The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 115 ｜ How We Can Stop the Next Great Catastrophe ｜ Niall Ferguson ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

00:00:00.000 I think it's pretty safe to say that we've all become pretty familiar with catastrophe over the last year.

00:00:05.180 The world was wrecked by COVID. Afghanistan is in complete chaos. 1.00

00:00:10.920 I don't recognize America. I don't recognize any part of us anymore.

00:00:16.920 And our leaders seem to be encouraging this shift.

00:00:20.320 So how do we make sense of all the catastrophe and chaos?

00:00:24.960 There is a guy I haven't talked to in a long time who I just love.

00:00:29.220 His latest book is called Doom, The Politics of Catastrophe.

00:00:33.820 It's not what you think it is.

00:00:35.600 It examines our really weird, ambivalent relationship with doom.

00:00:41.700 It's a tool. It's a game.

00:00:44.620 And as we see over the last few years, especially in the last year, it is a way of life for some.

00:00:53.720 Maybe most frighteningly of all, it is it's also a currency.

00:00:58.000 Today's guest approaches doom and catastrophe from all of those angles and more.

00:01:03.600 He opens the book by saying, never in our lifetimes has there been a greater uncertainty about the future and greater ignorance of the past.

00:01:14.620 He is incredibly qualified to make that statement.

00:01:18.000 He is a historian, professor, author of 16 books, senior fellow fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

00:01:25.960 He is a senior faculty fellow fellow at Harvard, founder and managing director of Green Mantle LLC, an advisory firm.

00:01:35.200 He has won an international Emmy in 2009 for a PBS series.

00:01:40.300 He did the ascent of money.

00:01:43.340 And his wife, I.N. Hersey Alley, is not too shabby herself.

00:01:49.140 Please welcome, Neil Ferguson.

00:02:04.260 Neil, welcome.

00:02:06.260 That's great to be with you, Glenn.

00:02:07.960 It's been way too long.

00:02:08.920 I know.

00:02:09.240 And we find ourselves in a very different world since I think the last time we spoke, I felt the rumblings of what was coming.

00:02:20.640 And and now here we are.

00:02:22.700 And I'm not sure exactly where we find ourselves.

00:02:26.960 But I I have a feeling you're going to be able to to tell us.

00:02:34.380 Let's let's start with the with the basics.

00:02:38.020 What comprises a catastrophe and describe a disaster like you do in Doom?

00:02:45.980 Well, disasters will happen.

00:02:48.680 They are an integral part of the human condition.

00:02:53.280 And one of the problems we face is that they are unpredictable.

00:02:59.680 We can never know when the next disaster will strike.

00:03:03.320 We can never know what form it will take.

00:03:05.720 And disasters can take a great many different forms, ranging from a pandemic to defeat in war.

00:03:14.100 Just to think of a couple of random examples.

00:03:17.460 Something random.

00:03:18.540 I don't know what you're saying.

00:03:19.940 I mean, I don't know how you pick those two.

00:03:21.620 It's in my mind, but it's just popped up.

00:03:24.480 And and for whatever reason, there there's just no model or or theory of history that allows you to to say which disaster will come next.

00:03:33.440 But there will be disasters.

00:03:35.160 And each disaster, no matter how large or small or whether it's manmade or natural, has at least one or two common features beyond the unpredictability.

00:03:46.440 And the one that's interesting to me is the role of of human error.

00:03:52.100 Even if a purely natural event happens, like a volcano erupts, there's always some human element that determines how many people die.

00:04:03.520 Like if you decide to build a really big city next to a volcano, that is going to make consequences of an eruption much, much greater.

00:04:10.740 Right. And in the same way, if if the same new pathogen strikes every country in the world has happened last year, human error will determine how many people die in one country versus another.

00:04:25.600 In Taiwan, hardly anybody died of covid in the United States, as we all know, more than 600000 people died.

00:04:30.940 So human error is a really crucial variable, regardless of whether a disaster is is natural or manmade.

00:04:37.180 In many ways, that's a false dichotomy.

00:04:39.080 But you don't. I mean, we're not learning from any of these disasters.

00:04:43.860 It doesn't seem like there is a learning curve at all.

00:04:48.480 The same people. Let's take the let's just take war, for example. 0.93

00:04:51.600 The same people who empowered ISIS and created ISIS are exactly the same people that just have empowered the Taliban. 0.94

00:04:59.860 There's no learning curve.

00:05:01.680 It's a remarkable thing. And one of the reasons I wrote Doom was to try and address this problem.

00:05:08.940 Why are we so bad at learning from past disasters?

00:05:12.960 And why do we seem to have got worse at it?

00:05:15.680 I mean, the amazing thing is that we are far more scientifically sophisticated than any previous generation.

00:05:23.540 We know things that even our our parents generation didn't know we can sequence the genetic structure of a virus in just hours.

00:05:35.100 This was never possible before to give just one example.

00:05:38.760 And yet, despite this vast increase in our scientific knowledge, we still seem remarkably bad at learning from history.

00:05:46.900 And I think there are a couple of reasons for this.

00:05:49.140 One is that history is no longer taught.

00:05:51.360 There are history lessons and there are history departments.

00:05:55.340 But if you look closely at the content of what is taught in our schools and at our colleges, it is not, in fact, history at all.

00:06:01.140 It's some branch of cultural studies.

00:06:02.840 There is almost no good course anywhere in the United States to give just one example on the lessons of the last 30 or 40 years about radical Islam as a political and ideological force.

00:06:23.880 That there are undergraduates, I've encountered them at major universities who know almost nothing about what led to the 9-11 attacks.

00:06:35.180 In fact, I was teaching a class, sitting in a class as a guest teacher just a couple of years ago with some undergraduates and realized with a terrible shock that they knew almost nothing about 9-11.

00:06:49.600 Of course, they'd barely been born when it happened, and this is something that it's always a struggle to remember.

00:06:55.160 But today's undergraduates were being born around the time of the 9-11 attacks 20 years ago.

00:07:01.300 I was born 20 years after Pearl Harbor, and I knew what Pearl Harbor was.

00:07:08.320 Exactly.

00:07:09.380 Exactly.

00:07:09.980 Because in our generation, history was still something that had content.

00:07:15.180 We were being taught about the origins of wars.

00:07:17.740 Because I was born in 1964, long after the end of World War II, but I was brought up thinking all the time, how did these disasters, the world wars happen?

00:07:28.240 My grandfathers had fought in both wars.

00:07:30.000 How did these disasters happen?

00:07:31.780 This was the central question that motivated me to become an historian.

00:07:35.160 It was why I wanted to begin my career studying Nazi Germany or the origins of Nazi Germany in the 1920s.

00:07:41.600 But today's history courses are largely devoid of those great questions.

00:07:46.120 Instead, we're asked merely to judge the past according to our own anachronistic values.

00:07:52.460 And so American history is now essentially a condemnation, a kind of ritual denunciation of the past for its racism.

00:08:00.220 And that has no value.

00:08:02.180 It doesn't help us to understand the world we live in, and it doesn't help us to understand the world that George Washington lived in.

00:08:07.660 How do we, how is it that we are so fascinated, I was born in 64 as well, we're so fascinated by World War II and the Nazis, but we don't seem to recognize the signs when they pop up again.

