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

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

The world was wrecked by COVID.

Afghanistan is in complete chaos.

I don't recognize America.

I...

I don't recognize any part of us anymore.

And our leaders seem to be encouraging this shift.

So, how do we make sense of all the catastrophe and chaos?

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

His latest book is called Doom, the Politics of Catastrophe.

It's not what you think it is.

It examines our really weird, ambivalent relationship with doom.

It's a tool.

It's a game.

And as we see over the last few years, especially in the last year, it is

a way of life for some.

Maybe most frighteningly of all, it is

also a currency.

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

He opens the book by saying, Never in our lifetimes has there been a greater uncertainty about the future and greater ignorance of the past.

He is incredibly qualified to make that statement.

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

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

He has won an International Emmy in 2009 for a PBS series he did, The Ascent of Money.

And his wife, Ian Hersey Alley, is not too shabby herself.

Please welcome Neil Ferguson.

Neil, welcome.

It's great to be with you, Glenn.

It's been way too long.

I know.

And we find ourselves in a very different world since I think the last time we spoke,

I felt the rumblings of what was coming, and

now here we are.

And I'm not sure exactly where we find ourselves.

But

I have a feeling you're going to be able to

tell us.

Let's start with

the basics.

What comprises a catastrophe and describe a disaster like you do in Doom?

Well, disasters will happen.

They are an integral part of the human condition.

And one of the problems we face is that they are unpredictable.

We can never know when the next disaster will strike.

We can never know what form it will take.

And disasters can take a great many different forms, ranging from a pandemic to

defeat and war.

Just to think of a couple of random examples.

Suddenly random.

I don't know what you're saying.

I mean, I don't know how you picked those up.

Yeah.

Those just popped up.

And

for whatever reason,

there's just no model or theory of history that allows you to say which disaster will come next, but there will be disasters.

And each disaster,

no matter how large or small, or whether it's man-made or natural, has at least one or two common features beyond the unpredictability.

And the one that's interesting to me is the role of

human error.

Even if a purely natural event happens, like a volcano erupts,

there's always some human element that determines how many people die.

Like if you decide to build a really big city next to a volcano, that is going to make...

consequences of an eruption much, much greater.

And in the same way,

if the same new pathogen strikes every country in the world, as happened last year, human error will determine how many people die in one country

versus another.

In Taiwan, hardly anybody died of COVID.

In the United States, as we all know, more than 600,000 people died.

So human error is a really crucial variable, regardless of whether a disaster is natural or man-made.

In many ways, that's a false dichotomy.

But you don't, I mean,

we're not learning from any of these disasters.

It doesn't seem like there is a learning curve at all.

The same people, let's take the, let's just take war, for example, the same people who empowered ISIS and created ISIS are exactly the same people that just have empowered the Taliban.

There's no learning curve.

It's a remarkable thing.

And one of the reasons I wrote Doom was to try and address this problem.

Why are we so bad at learning from past disasters?

And why do we seem to have got worse at it?

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

We know things that even

our parents' generation didn't know.

We can sequence the genetic structure of a virus in just hours.

This was never possible before, to give just one example.

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

And I think there are a couple of reasons for this.

One is that history is no longer taught.

There are history lessons and there are history departments.

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

It's some branch of cultural studies.

There is almost

no good course anywhere in the United States,

to give just one example, on the lessons of the last 30 or 40 years about radical Islam as a political and ideological force.

There are undergraduates, I've encountered them at major universities, who know almost nothing about what led to the 9-11 attacks.

In fact,

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

Of course,

they'd barely been born when it happened, and this is something that it's always a struggle to remember, but today's undergraduates were being born around the time of the 9-11 attacks 20 years ago.

I was born.

I was born 20 years after Pearl Harbor, and I knew what Pearl Harbor was.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Because in our generation, history was still something that had content.

We were being taught about the origins of wars.

I was born in 1964,

long after the end of World War II, but I was brought up thinking all the time, how did these disasters, the World Wars happened?

My grandfathers had fought in World Wars.

How did these disasters happen?

This was the central question that motivated me to become a historian.

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

But today's history courses are largely devoid of those great questions.

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

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

And that has no value.

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

How do we...

