If Books Could Kill - The World is Flat

00:00:00.000 Michael. Peter. What do you know about The World is Flat? Nothing. Not even enough to make a joke.

00:00:20.980 So I know the music kicked in, but like I'm not making a joke. I really know nothing about this

00:00:25.540 book. So I'm excited to talk about it. Well, what do you know about Thomas Friedman?

00:00:29.020 I know that he's a New York Times columnist. I know that a lot of people on the left like really dislike him. But I've never really known why. Like he's he's always been somebody who's been in the side mirror for me as someone who people like me talk about a lot. But like I've never really understood why. Right. He's how I regarded Taylor Swift until you told me about 1989. It's just like I don't know about this person.

00:00:55.380 There is no need to know about Thomas Friedman.

00:00:58.640 He doesn't add any value to the world in any meaningful way.

00:01:02.860 The background is actually relatively simple.

00:01:05.800 He made a name for himself covering the Lebanese Civil War in the late 70s.

00:01:11.220 The Times picks him up.

00:01:12.960 They dispatch him to Beirut for a bit.

00:01:14.980 He's covering the conflicts in the region.

00:01:17.360 He's winning Pulitzer Prizes.

00:01:19.700 and then in the 90s he sort of drifts his way over to the op-ed pages where he has remained

00:01:27.540 ever since but i think like the reason that he's so annoying is not just his ideology it's his

00:01:35.260 his style oh yeah malcolm gladwell was like an anecdote guy right he tells his anecdote and then

00:01:42.480 he follows it up with some data that we ended up thinking was maybe some cherry-picked data

00:01:47.600 freedman does the anecdote part and then just stops oh and then he starts speculating wildly

00:01:54.520 he could be like in a bodega in new york and if two guys walked in in sandals he would write a

00:02:02.100 column that starts with like in new york city no one wears shoes yeah that's the level of reasoning

00:02:09.080 that i was reading over and over again for 600 pages no way this book is 600 pages long

00:02:17.120 600 pages so let's dive into the book um he starts off on a golf course in india okay he's golfing

00:02:27.920 and he's looking around and he sees billboards for all sorts of like big western companies

00:02:33.840 ibm microsoft and he's like whoa i'm in india but there are signs for companies from america

00:02:43.620 and this is when he has his revelation about the globalizing world he goes on to compare his

00:02:50.900 journey to india to that of christopher columbus okay now i'm going to send you an abridged

00:02:58.040 quotation and i think this will give you a good sense of um how he writes and the sort of like

00:03:04.240 comparisons he likes to draw his his style you love you love sending vibe setters he says i had

00:03:11.600 come to Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, on my own Columbus-like journey of exploration.

00:03:17.380 Columbus sailed with the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in an effort to discover a shorter,

00:03:22.180 more direct route to India by heading west across the Atlantic on what he presumed to be an open

00:03:26.860 sea route to the East Indies. I set out for India by going due east via Frankfurt. I had Lufthansa

00:03:32.660 business class. I knew exactly which direction I was going thanks to the GPS map displayed on my

00:03:38.200 screen that popped out of the armrest of my airline seat. I too encountered people called

00:03:42.480 Indians. I too was searching for India's riches. Columbus was searching for hardware, precious

00:03:48.260 metals, silk, and spices, the sources of wealth in his day. I was searching for software, brain

00:03:54.180 power, complex algorithms, knowledge workers, call centers, transmission protocols, breakthroughs

00:03:59.440 in optical engineering, the sources of wealth in our day. Okay. So he's doing some like, it's a

00:04:06.180 land of contrasts like this is different in these really obvious ways right so this is like high

00:04:14.740 school term paper level observations yeah but also calling metals silk and spices hardware yeah and

00:04:23.340 then like workers and call centers are software for some reason i i don't quite what i love that

00:04:30.540 your brain is like fried from 600 pages of this because i'm like this isn't that bad but i've only

00:04:35.600 read one paragraph of this the compounding effect of this is like i had a whole section of this 0.95

00:04:41.660 episode that i was just like writing out and then i and i was like oh man this is fucking hilarious

00:04:46.480 and then i was like and then i took a day off and read it again and i was like mike is not gonna 0.57

00:04:50.620 understand why this is funny to me like you need to read 400 pages of thomas friedman and then read

00:04:56.460 this and you'll understand why it's funny i'm looking forward to you turning my brain into

00:05:01.880 this specific type of mush. So the section continues and I've sent you that. Okay. Columbus

00:05:07.360 was happy to make the Indians he met his slaves a pool of free manual labor. I just wanted to 0.96

00:05:13.080 understand why the Indians I met were taking our work, why they had become such an important pool

00:05:17.320 for the outsourcing of service and information technology work from America and other industrialized

00:05:21.980 countries. Columbus had more than 100 men on his three ships. I had a small crew from the

00:05:27.560 Discovery Times channel that fit comfortably into two banged up vans with Indian drivers who drove 1.00

00:05:33.500 barefoot. Columbus accidentally ran into America, but thought he had discovered part of India. 0.98

00:05:38.320 I actually found India and thought many of the people I met there were Americans.

00:05:42.940 Some had actually taken American names and others were doing great imitations of American accents

00:05:47.280 at call centers and American business techniques at software labs. Columbus reported to his king

00:05:51.980 and queen that the world was round and he went down in history as the man who first made this

00:05:56.200 discovery. That's not true. I returned home and shared my discovery only with my wife and only

00:06:01.700 in a whisper, honey, I confided. I think the world is flat. Oh God, the brain mush is starting to

00:06:08.800 happen. Right. Okay. He's doing another thing that I feel like I saw in rich dad, poor dad,

00:06:14.940 where it's like a very simple concept, but he just like over explains it again and again and again.

00:06:21.540 And you're like, OK, I get it.

00:06:23.560 Like your experience is similar to Columbus in some ways and different in others.

00:06:27.380 I don't know that I needed like, what is this, 12 different examples?

00:06:31.860 This is a consolidated version of this passage.

00:06:35.200 I can't tell you how much I cut out of this.

00:06:37.380 This is like four pages in the book of just like going on about the comparisons between

00:06:43.160 Columbus going to America versus me going to India.

00:06:47.680 And it's just drones on.

00:06:49.780 Yeah. It's the perfect vignette to open the book because all of the quintessential Thomas Friedman isms are here. So, yeah, first you have like the glaring factual inaccuracy, right, that you noticed. It's a well-known myth that Columbus was the first person to discover that the earth was round.

00:07:08.660 I knew that in like ancient Egypt.

00:07:10.000 i literally learned that that was a myth in elementary school yeah yeah so then second it

00:07:15.600 has all of these try hard comparisons that like you do not need right columbus was on a wooden

00:07:22.000 ship but i'm in a big metal airplane yeah and then third you have like something that makes

00:07:28.040 you feel like maybe it's racist but you're not sure i too encountered indians and then the last

00:07:35.360 thing we have here uh is the bizarre metaphor about the world being flat it's the name of the

00:07:42.300 book of course and he uses the idea that the earth is flat as a metaphor for our increasing

00:07:49.060 interconnectedness i i will kind of defend the concept of it it's like the the fact that the

00:07:56.300 the world is becoming more interconnected and that people can much more quickly and easily travel

00:08:01.400 from place to place and communicate across the globe is like genuinely something that

00:08:05.920 has profound impacts on the world.

00:08:08.140 And like he's exploring the impact.

00:08:10.060 He found a cute metaphor.

00:08:12.120 I think that's fine.

00:08:13.120 Having like a cute little phrase that you start your book with.

00:08:15.680 I think it's why the book is popular because he has this metaphor, even though it doesn't

00:08:20.140 really make sense.

00:08:22.180 Like a flat world would be a less connected world, right?

00:08:25.200 Like I don't want to be too pedantic because he is just being cute.

00:08:29.500 But I will say my tolerance for cutesy metaphors declined pretty drastically over the course of the book.

00:08:36.740 When I first read it, I was like, sure, you know, I get it.

00:08:40.340 By the end of it, though, I was like, he doesn't understand shapes.