00:08:27.400 You know, we, I've had this argument with the ADL before, what good is never forget if you can't point out and say, that's a seed, that's a seed.

00:08:39.560 It doesn't mean it's going to grow the same garden, but you don't want those seeds planted in the ground.

00:08:45.260 We don't seem to learn or, or I guess, recognize any of the signs.

00:08:53.220 Part of the problem, Glenn, is, is almost overuse of the 1930s analogy.

00:08:58.120 If everything is like Hitler, then nothing. 0.86

00:09:01.560 If Donald Trump was Hitler, if everything is the Munich agreement, then this becomes devalued.

00:09:09.060 Now, I think overuse of the analogy with, with the Nazis has led to its becoming worthless.

00:09:16.140 It's like a kind of intellectual hyperinflation where the constant use of parallels to Hitler, that their use even against, obviously, quite different kind of political leader, such as Trump or any of the populist leaders who've been compared with Hitler over the last few years.

00:09:36.340 This, this, this makes the, the whole analogy worthless.

00:09:39.180 I think people on the left have constantly confused conservatism, populism, fascism in, in a way that is, has actually rendered the terms meaningless just in the same way that they have rendered the word liberalism meaningless by using liberalism to mean censorship and restriction of, of free speech.

00:10:00.940 So, we, we have a problem that the categories that we used to be able to use constructively have become almost meaningless to most ordinary people.

00:10:12.840 If everybody is Hitler, then, then nobody is Hitler. 0.68

00:10:15.420 Correct.

00:10:15.440 Take, just to give you a concrete example, the readiness of people to believe two obviously absurd things.

00:10:23.180 Number one, which we heard quite a bit of late last year, early this year, Joe Biden is a transformative president who deserves to be compared, deserves to be compared with Franklin Roosevelt.

00:10:34.540 That, that is an absurd claim for a whole range of reasons, but a remarkable number of people were willing to make it.

00:10:42.360 Oh, he's Lyndon Johnson, though.

00:10:43.960 It seemed to me that that was a more dangerous claim to make.

00:10:46.960 And the other implausible claim is that the Taliban, after 20 years, have come back as moderates and are going to be far better stewards of Afghanistan than they were when they were overthrown by U.S. forces after 9-11.

00:11:05.100 And these are two equally absurd propositions.

00:11:08.620 It is obvious that Joe Biden is, if anything, the reincarnation of Jimmy Carter.

00:11:13.860 That, that, that was something that I felt was easy to predict from the outset.

00:11:20.100 And it is equally obvious that the Taliban will behave much as they did the last time they were in power, with brutality, with intolerance, with support for other terrorist organizations.

00:11:31.540 So, ultimately, I think the readiness of, of commentators to make absurd analogies and people to believe them is, is, is the problem that we're grappling with here.

00:11:42.540 Um, there was a, there was a, there was an article that was just written that talks about, uh, you know, the left fears, um, or the right fears, um, or the right fears, leftist totalitarianism.

00:11:55.120 And there is no such thing.

00:11:57.320 And, um, I'm, I'm, I'm, I, you know, I, I don't put Hitler into the right. 0.86

00:12:04.300 You know, I look at Americans, the American society, much different than Europeans do that's left and right. 0.99

00:12:12.020 But, you know, fascism and communism is the extreme on, on each side where in America it's anarchy or freedom, um, and then totalitarianism that could be a theocracy or, or any of them.

00:12:27.520 Can you, can you, can you bat down the idea that, that communism, uh, socialism, that none of these people are, are from the left in America?

00:12:40.540 I, I sometimes, I sometimes think the political spectrum is a bad analogy in itself, uh, that we imagine this kind of line, uh, with the political center there and, and extremes of the right out there and extremes of the left out there as far apart as possible.

00:12:56.240 I think it's much better to recognize that, uh, we are dealing with something here that has a curve, that the extremes of the left and right, uh, are so close together in many ways that they sometimes meet.

00:13:08.860 Remember the Nazis and the communists collaborated to bring down the Weimar Republic, even if that turned out to be a disastrous mistake, uh, by the German communist party.

00:13:18.840 But they both had, they both had socialism, uh, big government as their key.

00:13:26.280 National socialism and, and socialism in one country are two ways of saying the same thing.

00:13:32.260 Hitler believed in national socialism, Stalin in socialism in one country, but the effects of the, the policies were remarkably similar.

00:13:41.500 Uh, individual liberty disappeared, the rule of law disappeared, government became not only, uh, unaccountable, but increasingly violent, uh, towards its own citizens and towards other citizens.

00:13:54.400 There was systematic discrimination of targeted, uh, minorities.

00:13:58.060 If you were somebody who crossed from one regime to the other, this, this happened to Victor Klemperer, uh, a German Jew who survived the third Reich and then ended up in the communist controlled, uh, German democratic Republic.

00:14:12.620 The, the, the striking thing to Klemperer was how similar the two regimes were, even in the language that they, they use.

00:14:18.940 So this is an important point to recognize totalitarianism comes, uh, in different flavors, uh, but the content, uh, the practical consequences of totalitarianism are remarkably similar, whether the dictator claims to be, uh, a nationalist or fascist or a communist or an, uh, an Islamic fundamentalist.

00:14:40.140 I mean, in the end, the dictatorship of the Taliban will mean restriction of individual liberty, especially for women.

00:14:47.820 It will mean violence.

00:14:49.120 There will be no rule of law, uh, beyond a brutal, uh, Sharia law. 1.00

00:14:54.540 Uh, and, and from that point of view, the key distinction in my mind is between societies or systems that prioritize individual freedom and all the freedoms matter here.

00:15:05.440 Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of association.

00:15:08.840 The things that were hardwired into the American system by the founders, because they were so committed to the, the ideal of, of liberty systems that prioritize liberty are in fundamental, uh, conflict with all those systems that prioritize something above human liberty.

00:15:27.480 And it doesn't really matter whether it's a fascist system, a communist system, an Islamist system, or any other system, a system that is fundamentally hostile to individual freedom has an inevitable antagonism towards our system, which prioritizes freedom.

00:15:44.380 Now, let me talk about American totalitarianism, Glenn, because it's a really, really interesting phenomenon.

00:15:50.320 I used to think when I was a young scholar, that totalitarian behavior, like informing on your neighbor or denouncing somebody to the bureaucracy or having a show trial or erasing somebody from the historical record.

00:16:06.060 I thought that kind of behavior happened only when there was a totalitarian regime with a dictator in power.

00:16:12.840 Yep.

00:16:13.320 That was my conviction, but it turns out I was wrong that you can have people behave in those ways, informing on their neighbors, denouncing their classmates to the authorities.

00:16:23.300 You can have the cancellation, uh, the erasing of people, uh, with a free society if we choose to behave that way and to reward that kind of behavior.

00:16:35.480 The example, and you know where I'm probably going, is the way American campuses have gone from being places where free speech was encouraged to being the places in America where free speech is most difficult, where it is absolutely normal to inform on a professor or a classmate.

00:16:53.300 To the bureaucracy.

00:16:54.300 And it is absolutely normal for the bureaucracy to act in a way that bears no relation to due process.

00:17:00.680 That began to become the norm in universities relatively recently, uh, in the course of my career teaching at us universities, we've seen a remarkable change and that culture, which is, I think, everyday totalitarianism has spread out from the universities into an increasing number of corporations.

