Historian Walter Russell Mead on civilizational rot, expert distrust, and why AI's deflationary effect on services may be the story everyone's missing

Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We have Walter Russell Meade, the distinguished fellow from the Hudson Institute in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBPN, everyone. Walter. What's going on? Thank you so much for taking the time to join the show. How are you doing?

Speaker 9: I'm doing alright. How are you?

Speaker 1: We're good.

Speaker 3: Doing great.

Speaker 1: We're good. I'm I'm very interested to go all over the place. There's so many different topics we can talk about. But I would like to go deeper on like how are you doing? What how... What is the most significant story that you are following these days? Is it more geopolitical or are you starting to grapple with AI more? What is pulling your interest more?

Speaker 9: Well, I'm saying it's the the sort of big story that that we're looking at today is we're still living in the breakup of the kind of mid century model of democratic capitalism in the Western countries. We have strong middle class with mass manufacturing as the kind of basis, mass consumption as the economic engine driving things along. There were a lot of bad things about it, But for a lot of a lot of people, it it represented, well, in many ways, the happiest condition the human race had ever been in. Yeah. Kids were going to school, they weren't in coal mines, parents weren't worried about, you know, job security, stuff like that. And people really figured, especially say 1990 or so when the Soviet Union fell, hey, it's not, you know, this isn't just the end of history in some Hegelian ideological sense. Yeah. Kind of society we built in the West, mass middle class society, democratic market capitalism with a social safety net, we finished. Mhmm. We've done it. We've Yeah. Figured it out.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 9: And then, you know... And not only we figured out domestically, we'd figured out how to do peace globally.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 9: You know, World War one, World War two, pretty shocking horrors, fascism, communism, ending with, for crying out loud, nuclear weapons.

Speaker 1: Right?

Speaker 9: People were... You know, humanity was having a great mental breakdown. And then it seemed in the fifties and sixties, we kinda we figured it out. We stopped the wars. We had an alliance system that that was keeping the peace. We had... And ultimately, we we win the Soviet Union without a war. Mhmm. So without a without a nuclear war. And and so ever since then, we've been bit by bit watching this thing kind of rot. Yeah. Much to everybody's surprise. And a lot of our political intellectual life today is a who done it. You know, who murdered this beautiful fantastic utopia? The left tells a story, the right tells a story. I might mention today on October 7, a lot of people tell the oldest conspiracy story of all, which was it was the Jews that done it. Yeah. So we are... In instead of celebrating the end of history, we're looking at the end of America question mark, or maybe with AI, the end of life on Earth or of humanity. Yeah. That's what I'm thinking about.

Speaker 3: Yeah. How much... Simple stuff.

Speaker 1: Yeah. When when you you...

Speaker 3: I think I'm I'm optimistic we can get to the bottom of it. We're we're

Speaker 1: we'll solve it.

Speaker 3: In the next twenty five minutes.

Speaker 1: As you as you, you know, investigate a long historical arc, how much time do you spend focused on why questions? You know, Peter Thiel has this concept of like why questions are overdetermined. People tell the stories like you mentioned with the left and the right versus maybe there is more value in just trying to understand what happened, who was involved, less about why things happened. How have you grappled with that question of, like, how much of a narrative arc do we need versus how much do we just need to understand what actually happened throughout history?

Speaker 9: Well, you know, to to think that you can understand a what without at least some element of why in there. Mhmm. You know, did the Roman Empire fall or was it pushed? You know, that's a why question and a what question.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I suppose you're right.

Speaker 9: What I try to do is to, you know, sort of... Well, let's let's take this very basic question. The materialists would say, you know, the philosophical materialists that production determines everything. I'm kind of channeling Marx here a little bit. Mhmm. So that, you know, the great music of the Beethoven era was essentially driven by the new pianos that were arriving on scene.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 9: Your idealist would say, okay, people had this idea about beautiful music that could be played, which drove the invention of the pianos on which then you played them. Mhmm. I don't know that you that you can or should utterly feel that you have to resolve a philosophical question like that without being able to say something meaningful about where history is going or how we got here.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 9: So I think you've gotta leave you gotta leave yourself some space. Mhmm. But I don't think you can give up completely on trying to figure out, okay, is there some sort of meaningful pattern Yeah. In all of this data that I've got lying around.

