"The Elites are Shaking" - CIA Analyst breaks down modern media manipulation, Trump, Elon, and Obama

Almost all communications is some form of propaganda. The human relation to truth is very shaky. We adapted to the the printing press. How do we adapt to the digital universe and the AI universe coming right behind it? Why? What is it about this moment that is really pissing people off? Our elites are very panicky. They are not confident they're going to be around that much longer. Martin, we are living through a moment unlike any other in modern history by my estimation. Institutions are collapsing, trust in leadership is at an all-time low, and narratives that once held people's wrapped attention, literally holding society together, are all falling apart. Um you wrote a book about this called The Revolt of the Public. Now, my audience doesn't just want to understand the chaos, they really want to understand how to thrive in this moment. So, uh if it works for you, let's start here. What is the major force that's shaping this revolution, and how can people thrive in a moment where truth is so fragmented? Well, I mean, that was my job at CIA was to cover the media of the world. And it was an easy job. Looking back on it, I didn't think so at the time. You wouldn't have ever thought so the job was easy. But looking back at it, it was an amazingly easy job. You know, each country had one or two either newspapers or like the BBC would be a broadcast that were authoritative. And if the president wanted to know, "Okay, what are the Brits saying about this policy?" You go to the BBC and or you What are the French doing? You go to Le Monde. It was very easy. And then, all of a sudden, everything went haywire. Did absolutely haywire. As the internet, this this gigantic uh tsunami of information riding on you, propelled by a digital earthquake. In the year 2001, information was produced that was double double the volume of everything that had preceded all the way back to the cave paintings at the dawn of culture. Year 2002 double 2001. And if you charted it kind of really looks like a tsunami. This is incredible spike. At that time I was sitting at a very high perch at CIA like I had a view of the entire media of the world and I could see as countries digitize that tsunami rolled around the world. Right behind it there was an ever increasing um levels of of social and political turbulence. And this was beginning in the '00s all the way up to when they finally sort of erupted out of the digital world into the real world with the Arab Spring and everything that has followed since. Now, do you think that humans can only thrive if they have a limited amount of information being projected to them from credible sources? I am not a a norm maker. I think humans can can thrive under very many different conditions, you know. We have lived in in uh in the deserts and and and in the in the Arctic. Uh and for informationally it can be the same. You can live in an overabundance or you can live with scarcity. It's just learning how to deal with it and that is not something that happens at a personal level. It happens at an institutional level and it is not something that happens overnight. It happens over decades and sometimes over centuries. How would you characterize this moment as the institutions are collapsing as we are left with no sense of what is true or maybe even more terrifyingly everybody thinks they know what is true and it is no longer shared. Um how would you characterize what humans are like in this environment? We're essentially at the very early stages of this colossal transformation from the industrial age, which was very top-down, very I talk, you listen, very I have the information. I'm Walter Cronkite and I'm going to pass it on to you, or I'm the president. I'll give you a speech and and reveal to you something new that you haven't heard before to this new order that doesn't even have a name yet. So, we have no clue what's coming next. So, how do you how do we cope with it? How do we deal with it? With a great deal of confusion. Having said that, I think what you talked to us about truth to me has a tremendously positive side. I think I think as an analyst the question you always ask yourself is what don't I know? Right? You think you know something and that that scares me. When I When I think I know something, I go, "I'm missing something, okay? What don't I know about this picture?" Particularly if what you what you think you know conflicts with what your eyes are telling you, right? You know, there've been all these analyses about Trump, for example, and you go, like, "How can they live with this kind of cognitive dissonance?" They say all these things and you you know, they call him Hitler and you see him frying french fries in a McDonald's. You go, like, "This doesn't make any sense, you know?" I think it's healthy. For I think the the industrial age dealt from authority. It was a moment of tremendous optimism, tremendous elitism marked on expertise and and you know going to the right schools and and getting the the the right scientific knowledge and so forth. And it started new. And when Walter Cronkite told you, "This is the way it was on December 26th, 2024," you saluted and you said, "Yes, Walter, you're right." Why? Well, we had no other way of knowing otherwise. The human relation to the is very shaky. It's very shaky. Not that it doesn't exist. I'm not a post-modernist. I believe if a truck is coming up at me and I can see it, I'm not going to sort of like post-modernize it away. I'm going to get out of the way, right? So, but but that said, what we know about complex systems, for example, and then society is one, every human being is one. Um so, what do you know about yourself? Just to put it that way. Is not very much. Is not very much. And I think it's healthy if this new chaos makes us question and you know, every time something comes up on TV, you say, "No, oh, that was altered, so it must be true." No, you go, "I have no idea who this person is. That doesn't sound right to me. I'm not rejecting it. I'm just filing it away. Needs confirmation, right? Well, that is the scientific method in the end, right? Is that you need you need to have enough um witnesses and and enough circumstances in which the the the the proposition gets stressed enough that it either breaks down is false or it it endures and you can say, well, it's it's truth. And even when it's true, not to get too philosophical, is temporary, right? Because that the whole purpose of science, I mean, science at one point um believed that uh there was no such thing as a vacuum in space. It was impossible to have a vacuum. Well, there is a vacuum in space. Uh so, truth advances, but it has to be understood it's a tiny little advance on this vast darkness of ignorance that we carry around with us. Before I read your book, I had become obsessed with this idea that we may need a