What YOU Can Do to Ensure a BETTER FUTURE | David Brin on Conversations with Tom

hey guys hope you enjoyed the episode brought to you by our sponsors at blue blocks go to blueblocks.com forward slash impact theory for 15 off your order or just use discount code impact theory at checkout all right enjoy the episode [Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i am here with physicist turned award-winning and best-selling fiction author david brin david welcome to the show it's great to be uh oh it's great to be anywhere but especially in your company tom and and those of you that of your perspicacious audience well thank you that's very kind uh as i was saying before we started rolling i really struggled with where to start with you you've thought through so many topics but there's one ted talk that you gave that i found really interesting this idea of outrage and how you knew as you were telling people that the world is in many ways getting better that that was actually going to piss some people off and you ended the talk by saying uh in the old network film fashion you wanted them to stick their head out the window and say that they are instead of the classic i'm mad as hell and i'm not going to take it anymore that you wanted them to say i'm proud as hell and my civilization can solve any problem and i thought that was a really interesting place to start especially given the tenor of some people's attitudes right now you're not a pollyanna person so what is it that makes you say that we can solve these problems well i guess the fact that i have kids i i really have to believe that we can solve problems i i spend a large fraction of my life in the future both as a science fiction author uh speculating and do an awful lot of consulting for agencies corporations and things like that about future technological trends across the near term across the intermediate term which in science fiction is the hardest to write my novel's earth and existence are both set around the year 2040 and that's the most difficult one to write and the long-term future um the you know when when whoever takes over will look back at us as having been primitive cavemen like ancestors i'd like them to add but they did pretty good and they made progress to make us and that cues into one of the best aphorisms i know and that is your your job in this temporary time that you're on this planet is to try to be a good ancestor if you don't have kids of course you can still be a good ancestor because everybody on this planet is related to you um including you when you look back though so one thing you've talked pretty eloquently about is you know looking backwards over the 6 000 years of identifiable human history it's it's marked by feudalism brutality uh you know some pretty gnarly things so given that we are in your words the ancestor ancestors of the guys who had those harems what is it that makes you like concretely what what is it that um is it our prefrontal lobes is it uh that you see technology moving only in a positive direction what makes you think that this ends well well i i i don't uh necessarily think that if you look across those six thousand years um among 99 of our ancestors anybody who who lived in a society that had agriculture they were bullied by a few males who gathered together and said hey you know if we pick up these sticks or swords we can take other men's women and wheat um and this led to the pyramid-shaped social structure that dominated almost every human civilization almost every society and we're all descended from the harems of the guys who pulled off that trick and that helps to explain why males have such weird fantasies about things that we're never going to get but we fantasize about them anyway and if we're good in the things we do then our women folk will put up with the things we think um but across those 6 000 years of gruesome feudal societies dominated by kings princes lords priests who you know sometimes they had good rationalizations how they were going to take care of everybody in fact at the beginning there was only enough surplus to give extra food every meal to a few boys and those boys would grow up functionally smarter than the ones who went through periods of starvation and didn't have fully myelinated brains uh functionally taller they really seemed like they were closer to the gods so their mythology that the lords and the priests and all that were closer to god it was it was in certain ways it was true and they needed those few those 50 or 100 or 200 boys to grow up capable of being of learning to read and write so at the beginning the pyramidal structure might have even made some sense but over time what happened in this gruesome story that we call history you start seeing that this pyramidal structure had a huge flaw and that is that the ones at top had only one priority and that's to stay on top and make sure that their sons would inherit other people's sons and daughters that was their top priority their only priority maybe a little bit governed well and the result was horrible governance and that horrible story called history that's the basis of science fiction i'm going to take a little aside here and talk about science fiction because only 10 of us science fiction authors are scientifically trained as i am yet some of the best hard science fiction with real science in it is written by former english majors nancy kress for example greg bear kim stanley robinson sheila finch ursula le guin they write really dynamite hard science fiction with science in it because we've created a civilization that's very different than that old pyramid ours is diamond shape with a large middle class that's unafraid of the rich and and outnumbers the poor and in those circumstances people who go to university especially in the united states they feel it's their right to ask questions and that's the key to being a science fiction author if you live near a university you can get the hard science expertise you want for the price of pizza you go to the department that's doing what you want to write about and you offer to to take a couple of technical experts out for pizza and pick their minds you get what you need in order to have your characters say the right things in the course of your story it's a quite a deal and here's the even better deal they'll enjoy it so much that they'll pay for the pizza so um i mentioned that the great story is history humanity climbing out of the caves grindingly pulling itself out of this morass of feudal lordships that dominated 99 of our ancestors and that story there's nothing like that story most science fiction authors have studied more history than they have science and science fiction should have been called speculative history because it speculates about what this story is going to show next or alternate histories so it shouldn't have been called science fiction it should have been called speculative fiction so if it's true sorry speculative history if it's true that the job of the science fiction writer isn't to predict the car it's to predict the traffic jam um what do you see coming our way that we need to be aware of what are the the traps that you see set given modern life well you know this is why we have these pre-frontal lobes these little nubs above our eyes that are called sometimes in reference to the bible uh the lamps on our brow most of the other things that we do that animals can't do they we only do a lot better throwing for example was probably key to our evolution freeing up the hands and giving us the food we needed to become less clumsy um in one of my novels i talk about how the fact that we sweat resulted in us being the one predator who could hunt in the noonday sun huge advantage but the prefrontal lobes are the only thing organs that we have that no other animal has at all and these are the organs that let us imagine what if for instance it's the seed of empathy what if i were that person with that person's problems and that person's upbringings how would i feel and empathy allows you to either sympathize with others as we're trying to do in this culture because we're all you know largely satiated we're able to expand the horizons of inclusion and this expansion of the horizons of inclusion is the great american project and it's taking up an awful lot of space on the internet and the airwaves as it should be as it should we need to to to continue this project of inclusion but empathy