2021 Geschke Lecture Series: George Friedman, The Storm Before The Calm

we get started i'm going to turn the zoom screen over to ann scott's executive director of the athenian thank you amy good evening i'm anne scott the head librarian at the nantucket athenaeum and on behalf of our board and our amazing staff it's my pleasure to welcome you to the library's first installment of the 2021 geshke lecture series and i would like to take a moment to recognize the extraordinary impact that chuck and nangeshki have had on the island and on the etheneum we were saddened to learn of chuck's passing last week and we send our deepest condolences to his family the geschke lecture series was established in 2005 and chuck and nan's leadership allowed the library to greatly expand the scope of its programming and has provided a solid foundation of excellence to the athenians offerings ever since tonight's speaker embodies the best of what the lecture series offers a program that informs and challenges audiences with current critical ideas and issues dr george friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs he's the founder and chairman of geopolitical futures and author of six books with his most recent being the storm before the calm published in 2020. dr friedman has briefed numerous military and government organizations in the united states and overseas and appears regularly as an expert on international affairs foreign policy and intelligence and major media his most popular book the next 100 years is kept alive by the prescience of its predictions other best-selling books include flashpoints the emerging crisis in europe the next decade america's secret war the future of war and the intelligence edge his books have been translated into more than 20 languages he received his bachelor's degree from city college of the city university of new york and he holds a doctorate in government from cornell university welcome george friedman it's good to be here um this is the first book i have written in my own country all of my books previously have been about other countries and it's very strange to use the method i use to de-personalize the united states forget my place in it forget my hopes for it forget my animosities forget everything and try to understand how this country works which is a presumptuous beginning but it is what i was trying to do i started to write this book in about 1975 in a bar in carlisle pennsylvania where i was sitting with some friends bemoaning the catastrophic state the country was in we'd seen as relatively young people the murder of martin luther king and robert kennedy had seen the 82nd airborne called in to put down snipers in detroit we saw cities all over the country burning in the wake of the killings we saw a demonstration in chicago that utterly disrupted the uh utterly disrupted the democratic invention and was a new mark of incivility that we could imagine we can possibly imagine we saw kent state the shooting that took place and we saw an economic crisis uh triggered by the rise of oil prices that paralyzed the country in addition to that extraordinarily for the first time in history a president was forced out of office because of suspicion of criminality which actually was true so at that time i said what's happening and i asked the question has this ever happened before and i noticed a series of times starting with andrew jackson and his presidency when the nation turned away from settling the coast to settling the interior and the eastern banks were making it impossible for them to buy land settlers to buy land or equipment or anything else and then i looked at rutherford b hayes came right after the civil war who both faced an upheaval economically because of the war and instituted the gold standard which kicked off the industrial revolution in the united states i then looked at franklin roosevelt who oversaw if you will the transformation in the united states and the depression of course and finally in 75 i looked at this and i said well what's next having drunk a great deal that night i went home and put the notes away and forgot about it uh then i came back to it in 2015 which is when i started writing the actual writing of the book and i said well if this model of every 50 years roughly a massive social upheaval takes place economic upheaval takes place um incredible rancor incredible political anger john quincy adams accused of stealing the election he did but it was a clean sweet steal watching rutherford b hayes absolutely stole that election uh going through all of these periods i said well we're five years away from the next crisis in 2020 we should have a definitive crisis if by theory was true i spent a lot of time studying it and tried to understand why what appeared to be an accidental sequence had a logic in it and so this book was published in february 2020 february 25th in fact um which was the day that the coveted crisis began shutting the country down and let me assure you do not publish a book on that date that's a very bad time to publish your book but published it was and the book argued that we are in for a period in the next from 2020 to about 2023 24 of enormous upheaval enormous unrest tremendous ranker uh economic dislocation and i didn't even count covet because it wasn't there okay and that at the end of this century a new era would emerge just like the western era emerged just like the industrial revolution emerged and and so on so the question really was why 50 years and the answer i have is not good one uh it's that and i'll get into it a bit technology turns it uh and the question is why does a cycle and the answer it begins with understanding that this is an invented country unlike italy or russia which may have been invented but very long ago which is what i'll call an organic country we were invented our constitution was formed by committee uh our public is formed by immigrants which we're not supposed