transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:15] Welcome to Tech Stuff, I'm Oz Woloshyn, and today we're joined by Zachary Karabell. He's an author, an investor, who has written widely on history, economics and international relations. He writes a sub-stack called The Edgy Optimist, and he's the host of a podcast called What Could Go Right?, which I'm delighted to say Kaleidoscope is now producing. Today we're gonna hear from Zachary about the podcast and why you should listen, before playing this week's episode. But without further ado, Zachary, welcome to Tech Stuff.

Speaker 2:
[00:43] Why, thank you Oz.

Speaker 1:
[00:44] What makes you an edgy optimist?

Speaker 2:
[00:46] What makes me an edgy optimist? Well, I'm not an optimist full stop. So I wrote this column in 2011, 12 and 13 for Slate, and The Atlantic and Reuters.

Speaker 1:
[00:58] Right.

Speaker 2:
[00:58] And I called it the edgy optimist. And part of the point was, that was, I thought when we were beginning to descend into what I thought would be a more temporary nadir of pessimism and has remained a trough that we have only deepened and have yet to get out of.

Speaker 1:
[01:12] Which at the end of the first Obama presidency and being in the second, all of a sudden the kind of the gold, well, there was 2008 financial crisis, but I feel like from the 90s to the kind of 2008 era, like things are pretty good.

Speaker 2:
[01:24] Yeah, 9-11 being a, we had a kind of a collective response to 9-11 that felt like we were coming together. And then we kept getting more and more dyspeptic and negative. At the same time, because I had also thought about the context of the 1990s where everything was great and everything, we were on the cusp of utopian realizations of wealth and connectivity and tech was going to liberate us.

Speaker 1:
[01:48] People took the end of history seriously.

Speaker 2:
[01:49] Right. That if I was going to write a column that says, hey, we should be paying attention to the things that are good and not just paying attention to things are bad, it is likely, given my temperament, that if we were suddenly back in a 1990s moment where everybody was saying things are great, I would be the one saying, hey, wait a minute. They're not quite as great as you think. So I did that a little bit as I wanted to reserve the right to be edgy in the face of other people's optimism. I have not yet needed to do that because there has been no collective outbreak of a surfeit of optimism.

Speaker 1:
[02:21] How have you managed to stay, albeit edgy one, an optimist despite the chaos of the last few years?

Speaker 2:
[02:28] First of all, I think there's a bit of a temperament reality here, which is we do the cliché all the time, cup half full, cup half empty. Some people see clouds, some people still see silver linings. So I think, honestly, there is a pure temperament aspect to it. There are just some of us who are more likely to look at the bright side.

Speaker 1:
[02:49] That's always what my dad says when I'm feeling sorry for myself. He's like, maybe it's your temperament.

Speaker 2:
[02:53] And then there are those of us who constantly intone the Monty Python end of the meaning of life, always look on the bright side of life in the ironic sense as opposed to the English sense, right, because you, England doesn't have any optimists. So, there's the temperament part. Yeah. But I'm also aware of the fact that the temperament part means that you should always surround yourself with people of different temperaments as a reality check. I try, given my inherently things are going to work out, the human beings have a narrative of crisis followed by repair. And that's certainly, I think, been the story of humanity writ large, not necessarily individual nations and definitely not individual people. I mean, there are a lot of just really bad stories about individual people and individual nations that don't end well. Yeah. Not for one minute do I think that everything turns out okay. It's more of the grand scheme of things. The Martin Luther King, the arc of history bends toward progress. But in the meantime, so I don't know that there's another answer to that. I think it is a willingness and a discipline to look around the world and try to find areas where humanity is at its best. Even if at multiple times, it is in the midst of humanity being at its worst.

Speaker 1:
[04:10] But you also have media personality and the easiest way to succeed as a media personality is to be a doom merchant and yet you have resisted.

Speaker 2:
[04:19] That is why I'm not a more prominent media personality. I mean, there was someone once said to me, there was about a five-year period where I was on CNBC a lot. And I kind of played a role in one of these Talking Head shows. And someone came up to me and said, I love you on TV. I'm not saying this is a backpack, I'm just saying telling a narrative that, I love you on TV, why aren't you on more? And I said, the question you should be asking is, how the hell is it that I'm on as much as I am given who I am and what I do? Because I was always the guy who a producer would be whispering my ear and trying to goad me into a really binary, really absolute statement, which I would then ignore and proceed to, as politicians often do, just answer the question I wanted to answer in a rather meta and elliptical fashion. So I do think, I say it jokingly, but there is some truth to it, that there is a cost to being the person who will not do that. I mean, there are lots of people I admire who I think whose voices are brilliant and passionate and wonderful. So I'm not for one minute saying, everybody out there is dooming and glooming and being hysterical and binary, but on the whole, increasingly, news has always rewarded bad news. There's never been good news. It's always been if it bleeds, it leads. But the ecosystem of social media certainly is much more friendly to those who are much more binary and much more extreme in the moment. I strive for trying to be, hence the edgy part, that there is an urgency to making sure we look at what's working, and challenging people to do that in their own work.

Speaker 1:
[05:53] It's interesting, you wrote a, I'm not sure if it's an obituary per se, but a kind of semi obituary of Paul Ehrlich. Am I pronouncing it right, Ehrlich? Recently in your newsletter, who famously predicted the world would starve to death in the 70s, and was the most sought after talking head in the world. I think you mentioned he was on Johnny Carson 20 times. It wasn't exactly ding dong, the witch is dead. There was no ad hominem element to it, but there was a sense in which, here's somebody who was totally wrong and got very famous for being a doomer. What made you want to mark his passing?