can also enable you if you're at war or in competition to defeat your enemy because you can guess what they're thinking so the prefrontal lobes are powerful in that regard but they also do something very amazing and it's the key of science fiction and that is what if i do this or what if somebody did this or what if my enemy did this in other words speculating about the future about things that haven't happened yet and so we create these notions through a process called anticipation now i'm one of a dozen or so science fiction authors who consults with various agencies companies and all that sort of thing uh this is the first year and sixth that i haven't spoken at cia for example and i tried them all the time for having limited tunnel vision in the things that they worry about because they should worry about a lot more than they worry about and i'll tell you about tassat i'm going to drop that down later but the thing is that that their job is to take anticipation what the prefrontal lobes do where you you the audience member or you tom you're thinking what would happen if i raised this at the meeting tomorrow what would happen if i criticized this idea of my bosses what would happen if i wear this outfit what would happen if i try to run this yellow light and that's called anticipation you work out scenarios and the cia most government agencies most leaders most leaders of companies their principal job is to try to scope out and anticipate what strategy might work better so we have computer models we have statistical models that are improving our anticipatory ability tremendously and there are some amazing things being developed in the art of prophecy and prediction as we speak but the thing i keep pointing out is that anticipation inevitably fails we do this prefrontal lobe thing very badly maybe 60 correct when you're smart and wise and you're not and you're saying you might be right 60 of the time in your projections the cia with their tools and models they might be right 70 80 of the time and and get rid of a lot of dangers in advance that we never know about but they will inevitably fail and when they fail has happened on 9 11 has happened on 1-6 when those anticipations fail you have to fall back on the partner of resilience and partner sorry i gave it away the partner of anticipation which is resilience your ability to take a blow fall roll and land on your feet and that is what we have displayed during the coven we've shown both we've shown the failure of an anticipation we've shown that a lot of the past anticipation led to activities that led to a degree of resilience that resulted in within one year spectacular um delivery of uh of vaccines and all of that and we saw failures of resilience that need to be fixed our society's inability to resiliently decide we're in this together this is what we need to do so the way you improve all of those capabilities anticipation and resilience is by taking hard knocks you get hit in the head you get punched in the stomach and if we plan better and if we have a more resilient society and and and try to restore our society's ability to negotiate rather than scream then we may improve anticipation and resilience enough to get past the next 50 to 100 years and that was me blah blah blah blah blah i guess but it was a complicated concept and i have absolutely absolute faith that your audience on impact theory followed it all was very very generous of you um i want to talk about that the notion of screaming if we can get past that you know i think a lot so i have no idea how much you know about my background but um so impact theory is a studio we're trying to build something that rivals disney we um focus heavily on science fiction and fantasy and so thinking a lot about um you know what are those elements that you see coming that you want to help guide people through and i've heard you talk about how you've referred to the culture war as being treasonous and i want to know how much you think the division is a future problem something that we need to be aware of is it something else you sort of hinted at things the cia are worried about um what is it that we should be most paranoid of is it treasonous uh division within the country is it something else well um i'm going to take this opportunity to plug my latest uh book which is called vivid tomorrow's science fiction in hollywood and it's non-fiction like my earlier non-fiction book the transparent society only this one is a series of insights into how hollywood has promulgated the memes that make us who we are and to make a long story short because you know i go into avatar and and dances with wolves and uh avatar is dances with very very very very very very very tall smurfs um and star wars and star trek some of my really infamous riffs on star wars but fundamentally what it's about is how hollywood has pushed the greatest propaganda campaign the world has ever seen um and what specifically is that propaganda um this is all tied together we're in an era when um a majority of americans wants to proceed with the positive sum project american project of constantly getting better we're not satisfied having done what martin luther king wanted us to do and that was um you know provide basic voting rights and and and the right to share drinking fountains in hotels uh we're not satisfied with that we have to move on and deal with the remaining injustices which are very real just as he said we have to move on from ending slavery um so this notion of improveability that we're in a society that can be made better than our and our parents took for granted even though they had improved it from their parents this is not something you find across history in most cultures you do not find in most cultures the notion that the brightest children should be raised to be uppity and to criticize their own tribal elders and many of your audience probably a majority have a reflex of suspicion of authority soa where did you get this we are taught to think that we invented it you yes you not not you tom you you the person listening to this right now watching this right now you know who you are you invented suspicion of authority right wrong it is preached in every hollywood film name one that you've enjoyed across the last 20 years that did not preach stand up to some authority figure it could be invading aliens uh it could be an abusive boss it could be just a gossipy mother-in-law but in a situation comedy but you stand up to to oppressive authority tolerance diversity these are all in the hollywood propaganda and eccentricity personal individuality look at the movies you've most enjoyed the character you're supposed to bond with expresses some eccentric trait early on in the film then that helps the audience bond with that protagonist and here's the deal it doesn't have to be your eccentric trait it could be one that even irritates you but the fact that this is an individualist expressing an eccentric trait facing oppressive authority this is what hollywood has learned helps bond with the audience and there are almost no other societies throughout all of history that taught this there's a fifth lesson and it is the most important one and if your audience members don't grasp this concept they should go and study it until they do and that is the concept of the positive sum game the notion that we can engage in compete competition with each other in ways that develop a positive sum rising tide lifts all boats is one cliche most of human history was zero-sum and that is in order for me to win you have to lose most sporting events are like that one team has to win in order to make the other team lose this was the case with empires this was the case with family versus family for 6 000 years city versus city the notion of the positive sum game is that i want to be the one who wins more while we all win elon musk for example he's giving us access to space and elect and broke through the psychological barrier of electric cars so we're all going to get them from volkswagen and general motors and everybody well he's done very well by that he's winning but we're all winning too because of those breakthroughs like spacex and all of that people in this civilization a large majority of them understand the basic concept of the positive sum game most of the people in your audience tom grasp the notion and would be shocked by how few of our ancestors would have a clue what it means because we all know