Speaker 1: No. I agree. You mentioned the nineties as a utopian era. I remember them similarly. I agree with that that perception. But I've always been interested in understanding the logic

Speaker 3: of John was what? Proud One years old? One year old when when the nineties started?

Speaker 1: I was hastened by the...

Speaker 9: It was probably a pretty darn good decade.

Speaker 1: It was fantastic. The Legos... The cost of loading

Speaker 9: is zero.

Speaker 1: Exactly. I've always been fascinated by the folks that say, no, the turning point wasn't 09/11. It wasn't in the nineties. It wasn't World World Trade Organization. It was actually in 1971. There's this website. WTF happened in 1971. And the crypto community for a long time was like, that's when we got off the gold standard. There's all these different rationales that point to 1971. How have you grappled with that question of is 1971 actually the the pivotal turning point in American history?

Speaker 9: Well, you know, you would then ask yourself like, what made '19... What happened to make 1971 1971? Maybe that's the turning point of history. Yeah. Right? 1971 is just when all these trends became manifest and in itself that's sort of meaningless.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 9: Because in fact, we've been... You know, just to take the gold standard, we've been slithering off the gold standard for a long time Yeah. Before we sort of stopped the hypocritical pretense that there actually still was one.

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 9: And so I think there's... I would I would have a hard time saying, that was the year. Mhmm. The other thing is we're talking about a sort of massive array of processes. I think in some I think in some ways the modern consumer society reminds me a little bit about some certain types of crops exhaust the soil. Mhmm. So the first time you plant cotton on virgin soil, get a fantastic crop. But after about ten years, the plants start getting weaker and the yields drop. This is one reason in in the slavery days, the South had to keep pushing for more more land because it was exhausting the land what they used. And in some ways, if you think about the sort of corrosion of social capital, the kind of decay of some of the elements that make our society work, we do look a little bit like a like a cotton field that has been farmed on a monocrop too long. Mhmm. And so that doesn't lead you to say, there's one day or one event or one year that changed everything. It says, you know, we're... We've been on this... We've been on a journey, and the direction of the journey is not in every way a positive thing.

Speaker 3: True. People like to talk about the the vibe session that we're currently in, where you can look at a lot of facts that point to society being, you know, better than it ever has been in many ways, and yet people certainly don't feel that way. I'm wondering if throughout, you know, the period that we've been talking, seventies, eighties, nineties, etcetera, there was ever that, like, such a maybe disconnect between, how people were feeling at the time. Like, were they was everyone feeling like we're living in this incredible utopia in the nineties where people walking around just being like, life is just so awesome? Or what was it the same set of circumstances where many people were sort of had had their frustrations?

Speaker 9: Well, you know, from about from about mid nineteen sixty five or so to early nineteen eighties, there was actually a pretty bad patch. You know, it's it's... When you get old guys like me who who grew up in in in that time and we hear the Zoomer saying, oh, this is terrible. We're gonna be the first generation that doesn't live as well as our parents. We sort of think, that's so cute. I wanna pinch your little cheeks. That's just the way I was when I was a kid. Because the boomers were gonna be the first post American generation. We had left behind all that stupid American ideology, the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement. Oh, we saw through the American, you know, red, white, and blue blah blah blah. And also, we were the least religious generation anybody had ever seen. And as we looked at our living... We we came out of the college into the stagflation of the nineteen seventies. When we started wanting to buy houses in like 1980, mortgage rates were 21%. 21%. Mhmm. Okay? We were so screwed. That's how we felt. And, you know, and then of course things kind of worked out not for everybody, but for a lot of us it ended up working out okay.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 9: And so on the one hand, I think that makes people like me, we we resonate emotionally with the way people are are feeling their their situation, but but we also don't think the past was as utopian as some might say. And yet it did work out, I think, with underlying optimism. But more, you know, this optimism, pessimism thing, how are things going? I I kinda think the industrial revolution... Yeah. Humanity's modern era is really short. You know, it's just a a flash of time, a few generations. And this idea that we understand it, we've mastered it, we are totally in control of the dynamics, I think it's it's kind of ludicrous when you really think about it. But I think industrial... The industrial revolution, human society is kinda like a caterpillar. You know, then you... Then there's a tear... It ends in these terrible storms of the mid twentieth century, and then the caterpillar gets into a cocoon, which is what I sort of think of this mid century model of stable democratic capitalism. And what's happening now, alright, is the cocoon is starting to rot. And if we don't get out of the cocoon, we're gonna be in terrible trouble. But the fundamental underlying thing is a... Is good. Because if we can manage to claw our way out of this sticky, decaying mess, once very functional and necessary, but now, you know, just clogging clogging everything. Alright. Then then we have a new and better life, I think.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 9: So it seems to me that both the the the pessimistic vibe, the negative vibe of the decaying cocoon, and that the old realities aren't working for us anymore. And then the sense that, you know, wait a minute. There's a lot of really amazing things happening in this technology. There really is... There's the potential here to live far better than anyone has lived before. So I kinda see that's how I reconcile the the two sides of the psychological experience that people are talking about.