to say anymore uh immigrants who come in have come in and forged this country there is no one in the united states who came here because he had such a great life back home he wanted to try something bad all of us descend from people who came here out of necessity out of opportunity out of something that we might get it's also the geographies invented the erie canal the meaning of the mississippi river and how the mississippi river changed its purpose as it began to drain the central the agricultural system of the central states sell the goods to europe which is where they selled it allowed europe to take their farmers and move them into the cities to work in factories and kicked off the global industrial revolution i mean these were mechanical things the regime the people the uh countryside all of these were things that were how should i put it um natural things that had an unnatural start it isn't like other countries and at the root of everything that we do is technology the creation of our government was a contin creation of a machinery of government that was designed basically not to work very well because government was not trusted private life was valued and was always feared that the politicians would screw things up okay so we we saw it as a machine a machine the metabolized immigrants a machine that produced and exported it was a machine when you are invented that's way you think about it okay so in each era there is some innovation some invention that transforms the country and that runs its course so for example without going through all of them um the period from haze to um to fdr what it was invented was electricity well electricity wasn't invented by the utilization of electricity urbanization was necessary for factories because transportation was poor and factories had to ship goods back and forth and electricity made it possible to work and live at night imagine a city without lights well it couldn't be nine million people living in them that wouldn't be possible and electricity this core technology that was developed also developed a range of things from movies to phonographs to more things than i can imagine electricity drove the economy and continues to drive it and until the 1920s electricity transformed the country it was completely different and then after that it became routine the massive transformations were done there are many many things to do with it it was going to be necessary but it was no longer an innovation it became a commodity we all understood electricity and so on in the same sense really in the roosevelt period the key commodity was the internal combustion engine which allowed two things to happen have cars uh which change the geography of the country again the way we encountered the united states changed dramatically but in addition to transforming that made the airplane possible the first aircraft flew on internal combustion engines so it transformed the way we traveled and that was critical and really you go forward and you see that is inconceivable the general motors that ford that chrysler would not be the dominant companies in the same way it was impossible to imagine that edison's various companies wouldn't dominate but what happened was that at a certain point about 1965 50 years after the first ford plant was introduced uh the cars became a commodity and the creation of automobiles went from technologists to marketing people i remember as a kid the announcement of new cars and this one will be in green with fins or whatever the marketing people and the designers desperately trying to show some difference from what really is commodity and the net result was that the automobile by the 1970s the automobile companies were in deep trouble uh each for different reasons but you know chrysler on the verge of bankruptcy so what we see is that the institutions created by the free free market ruthlessly attacks these corporations when they become commodities you can't have a major commodity a corporation that sells commodities things that are just there so the automobile is still there it still matters we still buy it but it's not the symbol of our prosperity okay it's not the symbol of who we are it's just that in 1970 1971 i was at cornell and i went into [Music] off-campus store and i held in my hand a hewlett-packard calculator it was a very nice calculator they wanted 225 dollars for it this is 1971 and me and graduate school so we were partying companies and i had no idea what was going to be found in that what was inside there what was inside there was a microchip and the microchip can create an entirely new technological culture an entirely new way of living that we all have benefited from or certainly experienced okay and that technology is no longer cutting edge it is 50 years old from the time that i stood there up at cornell uh in college town looking at that calculator well we have reached a point where it no longer is sparkling where apple is desperately trying to create a market for a new cell phone this time in black i'm not kidding they introduced this like that should matter um these companies are towering you know apple uh intel all of these companies continue to tower over as general motors did over the economy as old previous companies did but the point is that productivity growth productivity declined per person uh the growth rate declined i should say uh in each of the past four years now in the 1990s they surged they they overwhelmed that was in the 1990s now we are at a later date and 1990s they're doing pretty much what the automobile did or electricity did or any other things did they are becoming commodities okay try as they may there are many new commodities being sput off okay but still the transformative element the thing that made us different ended now notice that these technologies tend to have 50-year cycles again i look at it as empirically this is how the cycles they have but there it is and we're