00:08:43.760 I'm not 100% sure that he understands shapes.

00:08:46.420 I also think what he's doing is it's kind of this like performance of intelligence and analysis.

00:08:53.520 He's basically drawing a metaphorical difference between Columbus and himself.

00:08:58.800 and it in the way that a high school essay would it sort of seems smart like wow he's really like

00:09:03.500 analyzing this but then when you actually think about it he's not really like saying anything

00:09:08.420 right there's no real insight or analysis see you understand thomas friedman what's happening

00:09:14.120 thomas friedman has been here with you all along so friedman says that when columbus set sail

00:09:21.600 until about 1800 that era was globalization 1.0 oh we're doing the 1.0 metaphors which was

00:09:31.120 characterized by nation states driving global integration then you had from 1800 to 2000 or so

00:09:38.860 globalization 2.0 which is characterized by the rise of multinational corporations

00:09:44.700 and now we are in globalization 3.0 characterized by the individual having access to technology

00:09:53.340 that allows them to compete globally okay i understand why people hate this guy now 0.64

00:09:57.820 yeah pretty fucking annoying right it only took like six minutes his penchant for oversimplifying 0.97

00:10:03.880 this shit it's like it's a for him it's a oh man i'm gonna mix metaphors now i was gonna say it's 0.99

00:10:09.580 a penchant and then it's a thirst that can't be quenched oh you can't do it in the thomas 1.00

00:10:13.280 friedman episode he's ruined my brain chapter two is called the 10 forces that flattened the world

00:10:23.740 i hope that i can do justice to how bizarre this chapter is it is 150 pages long oh my god in

00:10:31.540 isolation a lot of this chapter is perfectly reasonable but he has this way of talking until

00:10:37.120 things no longer make sense right like it's the same thing with the columbus comparison where like

00:10:43.520 if he had stopped after two sentences you might have never thought about it again but he spoke 0.98

00:10:48.020 about it for so long that by the end of it you're like what the fuck is this what is this about 0.95

00:10:51.220 the first section the first flattener it's titled when the wall came down and the windows went up 0.86

00:10:58.340 oh this is about the collapse of the berlin wall but also microsoft windows getting popular

00:11:05.000 okay i mean i don't want to be unfair he talks about like the decline of centrally planned

00:11:14.600 economies right he's very anti-communist and he has all these snarky remarks he says under

00:11:19.960 communism everyone is equally poor and under capitalism they are unequally rich yeah it's

00:11:27.700 like again he's like this perfect little zing machine yeah but like that's not really like

00:11:32.700 insightful or like accurate about the levels of inequality in the soviet union again for some

00:11:39.440 reason half of this section is about how the windows pc also helped like precipitate the

00:11:44.760 flattening of the world but the discussion is like completely detached from the berlin wall

00:11:49.540 discussion right he combines them into one flattener and from what i can tell it's just so

00:11:55.960 he can have that cute little title about the wall coming down and the windows going up yeah even

00:12:01.380 though it doesn't make any sense because how would you put windows up on a wall that went down

00:12:05.600 you're gonna just apply pure literalism to every single thing that he says aren't you

00:12:12.380 you're like no cuteness freedman there's only so many times you can do this you know what i mean

00:12:17.500 like if someone just had the occasional metaphor like this you'd be like all right whatever it

00:12:22.880 doesn't quite work it's a metaphor but when someone does it 20 times in a row by the end 0.64

00:12:26.660 of it you're like you can't put a fucking window on a wall that came down so the next flattener is

00:12:35.220 the netscape ipo okay he uses that as something that's like sort of symbolizes the rise of the 0.89

00:12:40.480 of the internet of the worldwide web pretty inoffensive conceptually although there are

00:12:45.300 like long sections that are like what is the worldwide web and it was 2005

00:12:49.760 yeah we've yeah we've all been searching for pornography rather than trading it with people

00:12:57.200 in aol chat rooms for like seven years at that point so the next one is workflow software okay

00:13:03.740 so we get such insights as quote the first big breakthrough in workflow was actually the

00:13:09.180 combination of the pc and email okay that was one of many times that i just wrote thank you tom in

00:13:15.260 margin like very helpful tom all right the next flattener is uploading uh which is what it sounds

00:13:23.000 like the ability to upload things to the internet where other people can download them he gives the

00:13:27.760 example of wikipedia and blogs those aren't even really uploading though if you've been paying

00:13:34.100 attention the last three were netscape workflow software and uploading which could probably just

00:13:38.660 be consolidated into like the internet internet yeah and then the next three flatteners are also

00:13:43.660 just one thing framed slightly differently. Outsourcing, where you move a function of

00:13:49.240 your company to another country. Offshoring, where you move an entire operation to another

00:13:54.220 country, which is outsourcing at a larger scale. And insourcing, where a company takes on a

00:13:59.940 function from another company, which is literally just outsourcing from the other company's

00:14:04.220 perspective. The eighth flattener is supply chaining, which just means improving supply

00:14:11.000 chains in various ways. The ninth flattener is informing, which is his term for how Google and

00:14:18.020 Yahoo and other search engines have sort of given us a wide array of information at our fingertips.

00:14:23.400 That's just the internet again. It's the internet again. And then his 10th flattener is what he

00:14:27.300 calls the steroids. All of the various technologies that he says are turbocharging the other

00:14:34.480 flatteners they include wireless technology voice over ip file sharing and more widespread use of

00:14:43.760 personal digital assistance okay again basically just the internet again basically the internet

00:14:49.260 so those are the flatteners if the metaphor of flatteners with steroids isn't quite working for

00:14:56.900 you the next chapter is about what he calls the triple convergence okay he says that three

00:15:04.300 simultaneous convergences have occurred to drive globalization the first is the convergence of the

00:15:10.820 10 flatteners with one another the second is the convergence of the 10 flatteners with new business

00:15:16.660 practices the third is the convergence of the resulting new economy with new people oh my god

00:15:23.220 from china india russia similar countries right peter i'm exhausted so to synthesize you have the

00:15:29.780 10 flatteners ranging from the fall of the berlin wall to outsourcing to blogs and then you have

00:15:34.220 the steroids that turbocharge the flatteners which are themselves also counted as a flattener

00:15:39.020 and one of which wireless technologies Friedman describes as the icing on the cake okay then you

00:15:45.060 have the triple conversions where the flatteners including the steroids and the icing on the cake

00:15:48.960 converge with one another and also new business practices and new populations and all of that is

00:15:55.320 globalization 3.0 this is like the part of being John Malkovich where he goes into his own brain

00:16:01.320 nothing makes sense in there later in the book there's a part where he says that the next

00:16:06.720 generation of like products and services are the great synthesizers oh my god it never ends

00:16:12.460 this is again why these books should not be 600 pages long because like he could have

00:16:19.420 i feel like he could have pulled it off if it was just like the 10 flatteners right it's an excuse

00:16:23.920 to talk about like various ways the internet is changing the world fine yeah yeah it seems like

00:16:28.640 He's gilding the lily and then throwing in these other like, well, this this is like the acceleration of the flattening and then the unflattening and the reflattening at the same time.

00:16:37.340 It's like, Thomas, calm down.

00:16:39.360 That's the thing is there are all these little data points in here where he's like describing some business practice that has evolved over the last few years.

00:16:47.460 And I'd be like, oh, that's fascinating.

00:16:49.200 But then he builds it into these metaphors in a way where, like, you can't actually appreciate them on their own because he's trying to just, like, jam it into this narrative in a way that is clunky and, like, just doesn't quite work. 0.90

00:17:04.920 It's just so fucking annoying.

00:17:06.180 I don't even know, like, what the difference between flattening and converging is. 0.69

00:17:10.180 Like, several of the flatteners and convergences are the same thing from what I can tell.