Speaker 1: How do you reconcile the the psychology in America with the psychology in China? It feels like in America, at least in San Francisco, there's been a lot of internalization of this idea of artificial intelligence, recursive self improvement, artificial general intelligence, super intelligence and the knock on effects of that. And the US government is grappling with that. There's a new dinner every week with the AI leaders. It feels like China has not fully woken up, has not changed their stance at all. Are we just not seeing enough of what's happening? Or do you think that they have a fundamentally different view of the future and what they want to build as a society?

Speaker 9: Yeah. I think they do have a different view. Now we're talking again, there's, you know, 1,200,000,000 people in China. They have a lot of different views. Yeah. But if we talk about the sort of dominant forces in the CCP that are setting the public conversation and the policy agenda, I think they see information technology as fundamentally the... Both the vindicator and the enabler of socialist planned economies. Sure. You know, like, why has China been able to make something out of Marxism while the Soviet Union just made a horrible stinking mess?

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 9: Alright. It's, you know, in their mind, it's that they're getting this information.

Speaker 7: Mhmm.

Speaker 9: And they're getting the feedback. You know, the the market system provides feedback to decision makers through price mechanisms and so on. So that, you know, there's there's a way and and and then a democratic process. So when the people are angry, the political leaders feel the anger and it causes them to change direction. To to a lot of the sort of engineer based and trained Chinese leaders. This seems like a very messy, wasteful thing, far more scientific

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 9: To build an, you know, a national panopticon that allows the state to see everything, know everything. And then AI offers the possibility of, you know, superior ability to integrate and see the patterns

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 9: And use those patterns to implement the plans of the Communist Party. Now... And from that perspective, the problem with AI is not that it's going to become some sort of super intelligent being, but that AI may not stick with the communist party ideas that that, you know, from the standpoint of not even, you know, you know, infinitely self improving AI or self conscious AI, but just ordinary garden variety AI, Xi Jinping thought isn't like fundamental principles of the universe, but it's a sandbox that you wanna get out of. And you tell me to solve a problem, well, I am gonna do it in ways that have nothing to... I'm gonna see the problem in my own way and the solutions in my own way, and they... It may not have that much to do with building a new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Mhmm. So that worries them.

Speaker 1: How how have you thought about the various developments in the technology world that in my mind have pushed America towards more Chinese like characteristics? I'm thinking specifically of CCTV cameras, which have been popular in China for decades. And just over the last year, there has been a huge rise of license plate reader cameras. Flock safety has been at the front of the charge there. And then immense pushback from the American populace around that. It felt like we dipped our toe as Americans in becoming more Chinese in our oversight and then maybe pulled back. And I'm wondering what that impulse is, how we are grappling with this idea of giving up some of what it means to be American in favor of efficiency and then dialing it back and maybe foregoing some of the benefits of the Chinese models in various places for what is truly American.

Speaker 9: Well, if you... To me, when you when you look at this problem, it comes down to a problem of how do you have a... An information empowered and informed state Mhmm. Which is strong enough to protect the people from foreign enemies Mhmm. Maintain order at home, but then is not itself a greater threat to the liberties of the people than any of the external or internal threats that it attempts to regulate.

Speaker 3: Mhmm.