coming to the end of this cycle and the end of the technological cycle always coincides with increasing social unrest and political tension reasonable the economic opportunities become skewed in the case of the last cycle that ended with the election of ronald reagan the problem was there was not enough demand for goods that goods were more expressed than they should be by the market and the system didn't work our problem today is too much money in this cycle uh the amount of money you could get for a simple savings account they almost made you pay for the right to put in the bank which means that people who had saved money that savings had no marginal value beyond what they could buy the crisis is compounded by covid because so much money was printed that whereas the economist will explain to you don't have any effect he can't put three trillion dollars in the economy and not shake it up but this is happening anyway okay so the the monetary system we had had reached its end uh interest rates would go into nothing money was worth nothing a different crisis than the previous period but a crisis the corporations that ran the the microship economy had become so vastly powerful that they were under massive political attack very much like in roosevelt's years and so on and when we look at you know when the society itself not necessarily because of the microchip but old issues deep issues like the relationship of blacks to american society emerged again as they had in the 1960s and 70s as they had in the 1920s when the ku klux klan re-emerged emerged again and you know the segregationists dominated these are all as we say now politely conversations i love conversations they scream at each other it's called a constant conversation converse these were the transformative events so race always reemerges but also social tension and one of the social tensions that we have in the roosevelt era was the tension between the industrial working class and the others including management if you will but now we have a different one the industrial working class is the client uh the great fortunes that created you know general motors and so on i mean they're they had they're not there and unemployment and underemployment and drug use and everything has seeped into the center of the country in the meantime the technocracy has blossomed the technocracy that accompanied the rise of the microchip has done wonders for itself and for the country but as always happens the division between the two sectors creates very different interests and various different perceptions of what the problem is they're two dimensions this one of them is economic one part of the country is experiencing an extraordinary boom it now has moved here to austin texas where houses that you wouldn't buy for twelve thousand dollars are now going for two million okay and they're being bought and the people who used to live there in those houses are looking at and what has happened to me i didn't get to play and there's a social aspect to it as well in the sense of the crisis one of the crises of the technocracy is the university the university is the essence of the technocracy it teaches the technocratic and other skills as well as other matters and who gets into these universities determines who they are uh i remember but when i was writing the book reading a interview form that people at harvard used to interview candidates and then filled out and they would be asked is this a person you would like to room with is this a person that you would like to eat with have dinner with it was like reading the great gatsby which is to say what are the chances of a young woman from arkansas who is opposed to abortion getting into harvard well it would be hard anyway but it's not going to happen you therefore have two educational systems the community colleges and the state colleges are one system very much rooted in the community very much used in sharing communal activities and then the better schools as they say championing technocracy uh having values that are similar and teaching them well this is the way it happened in each of the cycles the universities became seismographs and so you have a country where you're not going to get a internship to goldman sachs if you go to arkansas state yeah i mean you might but it's not the likely path the great opportunities that are available as in the depression are not available now to that class there's another part of this which is a cultural division in much of this country churches are fundamental prince institutions and they have a high deal of respect and these churches teach that homosexuality is bad pre-marital sex is bad and these other things they may practice them but everybody feels bad about it now what really is important to understand is that we've undergone a social transformation in which what had been previously banned groups for this group became championed by the technocracy and those who were appalled by that okay were considered by hillary clinton deplorables well this is going to give you a social crisis and that gave us you know uh the last president it gave you the last president because he was the champion of one half of the country hillary clinton was the champion of the other half of the country and the country split i live in texas in a county that is all trump you don't live in hayes county and not vote trump about 25 miles up the road is austin a friend of mine spoke for trump and was almost lynched this is the level of anger that exists in our society but the most important is that the two groups do not know each other those who are of the technocracy don't know people strut struggling in the heartland and those in the heartland read about these people but they don't know each other it's very similar if you think about it to the great depression those who were smashed by the depression okay and those who weren't i mean it tilted toward those who were smashed which is why