like the initial detonation of this massive global explosion 1.00

00:08:30.000 that continued for at least 10 years, and it's still going on in many ways,

00:08:34.000 of the public just kind of spilling out on the streets and changing the environment in ways

00:08:39.000 that country after country after country is very characteristic.

00:08:44.000 In other words, they are very similar traits of how the public behaves in Egypt.

00:08:50.000 how it behaves in Spain with the indignados, how it behaves here in the United States with

00:08:55.000 the occupiers and the Black Lives Matter people and the January 6th people—all those have 0.93

00:09:00.000 very similar characteristics.

00:09:02.000 Or Hong Kong, the pro-democracy protesters there, you can see these very clear characteristics.

00:09:11.000 And the book is essentially an attempt to reconcile the fact that this new actor in

00:09:16.000 the political stage, the public, is now possibly the protagonist, possibly a protagonist.

00:09:22.000 Certainly it is one of the strongest forces that all political alignments have to deal with, and that there is a conflict from the people who have been established in the old 20th century institutions.

00:09:36.000 I call them elites.

00:09:38.000 That word has become so worn down, right?

00:09:40.000 But so my interpretation of what an elite is, and there are clear definitions of who the public is and who the elites are in the book, We can go over those if you want to.

00:09:49.000 But the elites, to be brief, are people who manage the great institutions that make modern life possible.

00:09:55.000 And that's not just government, it's business, it's media, it's the university, it's the scientific establishment, it's people from entertainment, all the way along.

00:10:06.000 All these institutions, much like the public has a characteristic way of being, all these institutions have a very characteristic 20th century way of being.

00:10:14.000 They're hierarchical.

00:10:16.000 They are credentialed.

00:10:18.000 You win your way there by going to school, knowing people, a great deal of status is invested.

00:10:27.000 So you have these elites who have this set of very hierarchical values colliding with this public that is networked on the internet.

00:10:35.000 And it's very asymmetrical, very asymmetrical.

00:10:39.000 And if you want a quick rundown of, for the first 10 years of 2011, when Arab Spring broke out till the pandemic, the public was in the ascendant.

00:10:54.000 Let me tell you, if you follow the sales of my book, the elites never picked up that it was even a situation until Brexit, first of all, but then Trump.

00:11:04.000 Trump was the gigantic detonation that woke up the elites.

00:11:09.000 So between 2016 and 2020, the elites Embarked on what you might consider a reaction, kind of like the reactionary movement that was imposed on Europe after the fall of the French Revolution and Napoleon.

00:11:26.000 They want to go back to the 20th century.

00:11:27.000 They want to go back to, you know, when we say things, you have to listen to us.

00:11:31.000 And if you say things that are different, it's disinformation.

00:11:35.000 And I think with the pandemic, the elites gained the upper hand.

00:11:40.000 They gained the upper hand.

00:11:41.000 I think the public was very scared.

00:11:43.000 They were very scared, and they wanted the elites to know.

00:11:46.000 The elite modality is, we are the experts, we know, you should listen to us, you should never listen to anybody else.

00:11:53.000 That made sense in the 20th century because there was nobody else talking.

00:11:56.000 We couldn't even talk back to them, right?

00:11:59.000 So the worst you could do was yell at your television set, which I sometimes did.

00:12:05.000 There was no way to communicate or to put out in public your opinion of these elite players.

00:12:12.000 Now, of course, that world is over, but the elites want to clamp down and say, no, no, we are the people who know.

00:12:19.000 A pandemic I think even the public wanted the elites to know, please, we're scared, help us.

00:12:27.000 And that began a process that spread, if you look at Twitter files, that spread from health to politics.

00:12:35.000 Because now it's the Russians that are interfering, and you don't want people to vote on false information.

00:12:41.000 But what's false information?

00:12:43.000 Hunter Biden's laptop is false information and suddenly becomes very one-sided.

00:12:51.000 The Democratic Party, the elites are not, it's not a partisan thing, right?

00:12:58.000 There are Republican elites, you talk to Mitt Romney, he is probably as elite as they come.

00:13:04.000 But the establishment of the United States of America, its political home is the Democratic Party, so question about that.

00:13:11.000 And it was remarkable for me to see how the entire bureaucracy of the United States, I mean I was in CIA, and I'll tell you when I was in it, One of the things that was almost like a religion with us was you did not have a political life inside.

00:13:26.000 You just did not have a political life.

00:13:28.000 You didn't even have a policy life, all right?

00:13:31.000 You weren't even supposed to say, this policy of the president is a great thing.

00:13:35.000 You dealt in platonic truth.

00:13:38.000 You basically told the policymaker, this is the world as it is happening.

00:13:43.000 These are the effects of your policy.

00:13:44.000 But you didn't say it's good or bad, right?

00:13:47.000 So the idea of all these people from intelligence getting together and putting together a manifesto saying that the idea that there's this laptop from Hunter Biden, this is a Russian manipulation, this is a Russian hack.

00:14:01.000 That has never happened before.

00:14:02.000 Many things are happening now that have never happened before.

00:14:06.000 I think it's an attempt that the elites are trying to do.

00:14:11.000 Every political action triggers a reaction.

00:14:15.000 We're in a reactionary moment across the world, but very powerfully in America, I think, right now.

00:14:20.000 The term public, as you use it, as I understand from your book, is taken from Walter Lippmann's definition as a group that coalesce around a particular issue.

00:14:31.000 So the public could be talking about a hockey game or they could be talking about anti-establishment policy.

00:14:38.000 It's fascinating to learn that during your time in the CIA, words like therefore and so were extracted from the discourse and you were encouraged simply to deal in data, not its connotations, implications or potential solutions that could be derived from it.

00:14:58.000 as you're talking. That was actually the CIA mandate by law or at least by regulation. CIA

00:15:05.000 is not supposed to be dealing in policy, it deals in facts.

00:15:09.000 Well perhaps one of the many metastasizations that has occurred as a result of this

00:15:16.000 radically shifting dynamic that you beautifully articulated as a kind of information tsunami and the

00:15:23.000 evidence seismic connotations of that is that these agencies have lost perhaps their apolitical

00:15:31.000 status and have become instruments of power in a more conventional manner.

00:15:37.000 What interests me a great deal, Martin, is the dissolution and evaporation of what seemed to be quite reliable taxonomies even 20 years ago, although there has always been a strand of public discourse that has been the centralised establishment are ultimately one entity, the distinction between left and right is meaningless.

00:16:02.000 But now we are seeing a kind of mobilisation at and a kind of interconnection between those two apparently,

00:16:10.000 formally polarised worlds that demonstrates that there is no real difference.

00:16:17.000 Just examples, recent examples, Bernie Sanders right in on Fox News yesterday, Chomsky saying

00:16:23.000 that Trump is one of the only anti-war advocates.