Speaker 2:
[06:27] I think it was important in that, the world of the Commentariat is a world without consequence. Everyone can say something on Monday, be proven completely wrong on Friday, say, I said all along something that is completely opposite to what they did, and there's zero accountability. And that's just the way it is. I mean, there's hardly any accountability in any walk of life these days. So I think it's important to call people to account, myself included. I've had people email me with things I've written and said, do you still think this? And let's say 80% of the time the answer is yes, and 20% of the time the answer is yeah, no, I got that one wrong, or I anticipated something in a way that didn't happen. Ehrlich is just so famously, profoundly, unbelievably wrong and over decades, and never stepped back and said, yeah, well, maybe I got this one a little wrong. I mean, he was in the, if you're going to predict the end of the world, just don't give a date camp, so that no matter how much his thesis of impending doom wasn't playing out, he could always say, just wait, and here are the signs and here are the indications, and yeah, maybe I got the time frame wrong. Although he actually gave a date. As you said, in these books, he's like by the end of the 1970s, and then he's like by the end of the 1980s. So he at least could have been more held responsible. I don't mean held responsible like he should have been taken out, put in the public stocks and had rotten fruit thrown in his face. I just mean, ideas do have consequence. I do this, you do this.

Speaker 1:
[07:55] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[07:56] In the belief that ideas have consequence, people value them and a capitalist society value them and are willing to pay for them or somebody is willing to subsidize them, and that ideas matter, and his ideas shaped a generation of attitudes and continues to.

Speaker 1:
[08:08] Of scarcity, which some people track to real-world consequences to his work, including the one-child policy in China and immigration laws and stuff. But you have focused on what Ehrlich missed, essentially, which was there was a technological solution that was going to emerge to take pressure off food scarcity.

Speaker 2:
[08:28] Yeah. I'm writing a book about corn as a technology we eat.

Speaker 1:
[08:32] But explain about the corn. And what Ehrlich missed.

Speaker 2:
[08:35] Corn was an answer to the problem that Ehrlich posited, which is we're running out of food. And then Ehrlich also said we're running out of resources, food and resources, that the carrying capacity of the planet was being reached by too many people, not enough stuff, basically. And corn is one of the many examples, but certainly one of the most profound, of corn yields just kept going up and not down, and they went up faster than human population did, which means corn doesn't just feed people, it feeds animals, it provides fuel, and there's a whole pushback to every single one of these. Maybe it's not a good thing, and maybe it's not a good use of land, but simply parallel to that equation of we're running out of stuff. We just didn't run out of stuff, and we didn't run out of stuff, whether it's oil, there was a whole peak oil theory in the 70s, too, because our technology made it possible not to. You couldn't have anticipated in the late 70s that corn yields would triple. You couldn't have anticipated that you would be able to drill 20,000 feet under the ocean bed and find oil, because the technology wasn't there. And part of the problem today is because of the legacy of the 1990s, where the technologists promised everything and only delivered something, that sort of techno-optimism is in disrepute because it did overpromise. So if you say today, I believe technology will solve some of the problems of global warming and climate change, that's a dismissible statement because in the past, it was overpromised. It shouldn't be nearly as dismissible statement because in the past, we've created technologies to solve for problems that human beings created.

Speaker 1:
[10:10] I'm curious about the moment in technology as you see it. You also written a book about statistics and numbers and how we measure things called leading indicators. Are you familiar with the concept of P-Doom?

Speaker 2:
[10:23] No, but you're going to tell me.

Speaker 1:
[10:28] P-Doom is the probability that AI will kill us all. You can be on a zero to one, I think on the P-Doom spectrum, one being that doom is inevitable. Do you think this discourse is just silly? I mean, how do you view the kind of existential risk around AI?

Speaker 2:
[10:43] First of all, thank God because I was really worried we're going to have a whole conversation and not mention AI. It's going to leave me feeling kind of bereft. So, look, the problem of new technologies versus past technologies is that we can say with certainty that everybody freaked out about a new technology in the past and it all kind of turned out okay. But we know that because it's the past. We don't know whether our present will turn out okay in our future because we haven't lived it yet. And at any given moment, those fears were legit. So there's a whole, and I did one of the podcasts this season with Sebastian Mallamy about one of the creators of the current AI world, Demis Hassibus, who created DeepMind for Google. And Sebastian actually wrote a piece recently about Demis as Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer famously helps create the nuclear bomb and then says, also famously, when the first test, quotes from the Gita says, I'm become death destroyer of world. But of course, there never was nuclear, that was it, right? I mean, if you said to Oppenheimer, we're going to use these things once and then never again.

Speaker 1:
[11:51] Knock on wood.

Speaker 2:
[11:51] No, but that's the thing, right? You can only speak to the present, you can't speak to the future. And it's interesting, you said the knock on wood, like that's the whole optimist-pessimist problem, right? In that, if you say we haven't done it yet, the realist or skeptical response is to say, well, yeah, but the reality is all we can do is say what we know, because we don't know about the future. And you're right, maybe none of you will be listening to this because we'll all be dead, right? Let's just stipulate that that is a possibility. And I think that that is the, you know, that's the rub of these things, which is everything, the doom, the P-doom, wherever you are on that scale, every point along that scale is right. And what I mean is, every point along that scale is justifiable by some future speculation. But how you assess future probabilities, you look at the past, you look at who's saying what, you try to parse it, and then you're left with the temperament issue that we talked about at the beginning, which is which story and tone resonates most for you. I know that's really unsatisfying. Like, we want to know, is this going to kill us? Is this not? Is this the end of days or is it not? And I get, I feel like having a certain humbleness about the inherent uncertainty of future outcomes, I take solace in. Of course, other people, that's really unsettling.

Speaker 1:
[13:13] But you've written recently in the Washington Post that focusing on negative possibilities rather than probabilities is actually harmful.