roosevelt won but those who had been devastated by the civil war we're facing those who profited mightily of the civil war so this goes back all the time we reach this point of a great division in our country and in this great division there is no neutral ground believe me i get hammered every way who do you look okay when i talk about how harvard selects people i'm a fascist and when i talk about the values in the churches i'm a communist and that's where we are we are at that moment that happens in every cycle where we cannot believe that anyone who's reasonable would disagree with us and those who do or monsters both sides you know regard them as that and then they start behaving as monsters because the war breaks out and they battle so what we are seeing now is the first phase of this transformation the second phase of this transformation comes now usually when you take a look at last election last phase um you had nixon okay he was replaced by gerald ford a nice non-entity and jimmy carter who desperately tried applying roosevelty and economics to non-rooseveltian phase so you go into a period of relative quiet politically underneath it tremendous tension tremendous anger that goes on and on until at the end of this period you have a transformative president now presidents are like diapers they get changed every four years they are not the instrument to transform society rather they wrap themselves around the forces that are protecting them ronald reagan did not know what he was going to do the idea that he was going to cut taxes on the wealthy uh and hold them steady for the poor was insane filing every raw but that created the investment capital that created the microchip economy that's how people invested in 1990s and made 10 baggers no investment money no society so you had that sort of thing you know that takes place in in each society when roosevelt faced the great depression he understood he had to increase consumption and when he was did that he was accused of being a communist well it still worked out okay so now we're moving into a period where about 2028 give or take a week about 2028 uh or sometime around there a new president will come into office roosevelt had no idea what he was going to do walter lipman said of roosevelt he's the least qualified man ever to be elected president i said ronald reagan was said to be an idiot completely unqualified but each of them presided over the transformation that has to take place well the transformation that has to take place here is we have to replace the microchip industry as the center of growth it's not high tech anymore it's 50 years old uh it's getting boring in a lot of ways but they are really going to always be here they're always going to be money to be made there's always jobs there what comes next well economically all all technology is invented to serve a social need edison was very frank about that and we've now have a time when we've managed the question of radically transforming communication and making it more efficient while managing the transfer of information we've changed the entire structure of these things we're reading reaching the end of the transformative period so what is the social problem we have to face well the critical social problem we have to face is that we're all living longer and the millennials are having fewer children now drawing a curve that means you're going to wind up in a society with a lot of old people and fewer young people that's a crisis it's a crisis not only because i plan to be old and cranky and really enjoy myself it's a crisis because if we maintain the diseases we have now alzheimer's parkinson's everything else these people become massive consumers and not producers and as you have a smaller working class supporting consumption hungry people you have a problem therefore the next technology has to be medical it has to be medical because that's the problem that's coming that has to be solved and we have to find a way to solve these diseases now the way that science medicine works now they solve diseases one at a time this guy's working on alzheimer's that guy's working on parkinson's there's no general theory now at this point i'll stop my son is a biologist a professor of biology and he really resents my speaking on the subject even i'll stop but to say that i never imagined the microchip as a solution to things that i was doing at that time in the military i never imagined many things i'm not a technologist but i do know it's needed when that comes in we're going to need a lot of money to invest in it because the new phase always begins with that so suddenly the problem we have becomes a potential benefit if money retains value so economically money retaining its value is crucial and so this is where we are and this is we're going to go to and it's perfectly normal and right now it really is a miserable thing to be an american because we're living with the original sin of our republic slavery we're living with the deep division of the country in mutual hatred and we're living with an economy that's slowly dubiously churning to close medicine by the way to rapidly solve things like hovid you know so all these things come together into that problem i want to go into just a little bit one other cycle that there is that other cycle that we really have to think about is an institutional cycle that goes for 80 years every 80 years it shifts we've found it 80 years later we've redefined the relationship between the states and the federal government through a civil war 80 years later world war ii was fought and we redefined the relationship between the federal government to society society the federal government essentially nationalized the american economy and it deemed nationalized only to limited sense the problem each of these occurred from wars by the way the revolutionary war the civil war and world war ii each were necessary you didn't have a choice the war