Martin Gurri

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMVG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately how they got to where they are today. I do think one thing we have to regain is the idea that we can reform ourselves.

We can reconfigure our government. I think the the constitutional framework we have is magnificent. And compared to any other countries, it has stood the test of time. Today on the Puck, I have the great pleasure of sitting down with Martin Gurri, a visiting research fellow at the Mercatus Center and George Mason University and a former CIA analyst specializing in the relationship of politics and global media. We discuss his early years immigrating from Cuba, his insights into our democracy today, what is needed in terms of true leadership, and the realities of everyday life.

It's a fascinating conversation that I enjoyed, and so let's get to it. Martin Curry, welcome to the Puck. We are excited to have you here. And one thing that I do wanna point out to our listeners is we're dealing with an ex CIA and researcher and an author. So tell us, Martin, a little bit about yourself, but also how did working for the CIA tie into what you're doing now as an author and the way in which you, approach the world?

Yeah. I think the, you know, first thing about me you you should know is that I'm an immigrant. My parents brought me over as a kid from Cuba. So I always look on this great country with an immigrant's eyes, which I think are a lot kinder and more forgiving than people who have been here all along. I have other systems and societies that I could compare this country to.

Of course, as I have traveled, as I have done so much, that has become even more, I've become even more grateful. CIA was, in a sense, where all the things that I write about today began because not necessarily because the world that interested in it, but because I happen to be an analyst at their global media unit. And if you go back to the olden times, that was a pretty straightforward job. And the trickle, the information in newspapers, and there were hardly any TV shows in those days. I mean, as late as the eighties and nineties.

It was a trickle. It was a trickle. But I was there when suddenly that trickle just blew up, Just blew up. You have this, I guess, earthquake, this digital earthquake, we say, you know, epicenter somewhere around Palo Alto or San Jose, some place like that, that just generated the tsunami of information that has battered our institutions around the world. We tend to think of ourselves as being very unique and all this.

No. No. No. This is pretty much around the world. And I was there at CIA watching it happen.

People call me very prescient and prophetic. I looked at stuff. I don't believe in that, actually. I believe in principle. You cannot prophesy, human events.

But I was at a very high place, and I was looking out farther than most. And I could see this thing coming. And what, number one, became amazing to me was the amount of information. Right? I always talk about the the data point that, the information generated in 2001 doubled doubled that of all previous human history back to the dawn of culture and the cave paintings.

2002 doubled 2001. And that has more or less not quite exactly been maintained, but more or less been maintained. It's a tsunami. It's far more than we can digest. It's far more than our institutions can digest.

The first thing as an analyst, for me, information was just something you've got to use. So now where do you get it? Where do you get it? What's authoritative? Secondly, though, you realize information has effects.

And the effects of this tsunami were seen almost immediately as we were watching it kind of roll over the world as different countries digitized at different times and rates. Behind that, you could see ever increasing levels of, social and political turbulence. Interestingly, you know, I mean, it sounds naive now, but we asked ourselves, so what's the connection? You know, this is just, like, you know, communications device, and this seems to be blowing up the politics in these countries. We're hearing voices we never heard before.

Now, of course, you know, the connection is pretty obvious. When I left government, that was a question I addressed. What is the connection between this digital tsunami and this increasingly turbulent, sociopolitical environment we find ourselves into? So you wrote a book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. Is that how you bring these issues together?

I mean, is that why you wrote the book? Yeah. Totally. I mean, when I was in CIA CIA is a wonderful organization, and the people there are amazingly courageous. And many of the people that I met were brilliant.

But it's an it's an old institution. It's a hierarchy. Right? And we're all kind of waving our hands and saying and a little corner of the agency was saying, look what's happening. This is important.

But it didn't fit their preconceptions. Right? There was the preconceptions that you can't have, say, a revolt, a revolution without a revolutionary party, a little hierarchy that then takes over, kind of like on the Bolshevik model. You look what happened in Egypt, for example, where it was all started in a number of Facebook pages. Right?

And there was no hierarchy and there was no party, just a lot of young people on the streets that had been watching and reading Facebook. That kind of went over the CIA's corporate head. So I left CIA thinking, well, what is the answer? What is going on? What does it mean?

And to me, there were a couple of findings, I think, that with lots of research. I mean, lots of research. And the research changes your mind and or otherwise, what's the point? A couple of things. Number one, I thought I had a between in this great big collision between the public, you know, that has been enabled by the digital platforms and the people in charge.

Well, I called the elites. I mean, that's the one thing I did do long before that word became fashionable. And I thought I had a side. I thought I was obviously on the side of the public. Right?

But the more you read about what was going on, you realize there was a very deep nihilistic streak in the way the public went about these revolts. They were not about trying to improve anything or trying to change anything. They wanted desperately to improve and change, but they had no programs. They had no leadership. Basically, they wanted to let it be known that they hated the situation and that they hated the government, the people in charge.