Speaker 2:
[13:22] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[13:22] What makes it harmful?

Speaker 2:
[13:24] Because at any given time, there's a lot of negative possibilities. And look, we are wired to be highly attuned to risks. And there's a lot of healthiness to that. You know, we are wired to preserve ourselves, our species, our family, our own bodies. And if you're too blithe about the absence of risks, we know that can do you harm. So I think there's healthiness in being attuned to risks. But if you are unable to distinguish between possibilities and probabilities, the manifold risks of what's possible will just drown it out. So be an expert in the field of AI doom, be an expert in the field of counterterrorism, of biological warfare. You know, how they sleep at night is really fascinating, right? Because they basically spend their days dealing with worst-case scenarios. And like really bad worst-case scenarios. And yet they, you know, they go to bed, they have kids, they wake up, they live their lives, right? They live their lives as if either they're going to prevent those worst-case scenarios from happening or as if they won't. And then that's also pretty fascinating as an indicator.

Speaker 1:
[14:30] Yeah, that's, I guess that's the kind of the magic locomotive of human nature that is without which we would write. Yeah. So, but talk about the question, which is also the title of your podcast.

Speaker 2:
[14:43] The What Could Go Right, yeah. We always ask what could go wrong. Back to that observation of human beings are wired to observe risks. And I think that that can be healthy. But if you're not asking what could go right in a particular situation, you're also leaving a lot of opportunities, possibilities on the table in a way that's deleterious. And if you start losing sight of the work that people are doing, the efforts that are being made, the change that has happened, the progress that is observable, my fear is that individuals, groups and societies that are convinced that everything is going wrong are much more likely to engage in behavior that enhance the likelihood that everything will go wrong.

Speaker 1:
[15:22] This is like if there's a whole bunch of dog shit on the street and you're less likely to pick up the dog shit.

Speaker 2:
[15:29] Right, because you're like, what's the point? It's an endless task that will go nowhere. It is the feeling of why should I invest my time and energy in an improbable future? Why start a business? Why write? Why have kids? Why do anything other than try to get as much as you can as quickly as you can? And I think we are in risk in the United States in particular of a degree of cynicism and pessimism that leads to apathy, disengagement. Look, I think the angrier people are, the more engaged they are, the more present they are. That's probably a healthy thing, even though it's unpleasant and difficult to live through. It's when you disengage and retreat into, I'm gonna get as much as I can while I can, because the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and there's no reason to think otherwise, that you then lose whatever local force you have. So I'm trying to deal with issues in a constructive fashion, but really deal with issues, and as you'll see if you listen to it, the podcast is not a series of light, easy topics. Fun places to go in Europe this summer. This is not a podcast about, let's just pay attention to what's joyful and happy in the world. Let's look at what's really hard, but with a constructive eye.

Speaker 1:
[16:41] So talk about what listeners can expect tangibly from the podcast. We're going to play your episode with Ian Bremmer after this conversation between the two of us. But you mentioned Sebastian Malaby is also, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Anthony Scaramucci, a big list of household names. What's your approach to A-booking, and then what do you do with the guests once you've got them in the seat?

Speaker 2:
[17:02] So aspiration, I want to get as much of a conversation as possible. That's hard to do, as we've observed, and I do the same thing. People promoting a book want to promote the book, they don't want to have a conversation about whatever, even though having that conversation in fact promotes them in the book. So I want to have a conversation and a back and forth. I want people to challenge me, I want to challenge them. Sometimes that works better than other times, and that depends on the chemistry with a guest. I want to engage ideas that they're passionate about, whether that's AI, whether that's global politics, whether that's domestic politics, whether that's our economy, how we're living socially, social isolation. Any of these topics, environment, engage them with an eye to be constructive. Often the conversation is going to be looking at what's going wrong, but it's looking at it from a perspective of, are we missing something? Are we missing something? We're missing the green shoots because we're focused on the dark clouds. I hope these conversations allow for a different tonality, a different sensibility. Again, those are hard things to market, right? Come listen because you're going to get a different tone, but that's exactly it. And I think that's the advantage of podcasts, it's the advantage of a conversation, it's the advantage of a long-form thing. Tone shapes the entire conversation in a way that it doesn't clearly as immediately do in the written form. And so I hope this is a way of going, hey, we can talk about hard things with an eye toward, it's not the end of the world. There's other things going on, there may be some hopeful patterns, although I'm not a call to action guy. Another one, people have always encouraged me, what's your call to action? What should people do when they listen to this? And I'm like, I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[18:47] Tell your friends.

Speaker 2:
[18:49] Listen more, have more of these conversations. Because ideas are not really about action, they're ideas, they can lead to action, they can spur action. If it leads to action, it leads to a framework, that's going to be all for the best.

Speaker 1:
[19:22] When you're traveling abroad, Wi-Fi is always an issue. Maybe you can't find it, or maybe you can, but the Wi-Fi network that's available looks a little bit sketchy and makes you think it might not be safe to connect to. I've certainly had that feeling, and it's why having a local SIM card on your phone can make all the difference. But you don't have to literally buy one. That's where Saily comes in, an eSIM service that is as simple as downloading an app, and it gives you instant internet access wherever you're traveling. That is safe and secure internet with built-in cybersecurity features like web protection and ad blockers and no need for local Wi-Fi. All you have to do is download the Saily app on your mobile device and choose the plan that works best for you. Once you install the eSIM, Saily will be instantly activated, so you can start your trip off right. Download Saily in your app store and use our code TechStuff at checkout to get an exclusive 15% off your first purchase. See details in the podcast episode description box. We're going to roll into your episode with Ian Bremmer now. Just before we do that, what's the framework for it? What should listeners be looking forward to?