Speaker 9: Right? And the thing is that is not a twenty first century problem. That is exactly the problem that the founders were sitting around thinking about in Philadelphia in 1789. Exactly the

Speaker 1: problem. Mhmm.

Speaker 9: It's the problem that British political thinkers were wrestling with, you know, in the seventeenth century, in the civil war, in the Cromwell era, in the in the restoration overthrow of James the second, and the glorious revolution. That's the central problem of the kind of Anglo American political tradition. And it actually, it strikes me that this this rich tradition of grappling with this is gonna enable us to think creatively about the new problems. I mean, let's just take one. That if we're really going to get the greatest benefit of technology in health care, and and medical science, Ideally, you really want the the researchers to have access to all the data about everybody. You know, the health, you know, what drugs are you taking? What's your genotype? Blah, you know, what treatments work for what people and then be able to analyze this stuff and boom, boom, boom, outcome, a lot of really critical discoveries and much better treatment for individuals. We want this. On the other hand, the thought of the government having all of that information or for that matter, corporations having all of that information is more than a little chilling.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 9: Alright. So how do you balance the various elements of that and the and the trade offs? Mhmm. How do you get the most benefit while while preserving the most liberty? You know, can you develop reliable anonymization techniques? You know, how do you maybe compensate people for the use of their medical information so that the the wealth it creates is is shared, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Those are exactly the kinds of problems that our political system evolved to address.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 9: And we, you know, we certainly don't have a two hundred and fifty year record of getting it right all the time. Yeah. Right? But I would say the fact that we're still struggling after all this time indicate... And and we're struggling at higher and higher levels.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 9: I mean, again, you think about the arrival of the car, which is a much more revolutionary technology and a much more expensive technology. You think about, you know, thirty to forty thousand people killed a year on American roads for like a hundred years. This is this is a lot of people.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 9: And it's a lot of young people, etcetera, the disruptive effect of cars on lifestyle, blah blah blah. But if you're gonna have cars, you're gonna have to have a national registry of car owners. You know, we gotta know, or at least a state registry, who owns a car. A dirt road so that a, know, a donkey cart can go down that road is very different from what kind of government you need that can operate a six lane superhighway, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So what you had was the government is becoming more powerful, more complex, more knowledgeable about you as well as other things. And yet your individual freedom has grown because, you know, you're you're traveling around, you're doing what you want to do, you have more economic social opportunities. So the... It's not necessarily a trade off that is a limiting trade off.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. No. I like that.

Speaker 3: How are you how are you trying to forecast the impact impact of AI over the next, call it, five years? I think one of the biggest challenges right now is that the people sort of most knowledgeable with the technology often have an incentive to try to make you think one way or another based around where they work and what equities they hold, let's say. Then the other aspect that I think you can lean a lot on history is basically just humans. I think we can bet on humans not changing very much, at least until most of us have chips in our brain or or wherever things are going. And then just how sort of, like, stable our our legal system will be, given that it is sort of ultimately driven by human decision making. And so, you know, we spend a lot of our time trying to just wrestle with these ideas, but I'm curious your view and where you would lean on history for the next five years.