Then they kinda turned it over to the same people saying, now fix it. Right? That doesn't make any sense. So I realized, no. I don't have you know, I I know what I like, and I know who I'm for.

This is just something that I'm looking at very closely and analytically. The second part that came out of the book is that our institutions clearly were designed in the early twentieth century, and when during the big progressive redesign of what the founders set up, We're designed to deal with informations on a twentieth century scale, on an industrial scale. Yeah. So that every institution, the government, you know, the media, academia had its own little monopoly of information. And because nobody else had any, they had authority.

They spoke when Walter Cronkite talked to us, there was nobody else. I mean, yeah, there were two other guys out there maybe. They sounded just like him, and they said the same things. So when the tsunami hit, these institutions went into a deep crisis from which they have not emerged. Deep crisis.

So you talk about this crisis, and in your book, you talk about how you predicted, for instance, the rise of the Internet and Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. How did you come to these conclusions? I mean, you're you're describing the fact that there's this tsunami of information, but how you analyze that information and predict these things coming out of that tsunami, how did that happen? Well, in page one of the book, I make it a very strong case that I I don't believe in predictions. I never predict.

I absolutely never predict. You wanna be wrong? Make a forecast. Alright? What I did, or what I hope I did, was I created a framework of understanding for the events that were visible to me from CIA and then later to everybody else as to what the dynamic was.

This coalition, you know, we tend to think we are very antiquated in our political language. We tend to think in terms of liberal and conservative. Those are nineteenth century British, you know, labels. Or right and left. I mean, that's where you sat on the French constitutional convention during the French revolution, for god's sakes.

What that got to do with us? So what I tried to convey was a sense that and the ideologies that we have today and the labels that we have today have sort of arranged themselves around this conflict, which is between the public and the elites. And almost every political issue, you can see that, well, there's always a partisan side and there'll be a semi ideological side. But the truly powerful motivating side is this collision. On the one hand, this very angry public that feels very ill served by the people in charge.

And on the other hand, this very controlling and very frightened at the moment, elite class that feels like these are a bunch of yahoos that are trying to tell them what to do, but they know better. Right? These are deplorables, racists, whatever. But, you know, they're not to be allowed in the discussion. They're badly bad manners bad manners.

Everything and this is true around the world. You see France today. You see Britain today. You saw it in Hong Kong, for example. Chile, the Chileans, revolt actually took over.

A rare case where that happened, and we could talk about that later because it didn't come to a good place. But Chile had a long history since Pinochet, the dictator, of very healthy democratic government. Left and right alternating and of tremendous economic growth. It was by far starting out from a poor country. It became a wealthy country.

It was basically admitted into the club of wealthy countries just by manufacturing and exporting and whatnot. And for whatever reason, the revolt said, we're not happy. We're gonna blow all this up. We're gonna blow up our constitution. And the president today is, 30 something who was part of the revolts, and they're wrestling with how to change the constitution.

They've had no success with that. But that's a case of the public taking over and really other than being against what was there before, not having a whole lot of coherent ideas about how to change things. They wrote a constitution that had, I think, 300 a 100 articles and 300 pages, something like that. Their constitution, I think, has, like, what, seven articles, I think? They wrote a constitution where basically, it was like a science fiction utopia that they were describing.

It wasn't a government document. So, essentially, the public is, in its own way, contributing to this turbulence. You said you don't like to predict things, but we at the POC wanna see where the world is going. So we do put it out there even if we make mistakes. So before we try to wrap into where this is going, let me try to understand, and for our listeners, some of the ways you describe the current situation, and that is you've got this term, the age of the public.

Why do you use that term, and how do we relate to that? Well, I mean, I am old enough to remember when there was no public. It was just a mass audience. And when you were talked to by the Walter Cronkites of the world, the worst you can do was throw something at the TV. And, of course, Walter wasn't even aware.

I did do that, by the way. Sometimes I I would throw something. I would get so annoyed. Not a Walter, necessarily. You couldn't talk back.

And if you did, they couldn't hear you. Today, that tsunami of information I talked about, that gigantic upsurge that keeps doubling and doubling the information set, That's not coming from the elites. The elites, they have their max that they had achieved before this started. This is coming from below. This is a sort of volcanic eruption to information from below.

So, yeah, I don't really know I mean, the age of the public simply means a time when the public can talk back to politicians, can find the information that they want about politicians, about elite figures, about people in charge, can then write about them, can say, oh, look. There's such and such a person that's running around on his wife, or such and such a person is, you know, said this sometime back. Now it's saying the opposite. That kind of gotcha things were very hard to to achieve in the old days. You had to go back to the archives or something.