Speaker 2:
[20:31] So this is one of these episodes where I have a long personal relationship with the person who I'm interviewing which I will do consistently. So I've known Ian for a long time and we have had an ongoing discussion about focusing too much on the risks and not enough on the possibilities.

Speaker 1:
[20:47] He's one of the foremost foreign policy thinkers, prognosticators.

Speaker 2:
[20:51] Right, but he's also built a business focusing on risks to help companies understand the risk matrix that they are entering into and help governments and help individuals, all which is vital and important. He's brilliant at it. But my challenge to him is often, if we're focusing so much on the risks, what are we potentially missing? And the conversation I have with him may not do that as much, but that's the spirit in which I enter into it.

Speaker 1:
[21:15] Zachary Karabell, thank you.

Speaker 2:
[21:16] Thank you. Ian, it's a pleasure to have you back. So we had this conversation more than two years ago, right after October 7th, 2023. If you're gonna look at the past two and a half years in the Middle East from a risk perspective, I imagine things have probably gone worse than one would have expected. But how much of this would you have anticipated? Not obviously in its specificity, but in its general chaos.

Speaker 3:
[21:46] So the big picture thing that was not surprising is that Israel, given its military escalation dominance in the region, was gonna continue to be able to call the shots. Some of the abilities that they displayed in terms of targeting and assassinating all of the leaders of Hezbollah, for example. I mean, the tradecraft is quite something, but that's not surprising. I think the surprising thing is that Trump decided to go much bigger on Iran as opposed to a repetition of the 12-day war, and he's now gotten himself in the thick of it. The result of that has been that the one thing that has been the most extraordinary development coming out of the Middle East in the last 20 years, which has been the globalization and these world-class economic models that are being developed out of the Gulf, are now being proven to be geopolitically extremely vulnerable.

Speaker 1:
[22:55] Because the Gulf states, of course, are also being targeted.

Speaker 4:
[22:57] An Iranian drone struck the grounds of a US consulate in Dubai, setting it ablaze. Multiple attacks on Kuwait last night.

Speaker 5:
[23:06] It has been a pretty heavy day of Iranian missile and drone attacks here in the Gulf, despite the ceasefire.

Speaker 6:
[23:13] There's a great deal of economic impact that's already been felt in this region.

Speaker 3:
[23:17] That is a surprise. It's not a surprise that they're in the Middle East. It's just a surprise that the tacit deal that had been made to keep them out of the fray has completely unwound as a consequence of Trump deciding to decapitate the Islamic Republic. He went bigger than the rules of the game allowed, and now the dominoes have all come tumbling down.

Speaker 2:
[23:43] So we're recording this at a time where we don't really know what's gonna happen. By the time you're listening to this, the Strait of Hormuz could be open, it could be closed, it could be open and closed, there could be ground troops, there could not be ground troops. So we don't really know right now exactly where this is headed in the next couple weeks. Between this conversation and when people are listening to this conversation. I have to say one thing I've been struck by, and I don't know if this is just my own lack of focus, is, if you step back from the strategic vulnerabilities of all the Gulf states and the degree to which they have been drawn into this conflict literally, palpably, that their air defenses and their missile defenses and their drone defenses seem to be extraordinarily good. It seemed for years, particularly the Saudis were just buying vanity hardware to make their state look better, but that their military capacity was fairly limited. It's kind of surprising how adept they are at their own self-defense and how much they have clearly prepared. I don't know if they were preparing for an Israeli attack, but they certainly were preparing for some sort of airborne attacks.

Speaker 3:
[24:44] So I guess I agree with that, Zach. But you know, the funny thing is, I don't think I would have taken that as a conclusion. I mean, the Iranians have done a lot of learning. They have been much more capable of hiding and dispersing their weaponry to be able to continue to fire even ballistic missiles after now, as you and I are talking, some four weeks of getting just the crap pounded out of them by the Americans and the Israelis, never mind the drone capabilities that we knew that they had. And that while the numbers of ballistic missiles that have been used has gone down since the opening days of the war, the percentage of targets that have gotten hit has gone up. And the reason for that is not about capability, it's about how much hardware these countries still have, that they are running out of the adequate defenses to ensure that they can keep Iran off of them. When I saw that the Prince Sultana Air Base in Saudi Arabia, which is the hardest target in Saudi Arabia to hit, it is the most defended, was hit directly by an Iranian missile after four weeks of the war, that makes you think differently about war fighting. And when I see $20 billion of damage done to a Qatari LNG facility that will take a minimum of three years to repair by a drone from Iran that cost maybe $100,000, probably less, the answer to that is, we are in a much more asymmetric war fighting environment, where the Ukrainians can do a lot of damage to Russia, and where the Iranians can bring the global economy to their knees. To me, that is the more surprising outcome from the opening weeks of this war.

Speaker 2:
[26:43] There's always the kind of the bigger picture part, which is, obviously, this particular kinetic conflict is going to end. There's still going to be massive capacity for energy production, fertilized production, LNG, oil in the Gulf. There's still likely, although provisionally, let's just say we don't quite know, going to be an entrenched Islamic Republic in Iran for X period of time, albeit a weekend one. I'm not sure what sort of lies on the other side in terms of the global system, other than there will be a continued preaching of we need to be more resilient, we can't be so dependent on any one choke point. I assume there will be lots of money spent by lots of people to create alternate supply chains for these things. But kind of like all the things that were said during COVID, where we were going to make all these supply chains more resilient and never again, I'm sort of struck in a way that even I had not really, and what I mean by even I is like, I've written about this stuff, I've thought about it, I hadn't been as palpably aware that here we are again, right?