we have neighbors in the united states of america and canada and the west who don't they think it's a plot they think it's a polemical trick all this talk of of positive some games and it's true in the leadership casts in our rival nations those that are despotic the thing they fear most is that they just don't understand this way of thinking this new era so they feel it has to be crushed so all right five memes that are pushed by hollywood and have been for 80 years at least to varying degrees and most of your audience members tom resent being told that they got these values from propaganda you you think you invented it you think you were the first to declare suspicion of authority or just you and your own little group and here's the irony of that um during normal times the main difference between a decent republican and a decent democrat is who they think is trying to become an oppressive authority figure they share and they share now this sense that freedom is a narrow window of time that could be crushed at any time by big brother and a decent republican is afraid that the ones the authority figures trying to become big brother are snooty academics and faceless government bureaucrats a decent democrat is concerned about conniving aristocrats oligarchs trillionaires and faceless corporations but when you put it that way they're both right male humans if they get a chance to cheat and conspire against an egalitarian fair society are going to be tempted to cheat six thousand years show they will show they often will and we are seeing this now and we're seeing it unfortunately in a pitting of people positive some people against positive some people yeah that so when you talk about that we're getting a lot of this stuff as memes that um the reason that i'm building impact theory is because i so believe in film in particular as a medium its ability to put out values out into the world you're one of the few people though that i've heard talk about how subtle shifts in the way that you present the value have huge consequences you talked about avatar i found this really interesting and you said look hollywood is doing something incredibly dangerous and they are making it seem like there's everyone should just give up there's humans are bad there's no way forward and you were talking about you know you thought james cameron probably had the best of intentions but the reality of showing that it's like the sort of evil men are up against the evil forget the name of the avatar the navi um and you gave a quick breakdown of a subtle change they could have made to the setup that would have this huge implication in terms of how we the audience read that do you remember that breakdown i thought this was really helpful it's it's right here in vivid tomorrow's where i i i say and you summarized that extremely well you really understood that piece um james cameron had the very best of intentions he came on and gave us dances with uh very tall smurfs actually let's take six berries as given there um and uh fern gully and and all these other lessons chiding lessons from the past that have helped us to become better uh also in vivid tomorrow's i talk about the role of science fiction in preaching what's called the self-preventing prophecy um many people in your audience have have seen the movie soylent green another movie silent running a bunch of environmental movies that have chided us about how much we'll lose if we don't wake up to what's happening to our mother world and i i participated i had a novel called earth that was called the moby dick of the whole earth movement um and these stories recruited so many tens of millions of environmentalists that if we squeak by this period of crisis it will be partly due to science fiction um the china syndrome um probably nuclear accidents would have been worse um certainly um outbreak and some of these you know these these these films about um about uh pandemics helped because many of the people who worked on these new mrna therapies say they were motivated that way nuclear war was arguably and there are retired military officers who say that it's true nuclear war was probably helped to be prevented by um dr strangelove on the beach fail safe war games all of which pointed at possible um accidental ways that it could happen and you may exist because of that but the granddaddy of all the self-preventing prophecies is george orwell's 1984 which girded hundreds of millions of people to um have a much stronger allergic reaction to accumulations of authority all of that all of which was prefaced to getting back to avatar because cameron wanted to do a self-preventing prophecy he wanted to join soylent green and silent running and all that in um in warning about uh ecological uh uh damage he wanted to join the tsunami of stories critical of colonialism he succeeded he totally succeeded at that the problem i have with avatar is that the situation in the movie presumes that none of the humans in that movie ever watched avatar i i mean that's a simplistic way to put it but none of the people in that movie act as if they had ever experienced those warnings that made jim cameron want to make this movie none of them had experienced the emotions that james cameron wanted to elicit in the audience they were all almost all thugs and the only reason that the protagonist isn't a thug is because of circumstances of his experiencing a series of miracles of the white savior it didn't have to be that way avatar could have had exactly the same story if they in the first five minutes showed some humans are really trying hard to do better here some humans watched avatar and i offer a contrived circumstance under which both those good humans and the moderate navi are all killed while they're negotiating and that leaves the company free to go ahead and do its terrible things because human males human males feudalism uh i'm saying that if you are aware of these propaganda messages it doesn't mean you have to stop giving propaganda messages it means you can do it with a little more panache and finesse because as it stands avatar simply says humans are horrible ugly and evil and give up and we should all die and it didn't have to give that message you actually really worry about that i see that a lot um the where the punch line is that you know we're sort of the stain on humanity one of the things that i or on humanity on ourselves on the planet however you want to think about it one of the things i liked about the matrix so much is that it you've got the bad guys taking the position that humans are a virus and they actually make a pretty interesting uh analogy that makes you go god like do we really go too far are we creating problems um but then ultimately you've got neo and the band of humans that rise up and do something good and you feel their heart and you feel their love for others um and so it's a very sort of warm feeling that i get from that movie and in the science fiction that i'm writing myself called neon future which is about a world in which humanity has been divided between those with technology implanted in their bodies and those without and we wanted to take the stance that actually technology isn't it's not going to be skynet it's not going to be the thing that takes us out it's going to be the thing that saves us and but even like when you're walking through that minefield uh it it's really tricky to make sure that you keep the conflict really high and yet have a message that you know people can take away that's functional that gives them something to do in the real world whether that's hope optimism a more specific moral whatever you know it is that you're trying to do but it was you gave me such an interesting way to sort of re-look at avatar because i um i took away the positive side of you know not being the that comes in and just sort of rape minds a planet for you know what they have to offer um but i guess i let roll off my back this idea that there was sort of there were no redeeming qualities and as i step back and look at where i feel culture going there is this sense of you know all we're doing is is digging a hole and the planet would be better off without us well i have a character in my novel earth who represents that side of environmentalism and over the course of the novel she gets her hands on a weapon system that could reduce the human population down to the level that she thinks would work well with the planet and that's