00:17:14.620 like outsourcing to India and China is a flattener, but then people from India and China

00:17:19.380 participating in the economy is a convergence. Right. I feel like he fundamentally doesn't

00:17:24.360 understand why we use metaphors. It's funny because I'm like a big storytelling structure

00:17:33.160 guy. Like I think the way that you outline chronological events is really important and

00:17:37.580 like what information you give to the audience at what time is really important. A lot of stories

00:17:41.720 can be sort of understructured where they feel kind of aimless. And you're like, why is this

00:17:45.560 person telling me this? But then things can also be overstructured where it's like, okay, there's

00:17:49.720 this rule and then there's these 10 things. And then there's the three ways that the 10 things

00:17:54.100 interact with each other. The kind of whole point of this is to like, make it easier to absorb the

00:17:58.920 actual information, but it doesn't seem like he's giving you much actual information. It seems like

00:18:04.120 he's just kind of spinning his wheels and giving you more and more and more metaphors. Did you feel

00:18:08.920 like you learned anything like does he have interesting sequences in this book i mean the

00:18:13.120 book is basically a string of anecdotes packed into metaphors and there are times within the

00:18:18.940 anecdotes where you're like oh that's sort of interesting like at one point he was talking

00:18:22.880 about the bursting of the dot-com bubble and how that actually helped drive globalization in

00:18:29.520 certain ways because like allocations of resources changed after the crash in in a way that benefited

00:18:35.560 india that's interesting yeah yeah i mean and there's there's a lot of good writing about how

00:18:41.100 economies are often shaped by market crashes and they're like there are plenty of little things

00:18:46.420 like that right it was like oh this is in and of itself not the least interesting thing his problem

00:18:51.060 is that he's just bitten off way more than he can chew and his ability to sort of like boil this

00:18:56.880 stuff down to a clean narrative is just not there right i was like i was yearning for like

00:19:05.560 Gladwell that is the sickest bird of this book that it made you miss Gladwell like deliver me

00:19:11.360 Malcolm I mean look Outliers was the first book I read for this show and I didn't realize how good

00:19:17.960 I had it yeah we retract our previous episode it's fine so that is the first half of the book

00:19:24.200 basically he's he's describing how and why globalization 3.0 is happening and I think

00:19:32.500 maybe we can pause here and talk about the concept of bullshit because this kept coming 0.98

00:19:40.080 into my brain. Friedman is super light on data. There are no charts or graphs in the 0.88

00:19:46.680 book. There are only a couple of sections where he finds any data at all to support

00:19:51.540 his conclusions. The primary vibe you get is just like a guy talking out of his ass, 0.99

00:19:56.860 just like telling you a story and then telling you what you should extrapolate from the story 0.98

00:20:02.120 without really justifying that extrapolation right so i'm going to give you some of my favorite

00:20:06.380 examples um i want to be clear i chose these off the cuff these are probably not anywhere close to

00:20:15.880 the worst things written in this book it's the first one america in the 1990s under president

00:20:21.240 clinton was perceived as a big dumb dragon pushing people around in the economic and cultural spheres 0.60

00:20:27.960 knowingly and unknowingly we were puff the magic dragon and people wanted to vote in what we were 0.96

00:20:33.820 puffing then came 9-11 and america transformed itself from puff the magic dragon touching people

00:20:39.940 around the world economically and culturally into godzilla with an arrow in his shoulder spitting

00:20:44.940 fire and tossing his tail around wildly touching people's lives in military and security terms

00:20:50.860 not just economic and cultural ones oh my god i get it peter i see it i see it 0.97

00:20:57.580 what the fuck is he talking about like all right so first of all the overall lesson of this is 0.73

00:21:04.480 supposed to be that prior to 9-11 we weren't impacting other countries militarily it's not 0.99

00:21:11.480 true but then also puff the magic dragon what is this metaphor i mean it's it really feels like he

00:21:20.520 came up with this like cute contrast between puff the magic dragon and godzilla right godzilla with

00:21:25.680 an arrow in his shoulder with an arrow i don't know where that comes from who's big enough to

00:21:30.220 shoot an arrow that would harm god's yeah my brain is melting trying to think of this yeah because

00:21:35.520 like all he's really saying here is that america before 9-11 had kind of like soft power and then

00:21:42.760 that became more hard power after 9-11 which i guess you could make the argument for that but

00:21:48.060 like he's not even really making the argument with like data or anything he's just making the 0.99

00:21:52.120 argument with this fucking metaphor. That's why it's so quintessentially Friedman. Right. The 0.97

00:21:55.920 underlying point is super vague and probably not correct. Right. And then also the metaphor he's

00:22:03.260 using is baffling. Like people wanted a vote in what we were puffing. Yeah. This makes you miss

00:22:10.160 Gladwell. This makes me miss Huntington. Huntington would just like say what he fucking means. All

00:22:14.920 right. I'm going to send you another one. OK. He says analysts have always tended to measure a

00:22:19.460 society by classical economic and social statistics, its deficit to GDP ratio or its

00:22:25.040 unemployment rate or the rate of literacy among its adult women. Such statistics are important

00:22:30.060 and revealing. But there is another statistic, much harder to measure, that I think is even

00:22:34.780 more important and revealing. Oh my fucking God. Does your society have more memories than dreams 0.99

00:22:42.720 or more dreams than memories what peter you talk about gdp but i talk about dreams and memories

00:22:54.000 let's talk about your memory to dream ratio baby this is worse than rich dad this is pay yourself

00:22:59.380 first levels of just like all right man sure what he's ostensibly talking about is like is your

00:23:06.120 country living in its past glories or does it have a plan for the future right but he's trying

00:23:11.940 to contrast it with other statistics even though it's not meaningfully a statistic it's not that

00:23:16.980 it's harder to measure it's that you cannot measure it right it's not it's like saying

00:23:21.140 other people measure their health by how often they're going to the gym or how many carbohydrates

00:23:26.120 they're eating but i measure it with my ratio of excellence to laziness it's like fine but that's

00:23:32.880 a different category of thing i think what i see in this is just a guy who every time he thinks of

00:23:39.340 a metaphor has to put it in the book he's never like i'm just gonna say that for my wife i've got

00:23:47.220 i've got a couple bangers i'm leaving on the table it really struck me that i was like maybe

00:23:50.620 this is why he's a popular op-ed writer because if what you were doing was just turning each of

00:23:56.680 these into like a punchy little op-ed column totally i could see how that works right i could

00:24:02.460 see how someone would be like oh dreams and memories sure you know it's also a low-key

00:24:07.880 indictment of the rest of his career because are we a dream society or are we a memory society is

00:24:14.320 like kind of a perfect six to eight hundred word op-ed but it's also totally meaningless like you

00:24:20.700 can find anecdotes that pad that out but like these are just totally qualitative categories

00:24:28.300 you can't say in any definitive or interesting way what we are but there's also a degree to 0.96

00:24:35.360 which his bullshit like more directly impacts his thesis one of his worst tendencies is that he will 0.83

00:24:41.840 squeeze any little anecdote that he can find into his thesis there is a section that starts off with 0.99

00:24:48.880 in the fall of 2004 i went out to minneapolis to visit my mother and had three world is flat 0.95

00:24:55.240 encounters right in a row okay right when i read that i was like fuck yes yeah here it comes this

00:25:00.960 This is about to be some good Friedman. 0.86

00:25:03.760 He says, first, before I left home in Washington, I dialed 411, directory assistance, to try

00:25:10.180 to get a friend's phone number in Minneapolis.

00:25:13.080 A computer answered and a computerized voice asked me to pronounce the name of the person

00:25:17.140 whose number I was requesting.

00:25:18.900 For whatever reason, I could not get the computer to hear me correctly.

00:25:22.660 And it kept saying back to me in a computerized voice, did you say?

00:25:26.680 I kept having to say the family name in a voice that masked my exasperation.

00:25:30.960 Okay.

00:25:31.520 Eventually, I was connected to an operator, but I did not enjoy this friction-free encounter

00:25:36.180 with directory information.

00:25:38.300 I craved the friction of another human being.

00:25:40.980 Representative. 0.98

00:25:42.180 That's what you're going to kill with the phone, Thomas.

00:25:44.100 So he's saying that automation of 411 directory assistance is an example of the world flattening.

00:25:51.740 Yeah, and also being bad and not working.

00:25:53.860 I don't really understand.