Speaker 3:
[27:45] European diversification post-Russia Ukraine has helped them respond to this crisis in a way that the Asians, for example, are more vulnerable. I think that's interesting. But your broader point holds. I mean, desalination is an absolutely critical node. It's not hardened facilities, and you've got countries that are relying on those plants for 90%, in some cases, 98% of their water. And they are being held hostage by the Iranians right now. If they are taken out, then you're going to have mass exodus of major cities. So that's a huge vulnerability. But also, I mean, I don't see any amount, because supply chain resilience is expensive. And you can do it in limited ways to deal with, you know, sort of more expected shocks. But taking more than 10 million barrels of oil a day off of the market, not to mention all the natural gas, the fertilizers, the plastics and the rest, taking that off the market for a month or two months or more, I don't see a world where you're gonna have people spend to prepare for that. I don't see that. What I see is that there are certain countries that have been investing longer term that are in better shape by virtue of the nature of their political system. So the Chinese have just much more full stockpiling in every commodity known to man that's helping them now. And they're also investing much longer term moving away from oil and gas and towards renewables. And think about what this means for the importance of their electric vehicle sort of capabilities. And BYD, which was looking problematic because of involution competition suddenly looks amazing again because Europeans and Asians just are gonna continue to turn away from fossil fuel automobiles. So China to me looks much stronger not because they've got suddenly resilience or 10 million barrels of oil off the table, but rather because they've been investing for the long term for a long time.

Speaker 2:
[30:04] You know, one of the peculiarities I find of the past month or two is we've got a lot of satellite imagery of how war is playing out. We've got a lot of pictures. The Israelis clearly had a lot of on the ground intelligence, otherwise they couldn't have carried out various and sundry assassinations of people in specific locations. But there seems to be very little publicly disseminated information about anything that's actually going on inside of Iran. Like, why is that? Is there information that just isn't being publicly disseminated? So whatever the Israeli government has at its disposal or the American government through human intelligence and or other signal stuff is just not getting out? I mean, that is possible. It's unusual that none of that gets out.

Speaker 3:
[30:54] One problem is that there is a state media in Iran is a propaganda organ and unuseful from that regard. Second problem is that there's almost no foreign media allowed into Iran. CNN was allowed one journalist with a cameraman and a driver. He was there for a bit and you got a lot of information, but you don't have different outlets that are providing information, so you're not getting those conversations. Internet shut down, so we're not hearing from average Iranians on the ground, citizens and the rest. But also, the Iranians are putting out these memes, and the memes are doing extremely well. The American government is putting out memes, and the memes are doing extremely well. There's enormous amounts of disinformation also, and so people are getting maximally, their attention is grabbed and they don't know what to believe, meaning that the space for the limited amount of real war journalism that's occurring, and there's not much of it, is just not getting to people. I mean, if you were following Al Jazeera on a daily basis, you'd be getting a better sense of what's happening in Iran on the ground, but you'd also have to do your own fact checking, because a lot of it turns out to be badly sourced and false, and not many people are willing to do that. And certainly and understandably, the mainstream media in the United States and in Europe is not going to take that at face value. So what you're missing, I want to see vice on the ground. Seriously, who are the people that have the local war correspondence that have their phones, and it's gritty, and it's not well produced, but they're at least getting real stories out to Americans about, here's what's happening, like the Houthis. Who's talking to the Houthis? Everyone understands that they are in an utterly indispensable position. If they decide to go after the Saudi East-West pipeline, individually, seven million barrels of oil off the table. And it's because they're now getting bought off by the Saudis. We have heard from sources on the ground in Yemen that are very credible that Yemeni Houthi fighters have now in the last week, for the first time in months, gotten half salary. They were not getting paid at all. And it's because the Saudis have provided them money. Not a lot of money, but some. And that's really important because it makes it, everyone saw the headlines, the Houthis are in the war. No, they're not. The Houthis launched the missile against Israel. The Houthis are not shutting down the Red Sea. They're not attacking Saudi energy. That is incredibly important. No one is talking to the Houthis.

Speaker 2:
[33:36] Except other Houthis.

Speaker 3:
[33:37] It's exactly your point.

Speaker 2:
[33:38] Right.

Speaker 3:
[33:38] It's exactly your point. It's a problem.

Speaker 2:
[33:40] Let's broaden this for a moment because there's a sort of information asymmetry. And I'm struck in the past month or so of, you know, we live in a world where we talk about just the sheer proliferation, tsunami of information and data. And yet, in these, in certain areas of the world, right, Turkmenistan, North Korea, Iran to a large degree, some aspects of Yemen, we have remarkable little visibility. And the capacity of governments clearly to control that information outflow and I suppose information inflow as well seems remarkably high. I mean, not even including China, obviously, where there it's more of information as control more than it is actually controlled information. But, I mean, I wonder if you've thought about this or what is this portend? Are these the kind of the rule, the exceptions to the rules? Or are these going to be the new rules and the more open is going to be the exception?

Speaker 3:
[34:37] Look, I don't think the United States is going to become Turkmenistan. But obviously, when Trump is meeting with Xi Jinping and talking with them over the last year, Trump's top priority in those bilateral conversations has been the acquisition of TikTok before the midterm elections. Look, they allow TikTok to keep running in defiance of a piece of legislation as ruled by Congress, which has the right to do that. So they were ignoring law. And China eventually allowed the sale to politically sanitized, acceptable people. It was not feasible that that sale was going to go to someone that was a political opponent of Trump in the United States. Why not? In an open media environment, where your ostensible concern is that you don't want the Chinese surveilling your data. It just needs to be an American company. That was never what was going to happen. So I do worry that increasingly, as we talk about CNN and Fox, but very few people watch those channels, and they're mostly over 70 years old. So those are literally dying channels. And people are getting their news from social media. They're getting the news from TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and the rest. And algorithmically, the control of what you see is increasingly in a small number of hands, which are themselves politically influenced, or at least subject to political influence, susceptible to political influence. And that, I think, makes it a lot harder to imagine that we're going to see a perpetuation of more free flow of information, where high quality outlets are available to the average person. I think high quality outputs are still available to a small number of people that are prepared to pay for them. But that is very different than the kind of information flow that you and I are talking about, Zach.