If you were a public a member of the public, you are constantly feeling these people are not being straightforward with you, and the public never achieving what they say, saying certain things, we're gonna do this, we're gonna solve problems, and never doing it. And the public never looks on this as incompetence. They look at it as corruption. These are people who are saying it without meaning it. And they're saying all these good things knowing they can't do it, and then what they're doing is feathering their nest.

The age of the public is the age of this gigantic force that used to be null, that has now left, center stage on the on the political stage, and is a leading actor, a leading actor in our politics. I wanna go a little deeper with that because Mhmm. There are times in our history, like the sixties, where we had Kent State and where we had protests and where Richard Nixon did, I think, deal and ultimately listened to a certain extent the young people in this country, and that there was an effect that these young people had as opposed to, let's say, the young people in China with Tiananmen Square. But in this country, we have seen these tsunamis, uprisings of young people where politicians reacted. What I hear you saying now is that we've still got that tsunami of information.

And, yes, you can still go into the public street and do it, but there's a way of demonizing people on social media and digging up dirt that is a new tool that these people have to use. If that's correct and we take it to the next level, then does that have anything to do with why people like Donald Trump, for instance, even when he's accused of all these things and all this dirt comes out, people are turning away from that because you can find dirt on everybody. So now it's almost like we don't care about that anymore. Yeah. Trump is like this.

You know, you look at these nature documentaries, these, like, bull walruses that have their thick hides, their full scars. You know, you can't you can't break through. Right? It's more than what you said. Okay?

It's more than just a weapon that you can use against the elites. It is a loss of belief that you should listen to these people. And these people, the elites, are the ones who decide what is what. Okay? Who is what?

In the olden days, everything I mean, we tend to think of truth as being very platonic and very, you know, hard and you it's not at all like that. Most truth is mediated and received from an authority. And sometimes, read a little bit about black holes. You just kinda go in a tremendous act of faith that something as bizarre as a black hole can exist. I can't prove it.

I've never seen one. Neither have you. But they say that they exist and you okay. That act of faith that the mediators between you know, the elite mediators between the world of knowledge and the everyday life, to have authority to explain things to us, has disappeared. So in a sense, truth is up for grabs.

Right? And in a place like that, yes, Donald Trump can, you know, come in, and most of the things he gets criticized for, including by me, are the things that he got elected for because he made it very clear by the fairly outrageous persona that he has that he is not one of them. The elites have this way of talking that is just amazing. And I I speak as someone who goes to these conferences that are full of elites. And it's like I'm in the same crowd.

Could be three different countries. Same crowd, same language, same big words. You know? Trump, no danger of mistaking him for one of that. Right?

So a lot of people said, yeah. This guy talks and and this is actually in the polling that many different kinds of people voted for Trump in 2016. But one of the most consistent traits was they said, he talks just like me, which is impossible. Right? Because the white the white truck talks, nobody talks that way.

Right? But I think what they meant was, he doesn't talk like one of them. So we live in a world where people are, as you said, skeptical of the elites. The elites are the leaders. We are a democracy, so we elect these leaders.

Can you help define direct democracy for us and also let us know what concerns you have about how direct democracy is working? What What do you mean direct democracy? Well, in terms of how we lead people. In other words, are we a republic? Are we moving more into direct democracy?

And how does that affect kind of how we as a country govern ourselves with this lack of trust in the elites? Yeah. I mean, we can't. The short end is we can't. We don't live really anything remotely like a democracy.

We use that word a lot. It's a representative government. I give my vote to some person, usually where I live. He He never gets elected or she never gets elected, so some other person gets elected who represents my interests in congress. An an Athenian would find that to be tyrannical.

That has absolutely nothing to do with democracy. Okay? So I feel like our institution so so everything depends on trust. You have to trust that the person that you have elected or even that got elected, that you voted against, really and truly represents, in some cosmic sense, in some ideological sense, represents the people. Right?

And you have to that way, all the way to the top. Right? You have to believe that the things that they do, the laws that they pass are legitimate because they represent the will of the people, and that the president of The United States is the only person, the other vice president that gets elected by all of us, has tremendous legitimacy to do things. When you erode authority, none of that happens. None of that happens.

It's the opposite, in fact. I mean, if you go back to the Kennedy year, say, which is maybe the last time that a president could do this, just by being elected, you, to begin with, had tremendous trust. And then maybe you eroded it or whatever because you weren't that good or whatever. But you had tremendous you walked into the White House with a gigantic, you know, investment of trust by the public. Today, people get elected.

And the moment they're in the White House, they're everybody's enemy. Right? It's a huge element against them just because they happen to be the president, and you say, well, they really didn't the the elections weren't fair. They they were cheated. There's nothing legitimate about his position, and he's using his position to further maintain some position, whether it be if it's Trump or whether it is, say, Biden.

Some position that you find to be not just, I'm against it politically, but it's disgusting morally as well. You know? So the Trumpists find the Biden people to be repulsive. The Democrats find Trump to be repulsive. There is no sense that, okay, these people represent other than bad things.