00:25:55.200 And I think it is part of a mistake that he makes consistently, which is just folding any technological enhancement or innovation into the flattening concept.

00:26:07.680 Right. He's just saying ways in which the world is changing, basically.

00:26:10.380 Yeah. The next two world is flat encounters in this part are one, a friend of his is annoyed that his clients prefer email. And two, another friend of his in marketing is upset that advertising firms are increasingly, quote, selling just numbers, not creative instinct.

00:26:29.220 what so one of those is at least about email i guess okay although i don't the story was about

00:26:34.700 his clients preferring email bids rather than bids over the phone and it's like is this about

00:26:39.200 the world flattening or is this just like someone is like can you shoot me an email and this guy's

00:26:43.420 like this is just boomers complaining that things are different right and the other guy is just 0.67

00:26:47.640 complaining about a trend in advertising pitches welcome to me reading fucking nudge peter where 0.94

00:26:55.340 you're like, this is not a nudge. But yeah, he has this like, there's no anecdote too thin for

00:27:00.960 him to lean on. And this made me think of the famous essay on bullshit, Harry Frankfurt, 0.86

00:27:07.840 where he describes bullshit as not simply lies, right? What he says is that people who tell the 0.58

00:27:13.300 truth and people who lie are both concerned with the truth, right? The people who are telling the

00:27:17.840 truth are trying to describe the truth and the people who lie are trying to obscure the truth. 0.87

00:27:23.520 bullshit is people who have no concern for the truth. Now, I'm not sure that I would go so far 0.58

00:27:29.100 as to say that Friedman in general is bullshitting. But what I think he is doing is prioritizing

00:27:35.840 telling this narrative. Right. So he packs every story he can into the narrative, no matter how

00:27:41.780 clumsy it is. Yeah. And by the end of it, you're not even really sure what like flattening actually

00:27:46.800 means. Right. Right. It's kind of similar to David Brooks's shtick, too, where he's like,

00:27:51.580 they eat Thai food in blue states and they watch Home Shopping Network in red states. 0.71

00:27:56.800 And then when people debunk it, they're like, yeah, there's plenty of immigrants in red states

00:28:01.040 and Home Shopping Network is extremely popular in blue states. He's like, come on, don't be 0.97

00:28:05.280 pedantic. You know what I'm getting at. You know the vibes. It's like, well, it seems like your

00:28:10.460 whole book is a vibe then. You're not really meaningfully doing any research. You're kind

00:28:15.400 of throwing everything into your book and just leaving people with an impression without really

00:28:19.500 interrogating whether that impression is true. Right. There's this phenomenon that I first

00:28:23.360 noted when we were discussing Fukuyama and the end of history. And then we discussed when we

00:28:28.260 were talking about nudge. And that's that like a lot of these pop science, pop politics books

00:28:32.800 are correct only when you zoom out so far that their thesis is no longer interesting. Right.

00:28:39.820 So like if the claim is, hey, look, technology is creating a more interconnected world. Sure,

00:28:45.840 that is true and that's what freeman can always fall back on as like the obvious truth underpinning

00:28:52.640 the book but then it's like it's something that no one needed a book to tell them in 2005 right

00:28:58.180 it's uh it would be very funny to be friends with one of these like opinion columnists where like 0.93

00:29:02.480 every single story you tell at dinner you're like oh it's gonna be in the fucking book right you're 0.87

00:29:06.920 like i was at the bank today and somebody's eating a banana in line and then like two years later 1.00

00:29:11.020 you're like, oh, God damn it. It's in the book. It's not even a good anecdote, man. 0.98

00:29:15.420 Right. You're like, you know, fucking advertising firms these days, they're all 0.99

00:29:19.460 numbers centric. And you look over at Friedman and he's just wide eyed looking back at you. 0.99

00:29:23.840 He's jotting notes furiously. Slow down, slow down.

00:29:27.760 What's interesting about The World is Flat is that if you look at it with a little more

00:29:31.520 granularity, the basic claim is actually a little more nuanced than it might seem.

00:29:37.580 A couple of years after The World is Flat was published, there's this economist critical of Friedman, Pankaj Gamowat, who wrote a piece for foreign policy called Why the World Isn't Flat.

00:29:50.160 He says, in truth, the world is not nearly as connected as these writers would have us believe.

00:29:55.720 Despite talk of a new wired world where information, ideas, money and people can move around the planet faster than ever before, just a fraction of what we consider globalization actually exists.

00:30:06.160 The portrait that emerges from a hard look at the way companies, people, and states interact

00:30:11.080 is a world that's only beginning to realize the potential of true global integration.

00:30:15.760 And what these trends backers won't tell you is that globalization's future is more fragile

00:30:20.500 than you know.

00:30:21.420 What does he mean by that?

00:30:22.880 So what he says is if you actually look at the data about the flows of capital, 90% of

00:30:28.060 global direct investment is still domestic.

00:30:30.780 And the level of cross-border migration, for example, is surprisingly small.

00:30:36.900 4% of people live in a country other than the one that they were born in.

00:30:41.140 One interesting thing is that the volume of cross-border flows has consistently increased,

00:30:47.080 but the geographic reach of those flows has not increased much since the turn of the century.

00:30:52.940 So the flow of information, capital, trade, people is highly regionalized,

00:30:59.100 meaning that these things flow relatively freely within certain smaller regions, but not globally.

00:31:05.480 This actually came up a lot in the debate over Brexit. The Brexit campaign was saying like,

00:31:10.180 oh, we're going to do all these great trade deals with China and India and we'll replace

00:31:13.600 all of our European trade. But then people pointed out that the UK's biggest trading partners are

00:31:18.120 like Germany, Netherlands, France, Ireland, and America's biggest trading partners are Mexico

00:31:23.780 and canada and it's like yes we can do all these things border flows skype moving money around

00:31:30.620 whatever but like most of what is actually happening is like fairly proximate right which

00:31:36.400 is not to say that globalization is not happening right it's just that it's much more complex and

00:31:40.340 the world is getting flatter right i think that that's important because the book is about

00:31:44.540 globalization and how our world is becoming more interconnected it's one of the most popular books

00:31:51.800 about globalization ever written. But also by the time it was published in 2005, there was actually

00:31:59.620 already sort of like a cottage industry about globalization. There's a sort of hack op-ed piece

00:32:06.200 that is ubiquitous by the end of the 90s that's like, I used to send paper mail and now I send

00:32:13.600 email, right? He's pitching this flatness concept as if it's novel when in fact it's actually just

00:32:20.840 an affirmation of everyone's pre-existing intuitions about globalization, right? Which

00:32:26.340 is sort of the opposite of what insight is. And like, this isn't just academic, right? Like there

00:32:31.940 are policy decisions that are impacted by perceptions of globalization. There are surveys

00:32:36.240 showing that people tend to vastly overestimate the amount of global integration. And that matters 0.51

00:32:43.820 in a lot of ways. And just for example, there's polling that shows that people want to restrict

00:32:48.420 immigration less when they learn how low actual levels of immigration are.

00:32:54.560 Yeah, exactly. That's the thing is he's not thinking like, oh, I have this impression

00:32:59.020 of what's going on, or it feels like globalization is happening in this way. I should check into this.

