How technology makes the current form of government obsolete. Now, I just finished reading an amazing book called The Revolt of the Public, which goes back through history, which you know I love, talking about how technology changes the way we communicate and act, and it goes to explain how all the problems, well many of the problems that we see today, specifically the problems with the loss of trust of institutions and the way that this top down control works,
and of course the way that the economic model is mimicking the complex system of information. I sat down with the author of the book for an awesome conversation. Martin Gurry joins me, and we are going to discuss the book itself, what were the fourth and fifth wave of communication, How the parabolic increase and the rise of information is
making the current forms of government obsolete. We go through recent history to look at revolutions that happened from twenty eleven forward, Occupy Wall Street, and so much more to break this down so you can understand exactly what's going on. It'll give you a framework to figure out where we're
going and how you should be managing your life. And this is something that you should know specifically with the restrict Act that's going into place right now, is ramping up this war, this battle because government is not compatible with what's going on anyway. It was an awesome conversation with Martin Gurry, with the author of this book. We do spend a little bit of time kind of setting up the book before we really dive into the revolutions.
So check out the time stamps down below if you want to jump ahead, but I'd encourage you to listen to the whole thing with that. Let's jump right in, all right, Martin, thanks so much for joining me today. I'm excited to dig in and talk to you about your book and learn so much. So thanks for joining me.
My pleasure. Mark.
So, yeah, I just read this book here, The Revolt of the Public, and you know I love books like this. It was a big, thick book. I had a lot of good information, a lot of stuff that I have been seeing, a lot of stuff I have been saying. But man, you really dug in deep to it. I guess, maybe just give us the quick thesis of the book before we start digging into what it's about. From your words, I guess yeah.
I mean, the origin of the book goes way back when I was still in CIA, I was an analyst of global media, and I and a number of people with me noticed this just radical transformation of the information sphere. Once that digital tsunami of information hit and we noticed further were behind that, there was this political turbulence. Now it seems very naive now, but we thought, we asked ourselves,
what's the connection. Right, we have the Internet, which is kind of like this fun communications thing, and you have politics over here. Right. And now, of course we know the mutual influence is powerful, determinative, but at the time
none of us do that. So after I left government, I dedicated myself to research of that, and it became clear to me that essentially the profound transformation in the structure of information was changing completely the institutional environment in which we had evolved from the twentieth century underward, institutions that were all shaped by the twentieth century ideal of
top down. I talked, you listen, there's no talking back from the public, and that a lot of the categories in politics, such as liberal and conservative and the right and left, which go back one hundred and fifty to two hundred years, really had lost a lot of meaning and what I saw was that there was an eruption leaping into the center stage as a political actor of the network public, people who had suddenly gained voice because of their ability to link up to the digital platforms,
and that almost every political conflict in the world today, some exceptions in some countries, almost everyone really maps down to the network public against the elites who run those institutions that were shaped in the twentieth century, who initially had no understanding what was happening. After certain events like Trump and Brexit, understood what was happening, but did not
like it and wanted it to stop happening. So almost every conflict you have, and every eruption of change and around the world, around the world, can be mapped to this profound, profound through tectonic collision between the public and the elites.
I guess since the beginning of time, that's how it's been, the public verse, since the beginning of time, that's what it's been, right, the public versus the elites.
And how not at all, not at all, I think. I think in the olden days, the public just kind of knuckled its forehead and said yes, sir.
But it was still the elites trying to figure out how they could control the masses. Uh, there's a there's a part in the Bible in Exodus where Pharaoh looks out over all the Israelites in Egypt and said, they outnumber us. What will we do? And they said, here's what we'll do. Let's work them so hard that they'll never have a chance to uprise again. So, I mean that was written thousands of thousands of years ago, so it's maybe always been a way that they try to kind of somehow manage the people.
Only insert the qualification that you can be an elite in an institution that has legitimacy, and whether that you should have it or not are that's a separate conversation. But you have legitimacy, meaning you have authority, meaning that I can tell you what to do and you will probably do it without me having to point a gunna, do you right? For example? And there are elites who need to point a gunna or you're not going to
do it. And we're slowly coming to the point where if the elites don't have a whole lot of compulsion, nobody's going to listen to them. Yeah, you can see that you saw it with COVID for example.
Yeah, that's definitely a topic we're going to dive into. And you're right, you made that point very clear in your book, kind of breaking down the trust in these institutions. I want to come back to that. But looking back throughout history, we see that it's always some piece of technological innovation that seems to kind of change the way
that we communicate and organize. A point that I had talked a lot a lot about and you talked about as well, was about five hundred years ago we had the Protestant Reformation that really seemed to have been driven by a catalyst about seventy years previous, which was the printing press, and sort of this dissemination of information that then led to this I think you would call it like this democratic access to information that changed so sort of like that times like a thousand or times a million.
Oh, I don't even know. I actually think the printing press was probably the most disruptive innovation in terms of information change. I mean, it's still early days with the internet, right, so we may get there and surpass that one, but no, no, I think I think and it's instructive to go back to that time because you know it. The results were brutal. The results, the consequences, the immediate consequences of the printing
press were brutal. If you went to the Thirty Years War, which was kind of an offshoot of their Reformation, in which, for example, if you know, if you went to church and the church next door had three different words than what your hymnal did or creed had, you now had those words in your book. You knew them there they were, they had So the other guy who didn't have those words or who had different words, they had to die. The Thirty Years War was the bloodiest war in the
history of Europe. And if you had gone there and asked those people what do you think of the printing press, that would have said it's the most horrible invention ever, take it back, destroy it. Well, today we know it was probably the most liberating, not only because of the Reformation, but because of the scientific revolution. You could not have had that with manuscripts. And then the French and American revolutions that brought democracy to the world. Yeah.