limited amount of information given to us. I don't think I was saying from on high, but certainly we were thriving more in an environment that had a limited amount of information such that we could all construct a shared view of what is true. Now, the reason I think that that is probably true is because of the dispersion of intellect. So, you have people at the top, you have people that I'll call right below. So, you've got the elites, you've got the almost elites, you've got sort of the average person, you've got people that don't have the cognitive horsepower to do what I think you're proposing. And the reason that top-down has done as well as it has for as long as it has is because uh like if you take religion as the ultimate pinnacle of top-down, a solo god tells you act like this and life is going to be good. Um and because it's from my perspective human-made wisdom that has lasted the test of time. So, if you take that as a definition of religion, the wisdom that lasts over time, you get this, hey think like this, act like this, your life will be better. People believe it comes from god, and so they just do that thing, and society hangs together. And now we're seeing this wrecking ball blast through everything because of the pre- under it's the tsunami of information as you were calling it. And I worry that because there are people that don't have the intellectual horsepower to make it, because you have people the sort of average band, they don't even want to think about it, because you have a layer above them that are almost elites and are probably annoyed at the elites, and and I think this is a large part of the battle on social media, uh you now run into a landscape where the people who just need somebody cuz they don't want to think about it or they don't have the intellectual horsepower to deal with it, uh to have a model that works. And without that, it seems like you're doomed to repeat Arab Spring, where you almost have something and it collapses, or Occupy Wall Street, you almost have something and it collapses. Um please prove me wrong. Well, I mean I think there's an element of truth in that. I would just say um a couple of things. Uh number one, no doubt when Adam and Eve looked back over their shoulders and saw that angel with a fiery sword, they thought, "Geez, life was so much better back then. You know, we could talk to God directly and, you know, we could walk around naked and nobody cared." Um but they had bitten the apple. They had bitten the apple and you can't go back, all right? So, we have bitten the apple. We cannot go back. We are now where we are and we have to deal with this structure of information that is before us and that is rolling. I mean, you have artificial intelligence just coming around the corner. Um and I will tell you another another aspect of that that contradicts what you said somewhat and is a story I've or kind of a the a parable I have borrowed from a a person I have a lot of respect for, Antonio Garcia Martinez. Imagine you got into a time machine and went back to the 30 Years' War. Uh 30 Years' War, as you know, was the most destructive war Europe has ever known, including World War II, per capita. It decimated Germany. It took generations for the population to come halfway back up to what it had been. And why did the 30 Years' War happen? Well, there had been a previous tsunami of information, a previous shift in the landscape. It's called the printing press. So, if you went to the typical man on the street in the 30 Years' War and said, "What do you think of the printing press?" That person would have said, "It is the most horrible, destructive, conflictive, insane thing. Look, over here, these people are coming out of their church and they have a creed. Look over there, those people are coming out of their church and they have a printed creed and there are six words that are different and they're killing each other because of those six words. They can now see the words, where whereas before it was like, "Who cares?" Nobody knows, right? Um the 30 Years War would never have happened without the printing press. And the this man in the street would have said, "Tear it up. Destroy it. Get rid of it." Okay? Now we know today, because of you know, time has passed, that it was the most liberating communications invention ever. I mean, the internet's going to have to work real hard to come up to what the printing press did. It gave us the American Revolution. It gave us the French Revolution. Most importantly, it gave us the Scientific Revolution, which would have been totally impossible without a printing press maintaining all the data uh so the scribes couldn't mess it up. Um so the your idea that top-down is good, top-down is good if there's one top. But if there's 20 tops and they're all saying, "I'm the top." And they all have the means of communication that explains to them, "Well, this is why they're bad." Because those six words are missing. Then you have an even worse chaos. We are not anywhere near 30 Years War level of of uh disorder or violence or or war. So we're doing way better than what the printing press brought upon us. Now, if I were to append that with the word yet, we're not doing as bad yet, would that feel accurate? Or do you think that this is more of a moment of disillusion, where instead of rallying together, we're actually all about negating, tearing things apart? How do How do we adapt to the structure? We adapted to the the printing press. How do we adapt to the digital universe and possibly the the the AI universe coming right behind it? How do we do it? There are many, many ways of doing it. My concern, one of the major reasons I wrote the book, is that at the end of this very destructive process, it is destructive, no question about it, a whole system is being torn down. It's like the airplane is being replaced in mid-flight. It's not an easy thing to happen. Um but at the end of that, I would like to see democracy, what we call democracy, our system of government, uh with all those rights and protections, be at the end. And there's no reason why it can't be, and it cannot be it shouldn't it it could be enhanced because when you think of the great big hierarchical structures, the mass structures of the industrial age, they're not particularly democratic. You know, the Republican Party or the Democratic Party in its classical day, they were not particularly democratic. They got told who to vote for, right? A guy sat in a room, picked picked picked a nominee, and then everybody got told, "That's your man, and you voted for that person, right?" And some variety of that is still happening today. I was going to say that sounds pretty familiar. Yeah, a little more chaotic perhaps, but uh it's still happening. So, the uh digital world is a flatter world. It's you're always going to need hierarchy. If you could dispense with hierarchy, that's that would be utopian and and counter