00:33:03.480 I should talk to actual experts. I should look at statistics. He's basically just reifying how

00:33:07.640 it feels. But that's what journalism is supposed to do. That's the number one fucking thing you're

00:33:13.960 supposed to do as a journalist. It's like this thing that feels true, I'm going to double check 0.99

00:33:17.700 it yeah and it's it's also just what makes for like compelling journalism just as like a selfish

00:33:23.640 reader you know like tell me something interesting please yeah i'll say that about gladwell he told

00:33:29.360 me some interesting stuff even if it turned out to be weird racist lies i was compelled all right

00:33:36.160 and who can fault him for telling you racist lies that were wrong as long as it was entertaining

00:33:41.120 so i do have a more specific criticism of the book and friedman in general which is that

00:33:46.300 he is like endlessly sycophantic and deferential toward corporations oh and generally just sort

00:33:54.500 of presents his narratives through the eyes of elites again i've said that the book is sort of

00:34:00.280 a string of anecdotes and like each has a little lesson that you're supposed to take away a huge

00:34:05.380 percentage of those anecdotes come through interviews with corporate executives the result

00:34:10.800 is that this is really the story of globalization as told by corporate elites, right? There's a

00:34:17.480 segment where Friedman is discussing Walmart as an example of how flattening forces can create

00:34:25.260 tension between workers and consumers. He says, quote, in pursuit of the world's most efficient

00:34:31.900 supply chain, Walmart has piled up a list of business offenses over the years that has given

00:34:37.080 the company several deserved black eyes and that it is belatedly starting to address in a meaningful

00:34:42.700 way. I am talking about everything from Walmart's recently exposed practice of locking overnight

00:34:47.720 workers into its stores, to its allowing Walmart maintenance contractors to use illegal immigrants

00:34:53.460 as janitors, to its role as defendant in the largest civil rights class action lawsuit in

00:34:58.860 history. One can only hope that all the bad publicity Walmart has received in the last few

00:35:04.140 years will force it to understand that there is a fine line between a hyper-efficient global supply

00:35:09.600 chain and one that has pursued cost-cutting and profit margins to such a degree that whatever

00:35:14.860 social benefits it is offering with one hand, it is taking away with the other. And Walmart never

00:35:20.560 violated workers' rights again. So, you know, I read that. I was like, actually, cool. Yeah,

00:35:26.660 that's a good, that's true. You know, there is trade-off between these things. And this was sort

00:35:33.160 of the first time I saw him openly taking a company to task. But then he writes this,

00:35:40.300 which I have sent you. You can read what's highlighted there.

00:35:44.620 Okay. The successor generation to Sam Walton's leadership seems to recognize that it has both

00:35:50.600 an image and a reality to fix. How far Walmart will adjust remains to be seen. But when I asked

00:35:56.460 Walmart CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. directly about these issues, he did not duck. In fact, he wanted to

00:36:02.720 talk about it. What I think I have to do is institutionalize the sense of obligation to

00:36:06.900 society to the same extent that we've institutionalized the commitment to the

00:36:10.500 customer, said Scott. The world has changed and we missed that. We believe that good intentions

00:36:15.560 and good stores and good prices would cause people to forgive what we are not as good at

00:36:19.880 and we were wrong. In certain areas, he added, we are not as good as we should be. We just have to

00:36:25.520 get better. This sucks. This is literally the last word on the subject in the book. Just actually 0.99

00:36:32.500 running pr for walmart yeah unreal and by the way the lawsuit the largest civil rights lawsuit

00:36:40.520 in history that he was referencing how did walmart handle that uh they ran it up to the

00:36:45.120 supreme court and got it tossed on a technicality walmart be dukes right the fact that he would like

00:36:51.080 outline all of this and be like let's see what the ceo has to say yeah good god how are you a 0.98

00:36:57.320 fucking journalist dude i loathe this like constant baby brain naivete of these journalists 0.98

00:37:04.160 who are like we talked to a ceo and he said he's going to institutionalize their social impact to 1.00

00:37:09.400 the same extent they institutionalize good prices but like this is a company it's a profit maximizing

00:37:14.300 company it's publicly traded right the ceo cannot prioritize social impact over profits right this 0.95

00:37:21.040 is how we've decided to structure our fucking economy you can't like constantly pretend that 0.96

00:37:27.020 this is not the case. I talked to the CEO and he said that Walmart rules. There's also a weird 0.97

00:37:33.820 like pooping back and forth element to this too, because when I worked in human rights,

00:37:38.160 I always worked on corporate human rights violations. And part of my job was like

00:37:42.240 dealing with corporations directly. Like I would go to these like meetings and have to put on a

00:37:45.700 suit and go talk to like corporate types and go to these like corporate dinner type things.

00:37:49.900 And a lot of like C-suite people kind of fashion themselves as like thought leaders.

00:37:55.880 Yeah. But then a lot of the actual kind of like punditry that they're doing and like things that they talk about at these dinners. It's stuff that they're regurgitating from like Thomas Friedman columns. Right. I guess at some point it's like he's talking to CEOs. He's also, by the way, talking to like elite government officials at times. Right. Right.

00:38:15.420 He takes their thoughts, pumps them into the New York Times with like a metaphor.

00:38:20.500 Those guys read it.

00:38:22.260 They make policy based on it.

00:38:24.660 And then they talk to Thomas Friedman again.

00:38:27.040 Right.

00:38:27.400 It's hard not to see that perhaps Thomas Friedman is a pawn in the games of powerful people.

00:38:33.920 Right.

00:38:34.600 If he's just going to regurgitate what they tell him, that can be useful, right?

00:38:38.600 When Tom Friedman is going to publish your little screed about how Walmart is going to do better in his book, that's useful for a CEO.

00:38:47.700 I cannot believe he actually, like, listed out all of the problems with Walmart and then was like, the CEO told me they're going to do better. 0.96

00:38:54.660 I cannot fucking believe it. 0.99

00:38:56.600 It's insane. 0.99

00:38:58.100 I also, like, I guess I knew this because he's constantly talking to CEOs and other people and interviewing them.

00:39:04.460 but i want to point out that like if you look at the book he is interviewing tons of people

00:39:10.800 his acknowledgments are extremely lengthy he put in a ton of legwork so like i don't want to say

00:39:17.940 that he's phoning it in really right he's not just sort of like doing this cash out book he's trying 0.97

00:39:24.620 very hard um which is what makes it even worse and more embarrassing yeah it's so dark dude that he 0.91

00:39:32.480 like this is like the best that he can do basically it's like i'm gonna spend months and 0.99

00:39:38.640 like really like put my whole pussy into this book as the kids say are the kids saying what 0.99

00:39:44.420 kind of kids are you hanging out with this is on gay twitter that's what they say on gay twitter 1.00

00:39:47.540 like she really she really put her whole pussy into that chorus you've never heard this the kid 1.00

00:39:51.360 you say the kids you just you just mean gay 24 year old man this is yes 100 and the gay 41 year 1.00

00:39:57.760 world who thirst follow them. So there's actually a part a little closer to the end of the book

00:40:02.400 where Friedman is talking about how we should be sort of conceptualizing the government's role

00:40:09.260 in a globalizing world. And he says, the social contract that progressives should try to enforce

00:40:15.200 between government and workers and companies and workers is one in which government and companies

00:40:20.380 say, we cannot guarantee you any lifetime employment, but we can guarantee you that

00:40:25.820 we will concentrate on giving you the tools to make yourself more lifetime employable we're

00:40:30.780 teaching people to code right in the flat world the individual worker is going to become more

00:40:35.680 and more responsible for managing his or her own career risks and economic security and the role

00:40:42.220 of government and business is to help workers build all the muscles they need to do just that

00:40:47.980 Okay. Now, Friedman considers himself a progressive, but I do think that he is envisioning a much more atomized world, right? He believes the welfare state as it is constructed is inadequate to address globalization 3.0. And I find that relatively disconcerting.

00:41:09.940 Again, this is a guy that's just talking to CEOs and elite government officials about what's happening.

00:41:16.820 And part of his takeaway is like, well, we might have to transform the way that government aids people to make it less about giving them money and more about giving them skills.

00:41:29.860 It's funny how all of these like big ideas books lead to just like cutting welfare for people, regardless of what the actual topic is.

00:41:37.440 It's like, well, I'm going to have to make some tough choices.

00:41:40.840 Yeah, that's probably a good transition into the second part of the book, which is really

00:41:46.260 dedicated to like the downstream effects of all of this globalization.

00:41:50.560 OK.

00:41:50.940 He says that we will experience the great sorting out, essentially the process by which

00:41:56.400 globalization creates certain winners and losers.