Speaker 2:
[36:45] Actually, let's pivot from them and talk about that information flow as it pertains to you and GZERO. So look, you have a good deal of influence. You have a certain amount of fame. You also have a lot of elite access. But one of the things that has done best for you over the past year, almost entirely via social media, are your puppets and the social media virality of the puppets. I mean, anyone hasn't seen the GZERO puppets. Am I calling them right just as a title?

Speaker 3:
[37:12] Puppet regime, which is the right name. It's definitely the right name.

Speaker 2:
[37:16] It's political satire. It's political commentary. It's a good degree of embedded information, meaning it's all of the above at the same time.

Speaker 7:
[37:23] We don't need congressional authorization. It's just that's not how the song goes. It goes special military operation, special military.

Speaker 4:
[37:34] I'm just doing my own version.

Speaker 7:
[37:35] You really are these days.

Speaker 2:
[37:37] So clearly there's a kind of a mixed bag, right? We're in a moment in time where the evils and ill of social media either has control, as you just talked about, in the TikTok sale case, or as Jonathan Haidt and the ill of which social media is done to a generation and law is banning that in Australia and states in the United States and suits coming down against meta at a state level in the United States. And yet you do have this kind of social media virality and education that is powerful, reaches a lot of people, is clearly, it's not countercultural, right? But it is speaking some truth to power. It is a voice of independence that if you were someone who wanted power and control, you wouldn't probably be that fond of, right? And how do you square those trends?

Speaker 3:
[38:21] Well, I think that, again, it's not centralized control. It's just a wave of bots. My view, and it's sort of similar, you know that I started my education on the former Soviet Union, and my friends were dissidents, and they were people that believed in the free flow of information, and they weren't going to get shut down, but they just weren't very influential. And I think that this is a similar environment. Like, okay, I've got over a million followers on Twitter, and if we put out a video with puppets, some of them will get five million views, which is pretty cool, and nobody owns us, nobody influences us, so we can do what we want. I can't get fired in the way that CBS would not do a show like this, no matter how well they thought it would perform. They just wouldn't do it because it's too vulnerable for them politically given their relationship with the government. And yet, these are tiny drops in an ocean compared to the vast majority of information and disinformation that is being algorithmically promoted to people in the United States and elsewhere. When Elon owns the platform, when Zuck owns the platform, when Trump's buddy owns TikTok, the information that you're going to get is largely going to be different than if the people were just creating things that they thought were interesting and worthwhile. So I don't pretend that most of what people are doing is the interesting and worthwhile. But the more we can do, and if I had 10 times as many resources, I'd have a lot more reach. And you can aim and aspire towards that. But as long as I'm here, I'm going to at least try. That's, I guess, the way I view it, is that you've got to try. You've got to try, even if it's not super effective. And the fact that I've got a platform, and I'm pretty well known, if I'm trying, that will also inspire younger people and other people in my field that don't have the same reach. They say, well, Ian can get away with it, so I can get away with it. It's important that they feel like they can also be more public in their commentary and saying what they think. At the end of the day, the Soviet Union succeeded because people were censoring themselves. Self-censorship is the worst kind of censorship. It's the most pernicious. You make an example of one person or 10, and then a million decide that they're going to not act in certain ways because it's not worth the risk. And so you've got to do what you can to try to erode the horrors of self-censorship.

Speaker 2:
[41:01] It's funny. I mean, I think of it a little differently in that the Progress Network also does these social media clips, some of which get millions of views. And I'm always saying that by way of, yeah, relative to hundreds of billions or trillions of views, a few million is not necessarily any more significant than any other few million. And the AI cat video and the Bill Maher had a hilarious reference the other day, saying the combined viewership of Fox, MS Now, CNN is less than the guy power washing his driveway on a TikTok video, right? Probably right, which is right. I mean, at that moment, I think he said, you know, the amount they're watching any of the cable channels on a nightly basis is three million, maybe four million. The amount watching that view, right? Even you're even even one of the puppet views or one of the viral progress network views can get three, four million views. Yeah, it's more that the noise drowns out all of it. And I think there's that interesting question. And I don't know how you feel about this now. I mean, you're so immersed in the risks of the world. It can be difficult, I think, to keep that in perspective. Maybe that's entirely the right thing. But there's also the question of, is the noise a form of its own control? Because you could make the argument that the best way to control an open society that prizes the theory or the abstract theory of its openness is to just flood the zone with noise. Because then you can get away with things because there's so much noise, you just won't get noticed. Rather than go through the really Herculean efforts of control, which you do see in other societies like the closed societies or like China, which has spent a good 15 years building. I agree completely with this.

Speaker 3:
[42:36] Completely.

Speaker 2:
[42:37] But you could say the other side, which is the noise is our source of freedom.

Speaker 3:
[42:40] The noise would be a source of freedom if it was actually random noise coming from all these citizens. It's not. The noise is actually meant to induce anger and concern and stress and it's addictive. It's not just random walk through the park, all these different people doing different things noise. Putin, this has always been his strategy, is I don't need to know to have the truth. I just need for people to not know what the truth is. As long as everything out there is plausible, then you can't turn anything away. That itself is a mechanism for control. Absolutely, I think that this is part of the strategy. It's when Steve Bannon says flood the zone with shit. I think that's part of the strategy.