I mean, I think the great political issue in America today, which hardly anybody talks about, alas, is how do you restore trust in the institution? What kind of politicians do we need? What kind of representatives do we need that can do that? So let's get into that. We're talking about the dethroning of institutions.

We've lost faith in our religious institutions. We've lost faith in our higher education institutions. We've lost faith in government. We lost faith in business. How do we start to rebuild this trust and solve these issues?

Because you may not be in the predicting business, but in a low trust environment, nothing ends well. Right? Because you don't have consistency, you don't have that level of trust so that you will follow those people, quote unquote. In a low trust environment, We know it's ultimately not in our best interest. How do we start to shift it back?

I think a lot of it is on us. As I don't want to get into philosophy much, but Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega Gasset has this idea that the elites and the publics mutually select each other. Right? And what a true elite is, is a person that the publics find admirable. They set the models as used to be for us.

I mean, everybody was told, you know, you have to be honest like George Washington, and you have to be industrious like Thomas Edison. You know, you had these people that were models for us. Right? Well, I think so it's it's on us. The elites get there in a fairly open society, which we still are, I believe.

The elites get to be elites because we place them there. We either spend our money or we donate, even more importantly, our attention to them or just we're indifferent and let them happen and do nothing about that. And I think we ought to be very careful, very careful about who we invest our money and attention, what kind of movie stars we support in their movies, what kind of politicians we support, not just in a question of are they my tribe, are they my my ideological, you know, sweet spot, but is this a person that I would want my daughter to be introduced to, you know, which I think in a lot of cases, the answer would be no. Not really. But how can we restore the first thing you have to restore is integrity.

I don't think our elite class is quite as as abysmally corrupt as in public things, but they're pretty pathetic. They are pretty pathetic. And they're there mainly to be there. In other words, they're there because they want to aspire to be at the top. Once they get to the top, they are as clueless about what they want to do as the public is about what needs to be done.

So the sense that we're here for public service and you're here because you think this issue is important and here's my idea of how we improve this, when did that last happen? I can't even remember. Well, that's a good question. I mean, Robert Putnam in the upswing talks about how we went from being a very eye oriented society to a we oriented society at the time of Teddy Roosevelt and the breaking up of trusts. And there was this movement back towards morality and there was a religious, you know, revival.

And when you look at the world today and you look at the as you said, these elites out there that are leading the charge, so to speak, how do you think you create this groundswell focused on what it sounds like you're talking about is integrity and character when there is such disparate places of communication? And with section two thirty, when you can essentially say anything, how do you get people talking about integrity and character to accomplish what you're talking about? Yeah. I think the first thing you have to realize is you can't do that. You can't get people to do anything.

And I think that part of the Internet fallacy is just that. Thinking is, like, you know, I'm gonna type up this thing on the web. I'm gonna put this post out there. I'm gonna you know, I'm gonna make people realize, no. No.

No. How about if we start with ourselves? How about if our criticisms that we have such our vehement criticisms that we start with ourselves? I mean, the Victorians were great at this. The Brits in particular were great at this.

You read their diaries and they they're, you know, they they were considered to be so smug, but you read their diaries and they were in constant agony because they felt they were not good enough. And they were always criticizing themselves. Right? They were grinding themselves upward by their own self criticism. Right?

So, I mean, it's easy to say the president should be doing this or be doing that. And then I can turn to you and say, well, you look to me like you should lose 10 pounds. Can you do it? You know? Well, it's much easier to criticize a president than to lose those 10 pounds.

I think we should start with ourselves, and I think we should behave with integrity, with obvious and and demonstrable integrity. And I think we should demand that the people we deal with do the same. And I think we should elect people who do the same, and when they don't, kick them out and put that upfront beyond the ideological and partisan desirabilities. In other words, I'm gonna vote for Trump even though he's this bizarre character because I'm against the people over there. I hate Hillary Clinton.

Or I'm gonna vote for Joe Biden even though he's a doddery, you know, person who couldn't get elected when he was young because I hate Trump. Right? So instead of doing those kinds of things saying no, These are not good people. Neither of them. Okay?

They have no integrity. Neither of them. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard. And even even if it means abstain, say, if if there's a 50% abstention rate, people might criticize that, but I think it's better than voting for somebody with no integrity just because they are against what you're against. Look.

I couldn't agree with you more. David French, who now is writing for the New York Times, is talking about one way to fix this is just only vote for people that tell the truth. Now again, maybe nobody tells the truth all the time, but vote for the person who tells the truth the most. And so, okay, let's go let's stay with that. Let's start with fixing ourselves.

Okay. We've had a lot of self help movements in this country. We have a lot of focus on the I. I need to be better. I need to be happier.