00:41:59.640 He starts to talk about America experiencing what he calls a quiet crisis that consists

00:42:05.980 of several parts which he calls our dirty little secrets number one the numbers gap which is the

00:42:13.320 relative lack of young scientists and engineers in america compared to china and india okay number

00:42:19.920 two is the education gap meaning that american schools don't push or invest in math and science

00:42:25.540 education enough and three is the ambition gap meaning that our youth are less ambitious than

00:42:33.020 youth in china and india the evidence for which per friedman is one teacher who told him that his

00:42:40.620 students were lazy and another teacher who said that her students were lazy finally finally we're

00:42:46.640 talking about how the kids don't want to work anymore it it always eventually gets to the lazy

00:42:50.680 kids um this is also the part of the book the very long part of the book that is basically

00:42:56.880 like we need to become a stem country okay we need to pile resources into science and engineering

00:43:04.820 if not we're screwed right because manufacturing we're getting out competed so what do we need to

00:43:10.520 do we need to be the managers and it experts etc we need to sort of like educate our way

00:43:17.840 to the top of the global hierarchy he says quote every young american today would be wise to think

00:43:24.280 of himself or herself as competing against every young chinese indian and brazilian that's a 1.00

00:43:30.440 fucked up way to think about your life competing it's these little these spry little chinese kids 0.99

00:43:37.360 like 14 years old it's a fucking weird way to think about the world later he says jfk wanted 0.99

00:43:43.900 to put a man on the moon my vision is to put every american man or woman on a campus 0.96

00:43:49.000 he does love his little phrases he loves it i want to put a man on the campus i would love

00:43:56.940 to just watch an editor go through a thomas friedman book draft and just write do you need

00:44:02.680 this every like right next to everything that he doesn't need to say remember how i said he talks

00:44:08.960 to ceos about um where business is going in this part he talks to the chinese vice minister of

00:44:16.740 education. And that person is obviously like touting Chinese education. And he's like,

00:44:22.260 oh, my God, they're good. And I was like, you're literally absorbing propaganda and telling it to

00:44:27.880 me like, whatever. So you're starting to see like his pivot in this book. What started out as a book

00:44:35.240 that's just like a shallow ish dive into the many ways that globalization has impacted the world

00:44:41.260 becomes a book about how to retain america's global hegemony right um and that's what like

00:44:48.500 actually that becomes the takeaway of the book right not just like this stuff is happening and

00:44:53.880 it's interesting but we must act now or we will be overtaken by india and china right and built

00:45:01.340 into this is like a lot of pretty aggressive fear-mongering about like america's getting

00:45:06.820 weaker other countries are going stronger yeah and he has a chapter called this is not a test

00:45:13.080 where he compares the modern moment to the cold war okay so he says what this era has in common

00:45:20.200 with the cold war era is that meeting the challenges of flatism requires as comprehensive

00:45:26.360 energetic and focused a response as did meeting the challenge of communism okay i'm sending you

00:45:34.520 a couple of paragraphs. I know it's long. This is his Cold War comparison. He says,

00:45:40.520 getting Americans to rally around compassionate flatism is much more difficult than getting them

00:45:46.140 to rally around anti-communism. Economics, as noted, is not like war because economics can

00:45:51.520 always be a win-win game. But sometimes I wish economics were more like war. In the Cold War,

00:45:57.400 we actually got to see the Soviets parade their missiles in Red Square. We all got to be scared

00:46:01.960 together from one end of the country to the other. Don't you wish that we had an all-encompassing,

00:46:07.780 pervasive sense of fear in this country? About, like, Chinese people and Indians getting educated?

00:46:14.340 You know what I miss about the Cold War? Always being scared. But today, alas, there is no missile

00:46:20.920 threat coming from India. The hotline, which used to connect the Kremlin with the White House,

00:46:25.200 has been replaced by the helpline, which connects everyone in America to call centers in Bangalore.

00:46:31.760 Nicely done, Thomas.

00:46:33.360 While the other end of the hotline might have had Brezhnev threatening nuclear war,

00:46:37.760 the other end of the helpline just has a soft voice eager to help you sort out your AOL bill

00:46:43.760 or collaborate with you on a new piece of software.

00:46:47.060 No, that voice has none of the menace of Nikita Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the table at the UN,

00:46:53.040 and it has none of the sinister snarl of the bad guys in from Russia with love.

00:46:57.140 there is no boris or natasha saying we will bury you in a thick russian accent no that voice on

00:47:03.980 the helpline just has a friendly indian lilt that masks any sense of threat or challenge

00:47:09.220 it simply says hello my name is rajiv can i help you god dude wait come on you got you got to read 0.98

00:47:17.280 the last line oh fuck i didn't even see that no rajiv actually you can't god 0.97

00:47:26.980 god peter is every paragraph like this he just extends it and goes and goes the helpline 0.98

00:47:34.420 the comparison between the line between the kremlin and the white house and a call center

00:47:42.820 helpline yeah again if he thinks of anything yeah any comparison any metaphor it is in the book

00:47:52.740 there is no editorial process to speak of it's so fucking bizarre like a you sort of forget that he

00:48:01.000 is advocating for like a heightened sense of fear and terror about all of this yeah but like that's

00:48:07.860 what that's what's happening right he's basically being like oh we should be more scared by the fact

00:48:13.640 that like people in indian call centers are helping us out yeah it doesn't even make sense

00:48:19.300 to say no Rajiv you can't help me because like he is he's helping you he can I mean if you like

00:48:23.920 want to contest your Comcast bill you call and Rajiv is like oh yeah we'll get that fixed I like 0.81

00:48:29.480 right it just is like a metaphor that completely breaks down and doesn't make any fucking sense

00:48:33.200 it's like these two things are the same but actually they're the opposite of each other

00:48:36.400 because one of them was missile threat and the other is just like me calling a phone number people

00:48:42.100 helping you yeah is this unfair is it unfair to show you all of his metaphors like maybe it's

00:48:48.540 rude of me to center so much of my critique around the fact that every time he tries to say something

00:48:54.760 he can't say it good yeah he can only he can only say it through these like completely

00:49:04.780 asinine metaphors and comparisons and then he mentions like nikita it's not like nikita

00:49:10.400 khrushchev it's not like from russia with love it's not like boris and natasha i don't need

00:49:15.760 three examples of things that it's not like i i get it on the first one also did you notice that

00:49:23.640 he basically compares like the harsh and scary russian accent to like the soft indian lilt 0.86

00:49:29.220 like you might notice that his accent is less scary like what the fuck putting the casual 0.95

00:49:34.680 xenophobia aside i have a little bit of sympathy for this because sometimes when i'm editing the 0.92

00:49:41.720 show i'm like okay this section doesn't make that much sense but like there's a good joke at the end

00:49:46.180 of it and i want to leave in the joke and i feel like he's doing the thing where like you can tell

00:49:51.800 he thought of the helpline hotline thing it was like damn that whips and then he has to build 0.96

00:49:56.980 this whole fucking preamble to it like i wish economics were more like war in the cold war we 0.99

00:50:03.020 had and then it's like and then he finally gets to the fucking helpline metaphor and it's like 0.98

00:50:07.520 okay that's why you were saying all this you thought it was cute that is the best explanation 0.50

00:50:12.120 of like why the book exists so one of the more interesting things i read about all of this was

00:50:18.920 an academic article by kathleen abowitz and jay roberts who point out that this is essentially

00:50:25.260 just a replication of a moral panic that we had in the early 1980s about how american students

00:50:32.060 were being overtaken by students in Russia and Japan. And that panic was driven by a report.

00:50:40.180 Ronald Reagan formed a committee to evaluate American education. And in 1983, they put out

00:50:46.400 a report titled A Nation at Risk, an Imperative for Educational Reform. The report very famously

00:50:53.060 declared that, quote, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a

00:50:59.140 rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people.

00:51:04.280 That report, very influential, continues to drive a lot of education policy, despite the

00:51:11.060 fact that other government-initiated reports have called many of the conclusions into question.

00:51:18.060 So one of the things the report found was that SAT scores had been steadily declining

00:51:23.600 for like 20 years leading up to the early 80s.

00:51:26.200 And in 1990, there was a report that said, yeah, that's because poor people are applying to college in greater numbers. Like we had increased access to the SATs. If you segment out the populations, scores are going up, not down.