00:16:26.000 And if what we're seeing, as you describe, is the redundancy of those terms, and you call for the introduction of the idea of the centre versus the boundary or periphery, that we are seeing that the establishment is able to assert control in an environment of fear.

00:16:45.000 Even under all of these neologisms, there is still a kind of primal and archetypal resource that we can return to, i.e.

00:16:57.000 the palette of emotions that human beings feel.

00:17:00.000 And it seems like the pandemic was a great opportunity to utilise fear to assert control.

00:17:07.000 When we look at the results of the pandemic, lockdown, introduction of digital ID, crushing of dissent, introduction of government control via the agencies we've discussed into presumed private spaces and the cooperation between spaces that we would never have assumed cooperation would be likely.

00:17:26.000 So, in your book, whilst you continually recognise that you ain't claiming to be Nosferatu, it seems that in terms of just information, there are trends that are emerging.

00:17:36.000 Do you imagine, Martin, that we are going to see attempts to assert centralised control and ways to advance globalism?

00:17:45.000 What will be the likely resistance and what Given that much of what you said was, I wish I could have written down and said, you know, what I was starting to recognise when I was at the CIA, what is it that you're saying now, given that even in the post-Trump, post-Brexit era, we are beginning to see new movements from centralised authority?

00:18:09.000 Yeah, I'll give you the sort of slightly negative view and then I'll transition, because I think, for example, I'm looking at something very positively right now, which is what you do.

00:18:23.000 What concerns me, Despite my youthful good looks, I am not a young man, alright?

00:18:30.000 I have grandchildren, young grandchildren, and I grew up in an America that was an adventure, alright?

00:18:40.000 It was an adventure.

00:18:42.000 I'm Cuban, I'm an immigrant, alright?

00:18:45.000 Many, many weeks and months where I forget that, okay?

00:18:48.000 It was never to me, if it was anything, it was an advantage.

00:18:52.000 The girls liked it, right?

00:18:53.000 For some mysterious reason.

00:18:54.000 So, um, I, my entire history, personal history in the United States, and I was not a particularly ambitious person.

00:19:04.000 I mean, This country gave me so many opportunities, and I have had so much fun just being alive as an American.

00:19:13.000 And fear was never a part of this.

00:19:16.000 Conformism, well, you know, we all conform a little bit.

00:19:20.000 But it was never this pressure.

00:19:23.000 And I fear that when you look at the generation right above my grandchildren, the Zoomers, you know, they are terrified. 1.00

00:19:31.000 They're terrified.

00:19:32.000 They have high levels of stress.

00:19:35.000 They have high levels of suicide.

00:19:38.000 They are the most conformist group that you can ever imagine.

00:19:42.000 They need safe spaces.

00:19:44.000 Words harm them.

00:19:44.000 I'm a 60s guy.

00:19:45.000 The words harm them.

00:19:47.000 I mean, the idea that I'm a 60s guy, the idea that words can harm you.

00:19:51.000 I mean, what are you talking about?

00:19:53.000 You know?

00:19:54.000 So I would like to make sure that my grandchildren grew up in an America like mine, where being 0.63

00:20:03.000 young is an adventure.

00:20:05.000 And you can sort of say, what are you people doing?

00:20:07.000 And why are you messing up?

00:20:10.000 And the old people yell at you, and you yell back. 0.86

00:20:12.000 And in the end, you become a little bit like your parents, because that's the way of the world.

00:20:17.000 But you change a few things here and there, all right?

00:20:20.000 So that, and I think the elites today would Would want to keep those Zoomers scared. 1.00

00:20:28.000 I mean, I think there are forces at work today, you can see them in the Twitter files, that basically everything is a harm.

00:20:36.000 Everything is a fear that they have.

00:20:38.000 That's a big thing with, for example, the social media companies.

00:20:41.000 You can't use this, you can't talk about this, because that's a harm, right?

00:20:46.000 Words are harm.

00:20:48.000 But a lot of those are, of course, politically latent and favor one side over the other.

00:20:53.000 Can they do it?

00:20:54.000 Can they centralize?

00:20:55.000 Well, I'm looking at Russell Brand, all right?

00:20:59.000 You, and I'll tell you what, I'm looking at Russell Brand, and since this is this weird Zoom thing, I'm looking at me too on the screen, all right?

00:21:07.000 And I'm looking at two people who have gotten to where they are by not following the pattern of the 20th century, all right?

00:21:14.000 You would never be doing what you're doing right now in the 20th century.

00:21:18.000 You just don't, you don't look like Walter Cronkite.

00:21:21.000 You don't sound remotely like Walter Cronkite.

00:21:24.000 You don't have the background that is necessary.

00:21:26.000 Where are your degrees, all right?

00:21:29.000 You're just somebody who came from some other field and happen to be good at what you're doing right now, all right?

00:21:37.000 And how do we know you're good?

00:21:38.000 Because you have lots of people who want to hear what you're doing, right?

00:21:44.000 The internet, or whatever you want to call it, the digital dispensation, gives us the possibility of doing those things.

00:21:51.000 My book was an e-book to begin with, right, before it was published by Stripe Press.

00:21:56.000 And that's very hard to centralize, very hard to centralize.

00:22:00.000 And you know, There are people with millions upon millions of followers who don't agree with this, and I think it took us a while to recognize what was going on with this weird post-pandemic shutdown of the information sphere.

00:22:17.000 You know, they locked us down at home, and then they locked down the information sphere in a very similar way, strangely.

00:22:23.000 And I think we We may have been a little laggard in figuring it out, but we're pushing back.

00:22:29.000 We're pushing back.

00:22:30.000 And I don't particularly care whether you believe in these things or not.

00:22:35.000 If you're a big believer in progressive ideas like identity, that's fine.

00:22:43.000 It's just, that's your little church.

00:22:45.000 Don't drag me in, right?

00:22:46.000 You can't use state power or corporate wealth or your control of the mainstream media to drag me in by saying, if you use these words or have these opinions, somehow bad things are going to happen to you.

00:23:04.000 That, I don't want my grandchildren to grow up in that America.

00:23:07.000 And I think we're fighting back.

00:23:09.000 And I don't think centralizing is, to me, I'm not the most brilliant person around, but I can't imagine how that can be done in what is virtually an infinite information sphere.

00:23:21.000 I mean, for human purposes, it's infinite.

00:23:23.000 It's so big that you can't occupy it.

00:23:26.000 You can't put, you know, fact checkers in every little corner of it and make sure everybody says the right thing.

00:23:33.000 In the absence of the potential for controlling it or regulating it meaningfully, it's likely, I would say, that we will see the assertion of unreasonable power and an increase in censorship, an increase in the smearing of dissenting voices.

00:23:49.000 And I think that what you're referring to with the utilization of progressivism is an attempt at asserting control with a moral aesthetic rather than a kind of blunt boot-in-the-face Orwellian feel.