00:17:22.380 It kind of began with the tech companies and publishing and newspapers.

00:17:25.720 The New York times is now essentially like an Ivy league, uh, campus in terms of its illiberalism.

00:17:32.240 And what is amazing to me is how many young people accept this as normal.

00:17:37.580 They don't realize that it is odious to inform on a professor or a classmate.

00:17:43.760 They think it's okay.

00:17:44.460 And here's an example in a survey that was published earlier this year, which was a survey of American students in four year programs.

00:17:52.020 They were asked if a professor said something you considered offensive in a class, would you report them?

00:18:00.220 Uh, would you report the professor to the administration?

00:18:03.160 85% of liberal or liberal leaning students said yes.

00:18:08.120 Asked if they would report a classmate for saying something offensive, 78% said yes.

00:18:14.080 So these are people who think that they are liberals.

00:18:16.320 Young people who think that they are liberals regard it as morally okay to write letters of denunciation about their professors or their contemporaries.

00:18:25.120 To me, that's utterly shocking because it suggests that, that our young people have no understanding of how a free society should work.

00:18:34.760 They're behaving as if they were in a totalitarian regime and they find nothing morally wrong with it.

00:18:40.280 I was, um, I, I was shocked when George Bush after 9-11 said, you know, he said, well, there's a phone number to call, you know, look at your neighbors.

00:18:48.780 And if there's something, and, and I remember kicking up a storm, that is absolutely un-American.

00:18:54.840 Um, and, and then Obama tried to do it and we've, we've drifted into this.

00:19:01.120 And the reason why I was so against it at the time was people always say when they come to America, Americans are so friendly.

00:19:09.800 They're so open that's because we've never turned our neighbors into each, into the authorities.

00:19:17.300 We've never turned on each other.

00:19:19.560 We trusted each other.

00:19:21.320 We lose something that is fundamentally American and unique the minute we start to live the way we're now living.

00:19:31.100 And with good reason, the term McCarthyism is a derogatory term. 0.65

00:19:37.400 We, we don't look back and, and, and celebrate that witch hunt against actual or suspected communists that occurred in the early phase of the cold war, not because there were no communists.

00:19:48.780 There were the strange thing about the McCarthy era was that there really were communists who'd infiltrated, uh, the, the state department, other parts of the government and at very high levels, people who were essentially Soviet operatives.

00:20:01.940 But the way in which that, that, that witch hunt was conducted has left with good reason, a bad taste in our, our mind.

00:20:11.200 Neil, why is it that we, what is missing that, that little connection between McCarthyism that everybody says is wrong?

00:20:20.680 Homosexuals that say, you know, I was in the closet and that is wrong for the way I believe and what I, what I am.

00:20:28.440 You can't force people into the closet and yet they're doing the same thing.

00:20:34.360 How is it?

00:20:35.560 They don't make that connection.

00:20:38.720 I think partly for what I, for the reason I gave earlier that, that we don't teach history.

00:20:44.860 So people aren't taught to be aware of what totalitarian behavior is like.

00:20:49.800 If you don't feel shame at writing a letter informing on someone, then it's because you haven't been taught that that is morally odious.

00:20:57.660 Uh, you have no, uh, inkling of what life was like in Stalin's Soviet Union.

00:21:01.740 If you did, you'd know that you've started to behave as, as if you lived there, but there's another thing going on, which I think is important.

00:21:08.540 And that is the way in which social media, the whole extraordinary explosion of, uh, of new forms of publication on the internet, um, have changed the nature of our, our political behavior.

00:21:21.360 It was the internet that allowed cancel culture to, to grow because prior to the internet, it was quite difficult to gather up a mob as it were, uh, and bay for somebody to be fired.

00:21:37.740 But it's become much easier to do that kind of thing online.

00:21:42.600 Uh, prior to social media, it was quite hard to humiliate somebody in public.

00:21:48.740 Sure.

00:21:49.380 Uh, you might, uh, write a letter or a postcard or, or even pin a notice on the school notice board saying a, uh, or B is a terrible person, but that didn't get amplified.

00:22:02.460 And, uh, that person might be humiliated by the notice on the, on the school notice board, but that was as far as it went.

00:22:10.060 But now the people who previously wrote those notices have access to the biggest amplifier, uh, the world has ever known.

00:22:18.900 And if they can put their hateful message on, uh, Facebook or Instagram or wherever they, they choose to, to put it, the possibility exists for somebody to become a pariah in a matter of hours.

00:22:33.040 And I think that's, that's the thing that's novel that we, when we were young people did not have to contend with.

00:22:39.140 I was a pretty obnoxious undergraduate.

00:22:41.260 I did and said a lot of contrarian, uh, inflammatory things because I, I was a product of two things, punk rock and Thatcherism.

00:22:50.420 By the time I got to Oxford, I loved the fact that I could say, uh, pretty much whatever I liked, uh, and be, uh, pretty obnoxious with it and, and pay really no price.

00:23:02.580 Uh, that has changed to the extent that the equivalents of me, the, the, the obnoxious contrarian types today have to self censor because they have to fear denunciation, uh, investigation, cancellation. 0.69

00:23:18.020 Uh, people have, have their careers destroyed over things that they said five or 10 years ago on social media that, that some malicious type has uncovered.

00:23:28.640 So the, the, the really big change that has occurred, I think is a function of the internet.

00:23:33.720 And this is a form of disaster, uh, that is particularly interesting to me because we haven't really thought through, or at least we didn't until recently, the unintended adverse consequences of creating a giant online network in which

00:23:47.440 the barrier to entry is zero and anybody can grab, uh, the megaphone.

00:23:52.640 We, we thought this would be awesome.

00:23:54.820 Everybody would be connected.

00:23:56.140 We'd all be netizens and free speech would triumph for the exact opposite has happened from what the libertarians in Silicon Valley predicted back in the 1990s and the early 2000s.

00:24:06.280 But isn't, I mean, you, you, you say in, you know, in your book that you talk about how everything, every disaster really is, is, is, comes back down to humans.

00:24:17.720 And that's the same with technology.

00:24:19.760 I mean, it is remarkable.

00:24:22.880 This is remarkable technology, but I don't think we are, we're, we're just not adult enough to be able to handle it.

00:24:32.280 We're just not ready for this kind of technology.

00:24:37.220 I think, and this goes back to the last book I published, the square and the tower.

00:24:41.800 We didn't think through the consequences of a complete transformation of the public sphere.

00:24:47.760 We underestimated the effects of creating an entirely new public sphere, uh, in which the audience would be potentially global.

00:24:58.520 The barrier to entry for publication would vanish and we failed to think through what the consequences would be in the square and the tower.

00:25:07.960 I suggested the analogy with the printing press when the printing press arrived in Europe and became a kind of standard mode of, of, of reproduction of printed material in the late 15th century.

00:25:18.380 The initial assumption was that this was great.

00:25:21.920 Uh, everything would be awesome.

00:25:23.700 Uh, but of course what followed once the printing press became used for religious debate was a period of profound upheaval.

00:25:32.000 We call it the reformation, but it was really a period of religious strife, civil and international that raged for about 130 years until finally, uh, with the piece of West failure, uh, it was brought to some kind of, of an end.