00:51:42.200 You can maybe say that Friedman is identifying some real trends here. He's also tonally and substantively replicating a moral panic that we have experienced before, where you have people fretting about being overtaken by these foreign others, right? He just replaces Russia and Japan with India and China. 0.98

00:52:02.980 right although i have to say branding wise the war on mediocrity is incredible branding oh yeah 0.97

00:52:10.340 i actually think that we do have a huge problem with fucking mediocrity in this country but it

00:52:15.460 starts at the top not at the bottom like that's that's where i would aim it's like people running 1.00

00:52:20.240 institutions who just like suck shit yeah there's definitely a lesson you can learn about mediocrity 0.98

00:52:25.280 from thomas friedman it's just not this one the fucking new york times opinion page would be the 1.00

00:52:30.100 first stop on that tour. So we can't wrap up Thomas Friedman episode without talking 0.88

00:52:36.940 about the Iraq war. Oh, yeah. I'm going to send you a clip that I know you have seen.

00:52:43.960 Now that the war is over, and there's some difficulty with the peace, was it worth doing?

00:52:50.480 I think it was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie. I think looking back at the 1990s,

00:52:57.180 I can identify that there are actually three bubbles of the 1990s.

00:53:00.620 Oh, no, three bubbles.

00:53:01.460 There was the NASDAQ bubble.

00:53:02.500 Classic Freeman.

00:53:03.240 There was the corporate governance bubble.

00:53:06.140 Lastly, there was what I would call the terrorism bubble.

00:53:08.840 Oh, God.

00:53:09.500 And the first two were based on creative accounting.

00:53:13.080 The last was based on moral creative accounting.

00:53:16.320 What?

00:53:16.600 The terrorism bubble that basically built up over the 1990s said,

00:53:20.580 flying airplanes into the World Trade Center, that's okay. 1.00

00:53:23.980 Oh, the Arab mind. 1.00

00:53:25.240 Wrapping yourself with dynamite and blowing up Israelis in a pizza parlor? 1.00

00:53:29.880 That's okay. 0.95

00:53:31.460 And that built up as a bubble, Charlie.

00:53:33.680 And 9-11 to me was the peak of that bubble.

00:53:37.400 Peak of that bubble.

00:53:37.900 And what we learned on 9-11 in a gut way was that that bubble was a fundamental threat to our open society.

00:53:45.020 Bubble threat.

00:53:45.420 because there is no wall high enough no ins agent smart enough no metal detector efficient enough

00:53:51.180 to protect an open society from people motivated by that bubble and what we needed to do

00:53:59.340 was go over to that part of the world i'm afraid and burst that bubble and what they

00:54:05.020 needed to see was american boys and girls going house to house from basra to baghdad

00:54:12.300 and basically saying which part of this sentence don't you understand you think this bubble fantasy

00:54:20.700 we're just going to let it grow well suck on this he's really cooking there this is another thing

00:54:28.580 that you wouldn't understand is funny until you've read the whole book but when he says like 1.00

00:54:32.500 three bubbles i was like tom you son of a bitch you've done it again tom can't stop him you can't 0.98

00:54:40.820 album at all times he's thinking of metaphors but also it's it's the same thing where it's 1.00

00:54:44.720 completely fucking incoherent what he's saying he's basically saying that like muslims have a 0.99

00:54:49.260 culture of violence and so we're going to go over there and bomb them right to fix their culture 0.99

00:54:55.800 this clip is somewhat famous because he is literally characterizing the iraq war 0.99

00:55:00.580 not as an effort to oust saddam or to protect anyone from wmds but to enact revenge on the

00:55:08.520 muslim world for fostering illiberal ideas yeah and i think that that was so like revelatory like 0.85

00:55:16.360 he's just sort of putting it on the table and being like yeah you know this was revenge on 0.90

00:55:20.160 muslims everyone was sort of like so you fucking admit it right like because at the time the 0.94

00:55:24.840 justification was all about like saving these populations from their dictator exactly we have 0.96

00:55:29.080 to get him out of power to save these people and then it's like these people are basically 1.00

00:55:32.060 fucking animals and we should just like kill them until like they behave better and keep in mind 1.00

00:55:36.500 And this is where Friedman cut his teeth, right? 1.00

00:55:40.400 Lebanon, Israel, Middle East expertise, ostensibly.

00:55:44.480 Meanwhile, he was, like many pundits, deeply incorrect all the time throughout this era.

00:55:51.140 Like, you know, he said the Afghanistan war was over in January 2002.

00:55:54.740 Great.

00:55:54.820 Some highlights from his columns over the years.

00:55:58.580 In 1999, during the bombing of Iraq, he suggested, quote, blowing up a different power station

00:56:05.720 in iraq every week so no one knows when the lights will go off or who's in charge okay that'll fix it

00:56:12.280 in 2005 he wrote about iraq quote if they come around a decent outcome in iraq is still possible

00:56:19.420 and we should stay to help build it if they won't then we are wasting our time we should arm the 0.97

00:56:25.540 shiites and kurds and leave the sunnis of iraq to reap the wind a couple months into the afghanistan

00:56:32.040 War, he wrote, quote, think of all the nonsense written in the press, particularly the European

00:56:37.500 and Arab media, about the concern for, quote unquote, civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

00:56:43.880 It turns out that many of those Afghan civilians, again, in quotations, were praying for another

00:56:50.620 dose of B-52s to liberate them from the Taliban, casualties or not.

00:56:56.560 A, he's sort of mocking the idea that there were civilian casualties, presumably being

00:57:01.560 like, come on, they were terrorists or something. But then at the same time, saying that civilians

00:57:06.080 wanted this to happen. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. There's like this

00:57:10.940 fundamental contradiction. And all of this I bring up because a good chunk of the final chapters of

00:57:16.000 The World is Flat is dedicated to Friedman's belief that the ostensibly insular culture of

00:57:23.600 the Muslim world is a threat to globalization. Wait, really? Yeah. He's got like a Huntington

00:57:29.280 turn at the end it's in his final uh chapters titled uh the muslim question oh no i mean i'm

00:57:35.640 kidding i'm kidding you gotta be careful peter that actually sounded pretty uh pretty real

00:57:42.600 actually sounded pretty plausible sorry um yeah he calls it he calls the muslim culture an

00:57:48.420 unflattener um and he talked at length about how this is something that the muslim world 0.85

00:57:54.160 needs to reckon with. I think that his writing about the Iraq war and about the Middle East

00:57:59.980 and war in general is actually really illuminating because the through line between his war coverage

00:58:07.000 and this book is that his primary goal revolves around retaining American hegemony in the coming

00:58:16.880 century. Like at first glance, you might think that there's a tension or inconsistency here

00:58:22.260 where like this guy is writing about our interconnectedness with the rest of the world, 0.85

00:58:26.160 but then he's championing these brutal campaigns of vengeance in the Middle East. But I actually

00:58:32.200 think it starts to make sense once you realize that his primary concern is American power,

00:58:38.820 right? He's not writing this book as like a student of technology or something. He's writing

00:58:44.100 it as someone who wants to ensure American supremacy, whether that means funding science

00:58:49.880 education or destabilizing the middle east he's also doing a very similar thing to nudge where

00:58:55.300 he's pretending to be doing this cool descriptive project like this is just how human nature works

00:59:02.140 we should make policy according to human nature but then once you get into the guts of it it's 0.94

00:59:06.520 like oh actually we should do a bunch of like crazy libertarian shit right like underneath it 0.83

00:59:10.380 is this extremely ideological project right and it seems like he's doing the same thing like i'm 0.95

00:59:14.300 describing how the world is becoming more interconnected and then whisper voice like 0.82

00:59:19.380 the muslims are really the problem with this right like that doesn't follow from the premise at all 0.65

00:59:23.840 no um i mean he has all of these ideas about like how oh internet interconnectedness will

00:59:30.440 foster peace in the long term and then he gets to this section of the book that's like

00:59:35.160 now let's talk about how muslims are a big wrench in all of this right i'm gonna send you

00:59:42.540 something that is so long and i'm sorry peter i can't do the episode unless we say it and you 0.98

00:59:49.500 make me go all the way through this fucking excerpt i want to i'm going to say something 0.87

00:59:53.340 before this i don't even know if it makes total sense to put it here in in at the end of this 0.91

00:59:57.940 episode but and i want you to listen to what i'm saying because we've read a lot of excerpts here

01:00:02.340 this is the worst thing in this book okay i have um a screenshot version of this that is

01:00:08.500 the entire page is highlighted because I started trying to highlight sections because I was like,

01:00:13.940 well, I don't want him to read all of it. It's too long. And then I just, I realized that I was

01:00:17.660 highlighting all of it. And so I was like, well, now it looks stupid. I'm just going to highlight 0.99

01:00:21.200 the whole page. Okay. He says, what if regions of the world were like the neighborhoods of a city?