Speaker 2:
[43:32] And yet you do have the optimism of, maybe optimism is too extreme, but you do have the belief that within that reality, putting out information, in the case of the puppet satire, in the case of your own commentary, is unarguably unbiased. No one's paying you to put out a set of views for a political purpose, right?

Speaker 3:
[43:54] Yeah, I could be wrong. It happens all the time, but it's purely my being wrong. It's not because someone's paying me to be wrong.

Speaker 2:
[44:00] But you also believe that noise will have an audience, and a constructive one, as you said, that if someone sees you doing it, they might go, hey, this is doable. Even within that more grim description, there's a reality of, they may not be neutral funnels, but they are not completely controlled ones either, right? There are things that can coalesce and get out. I'm still struck by somewhat of the eye of the beholder in that information ecosystem, where you can find a lot of information about everything. That can be incredibly valuable, it can be entertaining, it can be both entertaining and valuable, a la the puppet regime. And I take some hope from that, meaning I'm not as grim about the noise as control, even though I brought it up in the first place, I'm acutely aware of the degree to which that is a theory of the case.

Speaker 3:
[44:45] I just think that objectively, the information environment is worse today than it was 20 or 30 years ago. And we don't believe as much in our established media organs. And I think with good reason. And there's much more disinformation out there, and that's a problem. And people are getting more addicted in their own filter bubbles, and they're not listening as much across those streams. And that's a problem. But it is very different from saying that the information environment is controlled, that you don't matter, that you can't make a difference. I'm very sympathetic to people that are in positions, they're senior positions, they're in the establishment media, but they are working for someone else. And they understand that that means that they can be fired, right? And the media companies right now are mostly downsizing, they're mostly shedding employees because they're not performing as well, the ad revenue isn't what it used to be. And so these people are scared. And they're not doing the same job that they were doing 20 or 30 years ago. And I think that that means for someone like myself, I don't answer to anybody, it's more incumbent on me to be out there. I think the person who's doing a better job is someone that you and I both know and like quite a bit, and that's Fareed. Because Fareed, in my view, has been every bit as forthcoming and honest and speaking with authenticity and integrity as I have tried to over the last five years. But he's working for CNN, right? Actually, much harder for him to do it, much more consequential for him to do it. I speak to him about this a lot and how much I appreciate and respect the fact that he continues to speak truth to power. Frankly, in some ways, it's kind of uncomfortable for him. My natural personality is to be out there and say what I want. I get on stage and Fareed is a little bit more buttoned up. He's a little more cautious. I don't think he'd wear a hoodie with a blazer. I mean, that's just Fareed. But he understands the importance of the moment. For me, the optimism doesn't come from the system. It doesn't come from the institutions. The optimism comes from the people. The optimism is that despite all of our lack of belief in the fact that so much of this is coin-operated, so much of this is non-representative, that actually individuals, when you sit down and talk with them, are good people. And they still want the truth. And they want people to believe in. And they can sniff it out when you're full of crap. And they'll turn the channel when they think you're inauthentic. And they want that. They want people that they can really connect with. And at the end of the day, that still matters. And it mattered even in a system like the Soviet system. People understood. They used to say, we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us. Which is a very empowering thing to say in a dictatorship. It's a very empowered thing to say in a place where what is truth is determined. I mean, Zanjaten was out there for the Russians, just like Orwell was in the West, but they were living that. And I think that the Soviets damn well knew truth when they heard it. And I think at the end of the day, so do Americans, so do people all over the world. That to me is what drives optimism.

Speaker 2:
[48:13] Yeah, I mean, oddly, one of the things that many people who support Trump say that they appreciate about Trump is this feeling of his authenticity. And I suppose compared to how politicians tended to sound in the United States in the latter part of the 20th century into the 21st, he does sound authentic, meaning he's not beholden to the same conventions and third rails or things you're supposed to say and not to say. And there is, at least in a nominally democratic society, some degree of people kind of like that, right?

Speaker 3:
[48:47] Well I think that Trump is authentically a bad person. And I wish that weren't true, but I do. He was raised badly. I mean if you've read any of the history, right? I mean like it was very challenging and kind of an emotionally abusive environment, and he wasn't really cared for adequately, and he's a bully. And he cares about himself, and he doesn't really have affect for others around him. He certainly doesn't care about his country. He's very short term oriented, but I think he's authentic about all of those things. That does not make him a good president, but it does make him someone that people want to listen to, because they're sort of interested. They know that when he says something, probably is the way he actually cares. Trump does not give a fuck, right? And there's something very liberating about not giving a fuck. Now, I'm very different from that. The people in my firm will tell you this. You're a good friend, Zach, so you know this. I'm a chaos monkey, right? But I do care about my fellow people. Like, I like to cause trouble, I'm mischievous, but I'm fundamentally good, so I'm chaotic good. Trump is not good. And at the end of the day, as much as we need authenticity, we also need to keep people that aren't good away from us. And we certainly don't want them in positions of leadership because they destroy shit. And that's what's happening with Trump. A lot of people out there say that I sane wash Trump. That's not true, I don't. I analyze him and I try to help people understand what's happening without having my hair on fire. But I firmly believe he's unfit for the job.

Speaker 2:
[50:33] In an earlier piece, I described Trump as a narcissistic chaos monkey, which I kind of liked as a phraseology.

Speaker 3:
[50:39] That's too bad, because since I just used chaos monkey to describe myself, that's really bad.

Speaker 5:
[50:43] No, I know.

Speaker 2:
[50:43] But not the narcissistic part. No.

Speaker 3:
[50:49] But the throwing his poo at the wall, perhaps, is what you seem to be saying.