00:24:05.000 a new way of creating censorship, a new way of shutting down dissent.

00:24:11.000 And it seems that the only, well not the only, a way of neutralising this threat of ongoing

00:24:18.000 control and censorship is to accept now that there are indeed, curiously given the nature

00:24:24.000 of much of the rhetoric emerging from those circles, there is true diversity of opinion.

00:24:30.000 There is a requirement for real democracy that is decentralised.

00:24:35.000 Now I know that you have a lot of respect for many of the institutions that benefit from the ability to implement control, generate Generate and extract profit.

00:24:49.000 I'm talking about the corporate and governmental institutions that appear to have aligned during the pandemic period in conjunction with conventional media and indeed, evidently, social media.

00:25:00.000 It seems that they have a convergence of interests that is sufficient to negate the necessity for conspiracy, although there may yet be conspiracy.

00:25:11.000 In order to oppose that, it seems that a new vision needs to be put forward.

00:25:15.000 One of the things you talk about a lot in the book is that the periphery doesn't have an alternative vision.

00:25:19.000 When I've talked around these subjects, particularly with Adam Curtis, he said that the Arab Spring was a demonstration for the potential of change and an even revolution.

00:25:29.000 But when it came to the crunch, they didn't have an alternative idea to implement

00:25:34.000 at the level of government.

00:25:36.000 A similar thing could perhaps be said of Podemos and Syriza, although they were, broadly speaking, socialist ideals.

00:25:42.000 When it came to their encounter with centralized bureaucracy

00:25:45.000 in the form of the EU, both melted into the kind of centralized and establishment powers

00:25:51.000 that had preceded them.

00:25:52.000 What, therefore, do you imagine based on the information that you have access to-- and I understand it's quite a lot

00:25:58.000 and it's growing-- do you think needs to be the kind of vision

00:26:03.000 And what can we refer to?

00:26:04.000 Can we refer to ideas like anarcho-syndicalism?

00:26:07.000 Can we refer to plain old democracy?

00:26:10.000 Can we look at confederacy?

00:26:11.000 What kind of ideas, Martin, do we have recourse to?

00:26:15.000 Wow, if I had the answer to that, I wouldn't be talking to you, I'd be talking to my banker who would be counting my billions, right?

00:26:22.000 I mean, I would hesitate to put myself as somebody who can answer a question that gigantic.

00:26:30.000 I will tell you this, there are structural reasons why the public cannot generate, we're in a pathetic a sickly ideological moment. There are no ideologies. Identity

00:26:42.000 is the orthodoxy of the elites of the establishment, but if you really analyze

00:26:47.000 identity, it's not an ideology. It's kind of like a conflict generation machine, a perpetual

00:26:51.000 conflict machine. And the public can't oppose its ideology the way, say, the working class would 0.92

00:26:58.000 have opposed a very clear Marxist ideology in the 19th or 20th century for structural reasons.

00:27:08.000 The crowd in Tahrir Square - Cheers.

00:27:11.000 that overthrew Hosni Mubarak, was composed of many, many, many different strands

00:27:19.000 of political opinion, all the way from very agnostic,

00:27:27.000 socialistic types, to the Muslim Brotherhood youth.

00:27:33.000 The older guys in Muslim Brotherhood stood aloof, but the youth showed up, and in between every other kind of person.

00:27:39.000 They were unified, as is the public unified, every time by what they were against.

00:27:45.000 And they were against Hosni Mubarak, right?

00:27:48.000 But if you had gone into Tahrir Square and said, what should follow Hosni Mubarak, they would start fighting among themselves.

00:27:54.000 Yeah, and the same was true of the, you know, I mentioned Podemos.

00:27:57.000 Podemos was a tiny little, you know, subset of the indignados, and the initial indignados manifesto said we are apolitical.

00:28:07.000 We are not this and we are not that, all right?

00:28:10.000 And that's basically where the public has stood, like sort of beyond politics.

00:28:14.000 But beyond politics unfortunately means that all you can be is against, and if you are Forever against and never present an alternative, you fall into the pitfall of what I call nihilism, which is the belief that destruction is a form of progress.

00:28:31.000 Now, if you were to say, what are we to oppose to this?

00:28:34.000 I mean, we have to assume, coming from Cuba, I can tell you this, it's very easy for me to say democracy is better than anything else.

00:28:42.000 And in fact, in the world, almost every human being, even the people who don't actually

00:28:47.000 act on it, will use those words.

00:28:49.000 They say democracy.

00:28:50.000 I mean, if you read the North Korean constitution, tears will come to your eyes that it's such

00:28:56.000 a democratic constitution, right?

00:28:58.000 Of course, not much happens along those lines, but you have to at least pretend to be democratic.

00:29:05.000 That may seem hypocritical or fraudulent, but in fact it's not.

00:29:10.000 It means that the only game in town is democracy.

00:29:13.000 It's actually an important point.

00:29:16.000 So we are hobbling along with a democracy in the 21st century, when the public moves at the speed of light on the internet, that is moving... basically it's immobile.

00:29:28.000 A democracy that is in case of these immobile pyramids,

00:29:32.000 these hierarchies for the 21st century.

00:29:34.000 So what we obviously need to do is start thinking in terms of how can we move these 20th century hierarchies

00:29:42.000 into something that more resembles Amazon, right?

00:29:46.000 A 21st century institution.

00:29:49.000 Amazon is a great big bureaucracy, right?

00:29:53.000 Amazon is a hierarchy, but you don't encounter that.

00:29:57.000 What you encounter, number one is, oh, geez, I gotta go to my laptop and poof, you know,

00:30:02.000 I want this thing and I trust it, has a high trust factor.

00:30:06.000 I put my credit card there and I assume.

00:30:09.000 No, nothing bad is going to happen.

00:30:11.000 And then, oh look, I want this thing, I want this thing.

00:30:13.000 Two days later, a day later, it's on my doorstep, all right?

00:30:16.000 So what we encounter is service.

00:30:19.000 What it actually is, is a bureaucracy, like the government.

00:30:24.000 So the government is the opposite.

00:30:26.000 The government delivers more services than Any other institution in the universe.

00:30:31.000 But what we encounter is arrogance, bureaucracy, you have to stand on one foot, you have to sing the Marseillaise, you have to, you know, the Woody Allen comedy, which is, you know, put your underwear on the outside and start speaking Swedish, you know?

00:30:45.000 I mean, all these things that government demands of you just because they have power, and these are people who are not really meeting an end, but just exercising their power.

00:30:56.000 But the more that that institution can resemble Amazon and just be focused on service in a digital way, the flatter the government is going to be.

00:31:09.000 You always need institutions.

00:31:10.000 You will always need elites.

00:31:12.000 I am not a massive egalitarian in that sense, but the institutions of the 20th century just are Well adapted.