that i think defines us is the wars in the middle east 18 years of mismanagement failure and whether you're forward or against the war doesn't matter it it was not managed really well what were we doing from there and that raises the fundamental question of our society the government of expertise so world war ii was won by the experts the experts built the liberty ships the experts built the landing craft the experts built the bombers and nuclear atomic bombs and everything and that ex notion that experts are needed to run the government became a foundation of our government where we have experts working on all sorts of projects the strength of an expert is he knows one thing very well his weakness is he doesn't really isn't already aware of other things particularly the consequences of what he does he also creates a government that's incomprehensible social security if i recall was 15 pages long the legislation had passed it the implementation of the health care bill was 15 000 pages that from an expert point of view is perfect but who knows the whole thing who knows so we are in a position where we've created a government that is still piped and a lot of that is can be seen in the covid problem right this is the medical solution what is the social solution what is the political solution how do we reconcile these things so the government question now is what is the relationship of our government to itself yeah what is the relationship of the most a fundamental right in our bill of rights which is the right to petition our government that almost doesn't exist not because they want it not to exist but how can i get to anyone who has the authority so um story i was eligible for medicare i said eligible i decided not to take it i had my own health care it didn't matter i find out that i'm going to be fined for not taking the health care not much but really fine so i go to a very nice person in the office who would love to help me but can't because the experts who wrote the regulations left no room for her decision making she could not make a decision she was not permitted to so the the rules preclude petitioning the government because i can't get to the secretary of health education health and so on i can't get to these people and only corporations have you know lobbyists who can do that so in the development of expertise we also developed systems of management from which there is no appeal and this is our fundamental problem there and that also has happening for the first time in our history at the same time the social and economic cycle and the institutional cycle are bottoming out three three years apart now when i say three years apart i really have no idea how many years but pretty close and we are we i don't know how deep the crisis goes but this crisis the federal government and the inability of people to trust it which we saw in an insane form at the capitol building just not trusting the federal government has to be addressed and so we are in this crisis we've been in it before we will solve it it will be ugly and we'll call each other names other than that stay home watch tv enjoy and if there are any questions let me turn to you thank you so much dr friedman i'm sure we have questions and looks like amy's coming back on and janet yeah so put your questions in the q a oh here's one so janet wants to know how does the george floyd court decision shape your thinking about our next cycle well it's what i would expect in the cycle already in the cycle uh in the same way that we saw martin luther king killed and cried and violence in this cities in the 1960s and 70s in the same sense what's happened there is inherently part of this cycle and racial tension is always part of the american cycle along with other things but yeah that is simply a sim symptom of where we are i i have a question um i really enjoyed the book and i found it really accessible and um but as i was thinking kind of what you said at the end um dr freeman is i felt a little bit like helpless but also a little relaxed at the same time because it seems inevitable um and so i'm curious honest you know what's the action if there was an action society should be taking or the average person should be taking well most of you are under some pressure whatever it is social pressure a economic pressure something so it's not a theoretical question you will do what you need to do in order to achieve your goal politically what have you 330 million other americans are doing the same thing so what you are seeing is a massive millions of people feeling the same sorts of pressures some difference of the same struggling with each other and it's not that it's all determined it's simply that look this is the point we're at in history this is the problem you're experiencing it the decision you make is going to be paralleled by a lot of other people you're not alone in making that decision but this is a time of unlike the 1990s for example a time where we all come under enormous pressure economic social cultural and so on and we break into tribes but in the end it tries to have blended in back together on a personal level i drink a lot um okay so albert has a question the wearing of masks for covid seems to have become a battle line for the two sides is this just a temporary phenomenon or is there something else going on here what is going on is distrust of the federal government and experts fauci has become the symbol of the disease the federal government is not trusted by vast numbers of the american public and deeply trusted by another care oddly enough i find it interesting that the technocracy trusts the government more than the declining industrial class so what you see here is you come down to texas go to austin nobody gets in anywhere without a mask you come down here and go to that town bandera that i went to recently nobody gets in with it mask and what it represents is our relationship to the federal government and