Yeah, And if we frame that up in context of kind of what the book is and how we want to kind of move forward, it was basically the state, the church and state. At the time, we're basically controlling the information, telling the people what the Bible said, but they had no access to it. But once it was democratized, once the people were able to get it and read it for themselves, they said, wait a minute, you've been
lying to us whole time. And now even though the Church labeled them heretics and heresy and killed them, if they spoke out about it, it didn't matter. I mean, would that be a right way to frame true?
I think the parallel is good in many different ways, right. I mean number one, yes, the church and you know, you get inquisitions, right, and I mean we are not at the thirty years War level. We're not killing each other. But there are the minor, not not real inquisitions. But but I mean, you're not gonna get burned at the stake, but you might lose your job, you might get you know, all the platformed called out by digital mobs. You your reputation could be tord to shreds overnight by saying the
wrong words, right, So that's one thing. The other one is that once you start that process though, of well, I am breaking off from the Church and the next thing that happens is some group inside you. Your group says, well, I'm breaking off from you, and another group says I'm breaking up from that, and you get this kind of process of specialization where at the end you arrive at almost a chaos and you have to work out at what point do you put a boundary around that and
try to make that thing work? Right. The Reformation basically exhausted itself in the Thirty Years War and essentially resulted in our system of nation states, the nation states in both order that religious groups that sort of deserred the way in my opinion.
And if you go back before that, it was the religious groups that recreated the social order. Right, So we kind of had this decentralized kind of world, and the churches kind of came into power by bringing order, right. They brought order through chivalry and acts of kindness, and then they also rebuilt public infrastructure, which then kind of created that centralization. Then the printing press tore that apart, and then the nation and states kind of brought it back together.
Yeah. Yeah, and there were different you know that the nation state at a certain point, particularly when it got to the industrial state and the industrial democratic states like the United States, say in the nineteenth century, then you had to you have to somehow provide for the fact that you know, just printing books or having access to a printing press, which only a few people could have,
was not really enough. So then mass media came into being as a way of bringing, you know, bringing into the fold the tens of millions of citizens who had essentially entered history. They had become educated, they had become relatively affluent, they understood the world, but it had no access to the current information. And so you had the mass media movement that you know, I'm old enough, that was the world I was born into.
Yeah, the mass media where you had had a few new sources to choose from it. We'll get to that now. You talked about in the book. A couple of things that you talked about the book was one was sort of like this fourth wave and then fifth wave of information. I do want to go back to just kind of one thing that you said, just kind of for everybody,
kind of reiterate this since I've read the book. You talked about in the book, and you have a chart to illustrate this, and maybe this was the catalyst for you writing the book. That you said in two thousand and one, all of a sudden you realize that more information was created in two thousand and one than all of humanity before, and then double that amount happened in two thousand and two. And when you realize that, you realize that everything was going to be different. So that's
the key piece, and I think it's super powerful. Actually just tweeted that out earlier today as I was preparing for this. That's a massive movement, and I could only imagine it must be going parabolic for me, especially now.
Exactly that's exactly right. And you have to add to that that are institutions, and by that I mean not just government, but political part but corporations, the media, the academia, all these essentially nine twentieth century institutions were developed with a small trickle of information in mind, most of which they control, and that the gigantic doubling upon doubling up
on doubling of information has just battered them away. The institutions are in a state of absolute prostration because they weren't set up for this. They were not set up for the world that we live in today. They are like the dinosaurs. So the media are coming down. They're just maladapted. They were big in the twentieth century, they are looking at going extinct in the twenty first. Wow.
So what was the fourth wave and then what's the fifth wave?
Right? Let me go quickly through them all so that the whole thing makes sense. The first wave first was the invention of writing, which required sort of like a priestly or each wave of information, each structure of information accommodates or delivers a certain political and social system. So you have the the invention of writing. You need a mandarin or a priestly cast like in Egypt to do this very elaborate system of writing with thousands of symbols.
The alphabet is the second wave. You could not have had the classic republics of say Rome and Athens without an alphabet. The third one we just spoke about is the printing press. The most is eruptive ball in my opinion. The fourth was mass media. I also mentioned that. And then the fifth is where we are today. You're right in two thousand and one. Two thousand and one doubled all previous information in history. Two thousand and two doubled two thousand and one, And I'm not sure that it's
one hundred percent doubling, but it has continued. Parabolic is a good word.
Yeah, yeah, and yeah, so when you look at it from that zoomed out frame, and then you realize that technology changed the way that we communicate, which then change the way that we organize, and so then the state
also changes how it organizes and manages us. And so one of the points that you made in the book was that really through the Industrial Age, it kind of brought us from the farms into the cities and the factories, and then we started having this kind of mass movement of really Henry Ford kind of created this assembly line and it was a way to control the masses and
kind of equalize the masses. And then you talked about how then we needed sort of like a governance system and an information system on top of that to kind of manage that was that, right? Can you explain that?
Yeah, that's pretty close. I mean, you're talking about the Industrial Age. Industrial age was the profit of the Industrial Age was this guy who's sort of been forgotten but was very important as important still Ferrick Taylor, who believed that he did all kinds of time and motion studies and essentially treated workers like like pieces of equipment right for for the sake of efficiency. So everything was delivered by the brilliant engineer at the top gave all the
instructions where all the tools are going to be. The workers had no say in anything. They just they just basically moved. There could have been robots. That is the model for the industrial age.
Uh.
The mass movements, particularly the totalitarian mass movements like like Marxism, Leninism, like Nazism, like fascism, resembled that model very much. They had the brilliant fewer at the top or or you know, the polic bureau, and basically they decided everything all the way down to as Gorbashoff used to say, women's women's stocking. How many women's stocking is you're going to manufacture in a year?
You know?
Uh? And that system can only function and democracy wasn't quite that that brutal, but it was a version of that. Okay, there were two three four TV channels, there were two three four carmakers. You had very limited choices. You were a mass consumer, and industry found it very comfortable to say this mass product is exactly what you want. Right. What the digital age has done just sweep all of that away and lay bare the fact that, no, it
turns out we're very divided. We want all kinds of things, right, we want all kinds of things. The mass consumer of information. Like I said, I was born into that. It was like looking into this gigantic mirror and we were all there. We were all the same picture, the public in the digital age. It's just if that mirror has fallen and shattered and we all live on different pieces. So it's a very divided, very fragmented, very conflicted world.