fifty thousand which is worse than thanos oh yes much worse than thanos and of course she is opposed by another woman who is a much more modernist environmentalist who thinks that um no we're not a plague upon this planet we are this planet's only chance to get eyes and an arm to reach out to the stars and perhaps um sexual organs to be able to go out there and find mates out there so to speak if you if you were to um metaphorically say that the planet is a living being then humanity and our internet and our society we are the one chance this planet has to have a brain to think and not in a monolithic way the way my friend isaac uh asimov talked about how we would you know wind up galaxia just having this one cosmic mind no your mind as a person your mind is a vast ecosystem you have thoughts that conflict with each other you argue with yourself all the time this is the kind of model that at least in my novel earth i present as being the sort of thing that works because this civilization has done things that no other ever did if a.i were to rise up against us the first thing i'd say is so who the hell made you it wasn't the romans you know it wasn't the catholic church it wasn't it wasn't the the takagawa shoguns you were made by a diversity by a diverse culture that spread itself out rather than being a pyramid of power and privilege experiments when you say that we spread ourselves out in that example i don't understand what you mean spread ourselves out from uh um a sort of mixing of ideology and genetics or what do you mean we spread our we spread out power um instead of this pyramid which is inherently stupid look if you want to become a good silversmith you take criticism on your first attempts at being a silversmith and it makes you better i teach creative writing to classes sometimes and i am appalled by what a huge fraction of humanity can't deal with criticism now of course it hurts and there are times when it's nasty and there are times when i say up yours but if you school yourself to accept that criticism is the only known antidote to error situate i'll repeat it criticism is the only known antidote to error human beings are all delusional we all have delusions that we nurse becoming a scientist i was taught to repeat the sacred catechism of science i might be wrong and if you are taught to recite that it enables you to use the tools of science to eliminate maybe half of your delusional errors that's a that's huge scientists are pretty oh wow but the other half are still there and the it's the delusions that that empowered kings and priests and nobles to perform excretably horrible governance of the nations and empires that they ruled but occasionally there was a way out of this pattern and this pattern is very powerful called feudalism because all those guys who were at the top they got huge reproductive advantages i think this is one of the explanations for the fermi paradox why we don't see aliens out there because i think a large fraction of them fall into this permanently but we found a way out and it's called the periclean experiment pericles was the leader of the athenian democracy and it was already vibrant and creative when he came along but he taught the athenians how to run a democracy in a way where we find each other's delusions that's the thing you're deluded tom i'm deluded but we don't share the same delusions so i can criticize yours and i'll give it that give you that favor for free your enemies will give you the thing you most need for free they will criticize you for free and you will happily return that gift by criticizing them and you cannot get out of this gift economy if you look at it that way so the athenians as long as pericles lived they developed an ability to become maximally creative by reciprocally holding each other accountable it happened again in da vinci's florence and in amsterdam and in these cultures were they talking about it were they saying like hey we're going to hold each other accountable read through where he recites pericles funeral oration and thucydides even though he was not a member of the democratic party he nevertheless gives us passionately pericles's speech in which he explains 500 bc why he should have been at the constitutional convention in 1787 because he was thinking the same thoughts none of us is wise but together if we criticize each other we can cancel each other's delusions but work together on each other's good ideas a positive some game and the pericle periclean athens and da vinci's florence and and renaissance athens were so much more creative than all the other cultures around them that they terrified all the oligarchs and kings and priests around them and so they swarmed in and crushed these experiments to preserve the pyramidal society that's happening right now in the west and especially the united states of america oligarchies around the world and within america are all working together to smash this latest periclean experiment because it's by far the most successful 250 years of relentless too slow but relentless self-improvement technological advancement um generation of optimism and better governance but also better justice slow too slow grudging step one step and then a pause that was too long a pause horrible horrible but only horrible compared to what we aspire to be not horrible compared to all those other 99 of cultures across 6 000 years vastly better than them by all standards but we're horrible we're horrible compared to what we perhaps delusionally think we could become and it's only one culture that has spread that delusion that delusion of star trek that delusion that we can get past this that delusion that our grandchildren can be so much better than us that will wince the way the veil wins thinking of us the way we wince at some of the things that abraham lincoln said while admitting yeah he took things forward a lot i don't know answer your question it well we're certainly on an interesting vein so when you think about the that periclean experiment being undermined now um so we've got the reconsolidation of power into the hands of a few what else is going on to make that happen one thing i've heard you talk about and you were you know for people just listening to this um when referencing sort of the political spectrum you were holding hands and and talking about how each side was working together in a more um high functioning way in that they were apt to point out what you were doing wrong but they were doing it in a spirit and correct me if this is inaccurate to what you're saying but that they were doing it in a spirit of hey when we come together and recognize that the value is in the friction this is how i always explain it to people the value is in the friction between a conservative and a liberal and that either one taking to the extreme becomes uh it becomes uh problematic deeply pathologized and go ahead one of them has that's exactly what's happened to one of our sides of our political spectrum uh it's gone completely insane and when that happens you no longer have this give and take of discovery each other's errors you no longer have this word call called negotiation um you you no longer have a word that is highly derided and it's being derided by uh enemy propaganda media and that's a p word it's called politics which is filthy but it is how we've negotiated adaptation to new times and politics was i can tell you when politics was killed in the united states of america it was killed in um 1997. when newt gingrich who still believed in politics even though he was a nasty piece of work in a lot of ways he still believed that the job of the united states congress was still to negotiate do trade-offs and come up with something vaguely positive some a little bit for you a little bit for me more for me he was replaced by a fellow by the name of dennis hastert uh and your audience should look up this guy who one of our parties made speaker of the house the top official in their party and his hastert rule declared that members of his party shall never again negotiate with or even talk to or socialize with members of the other party this was said explicitly and it was backed up by the media of that political wing of of our society um and as a result politics the ability to actually negotiate and we're seeing this right now the ability to negotiate and adapt to new times in new circumstances was killed dead and it was that year in 1997 and there are