actually to human nature. Um but it could be a much flatter hierarchy, and you can see the top more, and you could trust it better cuz you can see what's going on. There's not this this opacity that that industrial-age mass hierarchies have. So, it could be. I'm saying that I'm saying it's going to be the potential for a more democratic form of government that utilizes the internet to basically pipe into public opinion on a real real-time basis is there, and then there's no reason on Earth why it can't happen. All right, I want to quote you back to you. But I think this is a pretty interesting quote given what you just said. Uh the unbundling of truth makes the business of democracy ever more difficult to conduct. As we fly ever farther apart, we can only hear each other when we scream. The result, I'll repeat, has been paralysis for democratic government. So, um is it merely an act of faith that we will get to the other side of this, or do you see an actual path? The future is is is an impenetrable veil, right? I'm not going to pretend that I know what was going to happen. I never make predictions. I worked for CIA. Prophecy was its business model, and when tomorrow looked like yesterday, which believe it or not happens more than you think, then they were right. But, what the president don't wanted was discontinuities, and every discontinuity CIA got wrong, and I learned never make a prediction. Complex systems are inherently unpredictable. Um so, Let me Let me approach this from a different No, I mean let me finish up cuz I I want to get to the We are on an early stage. I'm just The quote you mentioned is 100% accurate, I think. It has gotten worse since I wrote that, but I'm describing a stage in what is maybe a century-long process, maybe more. Yeah, that is terrifying. Something that I remind myself frequently is while the long arc of history really does seem to bend toward justice, it does not care about any individual life or generation, and it will just thrash them. The 30 Years' War being a very prime example. Let me approach this from a slightly different angle. You said something earlier about adaptation. And so, please know as I ask my questions, I'm far less interested in you predicting the future, though if you have a prediction, I will take it. But, more knowing my audience cares about how do I navigate this moment well. So, if we take that concept of adaptation, how does one adapt to what's going on? Now, I see the battle right now being between the sort of Sam Harris's of the world, who I love Sam Harris, and I think he's such a brilliant thinker, but the way that he's coming at the world is very much we need a new set of elites, and they need to be able to put some constraints on what people are saying and talking about, otherwise you're going to get Donald Trumps forever, and it's just madness spiraling off into infinity. And then you get the Elon Musks of the world, and I I think there's no coincidence to the fact that these two briefly were going at each other publicly. Elon Musk, who represents something far more I'm going to buy X, I'm going to make sure that people can say whatever they want to say and make it free-wheeling. That that grand collision between the path we should be adapting down is either control or the path that we should be adapting down is opening things up and and maybe letting nature run more of its course. I believe, if I'm not misquoting you, you've referred to as a prologue to freedom. Um and so this idea of you yeah, a prologue to the an an ideology of freedom versus the ideology of control that we have now. So without predicting where this goes, what do you think is the right path that people ought to be pursuing? I am a a free speech absolutist. I I come from Cuba, okay? I was born there. And when you start constraining um you start by doing it for very noble reasons. You want to protect ignorant people from falsehood and from making mistakes. And then suddenly you realize, well, I can I can also you know, that guy over there he keeps yelling about how bad I am. You know, he's sort of lying about me even when it's not a complete lie. So I I he should be censored too. And and you know, I'm such a great person and then that never get Somebody should have to Anybody who doesn't say I'm a great person, they get censored too. The human nature being what it is, you Our founding fathers knew this perfectly well. They put that first amendment there for very brilliant reasons. We're so protected. Thank Thank goodness because of that. Um so then you have a free-for-all. It freedom means free-for-all, right now. So how do you deal with that? I mean, part of what what has to get over is the industrial mindset that, you know, uh this is true or false. This is false or this you need Platonic truth is to be arrived at and it can only be arrived at as you keep saying through authority. Some authority somehow or another is able to pipe into the the cosmos and and squeeze truth, you know, Platonic truth out of it and then the rest of us thankfully receive it from that person. That that's gone. That doesn't happen. So, what you have to do to decide is don't look at it in terms of truth and falsehood. Look at it in terms of what is this message about? Who is sending it? Okay? What was the intent in sending this message? Does it look like that intent has worked? Did it backfire? What was the intended audience of this message? Why that audience and not another? Who's behind the the author? Is it just a guy on a blog? Is there some millionaire paying him to do it? My friend Andre Mir says the most interesting news is fake news. And the most interesting part of fake news is the fake part. Because if I'm trying to tell you something that I think is true and I happen to be wrong, well, that's just an error. That's neither here nor there. But if I'm consciously lying to you, I mean, if I were you, I would say, "Well, that's fascinating. Why is Martin saying this thing which I know to be false to me? What does he expect to get from that? What's behind all this?" We need to look at the information um set is vast vast information set which needs to be mapped in some ways the way that a propaganda analyst would do because that's what it is. Almost all communication is some form of propaganda. I don't know if you have children, but if you do, listen to yourself. Yeah, well, okay. I was studying this at CIA when I was my children were like early early teenagers or something like that. I suddenly realized that everything everybody says to anybody, particularly inside one's family, is persuasion, attempts at persuasion. The The mildest, kindest, you're trying to persuade. So, everybody's trying to persuade everybody. Understand that to begin with. In other words, don't look at it in terms of black and white, truth, falsehood, authoritative and and integrity and false and dirty putting back here. Look at it in terms of what's going on. Why