00:31:19.000 They are like the dinosaurs with that comet streaking down.

00:31:23.000 They cannot survive in the digital era with legitimacy.

00:31:27.000 The only way they could survive is through control, which is what they're trying to do now.

00:31:31.000 So we need to reform them.

00:31:33.000 We need to reform them.

00:31:35.000 In a sense, it feels like our government agencies are still being fuelled by the anti-democratic movements of the last century, state communism, fascism, in ways that are Opaque, this kind of corporatist and undemocratic version of democracy that most of us live within are in a sense, it seems to me at least, in attempts to manage outcomes.

00:32:07.000 Regardless of who you vote for, regardless of what happens, these elite interests will be able to continue unperturbed.

00:32:15.000 When you talk about the fact that public power is now networked, it seems that there are clues in the idea that that word encompasses, that networked power is part of the solution.

00:32:30.000 It's interesting that you say that the Successes in big tech these unprecedented power systems are perhaps somehow examples for how state power could evolve when it seems at least it's not something I've considered enough that they are

00:32:49.000 You know, monopolistic, profiteering.

00:32:54.000 But I really take your point that they elicit a lot of trust for all of the complaining that we do on this channel about Amazon.

00:33:04.000 Amazon do have my credit card details.

00:33:07.000 Amazon do deliver my packages on time.

00:33:09.000 They do make a fairly decent amount of TV and certainly they curate a lot of great Entertainment.

00:33:16.000 The fact is, in terms of utility, they're succeeding, and there must be something in that.

00:33:21.000 But just yesterday we spoke to Christian Smalls, the leader of the first Amazon union, and you only have to listen to him for a while to see what the invisible cost of that expertise is.

00:33:33.000 And similarly with Apple, with their friction-free, beautifully designed product, we know that elsewhere people toil to capture those resources. Part of, I believe, what's

00:33:45.000 happening is beyond even the advances of the industrial age and down to the project

00:33:52.000 of secularism itself. That we're pretending that we are not spiritual beings, that we're

00:33:58.000 pretending that we are not beings that require purpose, meaning, connection, ideas

00:34:05.000 that are difficult to articulate and certainly difficult to bring to the area of policy.

00:34:13.000 Good.

00:34:14.000 This is why I think it's very interesting and important that you say that democracy is the only game in town, that ultimately we have to abdicate from the idea that we know what's best and the idea that there is one universal best for everybody and perhaps look at What type of reform these giant central organisations are going to be required to make?

00:34:39.000 Sometimes it seems like such a behemoth of a task that we're afraid to undertake it.

00:34:44.000 But regularly with the subjects we report on, it's pretty clear That if you were to end lobbying, it's pretty clear that if you were to break down the military-industrial complex, if you were to demonopolise the big tech space in particular, if you were to end people in congressional and political positions owning stocks and shares in the industries that they're supposed to regulate,

00:35:07.000 There are changes that could be made pretty quickly that would restore public trust and would create the opportunity for real democracy, even at the seemingly unmanageable scale of great nations, that change could be instantiated.

00:35:21.000 But I wonder if, you know, it seems that when you were talking about the ability to interact with Amazon through a credit card, that we could be interacting with democratic institutions in a similarly direct way.

00:35:32.000 Yeah, I mean, think about it.

00:35:35.000 The political parties here in the States, as they are throughout the democratic world, they're dying.

00:35:43.000 They're just dying.

00:35:44.000 They don't have a reason for being.

00:35:47.000 They haven't for quite a while.

00:35:49.000 I mean, long before even the internet, they were falling apart.

00:35:53.000 But what if you basically set up a political party as kind of like a Reddit,

00:36:02.000 a subreddit, right? Okay, and I'm the Republican subreddit. What is the public interested in? So

00:36:09.000 the things that people are interested in, the issues that people are interested in versus what the

00:36:14.000 political players are interested in, are going to rise to the top as they do in Reddit, you know,

00:36:18.000 where everybody, the things that people want to talk about the most become the most talked about,

00:36:24.000 you know, versus now.

00:36:25.000 Part of what happens to the public is they're saying, you know, please help me with inflation.

00:36:31.000 Please.

00:36:31.000 You know, I think immigration is out of hand.

00:36:35.000 And when they look up, the person says, well, you're probably a racist.

00:36:38.000 And by the way, global warming.

00:36:40.000 So they don't want to talk.

00:36:40.000 Right.

00:36:41.000 They don't want to talk the issues that the public is interested in.

00:36:46.000 But you could change that, and it doesn't even mean necessarily, of course, that if

00:36:49.000 you're a Republican hearing this upswell of opinions, you'd have to accept it necessarily.

00:36:57.000 But you would know, you would have a data point of, okay, our people are saying these are the most important issues.

00:37:03.000 The people who are engaged, that's what they're saying.

00:37:06.000 Right now, there's this gigantic air gap between what the elites say is important and what the public wants to talk about.

00:37:13.000 And much of the anger of the public comes from the sense of distance.

00:37:19.000 You know, we are We are very immediate.

00:37:23.000 The internet age is a very immediate age. 1.00

00:37:26.000 President Trump can tweet something and I am right below Trump saying you're an idiot, blah blah blah, whatever. 1.00

00:37:32.000 So he and I are chickened out there, right? 1.00

00:37:37.000 Most of the elites, they're in some unfathomable distance at the top of the pyramid, and they're not listening to us.

00:37:44.000 They're talking their issues, their issues, they're all talking, you can see, they're all looking at each other.

00:37:48.000 That's the 20th century modality.

00:37:50.000 You know, if you ever want to know what a newspaper was, a newspaper in the 20th century, as I said, in my venerable old age, I can tell you, I was there, okay?

00:38:01.000 So, newspapers were elites talking to elites.

00:38:05.000 I mean, everything that was printed in a newspaper was something an elite was interested in, whether it was reporting or opinion.

00:38:05.000 That's all it was.

00:38:14.000 But that doesn't translate anymore.

00:38:15.000 Because the public is out there.

00:38:17.000 The public is saying, this is what I'm interested in, and this gigantic air gap has developed, and the public is very angry.

00:38:23.000 And I will say, you actually put your finger on something that I note, but don't I don't know how you would, number one, and I'm certainly the last one to be able to do it, which is the spiritual dimension.

00:38:38.000 I think part of the anger is because much of the people, the public that actually pours into the street, obviously there's always a disproportionate number of young people who do this, right?

00:38:53.000 And when you look at that late millennial and Zoomer generation, these are people who have stopped going to church, come from families that are not in good shape, I mean statistically, and their communities, you know, these are people who may be moving around, they're not necessarily embedded in a single community, they're everywheres, they're not somewheres, and And they want meaning. 1.00

00:39:23.000 They want whatever a human being wants.