How is it that we are so fascinated?

I was born in 1964 as well.

We're so fascinated by World War II and the Nazis, but we don't seem to

recognize the signs when they pop up again.

You know, I've had this argument with the ADL before.

What good is never forget

if you can't point out and say, that's a seed.

That's a seed.

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

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

Part of the problem, Glenn, is almost overuse of the 1930s analogy.

If everything is like Hitler, then nothing is.

If Donald Trump was Hitler, if everything is the Munich Agreement,

then this becomes devalued.

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

It's like a kind of intellectual hyperinflation where the constant use of parallels to Hitler, their use even against

an obviously quite different kind of political leader

such as Trump or any of the populist leaders who've been compared with Hitler over the last few years.

This makes the whole analogy worthless.

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

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

If everybody is Hitler, then nobody is Hitler.

Just to give you a concrete example, the readiness of people to believe two obviously absurd things.

Number one, which we heard quite a bit of late last year, early this year, Joe Biden is a transformative president who

deserves to be compared with Franklin Roosevelt.

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

Oh, he's Lyndon Johnson, though.

It seemed to me that that was a more dangerous claim to make.

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

And these are two equally absurd propositions.

It is obvious that Joe Biden is, if anything, the reincarnation of Jimmy Carter.

That was something that I felt was easy to predict from the outset.

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

So ultimately, I think the readiness of commentators to make absurd analogies and people to believe them

is the problem that we're grappling with here.

Aaron Powell,

there was an article that was just written that talks about

the left fears

or the right fears leftist totalitarianism, and there is no such thing.

And

I'm

you know, I don't put Hitler into the right.

You know, I look at Americans, the American society, much different than Europeans do.

That's left and right, but fascism and communism is the extreme on each side.

Where in America, it's anarchy or freedom

and then totalitarianism.

That could be a theocracy or any of them.

Can you bat down the idea that

communism, socialism, that none of these people are from the left?

In America?

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

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

Remember, the Nazis and the Communists collaborated to bring down the Weimar Republic, even if that turned out to be a disastrous mistake by the German Communist Party.

But

they both had socialism, big government as their key.

National socialism and socialism in one country are two ways of saying the same thing.

Hitler believed in national socialism, Stalin in socialism in one country.

But the effects of the policies were remarkably similar.

Individual liberty disappeared.

The rule of law disappeared, government became not only unaccountable but increasingly violent towards its own citizens and towards other citizens.

There was systematic discrimination of targeted minorities.

If you were somebody who crossed from one regime to the other, this happened to Viktor Klempere, a German Jew who survived the Third Reich and then ended up in the communist-controlled German Democratic Republic.

The striking thing to Klemperer was was how similar the two regimes were, even in the language that they used.

So this is an important point to recognize.

Totalitarianism comes in different flavors,

but the content,

the practical consequences of totalitarianism are remarkably similar, whether the dictator claims to be a nationalist or fascist or a communist or

an Islamic fundamentalist.

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

It will mean violence.

There will be no rule of law beyond a brutal Sharia law.

And from that point of view, the key distinction in my mind is between societies or systems that prioritize individual freedom.

And all the freedoms matter here.

Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of association.

The things that were hardwired into the American system by the founders because they were so committed to to the ideal of liberty.

Systems that prioritize liberty are in fundamental conflict with all those systems that prioritize something above human liberty.

And it doesn't really matter whether it's a fascist system, a communist system, an Islamist system, or any other system.

A system that is fundamentally hostile to individual freedom has an inevitable antagonism towards our system which prioritizes freedom.

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

I used to think when I was a young scholar that totalitarian behavior, like informing on your neighbor, or denouncing somebody to the bureaucracy, or having a show trial, or erasing somebody from the historical record, I thought that kind of behavior happened only when there was a totalitarian regime with a dictator in power.

That was my conviction.

But it turns out I was wrong.

That you can have people behave in those ways, informing on their neighbors, denouncing their classmates to the authorities.

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

The example, and you know where I'm probably going, is the way American campuses have gone from being places where free speech was encouraged to being the places in America where free speech is most difficult, where it is absolutely normal to inform on a professor or a classmate to the bureaucracy, and it is absolutely normal for the bureaucracy to act in a way that bears no relation to due process.