Speaker 2:
[50:53] The narcissism part makes a big difference. I know everyone uses the word narcissism these days. Everybody's a narcissist. But there are some, and he is one.

Speaker 3:
[51:02] Mostly men, by the way, but that's beside the point.

Speaker 2:
[51:04] I mean, there is this larger question, right, which we've had about democracies in the world today. And there's the kind of, you know, a lot of these democracies, particularly in Northern Europe, have seemingly succeeded in a lot of what governments were supposed to do from time immemorial. They've made sure that people were fed. They've made sure people are housed. They've created social safety nets. And yet everywhere we see these things fraying intensively with a lot of populist anger. The United States is by no means singular in this. It is. Particularly in the Trump story, right? But the trends and the flows are not unique to the United States by any means. When you kind of look around the world and then you go to somewhere like China, which for the moment has huge issues, but those are not its issues, right? How do we explain all this in the world today? This really easy question to answer.

Speaker 3:
[51:53] That when people feel, for a host of reasons that are well known, that their leaders do not represent them, and they do not believe that they can elicit change through the existing system, they will operate outside that system. Now in some cases, that means that they will have a gray market or a black market, or they will lay flat, as the here in China among a lot of young people, they're laying flat, they don't want to work, they're not going to be a part of a state owned enterprise, they don't want to join the Communist Party, because there's no benefit for it. In some cases, they'll turn to violence, they'll demonstrate. We just did a survey at GZERO of the greatest number of political demonstrations in the world over the last year, number being described as people gathering nonviolent, more than three for a political purpose. India was number one, not a surprise, also the most populous country in the world. The United States was number two, and Iran was number three in the last year. So interesting metal table, maybe not the one you would have expected. But there also is increasingly political violence, right? And I worry in the same way that when the CEO of United Health Care is gunned down by a relatively articulate college student who decides the only way out of the system is through, that's a really bad signal. It's not data, it's just a signal. But you and I are seeing more signals like that. Now, I believe that some of those signals are constructive. I believe a no-kings rally is a constructive signal. I believe that FDR was a constructive response in the United States to a kleptocratic system that provided for its elites. And FDR tried some things that were against the law. He tried to pack the Supreme Court. He tried to purge his own Democratic Party. He failed, but he eventually created an administrative state that was professional, that provided for the people. He provided a new deal. He created the basis for a working class and a middle class in the United States. I think that we are going to see more political revolutionaries in America after Trump fails, but they don't need to be like Trump. And in fact, it's highly unlikely they will, because Trump is a fairly singular figure, right? I mean, not just in the kind of person he is, but also in how talented he is. Like, he is an extraordinary communicator. A world-class communicator and an awareness of how to build and maintain a brand. So bringing those two things together, that's hard. I suspect that it's at least as likely, maybe more likely that the next political revolutionary in the US will be more like FDR and less like Trump. And I think that's great, because obviously much of the system needs to change, and it's not gonna change through its existing institutional frameworks.

Speaker 2:
[54:46] So as we wrap up, you know, we both sort of came to frame the world in the 1990s at a time when the primary frame, you were studying the Soviet Union, it had fallen apart, the Berlin Wall had fallen, there was the formation of the EU, after decades of effort. Fukuyama has been made fun of for prematurely declaring the end of history, but it was a view of the world that felt very palpable at the time that much of what had ailed the 20th century, let alone human history, had been resolved in a much more favorable fashion than most people had dreamt of. And that there was a really bright future on the other side of that, of technology, of prosperity. And a lot of that, as we can look back at 30 years, 25 years, whatever the decades are, was clearly excessively starry-eyed about the world and didn't acknowledge all the problems that remained. I just wonder if we have the privilege of having this kind of conversation 25 years from now, will we feel as well that we were too focused on all the things that were ailing us, given that?

Speaker 3:
[55:45] I don't think so. I think that geopolitics are cyclical. And in the same way that economics are cyclical, there are boom and bust cycles. And if you're in a bust cycle, you're too gloomy about everything. I mean, a lot of traders say, at the worst moment, that's just when things are gonna get great, that's when you should buy. But the point is that geopolitical cycles are long cycles. I wrote about the GZERO world in 2012. It was obvious that we were coming to a period where the balance of power was no longer aligned with the rules of the road, the international architecture. And as that plays out, you're going to need to reform your existing institutions, create new ones, and you're gonna see a lot more conflict and war. And that's what we're going through right now. So of course it's gonna feel a lot more negative because you're going through the long geopolitical recession. We will get through it. There will be something afterwards. There will be new rules, there will be new leadership. And that's happening institutionally inside our countries too. So I think the fact that something is cyclical gives you that push and pull. And when things are at the peak, you start to like feel really bullion and think that trees can grow to the heavens and they can't. And when things are towards the trough, you end up seeing a lot more negative news coverage and not recognizing that you're gonna rebound. That to me is the way I think about the geopolitics.

Speaker 2:
[57:02] Well, that's a good way to end it. Or a good way to end the discussion, not a good way to end the cycles. Thank you for your time. As always, everyone should...

Speaker 3:
[57:10] Good to see you, my buddy.

Speaker 2:
[57:11] If you take one thing away from this conversation, go check out Puppet Regime. I mean, if you know of Ian's work, that's great. But if you haven't been paying attention to the puppets, it's the best way to feel like you're on top of what's going on in the world, but you can also laugh about it.

Speaker 3:
[57:24] And if you take one other thing away from this conversation, is if you had a basketball game and you see me and Zach, you wanna hang with us, because that's where the real conversation is happening.

Speaker 2:
[57:30] Absolutely. Please send me your thoughts at theprogressnetwork.org or to my edgy optimist newsletter, and we will try to take them up. I certainly value the time that you are dedicating to listening to this, and hope to be with you again next week.