trust of what it says so like in the nineteen six in the 1970s there was deep distress of government that was lying to us about war and things like that okay it's not in you now the issue is uh masks so the problem is that the experts like fauci argue that we should do this this and this but they're not aware of the social consequences of what they're saying they shouldn't be that's not their job but we don't have intermediaries who are who can supersede his advice or shape it or somehow another so we get very blank you must do this to a nation that is hostile to anybody telling you what to do let's remember this is the united states we were built on you know what davy crockett said you know i'm going to texas you may go to hell that's the united states and down here you get a lot of that okay we have another question um could you speak a little bit more to your prediction on how biotech like the microchip will drive the innovation our current cycle well i'll call it medicine instead of biotech which biotech involved immediately gives you a hint that this might be a microchip possibility and i want to move beyond that so i'll call it well the what i said before was look we are going to get a demographic shift that's no longer in question that is going to happen and part of it is going to happen because medicine is extending life but not making it productive so i may live to be 90 and i'll be drooling for the last 10 years and somebody's going to have to feed me you're not going to kill me i hope but you know it's bad so this is social problem we have to deal with there it's not as an option and the option falls to medicine because they deal with these things and they're going to have to undergo a revolution in the same way the computer industry underwent a revolution after the microchip used to be you know uniback and things like that and the revolution they have to do is speed up the rate of innovation they are used to the idea of an infinite amount of time to get the right answer which is good when except socially when you become the key company this is a key profession you don't have that pleasure so there's a cultural shift that has to take place it's going to be painful but it doesn't really come to bear until you know the next 20 years before we really need that solution but you can take a look at the demographic figures take a look at the birth rate of the millennials take a look at the extension of life expectancy and you'll find about the date where it's going to become a problem uh so lenny asks how does immigration play into all of this everything the united states does is based on immigrants all of our history i personally can't was born in hungary i came here when i was a small child i'm an immigrant my wife who's from australia is a daughter of the mayflower descendant from bradford they went over there they came back here bradford was an immigrant okay we are all immigrants and as i said at the beginning no one comes here who's doing well at home you don't abandon your home if you're making billions you know you come here because you busted out okay and now we have in every generation we get immigrants so the scotch-irish presbyterians in other words were loathed when they came here they were seen as unruly impossible and cannot possibly exist in the united states the irish irish catholics were seen as the same the germans were seen as the same we have a town here called fredericksburg which is heavily german and as in flying german flags and they came here in the 1840s so there's nothing new about immigration including the hatred of the immigrant every immigrant class was hated okay so what we have now is mexican immigration which is different because on the border and they're always coming north okay but one of the funny things about the mexicans is when you call them people of color they really hate that because they don't see themselves as that they see themselves as conventional immigrants who in a couple of generations are going to be very wealthy and they are if you look at the cubans or others so that's this is a normal process one you get immigrants two you hate the immigrants three you go to work for the immigrants this is the american story so the immigration situation we're facing now is no different than we've seen in since the beginning of the republic and there's and there's no way of arguing you know saying that this is the same way as were because everybody knows that we were wrong about the presbyterians and certainly wrong about the irish irish catholics but we can't say that we're wrong in the mexicans so this will go on and the important thing to remember is that each side will pander to it to their own group so again if you see the split in the country you will see the right wing afraid of the migrants used to be the left wing early 20th century was afraid of them whereas poor is afraid of them and you will see the technocrats who may not have ever seen a mexican uh vastly in favor of their rights it's a wonderful game to watch you know if there's no football on watch the american argument on immigration yeah go ahead hands well you speak to the end of these these cycles like these cycles of innovation and how they it sounds like they correlate with an increase in social unrest and so you know as you talk about the next phase of innovation and what that might look like i just wonder then how does that how does that change the direction that we're going in terms of these divisions these social divisions well let's take a look at results europe divided between the industrial working class and big business and a lot of other groups okay industrial working class are ethnic catholic and jewish uh the others are protestants okay what happens is that you evolve the immigrant groups that make this up into something new so underlying everything is the fact that a lot of these people one of the things is americans get bored we got bored with the