Yeah, I mean, I wonder for me growing up in the eighties and the nineties, the same way, we all listened to the same songs, we all watched the same movies. You know, bands got really big and they could fill out a stadium, And now today there's you know, a million bands and they're just streaming on some station. Right. I wonder if it's I mean, I guess it's just natural progression. I don't know if it's a chicken or
the egg. I think you kind of made the point of the book that, like, our choices were limited, so our tastes were limited. But as we've been given more choices now, our tastes have grown. I guess that's just a natural evolution.
I actually think, I actually think we have now rediscovered our actual tastes. In other words, it was never the case that we wanted three kinds of car. It was never the case that we wanted three TV channels. That's just what there was. And since we had no voice, the public had no voice, we just took it. I mean, their alternative was you walked if you didn't like any of them, or you turned off the TV if you didn't like any show. Right, So it was all or nothing,
and most people just went along with it. But I don't think it was any any moment where any anybody, any large number of people within the mass audience actually believe that being part of a mass audience was what they were meant to be.
Yeah, yeah, you talked about I think you called it rather Gate. Explain Rathergate for us.
Yeah, let's see if I remember that one that was essentially a report during the trying to remember what year it was. It was two thousand elections, was it? When essentially it was very critical of George W. Bush for basically using his privilege to avoid going to just go to the National Guard, leaving the guard early and all kinds of what might be construed as abuse of power.
And this is a TV broadcast of which Dan Rather, who was the heir to Walter Cronkid, who was like the great figure of authority in the news world.
I think that's a that's a key piece. I mean, he was seen as this trusted authority, right totally.
Dan Rather stood behind this report saying all these things about George W. Bush. And what happened was the bloggers got a hold of that report and within literally hours, somebody had put it online and showed that it was in Times New Roman Fund. And this was supposed to have happened way back in you know, I think in the Vietnam War, and there was no New Times New Roman Fund in the Vietnam era. This is a digital fund, all right. So it showed that this supposedly type written
document i'd actually been printed off a computer. The whole thing was a hoax, all right. And then Rather sort of lost his job over that one. Yeah, yeah, And the credibility, of course of the anchorman never regained what it was doing. What the krunkitees day.
It's amazing how fast that happens today, you know, I'm on Twitter way too much these days, and I'll see someone post something that seems real, authentic, believable, and then I'll just read through the comments and just so quickly people will just start to disprove it or argue it or whatever. And it's amazing how fast that crowdsourced information
can change. But so you can see it's very hard for an institution to put that trying to be a trusted institution put that out there and being constantly fact checked by the crowd in real time.
Well, part part of the problem, I think is the mode. The rhetorical style of the twentieth century institution, authoritative institution was we are run by experts, which is whatever field you have, right, we know. So the problem with the digital world is now we know that we don't know, okay, and these institutions are still telling us you know that. I sort of call it the Anthony Fauci syndrome. Right, you know, this is really what science tells you, But wait,
two weeks ago, you told us the exact opposite. So people get very confused, and trust in that rhetorical style has evaporated. It's zero, right, and the elites that run the institutions have not learned and do not want to learn to speak in a more conditional way that have not learned to say we think this is the way things are, correct us if we're wrong, right, which is the way most of us speak, But that would that goes against the green of that style of vehetoric.
And the other thing is that with access to that information, so you know, a doctor would used to have to go through all this medical school to learn this stuff, and none of us had any access to that information, so then we would just have to trust that they had read it. But today I could spend an hour or two online and probably learn more about a specific something very specific related to my health than my average practitioner would probably know. I might know more about it
than he will. And we haven't had that before.
Yeah, I mean, at least you think you know more. I'm not sure that that's necessarily the case. I'm saying.
You know, in some topics, like an average practitioner like they didn't they haven't studied everything, right, And so you know, for me, if I have something concerning my own health, I could spend a couple hours and probably learn more about something very specific than that average practitioner might know, for example.
Essentially your doctor is going to encounter a much more educated, much more opinionated, and much more prepared you. Right, So whereas before we were just like as with television, as with the cars, we were the passive recipients of information. I'm your doctor, I'm telling you to do this. Now people say, well, wait a minute, I just read that. And this, by the way, cuts all across society, all
across society. Precedent, for example, used to have as what used to call it his news paper was the CIA Daily Brief, Right, And CIA came and had we have all these secrets, and we're going to tell you, mister president, what's going on. We're going to tell you the future. Because part of CI's thing is that if it tries
to foretell events. And it came the moment when the President started saying, but wait, I just read something here, and I just read something there, and you could just see the authority of the CIA leaking out, leaking out to where it probably is very low. Right now, precedents can go online just if you and me and they they can question what their geopolitical doctors in CIA tell them. And CIA has never learned to deal with this.
Hm. That's a great point, you know it It reminds me, you know, basically what we have as an economic situation really or it's an information problem. And you kind of referenced the centralization of some with these previous you know, whether that be the Russian, the Russian or the or what happened in Hitler's Germany or you know what Mao's greatly before he tried to do. And really the overall
problem with central planning is that they don't. Gorbachev doesn't have enough information to figure out how many girls pantehos need to be made. They don't have enough information. The free market has the information. They don't have the information, and so that's why central planning of an economy can
never work. And sort of what you're I guess now, I'm starting to think about as the CIA is a central planner of information for the president or the night the news is the central planner of information for us.
But they can't. They can't.
They don't have enough data, enough information to control that for the public, of what the public wants and needs at any given time.
They are very different modes of conveying information, and I think as much as anything. I think there's there's a definitely structural problem here, and the structural problem is the one that has to be tackled. But there's also a rhetorical or a style model. I mean, who do you get your information from?
Uh?