attempts to resurrect it but i'm afraid it's going to have to be resurrected over the smoldering carcass of one of our parties right my friends let's talk about blue blocks blue blocker glasses have been a game changer in my life if you're someone like me who is sensitive to artificial lighting and extra sensitive to artificial blue light from a cell phone or a computer screen then you need to try blue blocker lenses they are going to improve your sleep and now there's a company called blue blocks who is elevating blue blockers in a whole new way with stylish and scientifically based blue light blocking glasses blue blocks offers high quality blue blocker glasses designed for any time of the day for any lighting situation with three specific lens styles daytime nighttime and color therapy there's the blue light daywear computer glasses that filter harmful artificial blue light across the whole blue light 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order or use discount code impact theory at checkout once again that's blue blocks which is b l u b l o x dot com forward slash impact theory for 15 off your order or use the discount code impact theory at checkout all right my friends give these a shot i use them all the time take care and be legendary so this is where uh science fiction writers take on things gets pretty interesting for me as you start to imagine what the traffic jam is that comes out of that um once that relationship becomes pathologized to me you begin to have a breakdown of that sense of progress and i heard you made a comment one time and i wanted to ask you if this was just offhanded or if you really mean this you said that the enlightenment had collapsed and i thought okay do we mean that literally uh i'd love to get your answer that has the enlightenment collapsed oh no it hasn't collapsed what's happened is that several of the tools that we used to maintain our momentum had collapsed okay so now let's get real specific define for people what the enlightenment is and then what are the tools and then which ones are broken well the enlightenment is generally speaking the notion that uh individually we are flawed but that we can uh together uh increase the amount of light in the world uh so going back to the scientific notion of i could be wrong that friction between the the two sides i'll help you with your delusions you help me with mine it is less friction than it is competition look the the left has a mimic flaw in that they consider the word competition to be associated with um robert barrons when that's the opposite of how adam smith meant it adam smith hated oligarchy he knew about those six thousand years 99 of which competition which is the great creative force in the universe it made us now the competition in nature is bloody we're trying to come up with methods that are much more genteel like on a sporting yeah on a sports field and the way you tame competition so you get the maximum benefits from competition as on a sporting field with minimizing the blood on the floor and the cheating is regulation and adam smith did not say take away all regulation he said the opposite he said markets need to be regulated so that monopolists can't cheat because 6 000 years is the story of kings and lords and the owners the of all the property cheating so that their sons who never did a damn thing for anybody inherited everything uh no adam smith is the opposite of what a lot of these laissez-faire people uh said he extolled competition so the right tends to say yay competition boo regulation the left tends to say yay regulation blue competition it's ridiculous regulated competition is how we got the spectacular success of sports in which most cheating is caught and as a result the audience members have confidence in the thing that they're watching and enjoying and they're getting the maximum benefit out of that well guess what sports is only the fifth of five accountability arenas that harness competition in the enlightenment we spoke of markets those at the top and with the most money would cheat in markets they always have unless there's regulation to keep competition fair and to encourage entrepreneurship and new startups from the bottom uh democracy when when there's fair competition over policy you wind up getting negotiated compromises the public winds up supporting one uh thing over another um but democracy has to be regulated to reduce cheating or cheaters will cheat and we've been seeing that hugely lately um the third arena is justice quartz now they're it's very different everything is meticulous everything is you know because they it can't afford an error rate whereas markets can afford a huge error rate in order to encourage creativity so i i still weep every day and light a candle up at the foot of betamax it's all right i'm an apple user and the fifth arena other than sports is science and science doesn't need much regulation because science is the most competitive field of all scientists are most the most competitive humans our species ever created they are utterly ruthless at criticizing each other's failings because that's how they get their most reputation points so you don't need a lot of external regulation in science because the scientists are doing it themselves so you have markets democracy science justice courts and sports and they all do the same thing the reason they get the maximum positive some benefits out of competition while minimizing the costs the blood on the floor that we had in the bloodiness of nature or the cheating of most societies is through regulation and interestingly enough neither the left or the right zeroes in on this that it's only the combination regulated competition umpires that's what works so how do we begin to sway culture back is it going to be through the maybe that's not the right way to ask a question how do we navigate this moment how do we thread this needle so we have a time where uh there is tremendous distrust sort of in all of those arenas except for maybe sports but that's when i didn't quite understand how it fits with the other four but how do we navigate through this in a time where political discourse is broken social media just lets people isolate the algorithms tell you show you the people that are basically saying either the thing that outrages you which is where we started all of this how easily people are outraged or it just shows you the things you already believe um how do we begin to pull people back and get them on a useful path in my novel earth and this was 1990 i had web pages before there was a web uh in that volume the um i talked about how in the future people would become addicted to little nuremberg rallies little chambers echo chambers where they could hear the same thing um that they agree with and this human flaw has been exploited by the enemies of the enlightenment by the enemies of our civilization by desp foreign despots by ex-communists uh who use exactly the same methods and exactly the same guys as they did back when they were um communists as they did as their grandfathers did under the tsar um and those among the rich not all of them who want to conspire to be lords again um this we've been egged on into these little nuremberg rallies and in earth i talk about i talked back in 1990 about ways to penetrate these and also in my non-fiction book the transparent society but the thing is that the worst thing that's happened to destroy us is also the easiest to solve and that is um the media serving these enemies has taken uh something that is true and twisted it into something that's a lie and millions of our neighbors swallow this true not everybody who knows a lot and has expertise and is really smart is wise excuse me but duh that goes back to this even if it weren't obviously true in all other cultures it's certainly we all believe that because of suspicion of authority we were all raised to believe that any snooty expert who thinks who claims that they know everything uh is probably not wise and that it's possible for experts or people who know a lot to be unwise but this has been metastasized it has been warped deliberately by enemy propaganda into something else something they never actually say explicitly but it's implicit in almost everything you get from these propaganda centers and that is the following because someone is smart and knows a lot they are automatically unwise now that uses all the same words as the thing that you know is