00:39:26.000 They want meaning in their lives.

00:39:28.000 And they have decided that the place to find meaning is politics.

00:39:33.000 And politics is just transactional.

00:39:35.000 Politics is not a place where you find meaning.

00:39:38.000 So they all these when you look at the people in the streets in the indignados or you know the autonomous zones in Seattle you know this is all over YouTube right and they They just beam with this joy of transfiguration.

00:39:57.000 Well, everybody here has changed everything.

00:39:59.000 We don't use money.

00:40:01.000 People bring us food for nothing.

00:40:02.000 There's a brief moment of moral perfection and meaningfulness.

00:40:07.000 Then, of course, it dissolves into chaos, and then the police come, and everybody scrambles away.

00:40:12.000 But you cannot put the burden of meaning on politics, and therefore The anger multiplies.

00:40:19.000 It's like, well, we tried and we failed.

00:40:23.000 That is systemic.

00:40:24.000 You're never going to be able to get a kind of a, you know, meaning of life from any kind of political process.

00:40:32.000 So I think bringing up the spiritual aspect of it, the things that used to give us meaning, church, religion, a family, settled families, settled communities, Um, that's, that's a trick.

00:40:46.000 That's a trick.

00:40:49.000 Meaning is a root out of the self.

00:40:53.000 The reason I mention secularism is because, of course, in its most rudimentary form, it is the extraction of church, you know, the separation of church and state.

00:41:01.000 But like, perhaps more philosophically, it's the idea that something neutral is taking place that doesn't access the transcendent or the hysteria That the religious and spiritual, you know, ecstasy, hysteria, transcendence, all of the things that we can associate with spirituality, as well as duty, service, connection, meaning, purpose.

00:41:27.000 You're right that politics can't be a vessel for that.

00:41:30.000 They have to be grafted on artificially.

00:41:34.000 That true politics, who gets what where when, is about The administration of resources, an organization, but in a sense one can't underwrite these systems of pragmatism without an ideology, and the ideology ultimately has to, and has done in sort of Western humanitarianism, has borrowed from Christianity, even something as avowedly

00:42:01.000 atheistic as communism in the notion of solidarity has to borrow from fraternity, has to borrow from

00:42:09.000 a unitive idea, a potentially a unitary consciousness. So I feel that something

00:42:15.000 interesting happened at the advent of the union movement in your country, America, that

00:42:22.000 that there was a sort of a moment where populism appeared like it was going to be a kind of a

00:42:28.000 democratic movement. Someone came on here once and talked to us about that and like that now

00:42:33.000 populism has become a kind of...

00:42:35.000 Dirty word affiliated with, you know, extremism and a kind of a byword for all forms of prejudice.

00:42:44.000 But I'm beginning to feel that what has to be understood and appreciated, demonstrated and brought about is precisely what you've said, Martin, that instead of saying, you know, this is what you need.

00:42:57.000 I mean, then it can be a discourse and persuasion is always going to be part of leadership.

00:43:02.000 But we can't anymore have a politics that is, as you say, this is what you should care about, particularly when there is so little trust, particularly when ultimately we know that the policies in the particular areas that you cited aren't likely to meaningfully alter even the conditions that they claim to pertain to.

00:43:21.000 So what I feel is that You know, throughout your book you're talking about this tension between centralised authority and the peripheral voices that we assume to be the public, which are of course amorphous and of course numerous.

00:43:36.000 It seems to me that what is required is the opportunity to say, you in your community may want to run it this way, very traditional, very orthodox.

00:43:46.000 You should be allowed to, if that's what you democratically want to do.

00:43:49.000 Good luck.

00:43:50.000 You're entitled, by virtue of the land and population, to this amount of resource.

00:43:55.000 You, I mean, it's difficult to not do it geographically in terms of, you know, practically.

00:44:00.000 And as you say, we're dealing now with everywhere people.

00:44:03.000 We're dealing with constant migration.

00:44:05.000 I don't mean international migration, I simply mean movement.

00:44:09.000 It's bloody hard, but I guess as well, Martin, isn't it important when you talk about this spirit of adventure that you enjoyed as a young man, that we are intrepid, that we are bold, that we move forward with a vision, even if that vision is, we're going to try to provide you with what you want, and we have to accept that what you want is diverse, is sometimes conflicting.

00:44:30.000 If you in this area want to live this way, we're going to have to allow it.

00:44:35.000 If you in this area want to live this way, We're going to have to allow it.

00:44:38.000 This idea of trying to create a unipolar world, you know, and I believe even the current war is to some degree motivated by that desire.

00:44:45.000 I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

00:44:46.000 It seems to me like unwinnable and likely to bring about a true dystopia.

00:44:52.000 Yeah, I mean, I have said oftentimes that We, one effect of the internet has been to fracture the public.

00:45:03.000 By the way, that's the way the public really was.

00:45:07.000 The mass audience that I, when I was a young person, I was part of that mass audience, we all seemed to have the same tastes.

00:45:15.000 And it was just wonderful because, you know, the entertainment industry and mass production could all pitch to our tastes, which was remarkably similar.

00:45:24.000 Of course, we had no voice in the matter.

00:45:26.000 We chose between the products and the shows or whatever that were given to us, which were very few.

00:45:31.000 And suddenly, when the Internet came and we got a voice, it turns out, no, actually, we're very fractured.

00:45:37.000 And we're becoming increasingly fractured.

00:45:39.000 And I think I have been an advocate of the idea that government policy, national policy, should not be one size fits all.

00:45:48.000 Because when you do that, you're inviting a revolt. You're basically at least 50% of the people,

00:45:55.000 probably more, are going to say, "That doesn't suit me." All right? And you should tailor

00:46:00.000 your policies so that they can be implemented much more locally, because you're right. Our

00:46:05.000 localities tend to be far more civil and far more homogeneous. And maybe over here we're

00:46:11.000 conservative and we're not going to interfere a lot. Maybe over here we're very liberal and we're going to

00:46:16.000 have all kinds of programs to save the the world. I mean, that's fine. That's fine. The problem,

00:46:21.000 [BLANK_AUDIO]

00:46:21.000 of course, is...

00:46:22.000 that proximity. You know, the internet means we're all on the same stage jostling one another.

00:46:28.000 And we're watching the other side, watching the people, you know, if you are conservative,

00:46:33.000 you're watching California. And if you're a Californian liberal, you're watching

00:46:37.000 DeSantis in Florida. And it looks like he's in the room with you talking to you. And so

00:46:41.000 everybody's yelling and screaming. And that, I think, required that. I mean, there are many of

00:46:47.000 the issues we have to deal with are issues that in an older era in Victorian England would have

00:46:54.000 been called moral. All right.

00:46:56.000 Would have been called issues of self-control, self-assessment, self-presentation, right?

00:47:07.000 Issues that Number one, do you want to scream when you can just talk?