I need more freedom. But there's so much focus on the I. We are pulling away from community. We're not gathering together. We're not working as a team.

And isn't there a paradox which is I'm working on myself, but there is no I in team? How do we bring back a sense of community? Oh, yeah. I mean, I think when you work on yourself, it's the opposite of being I. The only way you work on yourself is to being a servant to somebody else or or assistant to somebody else, a helper to somebody else.

How can I be more, you know given what I what my good fortune has bestowed upon me, how could I do more for the people who have less or for the, you know, the members of my family who are in trouble? It starts at home. I mean, it starts at home. And I think part of the unhappiness of this moment, which is a very unhappy and psychotic moment for many people, When you look at rates of anxiety, rates of depression, rates of suicide, terrible. Part of the problem is you're obsessed with yourself.

You're looking in it's a very narcissistic way. You're looking in the mirror, and you never quite measure up to what you want to be. Right? And you're always feeling like, well, why can't I do this? And why can't I do that?

And I found in my life, which is very long at this point, that when I had children, when my wife had children, that went away. I was kinda like crazy intellectual, blah blah blah. And suddenly you have children, you go, I count for crap. Alright? These kids, these babies, that's it.

That's what I'm living for. Okay? And it never has returned. That's the sense that I have any importance whatsoever has never returned. I don't.

Okay? Trying to be important, trying to to have a certain image, trying to have millions of followers who can be an influencer, all of this is hollow and doomed, I believe. And I think part of the distemper of the age, part of the uneasiness of the age is that I think all these things are filling trying to fill a hollow, an emptiness that has been left behind by what you were talking about, which is the decline of religion, the decline of community, even the decline of family. Completely agree with you. But isn't there a little bit of a catch 22?

These values that you talk about, and I know we've talked in the past, a lot of your values came from your parents. When you go all the way back to where the head came off the act, it really is what is the institution teaching these values? Whether or not it's public schools, whether or not it's religious institutions, whether or not it's colleges. You know, you hear people on the right today saying that the colleges which were, quote, founded originally with Protestant and religious values and sacrifice and this whole notion of Prescott Bush doing for others and all that that came from religion, that's kind of been thrown out and we're left in this kind of secular world where it's science and it's getting what you can and it's materialism. How do we teach these values?

Yeah. I mean, I guess if I knew that, I would either be a trillionaire because I've sold a really good bill of goods or some kind of profit in the wilderness, you know, preaching to the lonely. I don't have a really great answer. I'm not gonna a BSU. I don't have a really great answer.

But I think not talking about it is the wrong way to be. I I think identifying what the questions are, what the sore spots are, the pain points are. I think that's the first way the first step to get into, so what do we do next? And I think the pain points are we have we're not having children. We're not getting married.

We are not religious anymore by and large. We still are some, but not as much as we used to be. And we move around so much that the sense of community is basically community is some kind of thing will have to do with the the laptop. Right? So that happens to you with on your you have a community on your laptop with the digital world.

That's not really community. Okay? We have to focus, I think, on on the world we live in. I think part of what we need to do is mind ourselves to live in the real world more than we do in the digital world. The digital world is wonderful, by the way.

I I am not a critic of the web. I just think we need to know how to use it. And living there forever, you know, I forget what the average number of hours for the younger generation of the Zoomer is. So they they spend, like, ten hours a day online. Right?

Most of the time, by the way, alone. So, I mean, that's not a human life. That's just some kind of sad thing. We have to regain control over flesh and blood bodies, and then we have to insert those into the web because part of what the web happens is we don't we're not you can call me any name you even in this moment when I can see your face and you can see mine. You can call me any kind of name.

You can call my mother any kind of name. You know, I can't touch you. I can't touch you. We're kinda talking as if we're together, but we're not together. The person I am right here is not me.

It's some kind of very faint copy of me. And I think we need to embody the Internet a lot more. And it's not gonna be easy, but I think it can be done. So we're gonna get our information from the Internet. You say it can be done.

Does that require rules and laws passed that make it illegal to do things? How would you change our relationship with the Internet? How do we take it to the next level? I mean, one of the things that drives you great laws, no. Never.

Okay. I come from Cuba. Don't do that. Alright. Don't mess with what people are allowed to see.

That never works. That is being done right now, as you know, from Twitter files. Don't do it. Stop doing it. But what you need is to teach people how to parse information.

It is remarkable to me how naive we are when it comes to information. We just oh, is it true or is it false? Is it good or is it bad? I mean, Andrei Mier, who wrote the book Post Journalism, which I recommend to anybody who's listening to this, says fake news, for example, is always very interesting. And the most interesting part of fake news is the fake part.

Because if I'm trying to tell you something straightforwardly and I make a mistake or kind of, you know, spin or whatever, that's one thing. If I'm trying to consciously lie, that's a really good analytic question. Why is that happening? Who's doing this? Who is behind this?