00:25:48.360 And I think we all forgot that simple lesson that if you transform the public sphere, there will be all kinds of unintended consequences.

00:25:56.920 Polarization will be, will be more rapid and perhaps more extreme.

00:26:01.440 People will form very rapidly new networks or clusters of networks and then, uh, define themselves in antagonism, in opposition to others.

00:26:11.180 All of that, I think took us by surprise because there was a naive, very unhistorical view in Silicon Valley that once everybody was connected, everything would be awesome.

00:26:21.340 And that was the standard line really right through the 1990s into the two thousands.

00:26:25.340 It was what Mark Zuckerberg was still saying, uh, as recently as, as 2016.

00:26:30.580 But in reality, if you create giant platforms of the sort, uh, that Facebook is, there will be a shadow side that will be revealed.

00:26:39.040 Our tendency to polarize, our tendency to be very aggressive, but we don't actually meet people face to face.

00:26:44.720 The capacity to spread fake news example after the reformation, the idea of witchcraft became more prevalent, uh, and more people were put to death as witches, uh, in the period after the reformation.

00:26:57.840 Then in all, uh, of previous Christianity, uh, that's a good example because it was just as easy to transmit the notion of witchcraft and witches live amongst us as it was to transmit Luther's critique of the Roman Catholic church in the internet world.

00:27:14.100 We have found that the crazy fake news conspiracy theories travel, uh, faster and further than the boring old truth that should not have surprised us.

00:27:25.220 And yet it did.

00:27:26.220 It shouldn't have surprised us.

00:27:28.220 I've done broadcast for 40 plus years and trying to tell good news, not real easy.

00:27:34.880 Um, you really have to, or even, you know, I made, uh, road to serfdom, I think was number one on the, uh, New York times bestseller list back in the fifties.

00:27:48.160 And then I, I did a show, a week long show on it on, uh, Fox.

00:27:53.580 And that was extraordinarily difficult to make it entertaining enough for people to watch.

00:28:00.400 They, they want red meat.

00:28:02.260 We want bad news for some reason or another.

00:28:05.180 We, we want the strife and then we reject it.

00:28:08.960 Why?

00:28:09.360 So this is part of what motivated me to write doom that every disaster, uh, is a gift to the media.

00:28:18.420 Uh, if it bleeds, it leads, of course.

00:28:20.840 And, and therefore, uh, there is a complete loss of perspective in the way that disasters are covered.

00:28:27.780 Each disaster is always the worst because it's the disaster on the front page this week.

00:28:32.820 In doom, what I tried to do was to give some sense of orders of magnitude.

00:28:38.240 Yes.

00:28:38.960 COVID-19 has been a very, a grave, a pandemic.

00:28:43.060 Uh, it, but it has killed around 0.06% of the world's population today.

00:28:48.820 0.06%.

00:28:51.000 The black death of the 1340s may have killed a third of all the humans living at that time.

00:28:58.600 Uh, even the Spanish influenza of 1918-19 killed nearly 2% of, uh, the population of the world.

00:29:07.240 So it's important to recognize that this has been a big disaster, but it's not one of history's really big disasters.

00:29:15.180 Disasters aren't normally distributed.

00:29:16.880 There's not an average disaster.

00:29:18.380 Lots and lots of disasters that are very memorable, kill hardly anybody.

00:29:21.780 The Challenger space shuttle blew up.

00:29:23.800 Seven people died.

00:29:24.720 Uh, COVID-19 is not the biggest pandemic.

00:29:28.360 That you and I have lived through in terms of mortality.

00:29:31.320 That was HIV AIDS, which to date has killed 36 million people, not least because they never found a vaccine for it.

00:29:37.920 So part of the challenge is to persuade people that there is a big difference between a disaster that kills a third of humanity and one that kills 0.06% of humanity.

00:29:47.920 And, and one has to bear that distinction in mind.

00:29:51.980 The same is true of warfare.

00:29:54.560 Yes, we will.

00:29:55.800 We fought a long war in Afghanistan, but by historical standards, U S casualties were really very small.

00:30:01.980 Uh, and by the end negligible because nearly all the fighting in recent years has been done by the Afghan security forces with U S support, but very few American lives were being put on the line, uh, in the final phase of this conflict.

00:30:16.100 By the standards of the 20th century, both the Iraq and Afghan wars were small wars in terms of their death toll.

00:30:24.120 Because remember world war one probably killed North of 10 million people in combat.

00:30:30.200 I mean, or directly as a consequence of the fighting and the death toll of world war two was in excess of 50 million with most of the people killed civilians because of the use of strategic bombing as, as a way of waging the war.

00:30:43.780 Uh, so sure there were wars, but to talk about the Afghan war as if it was an unendurable burden weighing down the American people is absurd.

00:30:53.620 Uh, by the end, it was a, what I would regard as a policing operation providing support to the Afghan army.

00:31:00.860 Uh, and that is part of the reason I wanted to write the book.

00:31:04.060 People struggle with orders of magnitude.

00:31:07.000 Everything is just big.

00:31:08.700 Everything is huge.

00:31:09.760 Every disaster is terrible, but in truth, there is a world of difference between.

00:31:13.780 A really big war that kills tens of millions of people and a small war where the death toll in terms of us personnel is in the thousands.

00:31:21.660 So let's, let's go to this because you, you said in your book, the scale of damage is dependent on the contagion.

00:31:28.040 You say that, uh, a gray rhino, uh, is something, an event that is foreseeable, dangerous, obvious, highly probable.

00:31:37.400 Um, you use hurricane Katrina, which I agree 100%. 1.00

00:31:41.540 We knew that was coming for 50 years.

00:31:44.020 We knew that was coming.

00:31:45.360 Um, the black swan is an event that can appear completely unexpected, but in reality is explainable.

00:31:51.300 An event that seems to us on the basis of our limited experience to be impossible.

00:31:57.460 That's the COVID-19 pandemic.

00:32:00.240 Uh, then you say dragon King.

00:32:02.380 That refers to an event that has consequences beyond excess mortality that sets it apart.

00:32:07.620 An event so extreme it lies within, uh, outside the power, uh, a power law distribution.

00:32:13.300 Let me, let me start here.

00:32:16.580 I don't, I think a black, I think COVID-19 is not a black swan. 0.55

00:32:22.120 It's a gray rhino.

00:32:23.640 The reaction of the government is the black swan or the dragon King.

00:32:30.560 Yeah, that's the right way to put it.

00:32:33.560 Glenn, the odd thing about the COVID pandemic was that it was entirely predictable.

00:32:38.300 Every year, somebody did a Ted talk saying there was going to be a pandemic.

00:32:43.520 Uh, it was the classic gray rhino that you've heard predicted so many times that it's almost

00:32:48.860 become background music.

00:32:49.900 But then when it struck, it really acted like it was a black swan and, uh, reporters would

00:32:55.560 use the word unprecedented, which is just of course, a word that you use if you don't know

00:32:59.360 any history.

00:32:59.940 And, and it became a black swan.

00:33:02.460 Now, part of what was very surprising was the way in which in March last year, a number

00:33:09.960 of governments decided the only way to deal with the problem was to lock everybody in

00:33:14.440 their homes.

00:33:15.480 This had never really been possible before because you couldn't in the 1950s tell everybody

00:33:20.600 to work from home.