That you trust? Right, It's usually some person and you and you trust that person because of personal characteristics. What's happened with the internet is in my youth. Uh, that was not the way it happened. It happened from authority. I am the institution, you know, And so there was it was depersonalized, and it became you know, newspapers spoke with a completely impersonal voice. Presidents stood behind great big podiums and you know, basically looked down and and and
gave us truth. The professors did the same. The Internet has re personalized information. So in other words, yeah, I think there's still people out there who provide information and are very good at it. And you can be somebody like Barry Wise or or Matt Taibe on Substack for example, and the personality of the human doing writing just shines through and you go, this is the person I can trust, you know, So I in part the difficulty is that the people in authority don't want to do that, I
think in part because they have no personalities. These are people who are exceedingly they're just climbers. They're just institutional climbers. And if they were to let their instant their personalities to shine, we would they would have nobody listened to them.
Yeah, it's it's uh, Matt Tybee, you know, or Barry White you're talking about. It's almost like a meritocracy right to the people who are better writers and who do more research and who present more of truth and facts get risen up, and the people who are trying to hide behind some bacade of fake authority, they quickly get found out in discredit. It's sort of almost like the
industrial Revolution. So, as you were saying, like, the one way I've looked at it is we had this assembly line, right and as you said earlier, like they kind of put everybody down into like a number and they can kind of control everybody. And if we were on the assembly line, you know, I put my part on you put your part on it, and you may be way smarter than me, but we basically do the same work. And you know, there's obviously economic reasons and geopolitical reasons
why the US middle class has been haulowed out. But a big piece of it is that we went from the mass you know, mass assembly lines into the information age, and in the information age, if you're smarter than me, you really start to rise up faster, and now I start falling behind. And so kind of back to this meritocracy. The Matt Taibe's they can rise up, while the Dan rathers they just start falling behind. Like CNN, they can't just live on those laurels of being trusted anymore.
Yeah, I hesitate there. We call it buddy smarter or less smart, and that being a reason for success. I think what Taibi does and what Barry Wise does and several others that I follow, is they put their product out there on substack. Right. That is a very talk about in the marketplace. That is there is no advertising right so that you can't be kept afloat. There's no subsidy. The government doesn't give you money, foundations don't give you money.
You're out there by yourself, and then you either have readers or you don't. Now substack it was a relatively small number of readers fifteen twenty thousands by Internet standards is nothing. It's going to make you a wealthy man. So you are now being given by your readers the freedom to be an independent writer. So if you don't, if you don't attract that, then then basically you may be smart, but you lost the race.
Yeah, and what we have now going on, I don't want to go dive down those rabbit hoax. I want to jump into revolutions and the follow USSR and stuff like that. But just real quickly, we're at a point now with technology and where we're at at the friends right now of really going to a model with substack type models of what we call value for value. So if I as a subscriber like Mytt Taibi, I can
pay him directly. He doesn't need sponsors because the sponsors can still co opt them and they could still kind of force his direction. But now we the people can pay directly to the creator and get that value for value, which is then really starting to drive that even faster.
I want to jump into. So you spent a lot of the book talking about these revolutions that happened mostly around twenty eleven and kind of kind of around the Arab spring I think Era and you drew a lot of connections that happened, you know, Tunisia and Egypt and Syria, and you drew a lot of connections there, mainly about how really one person with an Internet connection and a Facebook group or something like that could really start to
mobilize the masses and kind of get this uprising. I want to dig into some of the relationships between those and then some things that I thought about as I was listening to that. But before, do you kind of spend some time trying to separate the distinctions between what you call the public and the people and the masses?
Right, right? So the public guy that I didn't come up with my definition for the public, I borrowed Walter Lippmann's. Lipmann is one of the great political writers of the twentieth century, and he basically he was he thought that the public ought to have, should be synonymous as a citizen, and should have a tremendous engagement in democracy and so
forth in our government. And he was very disappointed in all his researches and the fact that no, the public just seemed to be the people who are pursuing a specific affair, I think is what he called it. Uh And use their you know, their their voice, their voice under influence to support on that side of that affair,
of their side of their affair. So you know, if you are an anti Hosni Mubarak person, young person in Egypt in the year twenty eleven, your affair is to get rid of Obarak, right, And so the people in Tyree were square. That we saw with all that drama were the public in Egypt that had gathered there because they had all met each other online. And there were several groups that did that. I highlighted one in my book that continued. That continued not just twenty eleven, it
was pretty much through twenty nineteen, twenty nineteen. In fact, it was probably the most turbulent year for those who of There were like at least twenty five major street revolts in twenty nineteen. It all kind of came to a screeching halt in twenty twenty. Mysterious.
Yeah, magically there was. There was ten countries with over one million people each in protesting previous to the twenty twenty silence.
Yeah, yeah, And I mean the interesting thing about it, you've got to touched on economics. This included rich countries. They included poor countries, you know, very rich countries, very poor countries. They included very healthy democracies and pretty terrible dictatorships. So the revolt of the public it doesn't seem to be completely or even maybe primarily about economics or about democracy. There seems to be something else that people are after.
And what is that.
Well, that's a good question. If you had if you had the answer to that, you know, you could probably make a lot of money.
I think I have the answer. Okay, maybe I can make Maybe I can make a lot of money with it. Well, I think, I think. I think Ultimately, people want to be able to pursue their own life, right, pursue their own life. And the problem is that my definition of utopia isn't the same as your definition of utopia, and so I need to be free to pursue my direction, my life, my version of utopia, and you should be
free to pursue yours as well. The problem is when we have these authoritarian figures who want to In the United States, three hundred and thirty million people have to live under one single regime and let's just way too many people. We can't live under that regime, and so I think you hinted in your book about you know, smaller regions.
Right, yeah, yeah. I think the tendency of the twentieth century, which is still the tendency of our institutions because they live mentally in the twentieth century, is to centralize and standardize everything. Right, as you say, I think we have reached the point in that experiment where we can say it's failed. We can't do that, not at this level. Not yeah, right, if you're even Switzerland, I me, Switzerland's like ten million, twelve billion people, and they live on
their valleys. They don't live in Switzerland's is the federal government of Switzerland, My goodness, it has almost no power. So yes, the US is on a different scale, but most any scale quickly registers up to the point where you cannot centralize it to that degree.