00:47:16.000 Are you going to be afraid of the consequences of your words, even though they are the words that really express your opinion?

00:47:24.000 There are all kinds of decisions that one makes along questions like that, that are in some sense social, that's a word we love to use, rather than moral, and in some sense political.

00:47:35.000 But they really boil down to, who am I as a human being?

00:47:39.000 What kind of value do I have as a human being?

00:47:41.000 And I think You know, if you are tailoring your words because you're afraid, and if you are backing off from the struggle or opposite, you become some kind of member of a war band that seeks out enemies and virtually attacks them and destroys them, and there's lots of people who do that.

00:48:03.000 You're being destructive and you're being cowardly.

00:48:07.000 And we just need to teach the manners of the internet, right?

00:48:11.000 I mean, people like Shaw, the old Victorian and post-Victorian Brits were great about this.

00:48:19.000 Everybody makes fun of the Victorians.

00:48:21.000 Go back and read them.

00:48:22.000 There was never a more self-critical crowd than them.

00:48:27.000 Gladstone's diaries.

00:48:29.000 The guy who had risen in this career, one of the great Prime Ministers of Britain, one of the great towering figures in the world.

00:48:36.000 His diaries are one gigantic anxiety question about, am I good enough?

00:48:41.000 He was religious.

00:48:41.000 Am I good enough?

00:48:42.000 Am I good enough, you know?

00:48:45.000 So that's what we need.

00:48:46.000 We don't need people to applaud us, all our anger, all our questioning,

00:48:53.000 don't aim it out, which is what the internet suggests you do. Aim it in. Am I good enough,

00:48:58.000 right? Am I good enough? So, I mean, there is that to this, and I'm a little uncomfortable

00:49:02.000 because I'm not a moral preacher, I'm not particularly religious, you know, so, but

00:49:07.000 unfortunately all these questions lead back to what I consider to be a very, very moral posture.

00:49:14.000 And the last word on that I would say is, if you're an elite, it is morally incumbent on you to convey the fact That you are not an oracle, that you can't see the future, that there are questions that are too complex for the human race to understand fully, all right?

00:49:32.000 And to pretend that you know what's going to happen 50 years from now, to pretend that you know that this is the only policy that's going to fix some, you know, solve some problem that then doesn't happen.

00:49:44.000 You're going to be sowing distrust, and your institution is going to be hemorrhaging that much more authority.

00:49:51.000 So you have to be able to convey the will to move forward by understanding a scientific way, which means we're not certain.

00:49:58.000 We think this is the way.

00:49:59.000 We're going to try this way.

00:50:01.000 The human race has only ever advanced by trial and error.

00:50:04.000 Nobody ever predicted, well, 100 years from now, this is my 100-year plan, and we're going to get there.

00:50:09.000 That never has happened in history, ever.

00:50:11.000 You try this, you try that, and something works, alright?

00:50:14.000 And our elites need to change their 20th century rhetoric, which is very utopian, very, we can fix everything if you give me enough power, enough science, and enough money, to a much more humble.

00:50:26.000 And that's a moral question, too.

00:50:28.000 Yeah, it is, and it's interesting, Martin, how often you return to ideas that, in my lexicon at least, are spiritual.

00:50:36.000 And I just want to allude to two ideas that are, given that your book, in a sense, offers a transcendent lens to view what's regarded often as a sort of a quite narrow polemic between old, atrophying ideas, what we once regarded as left and right, So individualism and materialism as derived from post-enlightenment

00:50:55.000 rationalism, the idea that the rights of the individual, which I do

00:50:58.000 obviously believe are sacred, the rights of the individual have somehow become this desiccated

00:51:04.000 and isolated idea that is serviced through consumerism,

00:51:09.000 that your function is to fulfil yourself through your screen,

00:51:12.000 and that even your emotional requirements are conducted in a virtual way.

00:51:19.000 I've come to understand, whilst I'm sure I err frequently, that morality is about what I do, not what I believe you

00:51:28.000 should do.

00:51:29.000 My morality is how do I treat people, and as much as possible it oughtn't be abstract.

00:51:35.000 It oughtn't be, "Well, when we've got this utopia, how am I driving today?

00:51:40.000 How am I speaking to the people I work with?

00:51:42.000 How am I treating my wife and my children?"

00:51:44.000 The reality of my moral and ethical conduct, which often in my fanciful allusions

00:51:50.000 to great change and utopia, I personally forget.

00:51:54.000 This is also recognised that the necessity for continuing acknowledgement of personal fallibility, that there is no end point, that there is, that, you know, as Christ indicated, the Messiah has to be found within you, that there is no external source of salvation that's going to become available, that it's not going to be resolved externally.

00:52:19.000 And also this idea of, part of the problem I believe that we're encountering is because, excuse me, beyond the you know sort of limited dynamic of parliamentary or congressional politics, there is a unchallenged idea that underwrites much of what we're doing, progressivism.

00:52:38.000 But whether we're on the left or the right, we kind of, in the same way that you believe that, you know, the ideal, the ideologies of the last century were going to, oh, we're going to solve all your problems through this ideal or that ideal.

00:52:49.000 Many of us believe that technology, you know, like there are sort of technological utopianists, if that's a term, that still say, no, no, we can solve this.

00:52:58.000 We'll just go to Mars.

00:52:59.000 This will happen.

00:53:00.000 AI will solve this problem.

00:53:02.000 But I also, like, you know, Gandhi said, like, You know, like, obviously it can't have been later than the early 1940s.

00:53:09.000 Look, we are too obsessed with trinkets.

00:53:13.000 We are too obsessed with comfort.

00:53:15.000 India is a country of 70,000 villages.

00:53:18.000 We should be, each of the villages should be independent where possible.

00:53:22.000 That we must not lose craft and trade.

00:53:24.000 You know, and like, how vehemently he opposed the separation that took place after British occupation.

00:53:31.000 Believing that there was a way for Muslims and Hindus And other Indian religions that are obviously of less significance when it comes to scale and size must find a way to cooperate.

00:53:41.000 And that India oughtn't just replace the power structures that the British had implemented with new elites.

00:53:48.000 And it seemed that that happened.

00:53:49.000 So it seems to me that what's required is a kind of a reckoning, an inventory, about where we're going and what our vision is.

00:53:55.000 An acceptance of our shortcomings and a kind of understanding that, as you say repeatedly in your book, the old idea, that's gone now.

00:54:02.000 To assert centralised control in the way that you could a century ago is going to have a high cost in blood.

00:54:08.000 And the dissolution, just the nihilistic Destruction of these institutions also leaves us with a landscape that's difficult to contemplate.

00:54:20.000 Somehow, from the thesis and antithesis, some kind of synthesis must be born, and that can only be born through conversation.