00:33:21.660 I mean, many people didn't even have a landline.

00:33:23.540 So you're right that the government response was surprising.

00:33:27.360 There was a rational way to deal with the problem, which for example, the Taiwanese and the South 1.00

00:33:32.340 Koreans did at the beginning, which was to tap test everybody as quickly as you could 1.00

00:33:36.900 and then try to identify who was infected and quarantine them.

00:33:40.920 But we didn't really try that.

00:33:42.460 We waited until spread was out of control.

00:33:44.860 And then we, then we shut everything down.

00:33:46.820 And then we were shocked, shocked to find that we'd cratered the economy.

00:33:50.440 Uh, and the chain reaction went from there.

00:33:53.280 The money printing, uh, began because a financial crisis is a financial crisis.

00:33:58.120 So let's print money.

00:33:59.760 And then came the next part of the chain reaction, which was the social and political eruption

00:34:04.880 of the summer of 2020, the black lives matter, uh, protests, which in turn led to a breakdown

00:34:10.940 of urban order and a surge in homicide.

00:34:12.940 And this brings me to the dragon King in terms of mortality.

00:34:17.760 As I said, COVID-19 is not one of history's really big disasters.

00:34:21.320 It's a bad one, but it's not, it's not top 10 in terms of its economic consequences.

00:34:26.440 It is top 10 because the economic shock and the fiscal and monetary consequences are up

00:34:31.920 there with world war two.

00:34:33.540 Uh, if you only knew the debt to GDP ratio of the United States, you would assume we're

00:34:37.920 in world war three right now.

00:34:39.300 Uh, such has been the scale of the expansion and then, uh, come the political consequences.

00:34:46.060 It's a curious phenomenon, but very often in the wake of such a shock, uh, particularly

00:34:52.460 if it's a big economic shock, you get political disintegration, political crises.

00:34:57.920 You'll remember because it was when we were last regularly talking how the financial crisis

00:35:02.420 led to all kinds of unexpected political consequences, including a huge revolution in the Arab world,

00:35:07.520 the famous Arab spring misnamed Arab spring in the same way COVID is going to have a whole

00:35:13.420 succession of political and geopolitical consequences, which will be greater ultimately in their impact

00:35:20.100 than the impact of the disease itself on human mortality.

00:35:23.820 Now we can already see state failure in a number of places.

00:35:26.660 Lebanon is one.

00:35:27.640 Afghanistan is falling apart. 0.98

00:35:29.220 We're abandoning our presence there in the most chaotic way imaginable.

00:35:33.640 That too will have consequences.

00:35:35.760 It's not one and done when you retreat in the way that the United States is retreating.

00:35:41.480 It has consequences because the Chinese watch and the Russians watch and they conclude this

00:35:46.340 is probably the weakest administration since the late 1970s.

00:35:49.680 What can we do with this?

00:35:51.720 So I think it will turn out for future historians to be clear that the real historical significance

00:35:57.100 of COVID-19 was not the number of people who caught the disease and died.

00:36:01.060 The real historical significance will be the economic shock and its huge political consequences.

00:36:07.540 When I look at, you know, history is written by the winners and you read things now, things

00:36:15.420 that I've experienced, Tea Party, etc.

00:36:18.120 They were pretty much erased from history.

00:36:22.380 And when they are mentioned by today's historians, they are not mentioned in a flattering sort of way.

00:36:29.560 They couldn't even compare to BLM and the way that is being written.

00:36:35.840 Does this come back and correct itself, Neil?

00:36:39.760 Do we, a hundred years from now, are we going to, our children or grandchildren, read the truth of these times?

00:36:50.620 Because it seems as though there is no truth and we're asked to deny the things that we know are true

00:37:00.140 or have seen ourselves.

00:37:02.900 Does this, is this erased or do we find it again?

00:37:06.320 The danger, Glenn, is that in a hundred years' time, there won't be properly trained historians

00:37:15.420 or, for that matter, broadcasters who can convey the real history of our time.

00:37:23.220 I think of there being a succession crisis in my world.

00:37:29.060 I don't really know who will be doing what I have done 50 years or even 20 years from now

00:37:35.400 because it's so very hard to get people to write the kind of history that I think that we need.

00:37:42.600 A history that looks not only at the cultures of the past, but tries to understand the political economy,

00:37:51.580 looks at debt dynamics, looks at wars, looks at how empires rise and fall,

00:37:56.520 tries to make sense of American history in the broader context by comparing it with the history of other great powers.

00:38:02.580 I don't think that history will necessarily be written at all a hundred years from now if we're not very careful.

00:38:08.220 Because the revolution in academic life that has produced critical race theory

00:38:14.020 and all of the different variants of wokeness ensures or is designed to ensure that that kind of history doesn't get written.

00:38:23.160 Now, I hope that there will be some kind of ongoing attempt to train at least some people in the right historical scholarly methods

00:38:33.840 so that one day the history of the last 20 years will be written in the way that I hope that I would write it if I were still around then.

00:38:43.700 Let's ask ourselves how a future historian might approach this.

00:38:47.200 A future historian might say that the United States having won the Cold War with the Soviet Union

00:38:52.460 through a party in the 1990s, a hedonistic and hugely enjoyable party,

00:38:59.360 but one that really mostly the 1% participated in and a really large proportion of the population did not share in.

00:39:09.300 There was a rude awakening when 9-11 happened.

00:39:12.500 Americans were reminded that the rest of the world was out there and history had not ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

00:39:19.880 But the American reaction to that shock was to send a tiny number of Americans to go fight the bad guys in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq

00:39:29.560 and leave most people more or less untouched by the conflict.

00:39:33.400 A remarkably small number of people have a direct relative who served in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

00:39:38.540 And so, in some measure, the party continued.

00:39:41.560 The 1% continued to be the main beneficiaries of globalization and a really large proportion of the population flatlined at best in terms of their income.

00:39:50.420 Then came in the financial crisis, a product of the irresponsibility of the financial elite.

00:39:55.180 And what happened?

00:39:56.380 The financial elite was bailed out and those people who had done poorly in the previous 10 or so years did even worse.

00:40:02.840 The recovery was anemic.

00:40:05.100 And ultimately, the surprising thing, a future historian will write, was how long it took for the backlash to happen.

00:40:12.260 And finally, it happened.

00:40:13.860 It took two forms.

00:40:15.260 You mentioned one, the Tea Party.

00:40:16.740 That was the first part of the backlash.

00:40:18.860 But politically, that did not translate into a successful presidential campaign.

00:40:23.620 The Tea Party did not produce a president.

00:40:26.100 The Romney-Ryan campaign failed.

00:40:28.580 The Obama administration got a second term that it did not deserve.

00:40:32.020 And that further four years created the conditions in which a maverick figure who had no real ties to conservatism could become the focal point of the hopes of all those people who had lost out over several decades of prosperity that went only to the elite.

00:40:49.180 And that maverick figure was reviled and loathed by the elite, particularly by the media elite.

00:40:55.960 And their reviling and loathing of him temporarily ousted him from power.

00:41:01.940 But that only added to the bitterness of those people who had pinned their hopes on him.

00:41:07.180 And the future historian will then say the one thing that the liberal elite never foresaw in the hour of its victory at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021 was that the maverick figure could return to power.