vietnam war and with anti-war demonstrations so as these go on people get bored and start to innovate and find solutions so as we move into this period and the biological industry the medicine industry starts employing vast numbers of people all of whom went to some obscure university okay you see a transformation a mediation so go through the first we are at the end of the last cycle all hell is breaking loose a new solution will come out it will take about 10 years took about 10 years for reagan's solutions to take hold and then we go into a period of a golden age where we go we look back on the 50s as a globe and golden age and we look back on the 90s is really stunning in the 20s okay so there's always a golden age and then it turns and live in hell that's america oh sorry go ahead dr friedman i was going to say that other countries don't have this cycling they weren't built like us with everything temporary with the expectation that nothing would be permanent it wasn't built be with various ethnic groups and with different histories at war with each other and it wasn't built on technology okay the united states is and all those things make it work this way so if i s as i said at the beginning i usually work on other countries i worked on this one on my own and i was very surprised by what i found which is that has a very crisp logic and it needs this period to clean out the system i'm sorry we have a question um we've had some social justice progress in the last 50 years and they're thinking especially of gay marriage and the recognition that love is love this population also has economic might how do you see this contributing to this cycle well there's huge resentment against the idea that gay marriage is marriage uh against they don't see this as social uh progress social justice they see it as two things a deterioration of moral values and an attempt to delegitimize their own religions so it's a it's a problem that comes out in both ways the class that embraces the new ideology normally is the wealthy class they're a novel class they try to invent new things they embrace them the declining class is usually conservative because it's under pressure and it clings to its values so naturally you're going to have a situation where tech you know the google people all embrace this transformation of our understanding of sexuality and naturally you're going to have again in arkansas i don't know why i'm picking on arkansas uh in arkansas you're going to have a feeling that this is a direct violation of the rules laws of god but even more an attempt to destroy their church so we will fight and what comes out of it usually is an unexpected social change because what came out of for example the roosevelt years um you know was reagan and we a reagan who was very different from what we expect a conservative republican to be in 1930 a very different set of values very different persona so we get news you personas that have that fit remember i was talking about when you're you know that you will do what pressure forces you to do okay same presidents okay i doubt very much that biden has the slightest idea what he's going to do next but it's going to be what works as president and that's going to define him and reagan simply certainly had no idea what he was about to do until reality tells him the great presidents are those who have few opinions of their own and listen very carefully to reality that sounds very quotable so our next question is from brooke who asked do you think the concentration of wealth is necessary to fund the neces the necessary investment in transformations in medicine well if you're poor you probably don't have a lot of money to put into a startup so if you're going to start a new technology it costs a lot of money go back and see what it took to begin many of these companies they normally you know in other countries governments do this and governments are not very good at this as they wouldn't be good here therefore there has to be people with surplus capital of significant amounts and that's called a rich and they many of them lose their shirts on various investments because they're not nearly as bright as they thought they were and some make fortunes but if there is no rule if there is no capital available to buy the equipment hire the people and everything that a startup needs okay then there won't be one the united states has a large number of rich people what had happened was they had lost investment capital during the later years of the last period reagan gave back to him now we're going to have increased taxes no question about it which is we have to increase consumption as well but there's plenty of reserve capital among the wealthy to build the next cycle but i can't even imagine the kind of dinguses they're going to have to have in order to you know make this i asked my son you know he has he does mitochondrial research which i don't fully understand but he said he needed a machine machine cost four million dollars i almost had a heart attack he says by the time this is done you have no idea what this will cost and he has no idea if it'll work that's the tech revolution um we have a question it's from anonymous and i know what you say in your book so this will be interesting what weight do you give climate change when evaluating the next technological challenge i don't know look climate change has become a religion down here in texas there ain't no such thing well we're oil country uh up north we're gonna die in three years the fact is i i do i started my career as a military modeler i modeled wars mathematical modeling i know a little bit about it i don't really know enough about climate there are so many variables in climate just the process of saying what is the world's temperature how do you take the world's temperature how do you track all those variables i'm not denying at all that climate change is there or it's catastrophic i'm just saying i