I have another theory too. I'm going to come back to that though, because I want to go back to these revolutions. So you kind of talked about these different revolutions that happen around twenty eleven, and to your point, yes, they're continuing, et cetera. And you talked about I want to kind of go back to that though. The public is all the people, but they identify with different causes
that don't always interrelate. So I care about what's going on with surfer with surfing and motorcycle riding and health food, but not always at the same time. And other people that are interested in health food don't necessarily care about the motorcycle right in the surfey right, So we're we all have these different interests that don't necessarily overlap. That's the public or that the people.
There is the people, it doesn't exist, Okay.
So it's just the public, and then what's the masses? The public are the people are part of the masses. That then the public.
The public is not the people, although every protest you will ever see it claims to represent the people, but the people the people essentially is a category of political philosophy that there's no such thing as the people. The masses was just a twentieth century sociological term. It was useful, then it's not so useful anymore. It doesn't really get to use.
So maybe the masses and the people are kind of the same.
It's just just.
A group of people that don't really identify themselves, whereas the public are a group from within the public or the are people over the masses that step up to identify themselves with a movement.
The public is born from friction. Okay, if if the elites are legitimate and the public is content, and the people within who are not elites, non elites, are content, there will be no public. At some point, something done by the elites or some circumstance of life rubbs enough people the wrong way that they break off from the elites and say, I don't like the way things are headed. And that's how the public is born. In the old days, they would have had, you know, radical parties that are
organize them or whatever. Today they go online and they organize that way.
So we have these revolutions that were happening, and not just over in the Middle East. Obviously we most of it in the Middle East that you talked about, but then you even talked about Occupy Wall Street happened in the United States and it wasn't near as big of a movement. But one thing that you had drawn some ties between these groups was that they weren't like a
poor class. They were typically kind of more of a middle class, educated class of people that that that seemed to kind of how how how they were You also kind of drew some conclusions that maybe they weren't organized or agitated or placed there by the left. You talked about the left versus the right, and you said that maybe the left wasn't the ones that had put them up to they seem to have kind of moved more organically something like that.
Is that right? Yeah, I mean the reaction of the opposite side. But first of all, these groups are not left or right. They have lefties flavor, and for example, the Indignalois and Spain were sort of like leftish and when they finally after years organized a minor particle, but then it was definitely a left party, and some like for example the Yellow vest in France have kind of like a rightish flavor. Okay, but the politicians from those sides have tried tried to draw them in on their
side and they rejected them. They're really anti establishment, anti status cool. They want a radical change. The problem is they have no leaders, they have no organizational structures, they have no programs, no idea. Yeah yeah, yeah, so they are against but they are not necessarily they can't articulate what they are for.
They'refore there. It's not what they're for, it's what they're against. How would you define the left versus the right in that context.
That's a really good question. I would just almost genealogically right people who claim to be that and descend from from left. For example, both the Indignado's and and the Occupiers had a very strong anarchistic element. Right, so the anarchists are real good organizing these street protests and and
their system. See all these are our model after like online discussion groups, and the anarchistic model of discussion fits that very well, the model where everybody's allowed to talk and there's no votes, no decision making process or anything like that. So that you know, basically those those movements had a slightly leftish flavor because they were slightly leftish, you know, the genealogically leftish people in them. But the vast you could put i mean, not Occupy Wall Street.
That was a slightly different group because they never generated large numbers, but the indignology could put a million people on the street. And there aren't that many anarchists in all Spain, right, So and they got opinion polls showed large, large majorities approving of them, even though they stood for nothing everybody wanted against.
Would you say that left tends to want to have more government control and right wants to have less government control.
I mean that's true here. I guess generically, I see what is? What is? Uh? What's Emmanuel macronan France? For example? Emmanel Macron was sort of born in the Socialist Party, but he was a he was with the Rothschild Bank. Okay, that's not your idea of what a socialist should be doing. And then he broke away from the social he created his own party. What was that party? Was it left? Was it right? Well? He is turned out to be
a very undemocratic president. He basically just ram this this law without getting a vote of the National Assembly in France. But is he right? Is he left? He definitely wants more government power. I don't know. I do not know.
Yeah, that's the problem, you know. You know they say fascism is right and socialism is left, but to me, they're both authoritarian governments. So uh, it's hard. It's hard to draw a line. I recently wrote a book, shameless plug. I wrote it last last August. Nowhere near like your book. It's titled The Uncommunist manifesto.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard of with it.
Okay, So the uncommiss Manifesto, and in it I have a diagram. It's it's too small to show you, but I drew a diagram here in the book. And basically what this did, it's what we framed as the real spectrum. And over on the right hand side we show politics, and we have you know, communism being on the left and fascism being on the right, but all of it is on the politics side. And then over here, all
the way over here is where we have individualism. So fascism is right, socialism is left, whatever right, they're both authoritarian governments trying to tell us what to do and tell somebody paneo as we could have. I don't know what the differences of the flavors are. But anyway, so going back to this, so the one thing that I was thinking is I was listening to frame up all of these is you had talked about how really this top down central planning fell, It really collapsed with the
fall of the USSR. So you kind of made that case. Now, you know, in my book the COMMSS Manifesto, we talk about how Marxism, communism really never kind of went away. It's still kind of here, kind of almost went underground. And so what I was kind of hearing as you were talking about all these different movements that were going on, it was all very anti capitalist, very anti capitalist, and pro welfare. That's what it seemed to be what people wanted the well okay, actually, so it seemed like the
main problem that they were all facing. And when I've studied the study some of these, it seems like when people can't eat, that's when they go revolt. And so they were all sparked by the rise of in christ increase of living standards. That girl that you talked about, I forget where, you know, she blogged about she couldn't afford her apartment anymore in Israel, right, real, she couldn't afford apartment anymore. So really it was the rise of
prices you talked about all in Spain and Catalonia. What happened. It was the increase in living costs drove people past the point, past the brink, and then they seem to demand the government fixed that, fixed that by taking away capitalism which they think had caused that divide, and to give more welfare to help bridge that gap. Do you think that's a fair assumption.