are people trying to persuade others? Why lies? Why would somebody lie to persuade? Who gets persuaded? Does anybody ever get persuaded? Separate conversation. I don't believe that happens. Persuasion is the hardest thing to do ever, okay? Most of us believe that you can't persuade. We were born that way. Governments absolutely believe they can persuade. Uh and dictatorial governments uh and sometimes democratic governments think they can persuade with lies. We'll get back to the conversation with Martin Gurri in just a moment, but first, let me tell you about an AI tool that is changing how content creators work. If you're creating content, you know how time-consuming it is to find the perfect moments in your long-form videos. Clip anything by Opus Clip, however, is designed to solve that problem. Clip anything uses every element in your video, people, actions, emotions, themes, everything. Just tell it what you're looking for, like find all the motivational moments or clip the part about financial advice. At Impact Theory, we've integrated it into our workflow and it's making a difference. Whether you're running a podcast, creating reaction videos, or making non-talking content like ASMR, Clip anything can help streamline your workflow. 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Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Bluevine Bank, member FDIC. Found's core features are free. They also offer an optional paid product, Found Plus. And now, let's get back to the show. So, understand what goes underneath the information and above the information and the audience, and you suddenly are much wiser than you are by going from some little three stream coming at you, and you have to say, "Was it true or false?" And if it's true, then this, and if it's false, then that, and that's it. It's a much more complex process. I don't think it's a bad thing. I think I would have done People did that. Propaganda analysts did that in the old industrial world where where life was a lot simpler. Um and I think you got at what was going on in that world in terms of information much better than by just going the old Walter Cronkite of "It's It's Cronkite, therefore it's true" um syndrome. So, that would be And and I think this is something that needs to be taught very young at school. You know, instead of the problem is teachers, of course, have that well, I'm telling truth and now you I want to protect them from falsehoods. No, no, you you want to make them robust. You you want to make them so that they thrive from from a very chaotic environment. They get information out of it that a simpler environment wouldn't get wouldn't give them. So, that's the way I would go about it. All right. So, as a free speech absolutist, what do you think about Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter? I mean, I think it prevented the greatest runaround on the First Amendment in my very, very long life in the United States of America, okay? I think it prevented that. When he said he was going to buy Twitter, the blowback was so disproportionately huge. People were saying things like it's going to destroy your democracy if if somebody allows things to be said on Twitter. It really perplexed me, all right? I believed at that time that it was kind of like a bunch of elites who kind of in a conformistic ways had all agreed their words were not going to use, their people whose opinions we want to kind of shadow ban or whatever, or just silence. Um and it never occurred to me, never occurred to me, that the United States government was behind it. With the Twitter files and then the work that people like Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger did, um it it came out that no, the government was absolutely the beginning of this thing. It was a a governmental structure that was erected very surreptitiously, very behind our backs, um to make sure that certain people didn't get the resonance of the of the web. It began with with COVID, the pandemic, but as I say, it quickly became, well, you know, we're preserving democracy by silencing Trump and his allies. And then it was like from there on it was like anybody who disagree you're Russian if you're against the Ukraine war then you're probably Russian stooge. So the whole range of normal everyday sometimes as Mark Zuckerberg recently said um parody sites right parody sites that were just making fun of things got either kicked out of of the social media or shadow banned. Yeah, it's whoo it it has been eye-opening to say the least. Elon has been saying something recently that's really freaked a lot of people out in the media which is you are the media now meaning the users of the X platform. What do you take from that? Like what what is that collision? Why would the media be up in arms about the people being the media? Yeah, I mean I'm not really big on slogans and I think um Elon like any really really good internet person is just like a fountainhead of memes and slogans and whatnot like a geyser you know. Um but I think what you encounter there is the old world looking at the new world. The old world you had a press pass and man this press pass got you into places nobody else could go to and you were connected to these prestigious institutions the Washington Post the New York Times CBS News and that made you a special kind of person. And now here's this clown Elon Musk who maybe he can build a rocket but what the hell does he know about media saying no you are the media anybody's a media anybody can say anything. So any ignorant person can say whatever ignorant thing they're going to say and that is somehow equivalent to me with my press pass who have just talked to the president how can that even be possible? And they're angry they're angry. It's I mean it's it they're dying out by the way. It This is This is a slow process of the what you hear all those screams that you hear are are death agony of of a whole set of media instruments that cannot possibly survive just for the my question of business model into the digital age. The digital age. It is a a fascinating shift that is happening and to be a part of it is certainly bizarre, not something that I ever thought would happen. However, the very interesting thing that seems to be coming out of it is when you unlock the floodgates, what comes out is anger. Why? What is it about this moment or whatever that is really pissing people off? There are structural reasons for the anger. Um and I'll give them to you, but then I'm going to back off and say, well, maybe not. Um When you are When you are like you and me right here, we can just talk. All right? I mean, we're on Zoom. There's two little boxes, me and my my box and your box. We can talk all we want to. Now, let's say there's 300 million boxes and we're all talking at the same time. Who's going to be heard? The person with the absolutely loudest voice. What is a really good way to be loud? To be