01:00:29.480 What would the world look like? I'd describe it like this. Western Europe would be an assisted

01:00:34.620 living facility with an aging population lavishly attended to by Turkish nurses. 0.94

01:00:40.000 The United States would be a gated community with a metal detector at the front gate and

01:00:44.760 a lot of people sitting in their front yards complaining about how lazy everyone else was, 0.99

01:00:49.320 even though out back there was a small opening in the fence for Mexican labor and other energetic

01:00:54.260 immigrants who helped make the gated community function.

01:00:57.280 Latin America would be the fun part of town, the club district, where the workday doesn't

01:01:01.400 begin until 10 p.m. and everyone sleeps until mid-morning. It's definitely the place to hang

01:01:06.280 out, but in between the clubs, you don't see a lot of new businesses opening up. Except on the

01:01:11.460 street where the Chileans live. The landlords in this neighborhood almost never reinvest their 1.00

01:01:18.620 profits here, but keep them in a bank across town. The Arab street would be a dark alley where 0.99

01:01:24.060 outsiders fear to tread, except for a few side streets called Dubai, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar,

01:01:30.260 and Morocco. The only new businesses are gas stations, whose owners, like the elites in

01:01:35.380 the Latin neighborhood, rarely reinvest their funds in the neighborhood. Many people on the 0.98

01:01:40.260 Arab street have their curtains closed, their shutters drawn, and signs on their front lawn

01:01:44.700 that say, no trespassing, beware of dogs. India, China, and East Asia would be the other side of 0.99

01:01:51.880 the tracks. Their neighborhood is a big teeming market, made up of small shops and one-room

01:01:57.140 factories, interspersed with Stanley Kaplan SAT prep schools and engineering colleges.

01:02:03.720 We're like halfway through. Nobody ever sleeps in this neighborhood. Everyone lives in extended

01:02:09.520 families, and everyone is working and saving to get to the right side of the tracks. On the Chinese 1.00

01:02:14.500 streets, there's no rule of law, but the roads are well paved. On the Indian streets, by contrast, 0.99

01:02:19.480 no one ever repairs the streetlights, the roads are full of ruts, but the police are sticklers

01:02:24.080 for the rules. You need a license to open a lemonade stand on the Indian streets. Luckily, 0.54

01:02:29.340 the local cops can be bribed, and the successful entrepreneurs have their own generators to run

01:02:33.920 their factories and the latest cell phones to get around the fact that the local telephone poles are

01:02:38.160 all down. Africa, sadly, is that part of town where the businesses are boarded up, life expectancy is

01:02:43.700 declining, and the only new buildings are healthcare clinics. Fucking hell, Peter. It's so fucking 0.99

01:02:51.580 annoying it's like just say what you mean man it's not even a metaphor half the time he's just 0.97

01:02:56.820 described like he starts off with like the assisted living facility and the gated community

01:03:02.060 and you're like okay this is a metaphor i guess right by the end of it though he's just describing

01:03:06.900 the countries yeah in the african neighborhood life expectancy is declining like you don't need 0.94

01:03:12.540 the metaphor just say life expectancy is declining in africa what the fuck is this dude right and 0.78

01:03:20.040 like there's no rule of law in the chinese neighborhood you're just talking about china 0.94

01:03:24.560 you don't need the neighborhood thing for that and like the arab street is a dark alley except

01:03:31.400 for dubai bahrain right car and morocco like this is not you stop doing the metaphor please yeah i

01:03:39.020 think what you said earlier is right that like it's not clear that he knows how metaphors work

01:03:42.980 right like metaphors are supposed to simplify situations or like describe the nature of

01:03:48.820 something to say that like the factory was hell yeah it condenses all of this other information

01:03:54.480 but if you're gonna say the factory was hell and like hell it was hot and loud and everybody hated

01:04:01.760 it you don't need the middleman at that point you're just describing the factory the factory

01:04:05.840 was like a neighborhood where my boss was yelling at me all the time it's not a metaphor it's not

01:04:11.120 really a metaphor yeah these are the sorts of like little things that you encounter in friedman's

01:04:16.320 writing all of the time wrapped up in what we haven't even discussed as the most ethnically 0.96

01:04:22.520 insensitive shit i've ever read like are you fucking kidding me there's parties in latin 0.99

01:04:28.000 america every night he literally ripped through every region of the world and was 1.00

01:04:33.680 like a little bit rude about all of them yeah 1.00

01:04:36.600 fuck man this also just like isn't smart he's just like repackaging conventional wisdom bullshit 0.99

01:04:45.640 that's why i thought it was worth ending on it a because we have to talk about it i mean i lost my 1.00

01:04:51.020 fucking mind when i read it and b because like this is someone who is purporting to be able to 0.63

01:04:57.860 describe the world in an insightful way and this is what he has to say about the entire planet 0.98

01:05:05.200 right this is his description of every continent there's just like nothing there this is there's

01:05:11.000 no real insight he is bullshitting right alexander cockburn in 1999 wrote a takedown of friedman 0.52

01:05:17.080 that was devastating um one line of it friedman is so marinated in self-regard that he doesn't 0.99

01:05:22.360 even know when he's being stupid just right like right to the heart of thomas friedman got him 0.89

01:05:30.880 but the other side of that is like friedman has sway in elite circles and like was reportedly 0.98

01:05:36.900 relatively influential in the obama administration i don't know this isn't someone that everyone 0.54

01:05:41.980 agrees is dumb um right i i think that there is a market and has always been a market for 0.88

01:05:50.220 people who are good at making you feel like you learned something when you didn't yeah yeah put 0.97

01:05:56.340 together this cheeky little metaphor and people are like oh that's yeah that's a way to look at

01:06:01.200 right right people are up late in latin america amazing uh yeah you ever think about the the

01:06:07.800 neighborhood metaphor like the united states is a gated community and the middle east is a place 0.99

01:06:13.520 where everyone sucks and is stupid if it were a neighborhood i'm saying that's the type of 0.97

01:06:19.740 neighborhood it would be peter it's very funny to me that when both of us do our like generic 1.00

01:06:24.180 asshole voice we both do new york accents but yours yours is your actual accent no my 0.91

01:06:30.620 my accent is a combination of new york and philadelphia full of the nicest people on earth so 0.54

01:06:36.880 yeah i don't i don't know where i adapted my were you adapted you just did it my like i i don't know

01:06:45.160 i guess it is just like the strongest like it's just the dumb guy that i grew up knowing to some

01:06:51.260 degree right like there's like the belligerent man nearby was generally either a philadelphian

01:06:58.160 or a new yorker and i think the new york accent is just a little bit easier to do so i think it's

01:07:01.860 the person you're still in danger of becoming that's where all my bad voices come from like

01:07:05.820 this person lives inside me when i'm like 80 with dementia or whatever i'm just going to be this

01:07:11.060 like belligerent character from the sopranos and people are gonna be like he was he was a nice guy

01:07:15.960 and he didn't have this Brooklyn accent.

01:07:17.800 It's not real. 0.64

01:07:20.380 That's how I started saying hella.

01:07:21.800 I started saying it as a joke

01:07:22.740 and then it became like 80% of my personality.

01:07:25.580 Don't be careful.

If Books Could Kill - June 01, 2023

The World is Flat

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