That began to become the norm in universities relatively recently.

In the course of my career teaching at US universities, we've seen a remarkable change.

And that culture, which is, I think, everyday totalitarianism, has spread out from the universities into an increasing number of corporations.

It kind of began with the tech companies and publishing and newspapers.

The New York Times is now essentially like an Ivy League campus in terms of its illiberalism.

And what is amazing to me is how many young people accept this as normal.

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

They think it's okay.

And here's an example.

In a survey that was published earlier this year, which was a survey of American students in four-year programs, they were asked, if a professor said something you considered offensive in a class, would you report them,

would you report the professor to the administration?

85% of liberal or liberal-leaning students said yes.

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

So these are people who think that they are liberals.

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

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

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

I was shocked when George Bush after 9-11 said, you know, he said, well, there's a phone number to call, you know, look at your neighbors and if there's something, and I remember kicking up a storm.

That is absolutely un-American.

And

then Obama tried to do it.

And we've drifted into this.

And the reason why I was so against it at the time was

People always say when they come to America, Americans are so friendly, they're so open.

That's because we've never turned our neighbors

into the authorities.

We've never turned on each other.

We trusted each other.

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

And with good reason, the term McCarthyism is a derogatory term.

We don't look back and celebrate that witch hunt against actual or suspected communists that occurred in the the early phase of the Cold War, not because there were no communists, there were.

The strange thing about the McCarthy era was that there really were communists who had infiltrated

the State Department, other parts of the government, and at very high levels, people who were essentially Soviet operatives.

But the way in which that witch hunt was conducted has left, with good reason, a bad taste in

our mouths.

Neil, why is it that we, what is missing that

little

connection between McCarthyism that everybody says is wrong, homosexuals that say, you know, I was in the closet and that is wrong for the way I believe and

what I am, you can't force people into the closet, and yet they're doing the same thing.

How is it they don't make that connection?

I think partly for what I, for the reason I gave earlier, that we don't teach history, so people aren't taught to be aware of what totalitarian behavior is like.

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

You have no inkling of what life was like in Stalin-Soviet Union.

If you did, you'd know that you've started to behave as if you lived there.

But there's another thing going on which I think is important, and that is the way in which social media, the whole extraordinary explosion of new forms of publication on the internet,

have changed the nature of our political behavior.

It was the internet that allowed cancel culture to grow because

prior to the internet, it was quite difficult to gather up a mob, as it were, and bay for somebody to be fired.

But it's become much easier to do that kind of thing online.

Prior to social media, it was quite hard to humiliate somebody in public.

Sure.

You might

write a letter or a postcard or even pin a notice on the school notice board saying A

or B is a terrible person.

But that didn't get amplified and that person might be humiliated by the notice

on the school notice board, but that was as far as it went.

But now the people who previously wrote those notices have access to the biggest amplifier the world has ever known.

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

And I think

that's the thing that's novel, that we, when we were young people, did not have to contend with.

I was a pretty obnoxious undergraduate.

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

By the time I got to Oxford, I loved the fact that I could say pretty much whatever I liked

and be pretty obnoxious with it and pay really no price.

That has changed to the extent that the equivalents of me,

the obnoxious contrarian types today, have to self-censor because they have to fear denunciation, investigation, cancellation.

People have their careers destroyed over things that they said five or ten years ago on social media that some malicious type has uncovered.

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

And this is a form of disaster that is particularly interesting to me because we haven't really thought through, or at least we didn't until recently, the unintended adverse consequences of creating a giant online network in which the barrier to entry is zero and anybody can grab the megaphone.

We thought this would be awesome.

Everybody would be connected, we'd all be netizens, and free speech would triumph.

But the exact opposite has happened from what the libertarians in Silicon Valley predicted back in the 1990s and the early 2000s.

But isn't, I mean, you say in

your book that you talk about how everything,

every disaster really

comes back down to humans.

And that's the same with technology.

I mean, it is remarkable.

This is remarkable technology.

But I don't think we are...

we're just not adult enough to be able to handle it.

We're just not ready for this kind of technology.