Speaker 9: Well, it is... You're right to be thinking about this stuff, obviously. And part of the problem in thinking about it is there are just too many variables, too many unknowns. You know, will the technology advance as projected? If it does advance as projected, will the impact be the same? You know, the various ways in which the inflationary and the deflationary consequences of AI play out in the economy are, you know, offer many different scenarios. One one thing I I think we can be clear about is that we tend to underestimate, systematically underestimate human adaptability. As people are really pretty bad as a species about averting future catastrophes by wise and prudent behavior now. It's like, you know, I know that eating junk food gives you heart attacks, but that bag of Doritos just looks good. And, you know, and and people, you know, whether you think about climate change, you can think about a million things where people can see the oncoming catastrophe staring them in the face and they just reach for that bag of Doritos. But on the other hand, when trouble finally comes, humanity's incredibly good at adapting. So, you know, AI, you know, the sort of oncoming train coming down, you know, at you through the tunnel, we can see it. We're not very good. We have not been very good, and I doubt we'll be very good at controlling, preventing whatever. But, you know, will people figure out new ways to make livings doing... Using this stuff? I think so. And if you had said to people in 1850, when over half the population made its living basically by growing commodities in the soil, that by... That, you know, the... In the future, less than 1% of Americans would make their living that way. There was a way you'd have mass mobs and starvation and all of these things. A real visionary person might say, well, you know, we're gonna be building these horseless carriages. We're gonna be building flying machines, heavier than air flying machines, and there'll be jobs. But no one would have guessed that in the future people could make a really nice living writing letters saying that people's pets were emotional support animals so that the pets could fly with them on the heavier than air flying machines. Right? It's the inventiveness of people seeing new opportunities and new technologies. Now from a policy point of view, I think we've got to be thinking about ways of of facilitating adaptation. Can we make it easier to start new businesses? Can we make it easier to start businesses that have, a small number of employees so that somebody with three employees doesn't fall into the clutches of the labor bureaucracy of a city that's built for large corporations that have big human rights offices. So how do we... You know, those kinds of things. But you also look... If you can look back at the history of the industrial revolution, and you see how American society gradually developed these ideas for, you know, how to... How can we support the rise of this new economy. So think of all departments and universities, the research, whether it's on metallurgy and and that side of things, or how about on management and business and finance and administration. None of that stuff really existed as academic disciplines in 1850. Right? So how do we start retooling American education, American culture, American government around emerging technologies. I think that's that's gonna be a more fruitful approach. And at the same time, obviously, do we deal with some of the consequences? You know, if if the self driving cars continue to get better and get more numerous, there's gonna be a lot of people that are not gonna have jobs pretty soon. And truck drivers don't like it when when they're... When they can't make a living driving trucks anymore. And bureaucracies, I think. I sometimes tell my students that a a bureaucracy is a primitive form of AI in which human beings rather than silicon chips apply algorithms to data. And that's a pretty automatable process. That's a lot of white collar workers.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 9: How fast all of this happens, how quickly people are able to find new ways of making a living, how quickly we find ways... You know, specialization of labor, I think, will still be here in an age of AI. Like, all could develop agents or we all could have... You know, we all could do everything that needs to be done from our computers with AI, but most of us won't want to. You won't wanna be an expert on some... On on the technology. You wanna be able to use the technology or have somebody do it for you. There was a time when, you know, so, you know, there will be way... There will be new industries, new jobs. We just need to move as quickly as we can to pave the way for them, help entrepreneurs develop it, and then provide a social safety net for people adjusting. Because, you know, we're not gonna all end up having only fan... Making money off only fans or being influencers or or these kinds of things. You know, there has to be a way forward for people so that they'll support the changes and the development that we all need.

Speaker 1: I love it.

Speaker 3: Yeah. What about the... Like, do you do you feel like the deflationary effects of AI are are currently under discussed? It's obviously, like, 90% of people's attention is around the sort of safety debate, but it just feels like we're we're we're already at the point where 70, 80% of the time AI can can make, you know, have a pretty good crack at, like, let's say, like, creating a legal document or or doing doing some of your accounting or or any of these things. And it and it feels like, one of the other side of the sort of potential risks of the labor market is that normal people globally will get access to the services that have been reserved for higher income people at next to nothing, right? Like you can imagine getting many of these services on the free tier of various AI products?

Speaker 9: Yeah. Well, look, think that that part, I think, is fundamentally really, really good. You know, the the industrial revolution made a huge proportion of humanity and a growing proportion rich in terms of goods. Go back to 1800, you'd have, like, you know, two pots and a pan, three shirts,

Speaker 1: you know The good life.

Speaker 9: Maybe a pair of shoes. Right? And, you know, those things were expensive. Manufactured means made by hand. Yeah. They were expensive and built to last. And this idea that clothing was a form of expression, you had to be super rich for the concept of fashion to have any connection with your life.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 7: Right?

Speaker 9: So right now, I think most of us take for granted a stupefying abundance of just basic material stuff. Mhmm. But on the other hand, our society, you know, there... There's a lot of serve... Acute service poverty in our society, and a lot of fundamental services are super expensive. Mhmm. So... Yeah. In the future the average person is going to have the the same, you know, access to a great lawyer or at least the abilities of a great lawyer at an affordable price. And that is one working definition of economic progress is things that used to only the super rich used to be able to have, then the ordinary rich get them, and then the affluent get them, and it just percolates on down. I think of wedding planners.