I think in some cases, yeah, I think I think that what the term was that that young woman whose name escapes me right now used was Swinish capitalism, which, of course, if you were in Israel, is rarely you know, anything associated with pork isn't a good thing. So and the Wall Street occupiers, who are very anti capitalistic, I think they're all anti system. They're all anti system.
But they they wanted more welfare.
Right, you can't even say that because there was there was no theay in terms of any programmatic demands. They had their never programmatic demands. They want the government to make life meaningful, they want the government to make it life interesting. They all had certain, uh more or less reasonable and reasonable economic demands, but they also had social demands. We in the US go for racial demands and you know,
gender demands. So it is a sense in each one of these groups that the world is out of order, you know, it's out of kilter, and and the people in charge, the elites, are responsible for that. And then they turned to the same elites and you're right about that and say fix it. They had just accused them of destroying basically the meaning of life or whatever. And they have turned to the same people who have done that and they say, fix it.
Do you think, but do you think the main catalyst was that? Back to kind of what I said, this cost of living, this quality of life was going down. So to the girl in Israel, right, she couldn't afford her apartment anymore, They couldn't afford food.
She was. I don't agree with that all. I think she came from a wealthy Ashiknaz family.
She had turned her back, but she had turned her back.
On that, right she No, no, she had not. Israeli families are powerful. She was basically, I mean, everybody in life sometimes has to, you know, adjust to economic realities. She did not want to do that. She wanted the government to give her an apartment where she did not have to commute. And basically, this enormous protest, the largest ever in the history of Israel till these recent ones that we're having right now, arose from this one young woman not being able to afford her apartment.
So, but that's my point. She came from the cost of living or the quality life. She couldn't afford apartment. She wanted the government to give her a better apartment, right.
She wanted the govern to do something such that there would be you know, she could stay in a place where where she was close to her work. Yeah, but I mean in the motivation varied. In Spain, of course, there had been a tremendous decline in the standard of living after two thousand and eight. But in the US, the occupiers were just anti.
It happened after the two thousand and eight great financial cracks.
Well no, it was twenty eleven, so it was like three years later, all right, So it was an that would be.
Called Arab spring was because massive inflation happened and they couldn't afford bread anymore.
I mean, that's that they were way more affluent in Egypt than they had been ever in their history. So that's not true either. And you know, a country like Chile, which has probably the most drastic of the revolts, because basically the street protesters ended up running the presidency and writing the constitution. Chile was a massively prosperous, prosperous the most prosperous, like in the American country, unbroken prosperity.
Okay, all right, yeah, I'm just trying anyway, and so then it seemed like, like I said, it seemed like they all were demanding the government give them this. So it's like, on one hand they wanted to dismantle the government, to your point, but on the other hand they wanted the government to fix it. And so it seemed like there was a socialist ties and so I was just curious if that's it seems like a lot of Marxism
to me, right. Karl Marx himself talked about how he was so mad because he wanted to write philosophy, but the market didn't didn't value that, and he couldn't make any money, so he wanted to take from the rich. So he could, you know, each according to his ability, each court in their need, he could just write his philosophy get paid. And so it seems a lot of this kind of Marxist socialist kind of thinking that has spurred a lot of this.
Well he got angles to basically write his meal tickets.
Yeah, exactly exactly. So on one hand, it's like seemed like the USSR collapsed, But then maybe the idea is the ideologies of Marxism still kind of seemed to do that seemed to kind of still stoke that and ultimately it seems like you know, I guess we could say categorically, when people aren't happy with their own lives, and typically when people can't afford to live the quality of life they went and ultimately can't afford to feed their families,
that's when they really get crazy. This kind of goes back to this economic model. I'm curious. So you wrote a lot about, you know, what was going on in those days, obviously in our phone or conversation right now. Now, you wrote the book in twenty sixteen, is that right?
The first edition was twenty fourteen. The second edition, which has a pretty large update, was not like December of twenty eighteen.
Okay, because trust has seeming to be an eroding even faster, at a faster pace than we might have even imagined. And so I'm curious kind of what your take is. I mean, shoot, just in the last two years you already kind of mentioned the COVID complex and Fauci, what we've seen happening with the Canadian truckers. You know all of this, and now today you know the DeVos group met in February. The number one topic of Davos is missing.
How do we handle misinformation and disinformation malinformation in the United States, it's a threat to our democracy misinformation. But at the same time, we can't. Every day find out more lies the government's telling to us, and so it's like they are telling us they have to combat misinformation, but every day we find out they're the purveyors of misinformation. So I'm curious how this is sort of escalated in your thinking since you've updated the book.
Well, I mean that aspect doing to find really fascinating because what I love is dealing with information and how it intersects with politics and power. Right, So they're actually working on an article on that subject. Essentially, the elites want to return to a twentieth century, their reactionary twentieth century was a really good time.
To be put the genie back in the bottle.
Yeah, you could be John F. Kennedy and you know, have all these run ins with women, and they protected you. You were protected. Today of course everybody is out there. You know, the emperor is naked, and then nobody likes that.
So so they have tried, in the most interesting way and not good, to control the source of all this, which is the digital domain, and really and truly over the last of since twenty sixteen, since since Trump got elected, there has been this coalescing of government agencies NGOs, you know, non governmental organizations, the media, the traditional media all kind of huddled together, uh, to influence. And I think in the end, censor that's not a word I use lightly.
I only use it in terms of when the government is involved, right, Uh, censor social media from using uh, you know, basically broadcasting opinions that that they disapprove of.