00:41:19.080 And that, I think, is the future history that lies ahead of us over the next the next three and a half years.

00:41:26.860 The return of Trump because of the abject failure of the liberal elite.

00:41:32.080 I think you're exactly spot on.

00:41:36.900 And my my question on that then is, does Trump return as the same guy he was, you know, because I've I've I've war game this out for many years, as you know, and you can't keep injuring half of the population.

00:41:57.260 You just can't keep doing that.

00:41:59.700 And that's why a lot of people said, I don't care if he's a conservative or not, he's going to put him in their place.

00:42:09.780 Well, now he he tried and the the elites destroyed him for it.

00:42:17.660 And I think a lot of people now go, wow, if he can't do it, if they can destroy him, they they are totally in control.

00:42:25.880 Some are losing faith in that. But when the figure reappears or a new figure appears, aren't they given more license to be even more ruthless to to dig it out?

00:42:43.400 I certainly think the narrative that Trump was defeated by the deep state or liberal media has a great deal of power.

00:42:52.260 I think it's wrong. I think if it hadn't been for covid, he'd have been reelected.

00:42:55.880 I think in reality, covid was the the thing that destroyed his his presidency.

00:43:03.340 And you can't, I think, credibly claim that he handled it well.

00:43:07.780 And that's why he lost, because a significant proportion of people who'd voted for him in 2016 did not show up in 2020 or even flip to Biden because they felt disillusioned.

00:43:18.540 So I think it's important to bear in mind that in the end, President Trump did not handle that crisis well.

00:43:25.420 And and I've thought long and hard about this.

00:43:28.500 As I say in the book, it wasn't all his fault because CDC, the Centers for Disease Control, did a terrible job.

00:43:34.480 Department of Health and Human Services did a terrible job.

00:43:37.160 The governors did terrible jobs in the case of at least the big blue states.

00:43:40.740 There are lots of people who bear responsibility for the excess mortality in the U.S.

00:43:46.320 But even when you make all that allowance, he still did poorly.

00:43:49.920 And I think for that reason, deserve to lose even to a weak candidate like Biden.

00:43:56.120 But if he then is able to come back and he is the front runner for the nomination, just as the Republican candidate ought to win, given the way things are going, then I don't think he's going to come back as he as he was at the beginning of his administration.

00:44:13.440 I worry that he'll come back as he was at the end of his administration when he had become, to my mind, almost completely reckless.

00:44:23.620 If one thinks about the events that culminated January 6th, the reality is that President Trump behaved with great irresponsibility in seeking to challenge the result of the election and encouraged suggestible people to behave in ways that were truly disastrous.

00:44:41.460 So, I worry that he comes back in the state of mind in which he left office rather than the state of mind in which he entered the White House in 2017.

00:44:52.980 And that's a pity because if you look back on the first three years of Trump, the administration, if you look at it as a whole, did well.

00:45:02.280 Economically, it did very well.

00:45:04.800 In national security terms, I give it very high marks.

00:45:07.860 Finally, we stood up to China and the Chinese got a shock because this was an administration that was willing to put real pressure on China. 0.88

00:45:17.940 So, the Trump administration, if one looks at the whole four years, had many successes.

00:45:24.700 And I think it will be a great pity if he's reelected and arrives in a mood not so much as of the wrecking ball as the neutron bomb.

00:45:37.440 If he's going to return to power, he has to learn the right lessons of his administration.

00:45:43.900 And I don't think he's doing that.

00:45:45.400 The right lessons are clear.

00:45:46.720 If you appoint smart people and delegate to them, they can do a great job.

00:45:51.120 The right lessons are clear.

00:45:52.700 There is much about Republican conservatism that is urgently needed and needs to be empowered.

00:46:01.320 We cannot continue to run the fiscal policy of the nation in this extraordinarily feckless way.

00:46:07.780 If Trump can be reelected and give talented people their head in the key departments of government, then I think the outlook would not be bad.

00:46:18.860 The trouble is that I think he's convinced himself of what I'll call the conspiracy theory version of why he lost.

00:46:26.080 And that is going to motivate him to tackle the wrong things and learn the wrong lessons from his four years in office.

00:46:33.740 I'll be frank with you, Glenn.

00:46:35.160 I would far rather someone else were the front runner for the nomination.

00:46:38.980 I think Ron DeSantis has done a great job as governor of Florida and is a plausible contender to be the Republican nominee.

00:46:48.420 And there are others, too, that it would it would reassure me to see in contention.

00:46:53.320 But at the moment, there's just no escaping the fact that a significant proportion of Republican voters are deeply loyal to Trump and are ready to give him a second shot in government.

00:47:03.580 Most liberals are in denial about this.

00:47:05.360 As far as I can see, they're still telling themselves that it's all going great, though.

00:47:09.680 I think the fiasco in Afghanistan has been a reality check for many people.

00:47:13.440 But I don't think they're thinking through the consequences of this.

00:47:17.180 If this is going to be the Carter administration all over again with one foreign policy disaster leading to another.

00:47:25.340 Between now and 2024, you could see a profound shift in the political landscape.

00:47:30.120 I think they're going to get smashed in the midterms.

00:47:32.460 But I think if I look ahead to the next presidential election, the Republican candidate is going to be very strongly placed.

00:47:39.120 If it's Trump, I think we're in for more four more years of chaos because I'm I'm just not convinced he understands what went wrong in 2020 and what could be put right.

00:47:50.460 So when you I don't want to get into conspiracies, but there is a problem with what has been known as the deep state.

00:48:03.240 It's just the bureaucracy.

00:48:05.240 It's the people that have been in the State Department that just don't care.

00:48:09.780 I'll outlive this president.

00:48:11.400 And they just have their they're just moving and it doesn't matter what the people say or anything else.

00:48:19.020 And that has only gotten worse.

00:48:22.000 Now it's in the Justice Department.

00:48:24.080 It seems to be in our intelligence.

00:48:26.320 That's one of the lessons that I think that that Donald Trump needs to learn.

00:48:35.240 And I don't know how to fix it other than, you know, in the State Department.

00:48:40.340 I wouldn't mind seeing that thing come down to about two people.

00:48:43.760 But how I mean, has he learned that?

00:48:48.620 Is that a priority?

00:48:50.160 How do we fix this?

00:48:51.620 Justice doesn't mean justice anymore.

00:48:54.740 It's a really very profound problem.

00:48:57.800 I wrote about it in a book called The Great Degeneration 10 years ago.

00:49:02.220 And the observation I made was that the administrative state, because I think that's preferable to the deep state, has grown in its power and size.

00:49:12.060 And it is ideologically significantly to the left of center.

00:49:18.660 Washington is a liberal, progressive town populated by people who do believe in big government.

00:49:26.780 Now, Chris DeMuth, who was once president of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a brilliant article on the administrative state, arguing that its origins lay in the 1970s when Congress increasingly decided to pass difficult problems to federal agencies.

00:49:39.260 And create a whole slew of new agencies to deal with things that were too tricky for the legislature, too politically sensitive.

00:49:47.580 And that's really where it all begins.

00:49:50.240 The problem for any president.

00:49:52.720 Wilson?

00:49:53.380 Well, I mean, that was his dream.

00:49:57.220 But it wasn't fulfilled until much later.