00:54:28.000 So it seems to me that one of the subjects we've talked about and talked around a lot, the kind of cultural conflict and the inability to accept differences, whether that's wokeism or anti-wokeism, That must be benefiting the elites.

00:54:41.000 That must be benefiting them.

00:54:43.000 Because in order for their stasis to be maintained, their supremacy to be maintained, you cannot have mobilisation of ideas through these currently opposing cultural forces.

00:54:55.000 Well, I mean, I think the elites, if you looked at what it was like to be an elite in the 20th century, it was a good life.

00:55:02.000 It was a good life.

00:55:04.000 You basically were protected, right?

00:55:07.000 I look at somebody like Joe Biden. 0.54

00:55:09.000 Joe Biden is a protected animal.

00:55:11.000 I mean, it's an amazing thing.

00:55:12.000 If you look at his personal history, You know, he has said things that are so weird and false, and he was guilty of borrowing other people's speeches a couple of times at once, has been guilty of inventing his own path and being caught at it several times.

00:55:31.000 This would have destroyed me, would have destroyed probably you.

00:55:35.000 But he's a protected creature, and this man just kind of, from his 30s on, he just kind of rode this wagon that got him to the Senate for 30 years and to the vice presidency.

00:55:46.000 God, how did he get—and now he's president, all right?

00:55:49.000 This man, who should never have been in the Senate in the first place, when you look at who he is, he was protected.

00:55:55.000 That was the 20th century, all right?

00:55:57.000 It's hard for them to give it up.

00:55:59.000 I suspect that people who have had any taste of it or who have a nostalgic streak in their

00:56:04.000 hearts will never give it up.

00:56:06.000 We need a new elite class.

00:56:07.000 That's the way I see it.

00:56:08.000 We need a new elite class.

00:56:09.000 And that's a hard process, but it's not impossible.

00:56:13.000 There is a dialectic, sort of a tension between the public and the elites.

00:56:20.000 They are chosen by us.

00:56:23.000 Democracy to a large extent, they are chosen by us. 0.75

00:56:27.000 Who do you give your money to when you go to the movies?

00:56:29.000 What TV show do you watch?

00:56:32.000 What products do you buy?

00:56:33.000 What books do you read?

00:56:34.000 Who do you vote for?

00:56:35.000 What party do you give money for?

00:56:37.000 All of this is the public asserting itself.

00:56:42.000 If we say, well, let's, this crowd doesn't cut it.

00:56:46.000 Let's look for new faces.

00:56:48.000 Unfortunately, they're such a close ranks that the public is always afraid of being duped.

00:56:54.000 You know, I'll vote for this guy.

00:56:55.000 I thought he was going to be it.

00:56:56.000 And then he turns out to be, you know, Emmanuel Macron, another guy, just like the other guys, you know?

00:57:01.000 So what you, the only way you are sure that this is not one of them is these weird political mutants that say outrageous things.

00:57:10.000 Like if you are, Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro or people like that.

00:57:15.000 So we have to now, somehow or another, the public has to assert itself to elect an elite or to select an elite class that is not necessarily chosen for its bizarreness because that's kind of like a token that, you know, the way Trump talked No elite ever talks like that.

00:57:36.000 I mean, Trump was an elite.

00:57:37.000 But he just was a different animal.

00:57:37.000 He was a billionaire.

00:57:39.000 He was a mutant, right?

00:57:40.000 And Bolsonaro was the same thing.

00:57:42.000 And I can name many others.

00:57:46.000 But, I mean, is that what you want?

00:57:48.000 All you have is a sense that he is not them.

00:57:51.000 So at least he's more like us.

00:57:53.000 But it's not even true.

00:57:54.000 It isn't.

00:57:55.000 You need to You need to aspire higher than that, I think.

00:58:00.000 In the absence of real legitimate change, people will accept novelty and peculiarity, these chimeras, these odd emergent things that ultimately have the same sets of interests and aren't meaningfully going to change the lives of ordinary people.

00:58:16.000 It's interesting what you say about new elites. I know you talk in the book about how the

00:58:20.000 current elites aren't able to handle the new dynamic and I suppose then that is why you know the magnates

00:58:29.000 of this century where it was once the Carnegie's and the Rockefeller's is now it's Facebook,

00:58:36.000 Google.

00:58:37.000 I love the bit where you talk about even the clues in their monikers that there would never have been a moment where they have easy names like Yahoo and Google and Facebook and Google would never have called itself the International Search Engine Corporation.

00:58:54.000 Even that linguistic change is an indication of something.

00:58:58.000 I've got a lot from this conversation, Martin.

00:59:01.000 I'd like to talk to you a lot more.

00:59:03.000 Still, I guess when I talk to you, I realise that I still must have some crazy ambition, because I feel like I'm trying to pull something out of you, that you know something that I need.

00:59:12.000 You know something that I need.

00:59:13.000 And there's things I want to ask you about.

00:59:15.000 I really want to know about how you feel media reporting on the current war is a demonstration of what we're experiencing.

00:59:23.000 Do you have time to answer that question?

00:59:25.000 Yes, I do.

00:59:26.000 Well, I mean, I think at a certain moment, and I kind of halfway have studied this but not in depth enough to give you some very definite answers, but I think a certain moment The media became, just like we're talking about the young generation being conformistic, the media became kind of like monolithic.

00:59:51.000 And don't question where the trigger was.

00:59:52.000 The trigger was, again, Donald Trump.

00:59:54.000 If you look at, if you make the habit of saying, okay, what are the subjects that are playing out in the media?

01:00:03.000 They always seem to have, well, this is higher, this is lower, this seems to be attracting attention.

01:00:08.000 Trump was like, I mean, a phenomenon. Nothing like it, I can tell you, had happened

01:00:15.000 in my lifetime. He was so far above in attention. Then came the pandemic. The pandemic was as far

01:00:20.000 above Trump as Trump was above the rest of us. That's probably what killed him, by the way,

01:00:24.000 because he didn't have that monopoly of attention anymore. When the war broke, that isn't true

01:00:29.000 anymore, when the war broke in Ukraine, it took that place.

01:00:33.000 And two things always seem to happen with this phenomenon.

01:00:35.000 Number one, it's monolithic attention.

01:00:37.000 Number two, monolithic opinion.

01:00:39.000 All right?

01:00:40.000 Everybody must have the same opinion.

01:00:42.000 So somehow, if you were in the slightest bit pro-Russian, you got kicked out of your job or something, because it was kind of like, if you didn't want to vaccinate, you got kicked out.

01:00:52.000 Suddenly this became an identity issue, and I think the media was responsible for that.

01:00:58.000 I think it was, there's this phenomenon that's going on with the media

01:01:01.000 where it suddenly becomes monolithic around the subject.

01:01:05.000 It doesn't particularly, it's discourse narrowing is a technical term for that,

01:01:10.000 where there used to be 100 subjects that were discussed.