I think, and this goes back to the last book I published, The Square and the Tower, we didn't think through the consequences of a complete transformation of the public sphere.

We underestimated the effects of creating an entirely new public sphere in which the audience would be potentially global, the barrier to entry for publication would vanish, and we failed to think through what the consequences would be.

In The Square and the Tower, I suggested the analogy with the printing press.

When the printing press arrived in Europe and became a kind of standard mode of reproduction of printed material in the late 15th century, the initial assumption was that this was great.

Everything would be awesome.

But of course, what followed, once the printing press became used for religious debate, was a period of profound upheaval.

We call it the Reformation, but it was really a period of religious strife, civil and international, that raged for about 130 years until finally, with the peace of Westphalia it was brought to some kind of an end.

I think we all forgot that simple lesson that if you transform the public sphere there will be all kinds of unintended consequences.

Polarization

will be more rapid and perhaps more extreme.

People will form very rapidly new networks or clusters of networks and then

define themselves in antagonism, in opposition to others.

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

And that was the standard line, really, right through the 1990s into the 2000s.

It was what Mark Zuckerberg was still saying as recently as 2016.

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

Our tendency to polarize, our tendency to be very aggressive, where we don't actually meet people face to face, the capacity to spread fake news.

Example: after the Reformation, the idea of witchcraft became more prevalent, and more people were put to death as witches in the period after the Reformation than in all of previous Christianity.

And that's a good example because it was just as easy to transmit the notion of witchcraft and witches live amongst us as it was to transmit Luther's critique of the Roman Catholic Church.

In the internet world, we have found that crazy fake news, conspiracy theories travel faster and further than the boring old truth.

That should not have surprised us, and yet it did.

It shouldn't have surprised us.

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

You really have to,

or even, you know, I made

Road to Serfdom, I think, was number one on the New York Times bestseller list back in the 50s.

And then

I did a show, a week-long show on it on Fox.

And that was extraordinarily difficult to make it entertaining enough for people to watch.

They want red meat.

We want bad news for some reason or another.

We want the strife.

And then we reject it.

Why?

So, this is part of what motivated me to write Doom.

That every disaster is a gift to the media.

If it bleeds, it leads, of course.

And therefore, there is a complete loss of perspective in the way that disasters are covered.

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

In Doom, what I tried to do was to give some sense of orders of magnitude.

Yes, COVID-19 has been a very grave pandemic,

but it has killed around 0.06% of the world's population today.

0.06%.

The Black Death of the 1340s may have killed a third of all the humans living at that time.

Even the Spanish influenza of 1918-19 killed nearly 2%

of the population of the world.

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

Disasters aren't normally distributed.

There's not an average disaster.

Lots and lots of disasters that are very memorable kill hardly anybody.

The Challenger space shuttle blew up, seven people died.

COVID-19 is not the biggest pandemic that you and I have lived through in terms of mortality.

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

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

And one has to bear that distinction in mind.

The same is true of warfare.

Yes,

we fought a long war in Afghanistan, but by historical standards, US casualties were really very small.

And by the end, negligible, because nearly all the fighting in recent years has been done by the Afghan security forces with US support.

But very few American lives were being put on the line in the final phase of this conflict.

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

Because remember, World War I probably killed north of 10 million people in combat, I mean, or directly as a consequence of the fighting.

And the death toll of World War II was in excess of 50 million, with most of the people killed civilians because of the use of strategic bombing as a way of waging the war.

So sure, there were wars, but to talk about the Afghan war as if it was an unendurable burden weighing down the American people is absurd.

By the end, it was what I would regard as a policing operation providing support to the Afghan army.

And that is part of the reason I wanted to write the book, People Struggle with Orders of Magnitude.

Everything is just big.

Everything is huge.

Every disaster is terrible.

But in truth, there is a world of difference between a really big war that that kills tens of millions of people and a small war where the death toll in terms of U.S.

personnel is in the thousands.

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

You say that a gray rhino

is something, an event that is foreseeable, dangerous, obvious, highly probable.

You use Hurricane Katrina, which I agree 100%.

We knew that was coming for 50 years.

Yes, we knew that was coming.

The Black Swan is an event that can appear completely unexpected, but in reality is explainable.