00:50:00.040 The federal government was still remarkably small, even after the New Deal.

00:50:03.320 It wasn't really until the 1970s that the federal executive branch acquired so many different competencies and ceased really to be meaningfully accountable to Congress.

00:50:14.780 And so I think the challenge for any reforming president is how do you address this growth of a bureaucracy that is essentially self-perpetuating, that is excessively powerful and is very bad at what it does?

00:50:29.400 Remember, one important lesson of COVID is that the people whose job this was, who had a pandemic preparedness plan, failed.

00:50:37.380 On paper, the U.S. was the best prepared country in the world for a pandemic.

00:50:41.200 They did terribly.

00:50:43.260 And one way to come at this problem is to explore why it was that the pandemic preparedness plan wasn't worth the PDF it was saved on.

00:50:51.600 And then to ask, what about the other parts of the government that are supposed to be ready to meet other contingencies?

00:50:59.120 Why, if the Department of Defense is one of the most well-resourced agencies of all, was the evacuation from Afghanistan such a catastrophic disaster?

00:51:10.340 I think by asking hard questions of the bureaucracy, we can start to expose where the weakness lies.

00:51:17.140 But who is asking, who's asking those questions?

00:51:21.220 I mean, it's one thing for the president to say the buck stops here, but there's no consequence for the buck stopping there.

00:51:29.220 There can be.

00:51:30.660 Let's remember, after the disaster of Vietnam, the U.S. military did learn lessons and cleaned up its act in a whole range of ways.

00:51:39.460 With support from civilians who, for example, fought through and implemented the idea of an all-volunteer force, got rid of the draft.

00:51:49.760 We know that things are fixable because the U.S. military fixed itself after Vietnam and regained public trust in the process.

00:51:56.580 Remember, trust in the military was very low by the mid-1970s, and it recovered subsequently.

00:52:01.500 So we know this is doable, but we almost need to regard ourselves as having suffered a domestic Vietnam. 0.94

00:52:07.100 I think COVID was a domestic Vietnam. 0.92

00:52:09.680 It was a failure by the public health bureaucracy.

00:52:13.120 Trump didn't help much, but he wasn't really the reason that we had excess mortality.

00:52:17.080 If Joe Biden had been president a year earlier, we'd have had pretty much the same excess mortality.

00:52:21.900 If Obama had still somehow been in power, if Clinton had been president, I don't think it would have gone much differently.

00:52:26.800 So I think we need to say to our legislators, our people who represent us in the Senate and the House,

00:52:32.700 you have to recognize that we had a domestic Vietnam, and you have to get to the bottom of it. 0.59

00:52:38.460 And in the process, we need to slim down and transform the culture of government agencies.

00:52:45.380 Look at the countries that did well.

00:52:47.380 South Korea, Taiwan, which, by the way, has been a role model of how to run a democracy in a crisis.

00:52:53.760 What have they done?

00:52:54.540 One thing they did in Taiwan, and it's also true in South Korea, is to use technology to empower citizens with respect to the state.

00:53:03.200 Greater transparency and accountability through technology is achievable.

00:53:07.480 They've done it in Taiwan.

00:53:08.740 It's one reason that they had almost no casualties in the pandemic last year and were able to contain a wave of Delta this year really quickly. 0.96

00:53:16.660 Explain what they did.

00:53:17.860 Explain what they did.

00:53:18.680 So the philosophy in Taiwan, which is the philosophy of Audrey Tang, the digital minister, is that we should use software solutions to get the public's input and to make the public authorities accountable.

00:53:34.800 And so there's a whole set of platforms that essentially allow citizens to provide information, but also to express dissatisfaction.

00:53:44.940 And this has created a much more nimble kind of government, a much more responsive kind of government.

00:53:50.880 And I think we should be thinking along these lines.

00:53:53.860 We should be going and looking at what they got right.

00:53:56.660 For example, a good illustration of this.

00:53:59.480 They had a mask shortage, like everybody did at the beginning of the pandemic.

00:54:03.100 But instead of lying, as our public health bureaucrats did, by saying, oh, you don't need masks, masks don't matter, and then changing the story once there were sufficient masks,

00:54:12.200 the Taiwanese government said, hey, we don't have enough masks.

00:54:14.840 We need to ration them so that the health care workers get them.

00:54:18.280 And they used a software tool to do that.

00:54:20.360 So they didn't lie.

00:54:22.620 Audrey Tang is impressive to me because her philosophy is that the public can handle it. 0.98

00:54:26.920 But technology needs to make the government accountable to the citizens.

00:54:30.900 We have a group of people who are, I mean, older than my grandfather when he, you know, we had to take the keys away from him.

00:54:43.600 They don't understand technology there.

00:54:47.000 I mean, honestly, I would love some people who are good and also understand freedom that understand technology.

00:54:56.640 The world is completely changing, and yet the government seems to be going to a 1950s, almost Soviet kind of idea of total control.

00:55:08.440 It doesn't work.

00:55:11.000 So it doesn't work.

00:55:12.160 It doesn't.

00:55:12.820 So they're just even more disconnected from the American people.

00:55:17.640 But they're getting into bed with these giant tech companies, which have their own purposes for doing it.

00:55:27.700 Right.

00:55:28.380 And so it's important for us not to copy the wrong China.

00:55:32.220 One thing that worries me about the current mood in Washington is, first, a whole series of plans.

00:55:38.860 That word plan always makes me uneasy.

00:55:41.460 Remember, it originates with five-year plans in the Soviet Union.

00:55:46.280 And then we're going to have a central bank digital currency.

00:55:49.900 I don't know if you've been following this, Glenn.

00:55:51.340 Oh, I haven't.

00:55:51.880 We're now eager to copy the Chinese in increasing the power of the Federal Reserve by giving it a central bank digital currency, 0.51

00:55:58.880 rather than allowing cryptocurrency and blockchain-based innovation to flourish,

00:56:04.400 which seems to me symptomatic of what you call the 1950s mentality.

00:56:08.780 Mind you, I'd happily welcome back the Eisenhower administration if I could get a 1950s level of competence in our Africa. 0.57

00:56:15.960 I'll take him just for his final speech.

00:56:18.220 He knew exactly what we were running into.

00:56:21.140 So true.

00:56:22.120 The more one looks back on the Eisenhower administration, the more impressive it looks.

00:56:27.000 But I think this is the crux of the matter, that we need to empower not Google and Apple.

00:56:35.960 After all, notice, they did a terrible job of making their technology work to help deal with the pandemic.

00:56:43.420 Why was it that they suddenly announced that they weren't going to have a contact tracing app,

00:56:48.200 that they were going to leave that to state governments?

00:56:49.980 Do you think state governments are well set up to do contact tracing?

00:56:52.920 I mean, that was a typical example of a sin of omission, where they could have done so much more with the data that they have,

00:57:01.480 from which they make so much money, but they chose not to because they were worried about potential downside risk.

00:57:07.040 I think we need to be empowering the new generation of technologies, and I include cryptocurrency in that,

00:57:14.120 where the emphasis is on decentralization.

00:57:16.680 What is great about decentralized finance?

00:57:19.080 That it is decentralized.

00:57:20.020 That used to be the spirit of Silicon Valley, until the network platforms, beginning with Amazon,

00:57:26.340 and then Google, and then Facebook, came along and created massive centralization online.