And I mean that's happening right now. And of course, like the Twitter files, which you know was born when uh Elon Musk bought Twitter and then turned uh basically a lot of internal documents to Matt Taibi, Michael Schellenberger, and Barry Weiss, and they looked at what was going on, and they saw that the FBI was essentially the Biden White House was telling Twitter, get that expel, that that account expelled that American citizen from speaking on on Twitter, and Twitters saluted and said.
Yes, yeah, yeah, And it's happening more and more and more, and now they're uh, you know, they're trying, they're trying everything it can. You talked about this conundrum that I thought was pretty interesting where you said, you know, governments would like to restrict speech and communication, but the problem is will stifle growth. So they want to have the communication and allow speech, but then they risk their power. Right now, if they stifle growth, they're going to risk
their power too. So it's like they're kind of caught in this conundrum where like, really there's no win there. I mean, if they stifle growth, they're going to get overthrown, and if they don't stifle growth, they're going to get overthrown. You had said early in the book that you I think you made the statement, correct me if I'm getting it wrong, but that the current form of government today isn't compatible with this kind of technology that we have.
Right, it's not just technology, it's a structure of information. Right, So are we are set up for a world with very thin streams of information that feed into each institution like the media for example, and and and it becomes a sert of as semi monopoly that then because there's so little this which is so scarce. When Walter Cronkite did go on television and say that's the way it was for you know, whatever date, we had no way of knowing anything. So if he gave us some information,
we were happy he had authority. Right today that that that whole system has been has been battered down and essentially, I I mean, it's the battle has been joined. So I don't make predictions, but I find it hard to believe that you can put the Internet genie back in the bottle. It's too big. The Internet is essentially for any individual purpose, infinite right, and government is not very capable. So, I mean, even governments that specialized in repression aren't very
good at it. So our government, thank goodness, has not specialized in that yet. Uh, it's terrible at it. So the idea that it can somehow deal with with the information world from a twentieth century perspective, it cannot. So, I mean, there are many ways in which we can change. These government structures can change. And you know, I'll tell it. I'll give you one, I mean one. The trust in our government organizations is collapsed right now. A lot of
corporations the trust is collapsed. If you look at one corporation in which it hasn't collapsed is Amazon. Amazon, for all its you know, problems or questions, what you have gets from customers a gigantic amount of trust. It makes sense. I mean, who of us did not use Amazon during the pandemic? And what do you do when you do that? You put your credit card online. That's not massive active trust. And you expect something to show up on your doorstep
a day later. That's another massive active trust, and you expect the thing to be of high quality a third massive active trust. Now Amazon is a gigantic bureaucracy, but that's not what you experience. You experience quick service with good products. The federal government is the most gigantic deliverer of services probably in the world, but that's not what you experience. What you experience is bureaucracy, condescension, arrogance. You know this this form that form, Who are you come
back tomorrow? It's gonna take years. It's gonna take So if you want to change the federal government in the set services side, make it more like Amazon and a lot less like the Great Pyramid of Giza.
While I'm certainly in agreement, and I sometimes hang some of my guests, some of my solace in the shearing competence of the government, to your point, they've look what happened. They tried to launch the Obamacare website, or they tried to overhaul the IRS website or whatever. But you know, it seems like the more control they lose, the more they're going to have to try to squeeze. You know, I don't know if you're following along with the latest technology.
I'm a big bitcoin advocate. And we have these decentralized networks now that are outside of the hands of the government, and so, you know, not a brand new one, but like Napster I think you maybe reference in your book, But then we had like BitTorrent, and we could download music and movies on the web and there's just nothing they can just do about it. And so we have these decentralized networks.
Now.
Now we have Bitcoin and that's outside the hands of the government. They can't stop that. And now there's another one. It's called Noster and it's a decentralized communication platform where you can build decentralized Telegram or Twitter or YouTube clients on it. And this is just it's outside of their control.
So in the past to your point where you know Twitter file is exposed that they were telling Twitter what to do, these are now new networks that that can't they can't impose their will on I don't know if you've if you've seen the rise of that, or if you have any prediction of how that changes things.
Yeah, no, I mean I won't make predictions because I don't. But that's part of what I'm talking about. The the the digital realm is too big and too elusive. It escapes like water. You can't grab it, you know. I don't know whether those those particular technologies and modes of communication will be the ones that permanently escape government control.
They may just be at the moment in time, we are at the very very early stages of this cosmic transformation from the industrial age to something that doesn't even have a name yet, right, And these may just be moments in that, or it may be that, yes, indeed, you know, crypto and bitcoin and so forth, uh turned
out to be a decisive change. I mean, if you have, if you have a way of essentially printing currency that the government has no control over it, you have radically changed the foundations of the nation state.
Well, one thing I would say, and we don't need to spend a lot of time on this, but just like to the point of your book, you talk about how what we considered information pre Internet era was you know, cronkite or rather either one you know, giving us the nightly news and three newspapers that were written by the same person. That was information, whereas today what we consider
information has completely changed. And so a kid you know in Asia posts a picture on the beach, and I have this information about the weather, the waves, all this information. Bitcoin is a way that we can transfer value. What we would consider money would be like our we store our value on that, we can communicate value. But I think the definition of that has been expanded, and so
that'd be interesting to watch. But what's interesting is so I recorded a video earlier today from my YouTube channel talking about this new bill that has been put forth. Bipartisan Democrats and Republicans are going for this, the Restrict Act. Have you heard about this Restrict Act? So basically it's called the Restrict Act, and it's basically to make TikTok illegal.
So they want to make TikTok illegal. But if you dig into what the act is, just like all of these, you know, save the Puppy Act, it's not what they appear on the outside. This is the this is the Patriot Act. Times a thousand times a million. And basically I'll just read you a couple of things from this.
Inside this Restrict Act, it allows the Director of National Intelligence and Secretary of Commerce, so two people we didn't vote in the authority to universally designate new foreign adversaries without notifying Congress, without a fifteen day window to notify the president, and it would require a joint resolution of Congress to overturn it.
I have not heard.