An event that seems to us, on the basis of our limited experience, to be impossible.

That's the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then you say Dragon King.

That refers to an event that has consequences beyond excess mortality that sets it apart.

An event so extreme it lies within

outside the

power law distribution.

Let me start here.

I think COVID-19 is not a black swan.

It's a gray rhino.

The reaction of the government is the black swan or the dragon king.

Yeah.

That's the right way to put it, Glenn.

The odd thing about the COVID pandemic was that it was entirely predictable.

Every year, somebody did a TED talk saying there was going to be a pandemic.

It was the classic gray rhino that you've heard predicted so many times that it's almost become background music.

But then when it struck, everybody acted like it was a black swan.

And reporters would use the word unprecedented, which is just, of course, a word that you use if you don't know any history.

And it became a black swan.

Now, part of what was very surprising was the way in which in March last year, a number of governments decided the only way to deal with the problem was to lock everybody in their homes.

This had never really been possible before because you couldn't in the 1950s tell everybody to work from home.

I mean, many people didn't even have a landline.

So you're right that the government response was surprising.

There was a rational way to deal with the problem, which, for example, the Taiwanese and the South Koreans did at the beginning, which was to test everybody as quickly as you could and then try to identify who was infected and quarantine them.

But we didn't really try that.

We waited until spread was out of control and then we shut everything down.

And then we were shocked, shocked to find that we'd created the economy.

And the chain reaction went from there.

The money printing began because a financial crisis is a financial crisis, so let's print money.

And then came the next part of the chain reaction, which was the social and political eruption of the summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter protests, which in turn led to a breakdown of urban order and a surge in homicide.

And this brings me to the Dragon King.

In terms of mortality, as I said, COVID-19 is not one of history's really big disasters.

It's a bad one, but it's not top 10.

In terms of its economic consequences, it is top 10, because the economic shock and the fiscal and monetary consequences are up there with World War II.

If you only knew the debt to GDP ratio of the United States, you would assume we're in World War III right now.

Such has been the scale of the expansion.

And then

come the political consequences.

It's a curious phenomenon, but very often in the wake of such a shock,

particularly if it's a big economic shock, you get political disintegration, political crises.

You'll remember, because it was when we were last regularly talking, how the financial crisis led to all kinds of unexpected political consequences, including a huge revolution in the Arab world, the famous Arab Spring, misnamed Arab Spring.

In the same way, COVID is going to have a whole succession of political political and geopolitical consequences, which will be greater ultimately in their impact than the impact of the disease itself on human mortality.

Now, we can already see state failure in a number of places.

Lebanon is one.

Afghanistan is falling apart.

We're abandoning our presence there in the most chaotic way imaginable.

That too will have consequences.

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

It has consequences because the Chinese watch and the Russians watch and they conclude this is probably the weakest administration since the late 1970s.

What can we do with this?

So I think it will turn out for future historians to be clear that the real historical significance of COVID-19 was not the number of people who caught the disease and died.

The real historical significance will be the economic shock and its huge political consequences.

When I look at

you know, history is written by the winners, and you read things

now, things that I've experienced, tea party, et cetera,

they were pretty much erased from history.

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

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

Does this come back and correct itself?

Neil, do we, a hundred years from now,

are we going to,

our children or grandchildren, read the truth of these times?

Because it seems as though there is no truth and we're asked to deny the things that we know are true or have seen ourselves.

Does this, is this erased or do we find it again?

The danger, Glenn, is that in a hundred years' time, there won't be properly trained historians or, for that matter, broadcasters, who can convey the real history of our time.

I think of there being a succession crisis in my world.

I don't really know who will be doing what I have done

50 years or even 20 years from now, because it's so very hard to get people to write the kind of history that I think that we need.

A history that looks

only at the cultures of the past, but tries to understand the political economy, looks at debt dynamics, looks at wars, looks at how empires rise and fall, tries to make sense of American history in the broader context by comparing it with the history of other great powers.

I don't think that history will necessarily be written at all 100 years from now if we're not very careful because

The revolution in academic life that has produced critical race theory and all of the different variants of wokeness ensures or is designed to ensure that that kind of history doesn't get written.