What's the intent? Did it reach what's the audience intended audience? Did it reach that audience? Did it achieve the intent? I mean, there are all kinds of analytic questions that can be asked about information that is palpably BS.

Alright? So you learn not to ask, is it true? Is it false? Is it my people or their people? You learn to ask, who is this?

Who's behind who is the voice that's speaking? Who is the power or the money behind that voice? What does that all represent in terms of what they might be trying to persuade? Every human speech act is an act of persuasion. Alright?

I'm trying to even if it's just, you know, I'm gonna persuade you, then I'm a charming guy or whatever. You know? Every human speech act. So what are they trying to persuade us of? What's the ask?

You know, where's the ask? And why are they doing it? Is it why are they lying? Why are they giving a certain evidence that's actually true, certain evidence that is probably, you know, wrong or bad? And you then form a map of information in your head.

And when you receive information, you parse it to the map, and you are an adult. You're not at the mercy of looking at things very literally. You're making judgments on it as you go along. That's what we did at CIA, of course. It all it's all born in propaganda analysis, but it drives me kinda crazy that we don't teach your kids this.

We talk about critical thinking, dah dah dah. It's not that. It's not critical thinking. It's understanding information, understanding the human dimension of information. The fact that somebody's always trying to get you to do something.

And what is that, first of all? Sometimes it's, you know, you had the, the Mastercard commercials where there was the the dad at the ballgame with his son or something. Well, that had nothing to do with with a credit card. Right? But that's what they were trying to get you to do, associate Mastercard with some all American dad son moment.

So it may not be the thing that they're asking. It may not be what they're talking about. So you have to kinda penetrate a little bit into that. But this can be done. It's not really terribly complex.

It's just asking a set of questions. Okay. So, again, asking a set of questions. It still takes work and effort. How do we motivate people who are not used to doing the work?

You went to work for the CIA. You loved doing the research. You jumped into doing the research. You wrote a book. You asked questions.

How do we motivate people to do that? How do we motivate people to ask those questions? Well, I would put it this way. Do you wanna understand what, you know, this tsunami or this any piece of information? This doesn't even have to be a tsunami.

Right? Do you want to understand information or do you not want to understand information? We should not have to motivate anybody to want to understand information. If they don't want to understand it, there's nothing we can do to help. But if they do want to understand it and they think the right questions to ask is, is this true or false?

Is this a Democrat or a Republican writing? Because I know which one of them I like. Then we can say, well, those are the wrong questions. You need to ask a different set of questions. And then you can ask your own questions if you want to once you have understood what the information is that's before you.

Well, I do think and I'm gonna push back a little. I do think people some people like to ask questions. Yeah. But I think Tony Robbins used to talk about the people are motivated by pain or pleasure. And so, I wonder if part of reframing this is, you go back and you talk about democracy.

You talk about that it's a little at risk because we've got this very angry public and a low trust with the elites. Perhaps one of the ways we get people to ask questions and do more work is a little bit of fear, which is if we, the people, don't get more involved in asking the tough questions and setting the agenda, this is going to end in a bad way. And yet if we do ask the right questions and if we do demand more of ourselves and ultimately get the government we deserve, that we can kind of right the ship, so to speak, avoid the iceberg. And so how would we message this in a way where we don't terrify people, but we do encourage them to get more involved in their democracy? Yeah.

I mean, again, that's that's a huge question, and and I'm not sure that I have the answer. I do think one thing we have to regain is the idea that we can reform ourselves. We can reconfigure our government. I mean, I I think the the constitutional framework we have is magnificent. And compared to any other countries, it has stood the test of time.

Right? But if you look at the reality of it, the framers came up with this kind of, gentleman's republic. It was very egalitarian if you were a gentleman. Alright? But it left out a whole bunch of people.

And somewhere in the late nineteenth century and then the the first, like, third of the twentieth century, that government was redone, completely redone to fit the industrial age, to fit mass movement, to fit the fact that there was there were tens of millions of voters and Americans who had now entered history. They were affluent. They were educated. They had opinions, whereas before they had not. And so these mass movements were created, including the political parties as they are today, very hierarchical, the old pyramids.

And the system worked through the twentieth century. Until the digital era, until that tsunami came, it was working fine. The problem is it doesn't work anymore. And we now need to do the same thing that the progressives and others did around the turn of the twentieth century in our own time. We need to reconfigure government to the digital age.

In many ways, the industrial age democracy was very undemocratic. Pyramids are not democratic structures. Okay? So and in many ways, the digital can be it hasn't been so far, but it can be democratic or at least flat so that people are in closer proximity to their rulers and their representatives. So there is no reason why we cannot reform our system and reconfigure our government to take into account the digital tools that will drain some of that distrust because everything will be much more reachable by the public, much more distant.