Now you might know from the Patriot Act that foreign individuals can now also be US citizens that are deemed a national security threat. Once designated, the bill grant's authority to enforce any action deemed necessary to mitigate the threat, with no due process and few limits on punishment. The Restrict Act will allow the government to access all of the data on your video devices if it has more than one million people using it iPhones, ring cameras, etc.
So now they can access all of that information. What kind of punishments? A million dollar fine, twenty years in prison, and the forfeiture of everything you own. You use a VPN to get around this boom, you go to jail, twenty years, you lose everything. This act also grants unlimited hiring position to to power to positions of enforcement, unlimited funds, and little to no review of immunity with no Foyer requests.
Well that's why I like these conversations. You have taught me something I had not heard of that.
I mean, this is bad. It is like really bad. So this is if you can't beat them, might as well just cut the internet lines like they tried in Egypt. I mean, that's kind of what this is saying, because it seems like they see these decentralized protocols that are
popping up and they know they can't control them. So then we just have unlimited access to everything, and if we catch you even looking like you're going to use it with a VPN, we're going to put you in prison for twenty years with no due process.
Yeah. I can't imagine that's going to pass.
It's got bipartisan support by big names including uh, I mean, I'll read you, I'll read you a couple here. It's got a lot of firepower behind it. It's got Mark Warner, Democrat, Virginia Senator Warner. It's got a couple of big ones here, Tommy Baldwin Wisconsin, Joe Manchin, Democrat, West Virginia mansions on it. Jerry Moran represented from Kansas, A couple other big ones here, Kristin Gilbrand from New York, Mitt Romney, Republican from Utah.
I mean it's got, it's got, It's got twenty or so people on here, both sides of the aisle.
This is this is the elites. Yeah, of course, I mean this is the I mean every one of those names, I would say, you can you can reproduce their behavior almost endlessly as elites for sure. Yeah.
So you know, it's, uh, it's back to that conundrum. You know, if we don't allow this technology, we're going to put ourselves in the back into you know, we're going to restrict our growth. If we do, we're going to constantly be overthrown here. So yeah, it's a it's it's definitely a massive ratchet up in this uh, in this communication game, to say the least.
I'll look it up.
Yeah, all right, Well, you don't make predictions, and you've already said that. In the final part of your book, you kind of give your thesis of where this where you think this kind of goes though, do you want to summarize kind of where you think that goes or kind of how you summarize the thesis in the end.
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
What was it called the finale for skeptics and you had a.
Yeah, Well basically what I say is, actually that was my sort of like, you know, if you do an experiment, you need to have well X happens, then you know this it means this. But if why happens is.
The no hypothesis you called it, Yeah, no hypothesis, right, and and you know I have to say, I, as you put it, I think earlier the one thing I got wrong was the speed at which this was coming at us, right.
I definitely didn't realize how fast it was moving. But I think in terms of the substance of it, when you look at us, I said, if my hypothesis correct, these are the things that need to be happening. If not that this is the opposite. Here's a no Our world today looks nothing like the no hypothesis. It looks like they were bolts of the public in steroids. Got it, got it?
Well, it's it's certainly interesting. What a time to be alive?
Right.
I often say that.
If you're if you're a geopolitical analyst. It is kind of fun, but I mean, what a mess. I also fear feel kind of like doctor death because my book and my people wanted to talk to me wretch it up. Every time something horrible happens somewhere, everybody feels like I can explain it, and of course I mostly can't. But happy to drive.
Yeah, well, I definitely recommend getting the book. I enjoyed reading it. Have you read the book The Sovereign Individual?
Yes?
Yeah, really good book.
It's good, fits together, fits together well with this, you know, So recommend to anyone listening check out The Sovereign Individual check out this book if you want an idea. I think I think it helps. It helps show what's going on in the world today. So it kind of brings some clarity to what's going on, and it helps you develop some frameworks to think about where we're going into the future and how you can navigate that.
Thank you.
The problem I have with with this act, this act, this restrict Act, is like, this is anybody in the world, Like this is the long arm of the government, right, It's it's against foreign individuals, which can also be you as citizens. But like you can't just move to another country and get away from this. So it's going to be interesting anyway. Man, it has been awesome reading the book,
it's been awesome talking to you about it. Anything that you'd like to point attention to that people should go check out?
No, I mean, like I said, the whole disinformation. You know what Michael Schldenberger calls it a information the censorship industrial complex. He calls it censorship industrial complex, which is really not industrial. Is bore like a protection racket. I would say, I think anybody who who values freedom ought to be watching that. I mean, it really is. It happened. It happened without debate, It happened without laws being enacted.
It happens without warrants. It happens without judges being involved. It happened without formal investigations. Suddenly we have this apparatus of control that the government has implemented, and I think we as citizens need to push back.
On that definitely. Well that we'll get and sign it off. We're gonna link to everything down in the show notes down below, so you can check out the book, check out his blog, and with that will sign off. Thanks so much, Martin. All Right, that's a wrap. Hopefully enjoyed this conversation I had with Martin gurry It. It was a good conversation, it was an even better book. I highly advised checking it out. We'll put a link down
to the description in the show notes below. As I said, there's new technologies that are going to make this state incompetent at trying to enforce this Bitcoin, decentralized monetary net works, NOSTER decentralized information protocols. If you want to check it out, you should come check out the Bitcoin Conference in Miami
coming up soon. I'll be a speaker there. I have a link for discount tickets if you'd want to come, I can get you a discount on some tickets, and if you send me send me a message showing that you bought it with my link. I'll put it down below. I'm going to organize little meetup with some people. So if you want to come check out the Big Coin Conference, get at discount on tickets, there's a link in the description. Otherwise, leave me a comment, let me know what you think
about this conversation. Let me know what you think about what the future of government looks like with this new technology that allows us to communicate without censorship. I'd love to hear what you think as always hit that like button if you like it, the dislike if you don't subscribe, if you're not already subscribed, And that's what I got to your success. I'm out.