angry. That means a fight for attention, okay? And I am And I think structurally you So, if I there's 300 million and there you are and there I am and I say, well, I hate you. You're you're a communist. They say, well, you're a fascist, all right? And suddenly the these three 250 boxes start to align behind us. Oh, he's the fascist group. We're the good people. He's the communist group. We're the good And suddenly you're gathering attention by screaming and yelling and doing that. That is structurally stuck in um in the very fabric of the internet. Um it it's uh what Jonathan uh Haidt, the social psychologist I think stolen the phrase from me uh calls the Tower of Babel. Uh which is true. Yeah, we're suddenly all speaking in different languages and yelling at each other. So having said that, it's as much a rhetorical pose as it is a real anger. For example, Elizabethan gentlemen wrote sonnets to their girlfriends, right? Well, I'm pretty sure that that's not the way they spoke. It was expected of them, you know, you you have somebody you're wooing or you want to woo or or want to get get on with, you have to be a bit poet. And I think So anger is the I think anger is anger is is the rhetorical pose. If you want to get on, you want to have a Trump the the 2016 circa Trump was a master at that game, okay? So you basically they troll somebody, they yell back at him, the people who hate the the people who are yelling get behind them. Suddenly he's a leader because he's the one who sparked the the controversy and the crowds behind the two groups get bigger and bigger, but he's standing in front cuz he's the one who started it, all right? It's a pose. It's a pose. I think there are many angry people. I think there have always been many angry people. This is just an era where communications are expected to be angry at certain um like for example politics because otherwise nobody hears you. It's it's the accepted rhetorical pose. I tell you what, I I always tell the story of the lap- laptop on the window. I look at my laptop where I'm looking at right now and everybody's fighting everybody, everybody's yelling, it's the end of the world as we know it, right? And you kind of scratch your head and go how can we how can we fix this? And then I look by my eyes a little beyond where uh my laptop is, there's a window. And in that window, it's usually open. And um I can see my neighbors walking their dogs and jogging. And the children come along playing ball. And I'm going like, "Okay, this doesn't look like the end of the world to me." Or we need to wrench our eyes from the laptop and look. And I think as a Cuban, it's easy for me to I've even had my childhood experience in a country that was uh really really troubled. Really troubled. When you you know, the streets were you could have a mob out there or something. Um and instead when I look over there at the gardens, they're all clipped, you know. And the worst thing about it is, you know, the the lawn mowers. They always got a lawn mower. I mean, that's the the big complaint around here. So, it's it you have to look at American society. And I think I mean, the the internet is is correct. The tsunami is correct. The institutions, the old industrial institutions are being battered. Uh uh are are in some parts, you know, falling to pieces. Um but do not despair. There's still a whole lot that's sane and healthy out there between us. It just happens outside of the laptop, which among the most terrible things that the internet has is the fact that I can call you all kinds of names and you can't do anything about it. If if I If you and I were in the same room and I called you all kinds of names, I'd get a broken nose. So, I'd be damn sure not to call you names. Uh in the internet, I can call you whatever I want and you may not even know who I am, much less, you know, get even with me. So, there's a lot of incentives to, you know, be that angry person, to say the extreme thing. Uh but that's the internet. And that's there's a difference between the two. The The one world The two worlds are connected. And and more than ever more deeply connected. Um so I I that's my my proviso. All right. So, what given all that, what does it tell us that Trump got reelected? Is it just that he's so good at cutting through the noise or does he represent the anger? Um I'm a big believer that the while it's not the sum total of the anger and frustration, but I believe this is an economic uh phenomenon. I know that you don't. Um so, I'd love to hear how why you think Trump got reelected if economics is not what's driving this. I mean, economics always plays a part of everything. So, I I you can't completely dismiss it. But, you know, when you look at all the uh like the year 2019 right before the um um pandemic. It was like the peak revolt of the public year. Okay, they were like they were like if I remember correctly, at least 25 major street insurgencies. And the thing that I found most fascinating was some of it was in democratic countries. Some of it was in pretty tough dictatorships like Algeria's, for example. Some of it was in very poor countries. Uh Sudan. Uh some of it was in very wealthy countries like France. So, I don't think either the revolt of the public, which is basically the uh social political so sort of label that I give to the the effect of that tsunami. I don't think it's primarily a cry for uh democracy. I don't think it's primarily an economic phenomenon. And And when you look at at uh the economics of it, it is never the marginalized or the poor or the bottom of society or the discriminated that um that take to the streets. It is the educated. It it the um children of the elite sometimes the children of the middle class sometimes but it is never ever the poor or or or the economically marginalized that that that take to the streets. Now Trump I mean if any Trump I could probably make a billion dollars if I could explain Trump. I I he is an inexplicable thing. He is a political mutant. I don't know if you ever read the Isaac Asimov books on the foundation this is science fiction stuff. So but I mean I know of it but I haven't read it. Yeah I mean basically it's a thing called psychohistory where it's scientifically you can predict the broad outlines of history and civilization is dying so they plan a rebirth they short circuit the dark ages the rebirth but again there's one guy and they call it the mule because he's he's a mutant. He's completely not you could not have planned for him all right. Well Trump is a mule but he's a mutant. He he is this weird comes from many different worlds comes from the business world comes from the popular culture world which I think is mainly what what he is and now he comes into the political world and injects his popular culture sort of circus atmosphere that that I think the elites who who have dwelled in in our high politics hate because they certainly like this is not the way