true but you know damn well that's not true that's that's a freaking lie it's insane in fact people who know a lot who developed expertise in an area who are very smart probably on average have a little more wisdom too especially when they are sicked against each other in an open playing field and we can hear them argue as we've seen going on among the scientists during coven as we see happen all the time in this society nobody is saying trust the experts because they're experts but a burden of proof falls on those who say all the experts in a field are wrong and that's best example of that is climate change and those who have been spreading climate denialism if you watch how they parse it it is endless repetitions of that second statement without ever saying it explicitly those who are expert in a field who are smart and know a lot are automatically unwise now this is not the first time that's been the case throughout human history the ruling classes have always taken the creative people and the expert people and cauterized them as what the english used to call boffins you just stay in your lab leave the wisdom stuff to us we broke out of that about 80 90 years ago well it was actually all along smart innovators and all that got more respect in america than most other places in the world the notion that you may criticize and poke and ask and interrogate the experts but if you're going to claim that all of them mutually competing with each other all the people who know about a topic are wrong except for the maybe one percent who have sold out for your media network uh uh excuse me you bear the burden of proof they don't bear how do we how do we break people out of that so i get there so my whole thing is don't try to change behavior try to leverage it so you've got the human inclination is to team up so i'm on this team this is my identity and then you pair that with that whatever you repeat will seem true so now you've got people who are likely to pick a side because it helps sort of shorthand for them who am i uh it streamlines the thought process right over the last i don't know two decades or something we've seen that if somebody identifies left or right you can now predict with some just egregious amount of accuracy how they'll line up on an issue depending on how that political um affiliation lines up because people are trying to take a very sort of overwhelming confusing world and they're trying to find things to simplify so okay i am liberal therefore i think this or i am conservative and therefore i think this so you've got propensity to pick a team married to i need somebody to just basically tell me how to think to simplify this world and now it how the hell do you break people out of that well there are there are a couple of techniques that are not being used for one thing um just because you can predict what people believe by which side of the spectrum they're on doesn't mean that there isn't a difference between how right they are and you can see this in the simple fact that one side of our spectrum right now is screaming hate at all of our expert casts we're talking science we're talking uh journalism teaching law civil servants and now they're screaming at the so-called deep state um which includes the united states military officer corps it includes all the intelligence agencies and uh the fbi and all of that all the people who won the cold war and the war on terror are all declared deep state enemies without the slightest proof um because they are almost all coming forth and saying facts are things now let me be clear the other side of the spectrum has some people like that that side contains some people cancel culture bullies who similarly post-modernists who similarly despise fact people but they don't run that side but let me just step back from sides okay you asked how you get past that the answer is simple wagers now many of us remember when mitt romney dared uh perry the governor of texas to a ten thousand dollar bet on tv and was ridiculed a rich man trying to bully a somewhat less rich man ah it's ridiculous the fact of the matter is nobody has tried it since and what you're talking about is now this doesn't work on the left because they'll just claim i don't have any money but those who have problems with facts on the right generally tend to have a substantial macho feeling a a a sense that machismo is very important to them they understand the concept of a bar bet there are times when it comes down to fact if you're going to bet on a sports statistic the bartender takes your your hundred dollars i d takes my hundred dollars we look it up he hands the money to uh whoever won there are so many aspects of this war on fact that could be very very clearly adjudicated and the way i express it is okay let's let's bet over whether or not your party is waging more on all fact professions name one you're not waging war upon now i'll bet you can't come up with one and how would you how would you adjudicate that like this feels like it was i like you tom you you exactly went to the next question you adjudicated in a way that terrifies them you say let's put it before a panel of retired senior military officers because that puts them in an absolutely lose-lose situation officially they revere and admire these guys but they know damn well that these guys spent their lives and their careers dedicated above all to fact these are mostly 70 percent of them former republicans but you know exactly how they'll rule on climate change or almost anything that's a fact determinable falsifiable or provable wager it's interesting because i think i think you're going to have a problem with the psychological immune system the the way that people will either try to undermine the process or back away from the process where i thought you were going to go so in your book um transparent world society transparent society um where you talk about thank you you talk about the idea that hey look uh having people spying on your privacy is not really a problem where it's a problem is when it's one directional and if you've got big brother who has a screen into your life but you don't have a screen into big brother's life that's an issue but once you're looking at omni valence i believe you called it once you have everybody looking at everything then there's nowhere to hide now that may have uh a possibility of being more successful but like really really truly david when i think about what it takes to get to the other side of this i only see and i really want this to be wrong this is not me saying hey here's the answer and i'm i am really really uh i'm an optimistic person by nature but i worry that until there is sufficient suffering on both sides that people continue down this path of teaming up to antagonize and fight against the other side with a total inability to accept criticism an unwillingness to say i might be wrong um to me the solution is somehow some way you have to get people to say i might be wrong well i i look in abstract you're right um everybody has these percept problems in practice you're wrong i spoke about how a majority of people in our culture unlike any other understand the basic concept of a positive sum game understand the basic concept that facts should overrule effects and objective reality should overrule subjective reality and that a decent person let alone a smart one adjusts their opinions in the face of disproof but do you see evidence of that right now i see absolute evidence i see absolute evidence and the majority of americans believe those things i believe it's a majority i believe that an oligarchy is very very cleverly manipulating all of our systems to take advantage of their last chance to cheat i'm more optimistic than you um i think they are in a blind panic right now because um demographically the party that they've used as their instrument of power is dying people uh fled from that political party in massive numbers by millions last year um and their desperate efforts to cheat right now are based on the fact that um they're going to collapse and american conservatism is going to have to reinvent itself they're already very respectable american conservatives talking about how to re reinvent it um if they're um if they hemorrhage even one million more members just one million more members all of their cheating will be in vain uh and we are in a in the desperate turning point right now um this year in the next year as to whether