00:57:32.400 So, my sense is that technology still offers solutions to the problems of dysfunctional government,

00:57:38.960 but not the technology of the giant network platforms.

00:57:42.560 We can't easily break them up, but we can render them somewhat anachronistic and obsolescent

00:57:48.360 with new platforms that emphasize privacy decentralization.

00:57:54.180 And in politics, the emphasis needs to be on the accountability of government, not surveillance of the citizen.

00:58:01.720 The great danger, in my mind, is that here we are in Cold War II.

00:58:05.340 It's obvious we're already in a Cold War with the Chinese. 1.00

00:58:07.780 The danger in a Cold War is that you become like your enemy.

00:58:10.380 That was Eisenhower's great fear, that the U.S. would become increasingly like the Soviet Union.

00:58:16.220 My fear is that we're going to become increasingly like China, because surveillance is already baked into our system. 0.98

00:58:23.560 It's just that it's private surveillance by big tech.

00:58:26.840 But it's not that difficult for that to become public surveillance.

00:58:30.140 We haven't done a great job of defending our individual rights over our privacy, over our data.

00:58:37.520 We need to fight back.

00:58:39.660 We need to take possession of our private data, which currently we handed over to big tech platforms for a pittance.

00:58:48.880 I know.

00:58:49.100 And it's very hard to achieve that once you've sold something for a pittance, it's hard to renegotiate.

00:58:56.260 But my conviction is that central to individual liberty is individual privacy, is ownership of your own personal data, and that that, too, is attainable.

00:59:08.160 But it has to be pursued.

00:59:10.460 Antitrust is not sufficient.

00:59:12.060 The way the Democrats are dealing with this, which is just to go down a bunch of antitrust actions, is not going to solve the problem any more than antitrust solved the problem of Microsoft's dominance of software.

00:59:23.540 We've got to be much, much more radical in our thinking.

00:59:27.200 And this is where I think conservative thinkers like you come in.

00:59:30.400 Having made all the mistakes we made over 20 years, whether it was the neoconservatives' mistakes of overreach or the Trumpists' mistakes of failing to deal with the problems we're discussing,

00:59:40.200 we have some learning to do.

00:59:42.780 We really do.

00:59:44.300 And we need to get on with it because the solutions that we need in the coming years are not going to come from the heads of politicians, much less from the heads of bureaucrats.

00:59:54.860 It's going to be people like us who figure out a new kind of conservatism, which emphasizes the individual citizen's liberty above all else. 0.93

01:00:06.240 Neil, I think one of the reasons why I haven't reached out more often lately is because you always make me feel like a mental midget. 0.97

01:00:17.380 You don't make me feel that way.

01:00:18.760 I feel that way at the end.

01:00:20.700 You're brilliant.

01:00:21.900 You're really, really brilliant.

01:00:24.260 I hope we can.

01:00:25.140 You're too kind.

01:00:26.200 But Glenn, I meant it when I said it's you and other broadcasters with reach who have to do this.

01:00:36.780 Professors are not, by and large, the people who change the world.

01:00:40.780 But there is a public out there hungry for new ideas, frustrated.

01:00:46.860 I mean, think of it.

01:00:48.060 They felt they'd found a solution in Trump.

01:00:50.640 They felt that there was a chance to take on the deep state, to take on big tech.

01:00:56.540 And it all went wrong.

01:00:58.440 And now what they want to know is, well, what do we do now?

01:01:01.140 And I think the answer probably needs to be something more sophisticated than reelect Trump and hope it works the second time.

01:01:07.680 I mean, the definition of madness is keeping doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome.

01:01:11.760 My sense is that we who are conservative intellectuals still have a lot of work to do to come up with meaningful solutions to the power of the administrative state and the power of big tech.

01:01:23.500 I mean, I'll give you one final example.

01:01:25.960 It was really clear to me after the 2016 election that the power of the big tech companies was excessive and that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was a central reason for their excessive power.

01:01:37.980 Because it was essentially a get out of jail card for anything that they did.

01:01:42.240 It allowed them to be tech platforms when it suited them and publishers when it suited them.

01:01:46.560 We left it way too late to address that problem.

01:01:49.920 It was only at the last minute that legislation began to be discussed to rewrite or delete Section 230.

01:01:57.600 So we've got to be far, far more consequent as conservative intellectuals.

01:02:01.960 We need to identify what is wrong with the deep state, what is wrong with big tech, and come up with some actionable solutions for the first 100 days of the next president.

01:02:11.880 I agree. I agree.

01:02:13.800 May I ask you to do one last thing?

01:02:16.800 Put yourself 50 years down the road.

01:02:19.940 You are a historian.

01:02:21.460 And based on the track that we're currently on, tell me what a historian is going to write about our future.

01:02:33.340 Well, I'm 107 years old by that point.

01:02:38.520 You're almost the same age as Joe Biden at that point.

01:02:43.580 I'm pretty elderly, but thanks to miracles of modern science, I'm still alive.

01:02:48.280 And here's what I'll say.

01:02:51.740 The decline of American power, the end of the American empire, was not difficult to foresee, even at the time of the 9-11 attacks.

01:03:03.140 It was obvious that Americans had four fatal deficits.

01:03:08.660 An attention deficit, a fiscal deficit, a manpower deficit, and a history deficit.

01:03:14.140 They blundered their way through two ill-conceived military campaigns.

01:03:19.860 They attempted a populist backlash that failed.

01:03:23.660 They kept falling back on the liberal elite that had got them into the mess in the first place.

01:03:28.940 And finally, an antagonist came along in the form of the People's Republic of China that, unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union,

01:03:37.740 had the economic capability to take the U.S. on and win.

01:03:42.700 The crisis over Taiwan in the year 2022 was as big a turning point for American power as the Suez crisis in the 1950s was for British power.

01:03:53.860 The decline of the dollar after that crisis was one of the great shocks of modern financial history

01:03:59.860 and exposed the weakness and reliance on foreign capital of American power.

01:04:04.980 I hope I don't live long enough to write that history, Glenn, but my fear at the moment is that that is the path we're on,

01:04:13.000 and we do not have much time to change course.

01:04:17.440 It is always a pleasure to talk to you.

01:04:19.300 Thank you so much, Neil.

01:04:20.680 Thank you, Glenn.

01:04:21.260 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend

01:04:32.460 so it can be discovered by other people.

01:04:34.080 And don't vote.

01:04:51.200 Thank you.

01:04:51.900 Bye bye.

01:04:52.620 Bye bye.

01:04:53.060 Bye bye.

01:04:53.580 Bye bye.

01:04:54.060 Bye bye.

01:04:54.520 Bye bye.

01:04:54.620 Bye bye.

01:04:54.840 Bye bye.

01:04:55.920 Bye bye.

01:04:55.960 Bye bye bye.

01:04:56.200 Bye bye.

01:04:56.340 Bye bye bye.

01:04:56.440 Bye bye bye.

01:04:57.040 Bye bye.

01:04:57.580 Bye bye bye.

01:04:58.680 Bye bye bye bye bye bye.

01:04:59.400 Bye bye bye bye.

The Glenn Beck Program - August 28, 2021

Ep 115 ｜ How We Can Stop the Next Great Catastrophe ｜ Niall Ferguson ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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