things are supposed to be it it is has inspired some of the most bizarre and I think and by the way I never liked the man particularly but I mean he just struck me as well he's got this and he's got that but no he's like pure evil he is Adolf Hitler he is a fascist. Now if you have any knowledge of what those words mean you you really have to go to therapy because they connect absolutely not at all with the person Donald Trump or the politician Donald Trump. So, um Do you think that Trump is a dictator or fascist in the making? That's always the pushback that I get. When I say, "Bro, look at Hitler and what he did. It's insane." Then people's pushback is going to be, "Well, compare Hitler, you know, uh right after World War I compared to where Trump is at in the beginning of his career." Like you just need to give more time and he's on that slippery slope. The guy's 78 years old. Come on. Name me a dictator that started at the age of 78. Dictatorship is a hard job. You start young. Usually in your 30s or 40s. I mean, practically every dictator that I can think of started either in his 30s or 40s. Um Fidel Castro was 33 when he took over. Lenin was in his 40s. Oh. Yeah. I mean, it's a young man's game. Look at Look at the revolutionaries both in our war, you know, the the the um the constitutional convention, for example, or uh the convention in France during the revolution. These were young people, okay? These were all young people. Napoleon was, I think, in his late 20s when he started to take over. So, the idea that there can be a um a dictator who starts at 78. Plus, okay, I'll give you one more reason and then this is a This is a boring subject. Um one of the things you have to have to be a dictator is command of a powerful institution. That can be your own private army like Hitler had, you know, with the SA. Or um it can be the real army. Or it can be the secret service. Um or it can be, for Stalin for example, it was he would he got to appoint everybody in the Communist Party. So, everybody going to appoint it was a loyalist. Um but you need a strong institution that you can then turn against the others and say, "Well, I'm going to overall all the institutions with this one or this these two that I own. The institutions hate Donald Trump. There isn't a single institution that likes him. None. So, um between those two things, 78 years old, an entertaining guy, that's number three. Uh and and also the fact that it it's um it would be impossible for him, for example, to tell them to tell the military go go shoot at my opponents in in that in that protest. Go shoot them. Go kill them all, right? Uh they wouldn't do it. They would not do it. Uh it would be impossible for him to tell the FBI go arrest my enemies. They would not do it. So, how could he become through what process could he be And he doesn't have a private army, to put it mildly. I mean, you look at those um I finally this this um this election cycle, I I had never really looked at any of his his, you know, shows that he gives. It's a combination um like a state fair and big tent revival meeting or something. I kind of look at it. The people that go to that are like, you know, middle class, middle age, and you know, they I mean, it's kind of like a party, like a really big party. He's not organizing an army out of that crowd, okay? So, um so I I to me that's just uh it says more about the people who claim these things than it says about Donald Trump. What do you think it says about them? I think it says that they are um living in a world in a in a house of mirrors. They see their own reflection and they think it's reality and um and they absolutely and and I'll give Trump credit on this. He he's kind of a crazy guy, okay? He does some strange things, but he has this superpower of making his opponents 10 times crazier than he is. So, they say these completely over-the-top things and they do these completely over-the-top things, like try to censor uh the government, you know, try to censor uh the web, and and trying to arrest him. I've never happened before, you know, a former president, you know, being indicted on a pretty blatantly political case. Um he just drives them completely over the top. And it tells you that our elites are very panicky. It tells you primarily that they are panicky. They are not confident they're going to be around that much longer. That's very interesting. You have referred to, if I have the words correct, you referred to Obama as the chief negator. Uh that might not be the exact phrase that you used, but it's certainly directionally correct. We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, let's talk about optimizing your performance. Elite athletes do not guess when it comes to supplements. That's why 100% of the NFL teams stock their locker rooms with Momentous supplements. Peak performance requires perfect fundamentals. That's where the Momentous 3 comes in. Protein, creatine, and omega-3. These aren't random. They're the cornerstone nutrients proven to support every cellular function in your brain and body. Momentous is raising the bar with what they call the Momentous standard. A commitment to transparency and quality in an industry that often lacks both. 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Businesses that want to grow grow with Shopify. And right now, you can join them with an incredible offer. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period. Just go to shopify.com/impact to upgrade your selling today. Again, that's shopify.com/impact. Now, let's get back to the episode. I think a lot of people think that this all started with Trump. You've referred to Trump as a symptom. Is Obama a symptom? Who Who is patient zero? I mean, it's a question of symptoms. It's a question of somebody who who adapted to the system, right? Somebody who who saw what was in front of him and instead of pretending that the year is 1950, he said, "Oh, wait. This is 2008. This is not 1950." He The initial election, this is his second election, the re-election campaign was different. But his initial election was very powerful use of the internet in very powerful ways. Um spontaneous support, you know, the the Obama girl, that portrait of of his that is, you know, so aspirational looking. This wasn't stuff that his campaign paid for. This kind of bubbled up from below, and that's the revolt of the public bubbling up from below. His He was a community organizer. Community organizers look around and see things that are faulty and bad and point them out to some higher authority, yell and scream and say, "Community, we need to protest about this." And then they protest, and then supposedly some higher authority comes and fixes it. Um after 2010, when he lost basically his governing majority big time, that's what he did. He He was a president of the United States, and he was constantly pointing out things that were wrong with the United States, right? He