or not uh those methods will succeed so yes i am optimistic it's it's it doesn't sound optimistic it's it's but i consider this to be phase eight of the american civil war and it's the same sides um this was a particularly a nasty one and it will only end the way the others ended can you give me can you rattle off all eight oh yeah the first phase was in 1778 when cornwallis went south um uh because washington had them stymied up in the north um in the north northern states the um citizenry was enraged and all in favor of uh mostly in favor of revolution so cornwallis took his army down to charleston in savannah on the theory that they would find more romantics down there and that's always been the zeitgeist is romanticism and sure enough they found that it was pretty much evenly divided a one-third revolutionary one-third tory for the king and one-third just leave me alone and um so he was able to run wild with a lot of support uh and that was phase one of the of the american civil war phase two was um handled by andy jackson in dealing with his vice president um at the time it was a minor phase but it was very seriously came close to breaking us up um phase three was um in 1852 the fugitive slave act and as soon as the fugitive slave act was um passed by this by a despicable supreme court squadrons of the irregular southern cavalry began crisscrossing northern states rampaging breaking down doors kidnapping people burning homes committing every tr every atrocity you could think of killing people and this went on and on and on until the northern states started radicalizing and restarting their militias and you don't you don't honestly think abraham lincoln would have been elected if there hadn't been eight solid years of horrible depredations and that led to phase four what we normally think of the civil war um and that was extremely violent and then the others were you know jim crow and reconstruction and we're now in phase eight and it it can only it can only be resolved the way the others were and that is my total union victory i'm not talking about liberal i'm not talking about uh leftist i'm not talking about any of that crap it happens to be that there's a correlation right now because that's where all of the fact professions have fled to i mean one of the parties contains some cancel culture obnoxious you know disgusting uh postmodernist bullies but it also contains all the scientists all the teachers all the journalists 90 and and increasingly most of the military officers and intelligence agents and fbi agents because they're on the side of the periclean experiment and if it wins then we will go back to arguing with each other again and that's me being optimistic in a very shall we say not optimistic tone of voice i don't i don't know for sure that we're going to win this round we had better because it's not just america that's at stake if this periclean enlightenment fails i don't think that's ever going to be tried again i think the oligarchs will make damn sure like they did after the periclean original periclean athens it wasn't tried again for another 2 000 years yeah that's crazy to think now they will have all of those technologies that you spoke of see when i when i'm talking about transparent society i'm not saying that omnivalence um look if we have omnivalence and the people can look back at power and this is what terrifies the polit bureaus or ex-politburo in in some of these um uh despotic states around the world they're terrified that the people would look back at them if the people can look back at big brother then big brother goes away and that we we're no longer worried about that but if light flows everywhere and we can all look at each other then you have the problem that was in that film the circle based on dave egger's novel called the circle and that is we look at each other and bully each other and nobody shot no shy person can find refuge um it's a return to the village of old but not a nice village the one got dominated by gossips and bullies and you see this a lot and it's inherent in human nature and so if we don't have dominance if if omnivalence enables us not to have um oppression by a few at the top what's to prevent oppression laterally you know by 51 little brothers because if it's all in the open and 51 vote democratically and openly for a law that oppresses your kind of person well there's transparency for you there's an answer to that and that is cultural values if we have a cultural value of mayab mind your own business leave each other alone have sympathy for the shy and the vulnerable then who is going to be outed in such a society where we can all see the ones who want to uh you having your privacy invaded or is it going to be those who invade your privacy is it going to be the bullies if you if we have a cultural value of mind your own business leave each other alone watch out for each other's feelings then that means that we'll defend each other's privacy there is no other path we have to have omnivalence to avoid big brother but if we have omnivalence how to avoid oppression by little brother by saying to all the little brothers out there mind your own damn business it's interesting in a world where people are volunteering so much information um i'll be curious to see if if that's a a plausible reaction um when you were going through the eight ways uh or the eight phases of the civil war it it made me wonder do you have a formal process for learning and is it focused primarily on history uh well you know as i said earlier i thought science fiction should be been named speculative history because actually science fiction authors read and watch on tv and youtube and all that more history than science uh even me i'm a scientist i consult with nasa i'm involved in nasa's innovative advanced concepts program you have a phd in physics right yeah yeah which already is crazy it does make you crazy um the the point is uh senior moment how do you go about learning so yeah like i look behind you and there's a bazillion books i imagine those aren't even all the books how do you decide what vein to tap into well you know one of the things that you when i give commencement speeches um especially to high school students but um also you know at college i tell them that if they spend their time at a university just studying what they're there to study they have betrayed their civilization let alone that's a big statement yes let alone betrayed themselves the modern university especially the american university is a wonder it's the greatest thing that humans ever did and part of the change that i was talking about where the boffins were unleashed happened because of the difference in the style of university if you go around the world most european universities and most universities in asia and africa that have imitated the european model they have a three-year baccalaureate degree we have a four-year degree if you ask a european why they will answer well it's because american students are so stupid they need another year of remedial education well in a sense in a sense yes but it's not that simple the reason why we have a four-year university degree is that spread across those four years is an entire year's worth of breadth requirements you go to an american university in canadian as an undergraduate and if you're a science major you're required to take a year of arts humanities history uh and so on and if you pay attention and let these things open your mind and heart to those topics you may retain a certain curiosity about them the rest of your life um i'm i was told that i saw einstein's play the violin when i was four whoa um i have no memory of it but when i went to caltech i met richard feynman murray gilman and found out that all the great scientists i've ever met had artistic sidelines that they pursued passionately literary uh feynman's painter and a bongos player um and so on you can be positive some you can be more than one thing how do you choose though how do you decide like time is so finite how do you decide what you're going to pursue you personally get angry at the finiteness of life i'm right there with you you get mad and that takes us back to that wonderful movie network if you want to fight something that's what howard beal says when he says you've but i don't know how to solve the inflation or the or the racism or anything but i know that first you have to get mad and then he says go to the window and