Now, I hope that there will be some kind of ongoing

attempt to train at least some people in the right historical scholarly methods so that one day the history of the last 20 years will be written in the way that I hope that I would write it if I were still around then.

And let's ask ourselves how a future historian might approach this.

A future historian might say that the United States, having won the Cold War with the Soviet Union, through a party in the 1990s, a hedonistic and hugely enjoyable party, but one that really mostly the 1% participated in and a really large proportion of the population did not share in.

There was a rude awakening when 9-11 happened.

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

But the American reaction to that shock was to send a tiny number of Americans to go fight the bad guys in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq and leave most people more or less untouched by the conflict.

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

And so in some measure the party continued.

The 1% continue to be the main beneficiaries of globalization and a really large proportion of the population flat-lined at best in terms of their income.

Then came the financial crisis, a product of the irresponsibility of the financial elite.

And what happened?

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

The recovery was anemic.

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

And finally, it happened.

It took two forms.

You mentioned one, the Tea Party.

That was the first part of the backlash.

But politically that did not translate into a successful presidential campaign.

The Tea Party did not produce a president.

The Romney Ryan campaign failed.

The Obama administration got a second term that it did not deserve.

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

And that Maverick figure was reviled and loathed by the elite, particularly by the media elite.

And their reviling and loathing of him temporarily ousted him from power, but that only added to the bitterness of those people who had pinned their hopes on him.

And the future historian will then say the one thing that the liberal elite never foresaw in the hour of its victory at the end of 2020, in the beginning of 2021, was that the Maverick figure could return to power.

And that, I think, is the future history that lies ahead of us over

the next three and a half years, the return of Trump, because of the abject failure of the liberal elite.

I think you're exactly

spot on.

And

my question on that then is, does Trump return as the same guy he was?

You know, because

I've wargamed this out for many years, as you know, and you can't keep injuring half of the population.

You just can't keep doing that.

That's why a lot of people said, I don't care if he's a conservative or not.

He's going to put him in their place.

Well, now

he tried, and the

elites destroyed him for it.

And I think a lot of people now go, wow, if he can't do that, if they can destroy him,

they are totally in control.

Some are losing faith in that.

But when the figure reappears or a new figure appears, aren't they given more license to be even more ruthless,

to dig it out?

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

I think it's wrong.

I think if it hadn't been for COVID, he'd have been re-elected.

I think in reality,

COVID was

the thing that destroyed his presidency.

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

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

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

And I've thought long and hard about this.

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

Department of Health and Human Services did a terrible job.

The governors did terrible jobs in the case of at least the big blue states.

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

But even when you make all that allowance, he still did poorly.

And I think for that reason, deserved to lose, even to a weak candidate like Biden.

But if he then is able to come back, and he is the front runner for the nomination, just as the Republican candidate ought to win, given the way things are going, then I don't think he's going to come back

as he was at the beginning of his administration.

I worry that he'll come come back as he was at the end of his administration, when he had become, to my mind,

almost completely reckless.

If one thinks about the events that culminated January 6th,

the reality is that President Trump behaved with great irresponsibility in seeking to challenge the result of the election and encouraged suggestible people to behave in ways that were truly disastrous.

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

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

Economically, it did very well.

In national security terms, I give it very high marks.

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

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

And I think

it will be a great pity if he's re-elected and arrives in a mood not so much as

the wrecking ball as

the neutron bomb.

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

And I don't think he's doing that.

The right lessons are clear.

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

The right lessons are clear.

There is much about Republican conservatism that is urgently needed and

needs to be empowered.

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

If Trump can be re-elected and give

talented people their head in the key departments of government, then I think the outlook would not be bad.

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

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

I'll be frank with you, Glenn.

I would far rather someone else were the front runner for the nomination.

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

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

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

Most liberals are in denial about this as far as I can see.

They're still telling themselves that it's all going great, though I think the fiasco in Afghanistan has been a reality check for many people.

But I don't think they're thinking thinking through the consequences of this.

If this is going to be the Carter administration all over again, with one foreign policy disaster leading to another,

between now and 2024, you could see a profound shift in the political landscape.

I think they're going to get smashed in the midterms.