would talk to the to a a women's group and say, "Your Your rights are about to be taken away from you." He He would, you know, talk to a a black black audience and say you'd more or less the same thing. Uh except of course there was no higher authority. So, he would he There is in the web culture and the revolt of the public a tremendous, um you know, and again, for structural reasons, tremendous power of negation, of denial, rejection, repudiation that is never uh counterbalanced by proposing an alternative. You know, the the the um s- organizer never felt he had to propose an alternative. Just like, "Look, here's a bad thing. You're the government, you fix it." And Obama was a master of that, and I think he was reelected cuz people many people thought, "Yeah, he is on our side." And he would he was, you know, it was kind of like, you know, "Stick it to the man, but you are the man." You know, he was the man, but he was sticking it to the man somehow in a very credible way for the for the voters. All right, you have um You've talked a lot about uh that you don't make predictions, you don't know where things are going to go. But as you look at this, um and Trump as a phenomenon, you've said that the government is founded on this initial sin of acting like they can solve all of our problems. Knowing that, do you think that what Trump is trying to do by limiting the scope of the government, by trying to get rid of the quote-unquote deep state, is he going to make any progress, or do you think that there's is a reality to be faced that the government cannot solve the problems that people care about right now? Yeah, I mean it's pretty funny because he this potential dictator is, you know, anti-regulations and then wants to shoot drain the swamp by closing down whole whole chunks of the government. But he is an old guy, okay? And when he talks, he says, "I will solve your problem. I will do this. I will achieve that. I will do the other." He has always talked that way. Even when it's blatantly obvious that the problem is not really a problem, it's a condition that can possibly be changed except through the long long process of evolution. He doesn't care. He will say it. So, um I don't know. I don't know how it's going to turn out. He's got a big fat target, I have to say. Coming after the Biden administration that did so many bizarre and unprecedented things. He's got a big fat target. He can go negation on all that stuff. He can basically burn that harvest to the ground and um and he would be doing a good thing. Uh now whether he replaces it with with a a different system. What we need, of course, is a reorganized, you know, a um reconfigured federal government. We sort of did this in the early 20th century. We reconfigured the federal government to fit the mass information age. Now we need to kind of do the same thing for for the digital age. I call him a skeptic. I I The best thing he has done in that regard is he's bringing in a whole bunch of young buccaneers. His kind of his his uh cabinet is something like 20 years younger than his first cabinet back in 2016. And those guys have some of them are we have going to be hanging around and maybe they will have what it takes to get us there. It's a long process. No doubt. So, as you look at the You've said that so many things have modernized, but the government is really struggling to go digital. What do you think is going to be the role of AI? You've got Elon Musk obviously closely tied to the government building an AI company. Do you think AI is going to help or hurt? Is it just going to flood more information? What's What are the What does that look like? I I have no idea. I have no idea and and it would be rank speculation, but you know, rank speculation is fun. So, I'll give you some. There we go. Um I mean, you could have such an amazing world with AI, right? You could have a farmer that tells AI, okay, this is your schedule for watering my plants and and the AI goes out there and hits all the right buttons and it gets done, right? You could have a child that has a tutor that knows all the information in the world and it's it it can be tailored to the child's interest or the child's capabilities and so forth. It's the world's greatest tutor so that that child will no longer thinks information is something that gets crammed into your head, you know, by teachers, you know, in a painful process, but it's something that you discover together with this tutor. There's many amazing things that can happen with AI. Will they happen or will it um I mean, I'm not at the the the dooms the doomsayers I I scratch my head about I don't quite understand all all the doom that's doom doomsday scenarios with AI are um trivial in my opinion. But, it could go bad. I mean, it could go bad in many different ways. The worst it could go for me is if the government gets a monopoly or basically puts out regulations that only rich and powerful people can play with it. We should probably put it out there for as many people to play with. That's the way you know, it's going to be a Darwinian process and the more that you can have people who are trying to adapt to it and exploit it, uh the sooner we can get to where we want to be with with AI. All right, so many people in my audience are in the age group of doers, people that are going to make the very fabric of our society going forward. Um when you think about what the right approach for them is, one thing that you've talked about are charter cities. And I believe you know uh Balaji Srinivasan who talks about network states, both of which seem to take this idea of people need to compete for the citizens, that it needs to be way smaller. Um if you were going to give us that that like, "Hey, this is probably a path to at least explore." Um what would you tell us about charter cities, the idea of network states? Well, I know that net network states better than charter cities. Charter cities are, you know, they're at the mercy of the political climate. Network state is totally speculative. So, they're just at the mercy of Balaji's enormous brain. Uh and I think and I think it it's uh what he does is a very tremendously necessary thing. Which is push the possibilities to their absolute limit. All right? My humble opinion, there will never be network states. But what do I know? Um Can you explain it to people that might not know? Yeah, network states they're like discontinuous. They use uh you know, cryptocurrency and they they basically that's the the bond is use of sort of cryptocurrency uh agreement of how you govern yourself, but it wouldn't be necessarily one place. It would be over many places. Uh you could have the same people So, it would be like in the internet. The internet has these communities of interests. The people could be anywhere. Well, it would be like that only for real. It would be like a country, all right? So, it would be a community that ruled itself along certain