yell i am as bad as hell and i'm not going to take it anymore and you will give your audience members a link to where i answer that it's a wonderful movie it's a powerful message and it's the wrong message for our time but when it comes to life and its limitations and the limited number of hours that you have in the day and the limited number of days that you have in your life that wonderful poem is important do not go you know softly into that good night rage rage against the dying of the light well raging against death is utterly futile but raging systematically against your limitations i am not a limited being oh i'm limited but time i'm limited in resources i'm limited in brain power i'm limited in all those things but i can be interested in more than one thing and so this is what the american and canadian university did if you're a science major you have to take a year's worth of breadth requirements and humanities and law and and things like that and what the result was that the nerds and the geeks at so many companies got frustrated with their bosses and said you know what what he does is real easy i'm going to start my own company or i'm going to get a law degree or or an mba on the side while i'm inventing and then all of a sudden you had a situation in which nerds and geeks who are inventing wound up actually owning and running and the same thing in the opposite direction arts majors history majors english majors are required to take three or four introductory science classes and some math now it's not much i've taught some of those classes in a real lightweight but it's enough that i'm going to ask you tom to guess what nation on earth always scores on the top three in adult science literacy it's cheating because i've watched so many hours of you talking i know the answer which is it was shocking by the way i would never have guessed it yeah even with the linguistic clues that i just gave your audience members one two of them are gonna have the guts to guess what nation is always in the top three of adult science literacy and it's the united states of america and we're so used to self-flagellating how awful and stupid our children are and a bad our education system is but because of those three or four science literacy classes that the arts and the history and the law and all those majors are supposed to take the average american who's had any university education actually knows a thing or two about what an atom is so what i tell the students that these talks is very simple i want you to get up now leave this stupid speech by this stupid sci-fi author and i want you to walk to a randomly chosen building on a college campus throw a dart each month at a map of the university on the wall and go to the nearest place to where the dart went choose a random building stand outside with some d d dice and roll a random floor go to that floor stand at the end of the hall throw a ball down the hall wherever the ball stopped now you've chosen a random room on a random floor in a random building pick up the ball no tripping knock on the nearest door and say excuse me what do you do here now always in life ask yourself what's the worst that could happen uh i was wooing a young woman i wanted her to be my wife she said she could never marry a man who hadn't jumped out of an airplane at 10 000 feet so i said well leadville colorado is at 12 000 feet can i jump out of an airplane on the tarmac and she said nope so well 30 years later we're still married so needless to say i jumped out of an airplane but when i made that decision i ask myself what's the worst that can happen and the positive out likely outcome outweighed the unlikely highly negative outcome when you are asked to choose a random door to knock on at a university campus what's the worst that can happen tom they tell you to bug off or it's empty those are those are like the two bugger off kid to which you reply and then just knock on the next door within three doors you will be taken on a tour of stuff you never imagined stuff that is changing what it is to be human as we speak do that just a few dozen times and you will never be the same person and all it cost you is a an hour a month and besides which it's a good date it's a great date you invite somebody along on that in a little group of three or four it's like nothing she's ever been asked before she'll be different of you than than all the other suitors um the point is when i told that story at the southern china technological institute a new university in shenzhen the the high tech entrepreneurial city in china the looks and this was the science fiction club these were the rambunctious ones the appalled looks on their faces taught me so much when i asked what's the worst that can happen if you knock on a random door one kid shouted out you might get caught and i have never given a sermon so eloquent as the one that i gave at that moment without any words just by letting my jaw drop open because it never occurred to me that i would get that response shouted by a young person at a university this distilled for me what the enlightenment experiment is about and i have received mail from all sorts of people who said they went ahead and they started knocking on doors and asking in a less systematic and less organized way it's what i did at caltech and when i did my phd at ucsd and it's how i got half of my education and it didn't cost much time you can it's not that you have to do that particular thing it's the attitude that makes you a member of this civilization i am surrounded by wonders i deserve to know about them my tax dollars helped pay for all this crap i deserve 10 minutes of your time telling me what the hell you do here and when i leave i may invite you to pizza [Laughter] i may make friends that i will never forget you have a right to that yeah i definitely want to live in a world where people are more curious there's no question about that david i think you introduced us to the perfect place to stop thank you so much for everything you put out into the world all your writing your vision for the future um all the talks that you do which are really really fantastic and thank you so much for your time today i definitely appreciate it i appreciate it tom and i'm sure there will be links below um could you include the link to a project that i'd like your folks to check in on in about six months it's called there's a story about that tasset after years telling people at cia and other places that um when they find something weird going on they should refer to 80 years of science fiction thought experiments because probably some author has thought through this thing alien contact rule people coming out of the ground whatever it is tassat is an organization that's going to try to get nerds and geeks to be available to refer to those thousands of stories in case those thought experiments are necessary we're still refining the site but within six months i hope that you and some of the uh some of your wonderful geeky audience will uh will sign in in any event you ask great questions and men do you do your homework tom thank you thank you for uh making my homework time well spent i appreciate that very much and other than there's a story about that which we will link to so if i just misspoke the exact uh letters don't worry we will link to it but where should people stay in touch with you oh well my my um website is davidbrynn.com i have a newsletter i hope people will sign up for it because i'm not a nag i i sent out one a year and the last five months has been the most productive of my professional life i've got 12 different book projects that have been i showed you a couple of them this is um my young adult book that just came out an adventure in which uh aliens kidnap a california high school and live to regret it um davidbrynn.com i also have a blog called contrary brim uh and it's got one of the oldest and um and savviest comment communities out there so in any event um hang in there and fight for civilization this remember it's not about left and right it's a stupid stupid metaphor we inherit from the french of all people i mean for heaven's sake it's about four little do they know by the way that you're fluent in french well david thank you so much for joining me today i really appreciate it uh good luck with everything and speaking of things that will bring you good luck if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care [Music] you