Those are the things the public is part of the when you look at the revolts, one of the themes that that comes out again and again and again is distance. Distance. I elect you to be my representative. You're just Joe Blow. You were just like me, and and you go to Washington.

And suddenly your your suit gets a lot fancier, your words get a lot stranger, and you're talking to the other people, and you here I am, and you're not talking to me anymore. You have disappeared in this cosmic distance of the elites. Right? So if you can, through the digital, lower that distance, where the the the digital does it naturally, you will be draining a lot of the distrust. How that could be done?

Oh, my gosh. I wish I could tell you, but it's possible. So when you say it's possible, you're talking about using this technology as a tool to bring government closer to the people. Yeah. Can you give me some examples of things you've seen where these tools have brought people together?

Unfortunately, things you see are not the best examples. I mean, the fact that Trump was such a, Twitter lion, you know, or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, same, you know, that these are people who let you into a little bit into the their own proximity in a way that the old elites, you know, which were standoffish. But you can see just speculatively, for example, the political parties are dying. They're dying because they're so controlling and so out of touch with what the actual public is interested in that people are just gonna, like, opting out. Well, I mean, how about something like Reddit?

Reddit has this thing where people vote the issues that they find to be most interesting. It's not you or me or the chairman of the party or whatever that decides on those issues. It's the majority of the faithful of that group. Right? I mean, why couldn't the Republican Democratic Party be the equivalent of Reddit?

And then, yeah, at the end, you need elites. Elites can't be dispensed with. And but at least they will have a conversation, you know, rather than saying no. The important topic is global warming, and somebody will say, yeah. But what about unemployment?

How about inflation? This is a dialogue of the deaf. At least it would be a way in which if you're a smart politician, you know, this is what the public is talking about. And a democracy, you would think there would be somebody who rides that to victory. So there are ways in which you can turn the digital to proximity.

So there's two issues. There's having more direct democracy, that's one approach. But I think you're also saying that politicians who are using these platforms can use them as tools for communicating in a positive way. It doesn't have to be a negative way. And I guess the challenge there is that we found from algorithms and otherwise that people react more to fear than they do to hope.

And so it is again coming back to the individual where you have an inspirational person using Twitter or otherwise that is speaking truth. And then it's up to us, it sounds like, to be responsible and to run with that. How do we educate people enough so that they are retweeting these positive messages as opposed to retweeting the messages that scare you? How do we get people to focus on the positive and not the negative? Yeah.

I I think that's actually a universal question of the of the modern world. In general, long before the Internet, and media, if it bleeds, it leads. Right? So disaster and war and all kinds of bad things lead the news always or almost always. So I don't know if you can change that because, as you say, it's kind of human nature.

But I think, again, if you are able to parse information in a sensible way, if you if you're able to ask the right question about information, you will just kind of, like, weed out a lot, Weed out a lot. I mean, I tell people people people talk to me, what news do you watch? And I I tell them, you know, I'm supposed to be an expert on media, so I watch some news. But if it were to me, I wouldn't watch the news. The news is is terrible.

It's all if it bleeds, it leads. And partisan yelling and whatnot. I don't absolutely don't think that that is a necessary part of the intellectual diet of a democratic citizen. I think you can you can be a better citizen by staying away from the news, honestly. But you have to know you you could read books.

Alright? And then when you look at information, generally, you have to know what questions to ask. Yeah. I think what you're saying is that in the same way that individuals go through a maturation process and things are fed to them, there is Santa Claus, there is an Easter bunny, but then they ultimately have to wake up and learn to do the work and determine fruit truth for themselves. It sounds like what you're saying is that America, you know, is going through a similar maturation process and that we have to, as a people that are voting, we have to grow up and actually start doing that work.

And if the news is not accurate, we need to go out and roll up our sleeves and discover that truth. And in that regard, you have a blog, The Fifth Wave. Tell us a little bit about that. And in your own way, are you trying to give people an ability to find the truth? I mean, I would hate to put myself up that high.

I feel like I have a few insights, and I have come up both because of my background and honestly because of my temperament. I see things a little askew, and sometimes you see them clearly that more clearly that way. My aspirations are very humble. I I believe in democracy. I I come from a country that has not been democratic for, like, seven years, and I believe democracy in its worst, most dysfunctional phase is infinitely superior to the most effective dictatorship.

Okay? So I am trying in my own meager way to push that, the idea that we when we're in this, honestly, we're on in this moment of tremendous transformation. The Internet is the equivalent of the printing press, and that was a tremendous transformation. This is a process that's gonna go on for many, many years. I'm not gonna see the end of it.

Okay? And it's gonna be turbulent and, you know, put on your seat belts. But my hope is, and what I hope to contribute to, is that at the other end of this process, democracy and the things that we value are still there and maybe better. Martin, I think that's a great way to come to the end here because from my perspective, we have to be role models to younger people and let people know that these challenges that we face are things that we can overcome. And that the youthful energy that helped elect John Kennedy, that when you couple that with wisdom and realizing that there is something to look forward to and that we do have this opportunity to transform this darkness, we can come together as a more perfect union and make the world a better place.