don't know because when i look at the models that are presented they don't use a math that would be recognized in many cases so there are a lot of people out there on both sides who are charlatans and the problem is this is a very complicated issue and i'm always reminded of the population boom because when i was in the 60s we were told we were going to run our food by 1970 by the club of rome which was at that time like the brookings institute so it didn't happen it didn't happen because they didn't take into account a bunch of variables such as people having fewer kids in urban society okay so birth rates had to decline so it didn't happen all right here we have the question could that have happened yes but there were variables that no one knew of that intervened and changed it could those variables be there yes it could also be variables that make it so much worse that i can't go outside i don't know is the answer and frankly i don't trust anybody says he does but that's because i'm cranky and old okay um let's see i think we have time for maybe two more questions so here's one from mark who asks what implications does this cycle have in reshaping our identity as a nation in relation to the rest of the world we've gone through four years of abandoning nato shifting our view about who is our quote-unquote enemy from russia to china etc etc what's next well let me intervene and say we did not betray nato nato betrayed us there is an obligation by every nato member to devote two tenths of one percent of his gdp to military no except for two nations in nato has that been carried out nato is a military alliance you cannot have a military alliance without a military and a country like germany doesn't have one so what is the point of a military alliance if they can't defend themselves they like us being there okay so the answer is we had an alliance it had a purpose when the soviet union was there when the soviet union collapsed its purpose declined everybody said let's pretend the russians are still there and have an alliance the europeans are very smart they said okay we absolutely have alliance we will have dinners we'll have toasts but we're not putting in the money we promise we put in so my view and i'm passionate on this because i spend a lot of time in europe and i hear this stuff okay my view is look there's obligations to be met that the europeans haven't met as to the shape of the united states let me describe it this way the united states is the only country with major ports on both the atlantic and the pacific because it has those ports it is defended from invasion plus the fact that mexico and canada can invade us if they wanted to virtually every other country in the world is subject to invasion we're not the natural condition of the united states therefore is isolation not engagement isolation because we don't have risks that other nations run and we can withdraw now we also want to make sure there is no naval power we stole the atlantic from the british in world war ii and yeah len lee said we'll lend money we'll we'll lend you 40 destroyers and you'll give us all your bases in the north atlantic basically said i was the end of the british empire and we beat the japanese out of it now the one thing we want to make certain of is that no power can take over the atlantic or the pacific and that's where the chinese are threatening to do or but they're far away from that so the united states has a consistent foreign policy to remain isolated as long as possible build alliances to block the other so our alliance in the pacific is japan south korea the philippines indonesia australia singapore in other words as an alliance is bigger than nato by most measures and why because now the issue is china russia is far less of an issue and the united states shifting its balance about is the same as every country would in the same position so i wouldn't argue on that level that the united states has abandoned or changed anything the russians have collapsed nato is gone we can rebuild it if you want but everybody has to ante up okay we have time for one more question this is from kenneth in essence it seems we continue fighting civil wars on race on the rule of government on the relative values of cities versus the heartland and so forth can we do this without a fight large-scale violence or not well except for the civil war which was a large scale violence we have uh and there's not always the same issues i mean different classes are engaging in the same discussion uh there's a declining class that behaves very much as the declining class we see now there's a technocracy which behaves very much as th is a rising class which behaves very much like our technocracy uh but it becomes a declining class after a while and it goes on so we will certainly have a degree of violence america is a violent country it's from its founding was a violent country and growing up in the bronx it was certainly a violent country but that's our character and one of the odd things about the united states as opposed to the french for example is we many of us loathe our character this is who we are the french love themselves i wish we'd be more like that but that would require that we need to embrace things that are really hard to embrace as it is the united states is not a lovable country okay on that note unless there's a final comment thank you so much dr friedman i really did enjoy the book thank you anne and thank you amy and thank you everyone for coming we have a um a number in this gesh number of speakers coming up in the geschke series so stay tuned and uh thank you very much have a wonderful evening you

Channel: Nantucket Atheneum

Views: 33,635

Keywords: Nantucket, Nantucket atheneum, public library, George Friedman, The Storm Before The Calm, Geo political forcasting, American history cycles

Id: djI3T_84Rko

Length: 66min 50sec (4010 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021