interests. Um I mean, that's a fascinating concept. It's not an impossible concept. There's no way of saying that it's totally not going to happen. But, given the realities that stand in the way of that, it's probably not, but it it makes your brain pushes your brain outward to think about well, how much of that I mean, you can have very massive communities that govern themselves to some extent. Um like the old religious communities, for example. Um according to certain rules that they have made up. But, that probably may happen at some point. Uh where where people flashes of the way forward in what Switzerland does, where it's really down at the regional level, or even what Estonia is doing, where it's sort of one nation under the internet? Um yeah, is there anything in those that we can take away from? in both. I mean, I wrote somewhere in the book that uh because everything is fractured so much, you know, we're now completely um you know, or the what I what we're saying is um the old mass world, for example, the mass audience that I belonged to when we watched Walter Cronkite together, that was like the entirety of the United States, you could see yourselves reflected in this gigantic mirror. Well, internet culture has taken that gigantic mirror and just shattered it. And people live in in the broken pieces, right? So, um so you you need somehow so every every time that you have the old industrial idea one size fits all, we're going to have one health plan for everybody. Well, at least half of them more of those fraction of fragments align against it, because that's not what I want, right? Switzerland is man, every valley governs itself, all right? And it goes down to the point where if you want to become a Swiss citizen, you don't go to Zurich and ask the the central government. You walk around your little valley shaking hands and say, "Please let me be a citizen." And they vote on it. And so, afterwards, if there's too much immigration, they can say, "Oh, the the idiots in Washington or those idiots in Zurich that and if and if uh you know, you you turn out to be a good thing, they go, "Well, it's my credit, not them." It's you own you own the decision. And and I think with the internet, you can do that a lot particularly local and state government, you can do that very easily. Um so, I I think it's a model that that the model and of course, Estonia has a really robust system. Uh living next to Russia, you have to. Um that everybody just has one number. One number, and you can look at everything that's online that's you. You can ask for uh what files the police have on you, and as long as there's not an ongoing criminal investigation, they have to give it to you. All right, Martin, leave us with a window into how we can determine what is true. My vote has always been utility. You've got a goal, does believing the same move you towards that goal or not? Um what do you have for us? Truth isn't it's not a thing. Truth is a relation, right? It truth is is uh there's no such thing as facts. You know, one person's fact is another person's, you know, nothing because it doesn't fit their framework. So, the important things are not facts or truths, they're frameworks, all right? So, again, I go back to my propaganda analysis is you have to understand the framework in which a proposition is being presented to you, right? If it was a Marxist-Leninist framework like in the old Soviet Union, you understood that. I mean, we devoured all those incredibly boring, by the way, um writings from the Soviet Union and the satellite country. We devoured it cuz you could get information from it. You You just have to understand the framework, right? So, what we have today is tremendously competing It's not truth and falsehood. It's competing frameworks. And keep an eye to what the frameworks are, you know, like Trumpism has this framework. Um the elite framework is tremendous resonance because it the New York Times and and and the the broadcast news and all these people side onto the elite framework, but it's just a framework. So, some things are true. Maybe in the real world, some things are just the way they're being described is probably an exaggeration or a lie. Um it in the end, um you know, if it's not engineering, engineering you build something it either works or it doesn't. Um in in society, you know, you you live in your small world, your Dunbar number world, you know, 150 people. Uh and that's pretty easy to tell usually what's true and what's not and who's honest and who's not not in that world. Live in that world. The part part of the problem with the internet is it makes us think that we we were born to judge the president of the United States and to write about it and say, "Well, this is false. This is the you know, Oh, I mean, the president of the United States, thank goodness, is one of the things I love about the United States as opposed to, for example, Cuba, has tremendously limited influence on my life. Who the president is, I don't even feel it half the time, okay? Uh so, but if my wife is angry at me or, you know, one of my children is sick or my neighbor, you know, gets angry cuz, you know, I stepped on his lawn or something, that matters a lot, all right? So, you have to you have to um live in your small world, your Dunbar world, and um and keep an eye when you when you raise your eyes to the, you know, the the social, you know, the mediated world, um to the frameworks. And the frameworks will determine why people are saying things and then you can Does it have an application for me or not? That's for you to determine. But as just looking at this information as you know yes or no, true or false that doesn't work. You have to look at the framework. I love it. Martin, your book Revolt of the Public was hugely influential for me. Where can people engage with you, find the book? Yeah, the book is on Amazon. It's easy to find. It comes in audible, comes in ebook and and hardbound. Hardbound by the way, this is uh uh Stripe Press. And the big Stripe company is an internet financial company. And as with all Silicon Valley entities, they have the best designers in the world. And alas, I will tell you I get told that is the most beautiful book I have ever bought at least as often as I get told that is the smartest book I have ever bought. Okay. It is a pleasure to have the had the had wonderful designer for the book, Tyler Thompson and it's worth buying the paying the extra money for the copy because it's pretty. I can agree. It is a gorgeous book. Martin, thank you so much for joining me today, man. I really appreciate it. It's been fun. Awesome. All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. A brilliant piece of the human experience, right? First of all, to answer your question directly, destabilizing the United States would be very difficult. Because at the end of the day, the US is a We are a strong unifying culture. When we are attacked