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

If it's Trump, I think we're in for more, four more years of chaos because

i'm just not convinced he understands what went wrong in 2020 and and what could be put right uh

so when when you

i i don't want to get into conspiracies but um there is a problem with what has been known as the deep state it's just the bureaucracy it's the people that have been in the state department that just don't care i'll outlive this president and they just have their they're just moving.

And it doesn't matter what the people say or anything else.

And that has only gotten worse.

Now it's in the Justice Department.

It seems to be in our intelligence.

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

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

I wouldn't mind seeing that thing come down to about two people.

But

how I mean, has he learned that?

Is that a priority?

How do we fix this?

Justice doesn't mean justice anymore.

It's a really very profound problem.

I wrote about it in a book called The Great Degeneration 10 years ago.

And the observation I made was that the administrative state, because I think that's preferable to the deep state,

has grown in its power and size,

and it is ideologically,

significantly to the left of center.

Washington is a liberal, progressive town

populated by people who do believe in big government.

Now, Chris Demuth, who was once president of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a brilliant article on the administrative state, arguing that its origins lay in the 1970s when Congress increasingly decided to pass difficult problems to federal agencies and create a whole slew of new agencies to deal with things that were too tricky for the legislature, too politically sensitive.

And that's really where it all begins.

The problem for any president.

Wilson,

I mean, that was his dream.

But it wasn't fulfilled until much later.

The federal government was still remarkably small, even after the New Deal.

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

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

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

On paper, the U.S.

was the best prepared country in the world for a pandemic.

They did terribly.

And one way to come at this problem is to explore why it was that the pandemic preparedness plan wasn't worth the PDF it was saved on, and then to ask, what about the other parts of the government that are supposed to be ready to meet other contingencies?

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

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

But

who's asking those questions?

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

There can be.

Let's remember,

after the disaster of Vietnam, the U.S.

military did learn lessons and cleaned up its act in a whole range of ways

with support from civilians who, for example,

fought through and implemented the idea of an old volunteer force, got rid of the draft.

We know that things are fixable because the US military fixed itself after Vietnam and regained public trust in the process.

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

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

I think COVID was a domestic Vietnam.

It was a failure by the public health bureaucracy.

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

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

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

So I think we need to say to our legislators, our people who represent us in the Senate and the House, you have to recognize that we had a domestic Vietnam and you have to get to the bottom of it.

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

Look at the countries that did well.

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

What have they done?

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

Greater transparency and accountability through technology is achievable.

They've done it in Taiwan.

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

Explain what they did.

Explain what they did.

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

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

And this has created a much more nimble kind of government, a much more responsive kind of government.

And I think we should be thinking along these lines.

We should be going and looking at what they got right.

For example, a good illustration of this.

They had a mask shortage, like everybody did at the beginning of the pandemic.

But instead of lying, as our public health bureaucrats did by saying, oh, you don't need masks, masks don't matter, and then changing the the story once there were sufficient masks, the Taiwanese government said, hey, we don't have enough masks, we We need to ration them so that the healthcare workers get them.

And they used a software tool to do that.

So they didn't lie.

Audrey Tang is impressive to me because her philosophy is that the public can handle it, but technology needs to make the government accountable to the students.

We have a group of people who are,

I mean, older than my grandfather.

When he,

you know, we had to take the keys away from him.

They don't understand technology.

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

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

It doesn't work.

So it doesn't work.

It doesn't.

So they're just even more disconnected from the American people, but they're getting into bed with these giant

tech companies, which have their own purposes for doing it.

Right.

And so it's important for us not to copy the wrong China.

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

That word plan always makes me uneasy.

Remember, it originates with five-year plans plans in the Soviet Union.

And then we're going to have a central bank digital currency.

I don't know if you've been following this, Glenn.

Oh, I haven't.

We're now eager to copy the Chinese and increasing the power of the Federal Reserve by giving it a central bank digital currency rather than allowing cryptocurrency and blockchain-based innovation to flourish,

which seems to me symptomatic of what you call the 1950s mentality.

Mind you, I'd happily welcome back the Eisenhower administration if I could get 950s level of competence in our administration.

I'll take him just for his final speech.

He knew exactly what we were running into.