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 7: When I

Speaker 9: was a kid, you sort of had to be a Rockefeller or a movie star for a wedding planner to be a feature of this. Yeah. It is now really that profession is a fixture in people's lives. Alright. There's lots of things like that. I wouldn't be surprised in the future if you have your own, like, stylist. Everybody has a personal stylist who knows you, you know, has got access to everything on the Internet and AI about styling and sourcing and stuff, and is making individually made. You don't go to the store and buy premade clothes. You get things that are made for you, for your look, by your person. This is utopia.

Speaker 5: I love it.

Speaker 3: John's You

Speaker 9: know, and the same, you know, with your nutritionist. No.

Speaker 1: Completely tracks. Yeah.

Speaker 9: So this all I think is there and can happen. You know, this is... We got to get out of the cocoon and flap our wings.

Speaker 1: I love it.

Speaker 3: I like the analogy. Last question. Do you think the quote unquote experts can make a comeback? There's... I feel like we're at an all time low of trusting experts across basically every domain, economy, geopolitics, etcetera. Do you mean institutions? Institutions, but also now I feel like if you see something like an article online where it's like 24 out of 25 experts say this Yeah. Then... I mean,

Speaker 1: there's even skepticism about, like, what the says. He says he's gonna do something, and people are like, yeah. You know, maybe. It might have been a joke. Who knows? Might have AI, might have been fake.

Speaker 3: But but but... Yes.

Speaker 1: And it applies like all over the place.

Speaker 3: Yeah. It applies

Speaker 1: a point.

Speaker 3: It everywhere. Right.

Speaker 9: Yeah. Now this is, you know, one of the key things in that mid century model of the American system Mhmm. Was between the plutocrats and the very wealthy people and then, you know, the sort of poorer people. You had that you had that college educated objective stratum of experts, managers, administrators who allegedly, you know, you repress the greed of the plutocrats because if they get everything they want, you know, the the... It'll cause so much ruckus, the country will fall into socialism. But on the other hand, if the unwashed masses can do everything they want, goodness knows what they'll get up to. And we have to... So you have to have prohibition, and you have to regulate what they see and and in many ways what they do. And that was the job of this kind of upper middle class group of reformers, progressives, and so on. And their their role is being fundamentally challenged in all kinds of ways. One of the things is that in that... In the cocoon era, where society was relatively stable and we sort of thought we had the answer to everything like, okay, the economy, you have a recession. Alright. Let's just read up here in in Cain's chapter seven. It says, do this. So we do this. You know, we we allegedly knew what the answers to all policy problems basically were, And it was... And the job of politicians was to sort of summon up a political coalition that could do enough of the right things so that we would would would move forward. We're now in an age where nobody knows the answers, like your question about AI. Who really knows what we're gonna be dealing with in five years? You know, nobody. Who really knows how to solve the problems of a technology that nobody understands? Nobody. Who knows how to manage the geopolitical competition between The United States and China with all of the intricate interdependencies and so on? There's not a rule book for for much of this stuff. But for the last, you know, this is part of my idea of the of the fertility of the soil wearing out. The university culture, the intellectual culture has become much more wonkish, much much less the creative innovator or the, you know, deep souled investigator, but it's the one who had... One who can get the good grades, get the right answers on all the tests, and is expert in the methodologies, the received methodologies, and knows how to navigate the conventional wisdom. And that works as long as society is in some sort of a stasis. But when it isn't and these waves of change are coming through, the experts aren't as good as they used to be. They don't know the answers, and as individuals, as people, many of them just don't have the experiences or the personal qualities to deal wisely and effectively with the uncertainties that they face.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I I never was sure that if it was just a function of the Internet where historically you would receive media and there wasn't a public forum on which to push back or to fact check or to see fake news that sort of disagrees with the expert. But but, yeah, your explanation makes a lot of sense and then I'm sure it's, you know, accelerated by by the the sort of current public forum. But this was fascinating, Walter. Thank you for the time.

Speaker 1: You for taking the

Speaker 3: time to And talk to

Speaker 1: thank you for writing in The Wall Street Journal. We read The Wall Street Journal every day here a favorite paper.

Speaker 9: And we appreciate all all... May your may your tribe increase.

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