So I applaud you for the things you're doing. It does begin with the individual, and I urge you to seek out people like Martin. Listen to what he's saying. Recognize there is hope that we can overturn this. That there is incredible opportunity.

But just like with the printing press, this new digital age we have is initially overwhelming because we're adjusting to it. Yeah. But that there is hope if we do the work. I think that's really what you're saying. Yes.

And I and, again, I can't emphasize more strongly that then we at our worst and we're pretty psychotic right now. I would I'll be the first one to underline that. We at our worst are so much better than so many other places on Earth. There's a reason why we at our worst are basically pushing people out or keeping people away that want to be here because we, at our worst, are pretty damn good. We are we're worse a country that has a lot of freedom, a a lot of affluence, a lot of tolerance even.

Okay? I mean, that doesn't come across on the Internet so much, but, you know, I I'm I'm I'm I was an immigrant. I made my way through when I landed this country, I couldn't speak English. You know? Nobody ever made fun of me.

Nobody ever mistreated me. Country compared to what, is my question always. Yeah. And I think we have to be respectful because not everybody had your experience. True.

There are people in the African American community, in the gay community, in the different minority communities that have really, really suffered in this country. But I think you make an incredible point, which is the world's not black and white. The reality is far more people are moving to America than leaving America. And when you look at our country, we're the worst country in the world until you look at the alternatives. And as you said, democracy is worth fighting for to not minimize the pain that minorities in this country, whether or not it's the transgender movement, have experienced.

But lean into the fact that if this is a country where even though we have challenges, we roll up our sleeves, we work together to overcome them, and let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yeah. And I mean, again, have being an old person helps. Yeah. There has been a lot of past suffering.

No no nation is without sin, same as no human being is without sin. We have ours. I'd like to think that we paid for them in blood, many of them. But, I mean, when I landed in Virginia a hundred years ago, this was Jim Crow. This is where I live now.

This was Jim Crow. I mean, literally Jim Crow. My high school desegregated when I was a sophomore. So you have no idea. North Virginia today is like the United Nations.

It goes beyond white and black. It's like my daughter I mean, her friends were, like, from 12 different, you know, ancestry. They were all American born, but it was like, yeah. Well, of course. You know?

So, yes, I grant you, there was suffering. The amount of suffering today, you have to show it to me before give me an instance. Give me a case. Don't make a generalization that people suffer because we live in a very generous and tolerant moment in that respect, I think, compared to, for example, Virginia back when I showed up where, you know, you were black and you were literally put in little ghettos that nobody served and in a very affluent middle class area. It suddenly had this country enclave, which was where the black people lived.

You know? The the streets weren't paved. The houses looked like huts. There were donkeys. You know?

I mean, I saw this. That was bad. Okay. That was bad. We are way past that.

Yeah. And, Marlon, I I agree with you. But I also think in a world of this digital stuff you're talking about, when you look at videos like of George Floyd floating around and you and young people are seeing these things and they're horrified Or you hear about what happened in Tennessee where they're, you know, banning legislatures. The reality is that being a gay person in the South in certain areas is not such an easy thing. It's one thing in San Francisco or Los Angeles.

So I agree with you, and this is the key for us as older people. It has gotten a lot better, but we still have work to do. And I think it's finding that balance that's so important. And as an immigrant, I completely agree with you that wait a second. This is a heck of a lot better than going to Cuba or China or any of these other countries.

But people have to be heard here because not everybody, for instance, has access to the American dream. It's much harder to buy a house today than it used to be. Our middle class has really been hurt, and then we've left a lot of people where housing has doubled in price, health care has doubled in price. And so there are real college. There are real challenges today that I think we have to lean into because if we minimize those challenges, we lose that youthful energy.

And so it's that fine balance of, yes, we have incredible amount to be grateful for, but let's also not leave people behind. Oh, yeah. I I mean, balance is the thing. Are we living in perfection? Hell no.

And that is, if you're a young person, that is good. Because if we were living in perfection, you know, you'd be told do exactly as I do. Right? So you don't want the young to do as you do. You want them to do better.

Right. Right? So my one thing is balance, what you said. Don't compare the problems we have against perfection. In other words, don't say all those issues about people being left out.

Okay. If it were against a perfect world, that has never existed. Weigh that against what it has been or what is in some other area, the other country of the world, and tell me how do we compare. And then let's figure out how to make it better. Terrific.

I completely agree. Great. The POC Venture Capital and Beyond is produced by CMVG Advisors. If you enjoyed the conversation today and haven't yet subscribed to our show, you can find us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Feel free to leave a review while you are there and maybe even a five star rating.

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