So true.

The more one looks back on the Eisenhower administration, the more impressive it looks.

But

I think this is the crux of the matter, that we need to empower not Google and

Apple.

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

Why was it that they suddenly suddenly announced that they weren't going to have a contact tracing app, that they were going to leave that to state governments?

Do you think state governments are well set up to do contact tracing?

I mean, that was a typical example of a sin of omission, where they could have done so much more with the data that they have, from which they make so much money, but they chose not to because they were worried about potential downside risk.

I think we need to be empowering the new generation of technologies, and I include cryptocurrency in that, where the emphasis is on decentralization.

What is great about decentralized finance?

That it is decentralized.

That used to be the spirit of Silicon Valley until the network platforms, beginning with Amazon and then Google and then Facebook, came along and created massive centralization online.

So my sense is that technology still offers solutions to the problems of dysfunctional government.

but not the technology of the giant network platforms.

We can't easily break them up, but we can render them somewhat anachronistic and obsolescent with new platforms that emphasize privacy, decentralization.

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

The great danger in my mind is that here we are in Cold War II.

It's obvious we're already in a Cold War with the Chinese.

The danger in a Cold War is that you become like your enemy.

That was Eisenhower's great fear, that the U.S.

would become increasingly like like the Soviet Union.

My fear is that we're going to become increasingly like China because surveillance is already baked into our system.

It's just that it's private surveillance by big tech.

But it's not that difficult for that to become public surveillance.

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

We need to fight back.

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

I know.

And it's very hard to achieve that.

Once you've sold something for a pittance, it's hard to renegotiate.

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

But it has to be pursued.

Antitrust is not sufficient.

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

We've got to be much, much more radical in our thinking.

And this is where I think conservative thinkers like you come in.

Having made all the mistakes we made over 20 years, whether it was the neoconservatives' mistakes of overreach or the Trumpists' mistakes of failing to deal with the problems we're discussing, we have some learning to do.

We really do.

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

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

Neil,

I think one of the reasons why I haven't reached out more often lately is because you always make me feel like a mental midget.

You don't make me feel that way.

I feel that way at the end.

You're brilliant.

You're really, really brilliant.

I hope you can...

You're too kind.

But Glenn, I meant it when I said it's you

and other broadcasters with reach who have to do this.

Professors are not...

by and large, the people who change the world.

But there is a public out there hungry for new ideas, frustrated.

I mean, think of it.

They felt they'd found a solution in Trump.

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

And it all went wrong.

And now what they want to know is, well, what do we do now?

And I think the answer probably needs to be something more sophisticated than re-elect Trump and hope it works the second time.

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

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

I mean I'll give you one final example.

It was really clear to me after the 2016 election that the power of the big tech companies was excessive and that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was a central reason for their excessive power because it was essentially a get-out of jail card for anything that they did.

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

We left it way too late to address that problem.

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

So we got to be far, far more consequent as conservative intellectuals.

We need to identify what is wrong with the deep state, what is wrong with big tech, and come up with some actionable solutions

for the first hundred days of the next president.

I agree.

I agree.

May I ask you to do one last thing?

Put yourself 50 years down the road.

You are a historian.

And based on the track that we're currently on,

tell me

what a historian is going to write about our future.

Well, I'm 107 years old by that point, Glenn.

You're almost the same age as Joe Biden at that point.

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

And here's what I'll say.

The decline of American power, the end of the American empire, was not difficult to foresee, even

at the time of the 9-11 attacks.

It was obvious that Americans had four fatal deficits.

an attention deficit, a fiscal deficit, a manpower deficit, and a history deficit.

They blundered their way through two ill-conceived military campaigns.

They attempted a populist backlash that failed.

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

And finally, an antagonist came along in the form of the People's Republic of China that, unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, had the economic capability to take the U.S.

on and win.

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

The decline of the dollar after that crisis was one of the great shocks of modern financial history and exposed the weakness and reliance on foreign capital of American power.

I hope I don't live long enough to write that history, Glenn.

But my fear at the moment is that that is the path we're on and we do not have much time to change course.

It is always a pleasure to talk to you.

Thank you so much, Neil.

Thank you, Glenn.

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