01:01:16.000 Now there's like three and one of them is way up here.

01:01:19.000 And if you look at it, everything is really about the same thing.

01:01:22.000 That has not continued with the war, but in the background, in terms of attention, but in terms of opinion, yeah, I think it still is.

01:01:32.000 The momentum has continued.

01:01:33.000 The inertia has continued.

01:01:36.000 You rarely hear any other than one point of view.

01:01:41.000 Since we've been having this conversation, and we stream it live to our membership community, so the public, or at least our community, have been present during this.

01:01:50.000 And I sometimes feel like I should be incorporating their questions, but they are communicating with each other.

01:01:56.000 Hello, those of you that are there.

01:01:57.000 It's lovely to see you.

01:01:59.000 And, you know, in a sense, the dynamic that you're describing is taking place even now.

01:02:03.000 Now, admittedly, this is an elective community that is created primarily around the content That we make but it seems to me that there is going to be more of this that if there are a set of ideals around which people can cut it like I guess like what you're talking about is there is now opportunity to canvas you know the fact is is that the elite establishment are not interested in serving the public you could not have that

01:02:28.000 That interest, and being the elite, it's an anathema, it's antithetical to that position.

01:02:34.000 So your counsel that an emergent class, at the very least, needs to emerge is a good one, that you have to come from somewhere else.

01:02:46.000 This is some comments.

01:02:48.000 Look at this.

01:02:48.000 Oh yeah, this is Blessed Old Bird says, Animal Farm, we're all equal, but some are more equal than others.

01:02:53.000 Bree One says, if we all begin sharing all our information, we will start a conversation that can't stop.

01:02:57.000 It may be revolutionary.

01:02:58.000 Change is possible if we take action.

01:03:00.000 Some optimism there.

01:03:01.000 Audrey says, COVID was always a tool to get the ball rolling for Agenda 2030.

01:03:05.000 Then there's just people saying that they love you, Martin.

01:03:09.000 Simple love being conveyed.

01:03:10.000 Perhaps that's most important of all.

01:03:11.000 That's from Claude, at least here.

01:03:14.000 What exactly is democracy?

01:03:15.000 The word democracy isn't mentioned a single time in the Declaration of Independence.

01:03:20.000 Have you got anything to say to that particular inquiry?

01:03:22.000 Do you think that's just a semantic thing?

01:03:25.000 No, I don't think democracy was in the mind of the founders.

01:03:30.000 I don't think it was mentioned in the Constitution either.

01:03:38.000 The system that was set up by the founders and the framers of the United States of America, and by the way, how fortunate is this country to have had such a A lot of geniuses.

01:03:50.000 To number one, break us apart from the mother country, sorry about that.

01:03:55.000 But number two, frame us a constitution that has served us so well for 250 years, whatever it's been.

01:04:05.000 So democracy we evolved into, and this is why I'm actually halfway optimistic, because The original system that was set up was a gentleman's republic, all right?

01:04:19.000 These were people who had property and were of course male and were white and so forth.

01:04:28.000 Somewhere around the beginning of the 20th century, that system was deeply reformed.

01:04:33.000 Between the 19th and 20th century, affluence was a new thing.

01:04:40.000 Education became very powerful.

01:04:42.000 Literacy exploded.

01:04:44.000 Newspapers exploded.

01:04:45.000 And there was this need for a system that incorporated all these tens of millions of people who had just literally just entered history, all right?

01:04:54.000 And they created this mass system.

01:04:56.000 We had mass political parties, mass movements, you had mass production, and people were stovepiped

01:05:03.000 into these mass systems.

01:05:05.000 It seems very undemocratic today, and it was very undemocratic, but they were incorporated 1.00

01:05:10.000 into the system.

01:05:11.000 That hierarchical system of the 20th century was actually, in its day, a reform, because

01:05:16.000 it included more people than just a whole bunch of white gentlemen.

01:05:21.000 The white male gentlemen.

01:05:22.000 So, it's just, as with evolution, you know, the environment changes, and then you have to adapt.

01:05:29.000 And that is what has happened today.

01:05:31.000 But democracy happened.

01:05:33.000 Democracy was not planned upon.

01:05:35.000 Democracy does not forget, through most of the history of the West, was considered a bad thing.

01:05:41.000 It was considered the rule of the mob.

01:05:44.000 It's precisely what we must aim for.

01:05:46.000 Finally, BeHereMeow said, Martin, thank you so much for joining me for this incredible conversation.

01:06:00.000 You're every bit as wonderful as I imagined you might be.

01:06:03.000 Having read your material, I know that it's something that I will continue to study and learn from.

01:06:09.000 I really appreciate you giving us your time and I hope we have the opportunity to communicate again.

01:06:14.000 Well, I would love to do that, and if I ever get back to Britain, which I love to be in and haven't been in way too long, I think 2019 was the last time, I'll look you up.

01:06:23.000 We do this event called Community where we bring together people like Vandana Shiva and Wim Hof up here.

01:06:28.000 If you're in the UK in July, we could certainly help to facilitate that if it's something that you would like.

01:06:33.000 Hay-on-Wye, the border between Wales and England.

01:06:37.000 We do this event where people come and share ideas and we create community and try to create symposia for discussion.

01:06:44.000 It would be wonderful if you were available to join us there.

01:06:46.000 Yeah, I'll look into that.

01:06:49.000 July is a good time to be in Britain.

01:06:51.000 Yeah, it's the only time that it is not punishing.

01:06:54.000 Thanks, man.

01:06:55.000 Martin, thank you.

01:06:56.000 Thanks for joining us.

01:06:57.000 -Lobby, that was great.

01:06:58.000 -Thanks, man.

01:06:59.000 Thank you.

01:07:00.000 That was, of course, Martin Goury, writer of The Revolt of the Public.

01:07:04.000 There's a link in the description to any information you might need about him and how you can follow

01:07:09.000 him and stuff.

01:07:10.000 Join me next week when I'll be speaking to Silky Carlo from Big Brother Watch, sharing

01:07:13.000 exclusive news about how governments spy and suppress information.

01:07:17.000 Also, Jimmy Dore's going to be joining us, talking about an upcoming rally in Washington

01:07:21.000 D.C. and asking for, get this, peace in Ukraine.

01:07:24.000 Don't forget to sign up for our Locals Community so that you can watch conversations like this live and ask your questions.

01:07:31.000 And also get access to my new exclusive weekly show, Stay Connected, where you can be involved and ask me and indeed Gareth there to answer your questions as well as be the first to see my new stand-up comedy show which is just fantastic.

01:07:46.000 Plus, there's a weekly meditation every Sunday, so you can stay in a state to consume all of this incredible information.

01:07:52.000 See you next week, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - January 27, 2023

Martin Gurri (The Political Revolution Is Now!)

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript