0:00

Michael Peter, what do you know about

0:02

the world is flat nothing

0:04

not even enough to make a joke

0:21

So I know the music kicked in but like I I'm

0:23

not making a joke I really know nothing Well,

0:27

what do you know about Thomas Friedman I know

0:29

that he's a New York Times columnist I know

0:31

that a lot of people on the left

0:33

like really dislike him

0:36

But I I've never really

0:38

known why like he's he's always been

0:40

somebody who's been in the side mirror for me

0:43

as someone who? People like

0:45

me talk about a lot, but

0:47

like I've never

0:47

really understood why right? He's

0:50

how I regarded Taylor Swift until you told me about 1989 There

0:55

is no need to know about Thomas

0:58

Friedman He doesn't add any value

1:00

to the world in any meaningful way.

1:03

The background is actually relatively simple He

1:06

made a name for himself covering the Lebanese

1:08

Civil War in the late 70s The

1:11

Times picks him up.

1:13

They dispatch him to Beirut for a bit. He's

1:15

covering the conflicts in the region He's

1:17

winning Pulitzer Prizes And

1:20

then in the 90s he

1:22

sort of drifts his way over to the op-ed

1:25

pages

1:26

Where he has remained ever since hmm, but

1:28

I think like the reason that he's

1:31

so annoying is Not

1:33

just his ideology. It's his his style.

1:36

Oh, yeah, Malcolm Gladwell Was

1:38

like an anecdote guy, right?

1:41

He tells this anecdote and then he follows it

1:43

up with some data that we

1:45

ended up thinking was maybe some cherry-picked

1:47

data Mm-hmm Friedman does the

1:49

anecdote part and then just stops

1:52

and then he starts speculating wildly

1:55

He could be like in a bodega

1:57

in New York and if two guys

1:59

walked in in sandals, he would write

2:02

a column that starts with like, in

2:04

New York City, no one wears

2:06

shoes. That's the level

2:08

of reasoning that I was reading over

2:11

and over again for 600 pages. No

2:15

way! This book is 600 pages long?

2:18

600 pages. So

2:20

let's dive into the book. He

2:23

starts off on a

2:24

golf course in India. He's

2:27

golfing and he's looking around and he sees

2:29

billboards for all sorts of

2:32

like big Western companies, IBM,

2:35

Microsoft. And he's like, whoa,

2:38

I'm in India, but

2:40

there are signs for companies from America.

2:45

And this is when he has his revelation

2:47

about the globalizing world. He

2:49

goes on to compare his journey to

2:51

India

2:52

to that of Christopher Columbus. Now

2:55

I'm going to send you an

2:57

abridged quotation. And

2:59

I think this will give you a good sense of how

3:02

he writes and the sort of like comparisons

3:05

he likes to draw his style. You

3:08

love sending vibe setters. He says,

3:10

I had come to Bangalore, India's

3:13

Silicon Valley, on my own Columbus-like

3:15

journey of exploration.

3:17

Columbus sailed with the Nina, the Pinta,

3:19

and the Santa Maria in an effort to discover a

3:21

shorter, more direct route to India by heading

3:23

west across the Atlantic

3:24

on what he presumed to be an open

3:27

sea route to the East Indies. I set

3:29

out for India by going due East via

3:31

Frankfurt. I had Lufthansa business class.

3:33

I knew exactly which direction I was going thanks

3:36

to the GPS map displayed on my

3:38

screen that popped out of the armrest of my airline

3:40

seat. I too encountered people called

3:42

Indians. I too was searching for

3:44

India's riches. Columbus was

3:46

searching for hardware, precious metals, silk,

3:49

and spices, the sources of wealth in his

3:51

day. I was searching for software,

3:53

brainpower, complex algorithms, knowledge

3:56

workers, call centers, transmission protocols,

3:58

breakthroughs in optical and digital. engineering, the sources

4:01

of wealth in our day." Okay,

4:04

so he's doing some like, it's a land of contrasts.

4:08

This is different in these really

4:11

obvious ways. Right, so this is

4:13

like

4:14

high school term paper level observations.

4:17

Yeah, it's fine. But also calling

4:19

metals, silk, and spices

4:22

hardware. And then like workers

4:24

and call centers are software for

4:26

some reason. I don't quite... I

4:30

love that your brain is like fried from 600 pages

4:32

of this. Because I'm like, this isn't that bad,

4:34

but I've only read one paragraph

4:36

of this. The compounding effect of

4:39

this is like, I had a whole section

4:41

of this episode that I was just like writing

4:43

out. And then I was like, oh man, this

4:45

is fucking hilarious. And then I was like, and then I took

4:47

a day off and read it again. And I was like,

4:49

Mike is not going to understand why this is funny to

4:52

me. Like you need to

4:54

read 400 pages of Thomas Friedman and then read

4:56

this. And you'll understand why it's funny. I'm

5:00

looking forward to you turning my brain into this specific

5:02

type of mush. So the section continues

5:05

and I've sent you that.

5:06

Okay. Columbus was happy to make the

5:08

Indians he met his slaves a pool

5:10

of free manual labor. I just wanted

5:13

to understand why the Indians I met were taking our

5:15

work, why they had become such an important pool

5:17

for the outsourcing of service

5:18

and information technology work from America

5:20

and other industrialized countries. Columbus

5:23

had more than 100 men on his three ships. I

5:26

had a small crew from

5:27

the Discovery Times channel that

5:29

fit comfortably into two banged up

5:31

vans with Indian drivers who drove barefoot.

5:34

Columbus accidentally ran into America, but thought he

5:36

had discovered part of India. I actually

5:39

found India and thought many of the people

5:41

I met there were Americans. Some had actually

5:43

taken American names and others were doing great

5:45

imitations of American accents at call centers

5:48

and American business techniques at software labs.

5:50

Columbus reported to his king and queen that the world

5:52

was round and he went down in history as the

5:55

man who first made this discovery. That's not

5:57

true. I returned home and shared

5:59

my discovery.

5:59

only with my wife and only in a whisper,

6:02

honey, I confided, I think

6:05

the world is flat." Oh

6:07

God, the brain mush is starting to happen. He's

6:12

doing another thing that I feel like I saw in Rich

6:14

Dad, Poor Dad, where it's a very simple

6:16

concept, but he

6:18

just over explains it

6:20

again and again and again. You're like, okay,

6:22

I get it. Your experience is similar

6:25

to Columbus in some ways and different in others.

6:27

I don't know that I needed, what is

6:29

this, 12 different examples? This

6:32

is a consolidated version of this

6:34

passage. I can't tell you how much I cut

6:36

out of this. This is like four pages

6:39

in the book of just going on

6:41

about the comparisons between Columbus

6:44

going to America

6:46

versus me going to India. It just

6:48

drones on. It's

6:50

the perfect vignette to open the book because

6:53

all of the quintessential

6:55

Thomas Friedmanisms are here.

6:58

First, you have the glaring factual

7:01

inaccuracy that you noticed.

7:03

It's a well-known myth that Columbus

7:05

was the first person to discover that the earth

7:07

was round. I knew that in ancient Egypt. I

7:10

literally learned that that was a myth in

7:12

elementary school. Then

7:15

second, it has all of these try hard

7:17

comparisons that you do not

7:19

need. Columbus was on a wooden

7:22

ship, but I'm in a big metal airplane.

7:25

Then third, you have something

7:27

that makes you feel like maybe it's racist, but

7:29

you're not sure. I

7:32

too encountered Indians. Then the

7:35

last thing we have here is

7:37

the bizarre metaphor about

7:39

the world being flat. It's

7:41

the name of the book, of course, and he

7:43

uses the idea that the earth is flat

7:47

as a metaphor for our increasing

7:49

interconnectedness.

7:50

I will kind of defend the

7:52

concept of it. It's like the

7:55

fact that the world is becoming

7:57

more interconnected and that people can much more quickly.

8:00

quickly and easily travel from place to place

8:02

and communicate across the globe is

8:04

like genuinely something that has profound

8:06

impacts on the world. And like he's exploring

8:09

the impact. He found a cute metaphor.

8:12

I think that's fine. Having like a cute little phrase

8:14

that you start your book with. I think it's why the book

8:16

is popular because he has this metaphor,

8:19

even though it doesn't really make sense.

8:22

Like a flat world would be a less

8:24

connected world. Like I

8:26

don't want to be too pedantic because he is just

8:28

being cute. But I will say

8:31

my tolerance for cutesy metaphors

8:33

declined pretty drastically over the course

8:35

of the book. When I first read it, I

8:38

was like, sure, you know, I get it.

8:40

By the end of it, though, I was like, he doesn't

8:42

understand shapes. I'm not 100%

8:44

sure that he understands shapes.

8:45

I also think what

8:48

he's doing is it's kind of this like performance

8:51

of intelligence and analysis. He's

8:53

basically

8:54

drawing a metaphorical

8:56

difference between Columbus and

8:58

himself. And in the way that a high

9:00

school essay would, it sort of seems smart.

9:02

Like, wow, he's really like analyzing this. But

9:05

then when you actually think about it, he's not really

9:07

like saying anything. There's

9:09

no real insight or analysis.

9:10

See, you understand Thomas Friedman. I

9:13

know what's happening. Thomas Friedman has been here

9:15

with you all along. So

9:18

Friedman says that when Columbus set

9:21

sail until about 1800, that

9:23

era was globalization Oh,

9:28

we're doing the 1.0 metaphors. Which

9:31

was characterized by nation states driving

9:33

global integration. Then

9:35

you had from 1800 to 2000 or so globalization 2.0, which is characterized by

9:37

the rise of

9:40

multinational

9:44

corporations. And now we

9:46

are in globalization 3.0, characterized

9:50

by the individual having access

9:52

to technology that allows them to

9:54

compete globally. Okay, I understand

9:56

why people hate this guy now. Yeah, pretty

9:58

fucking annoying, right?

9:59

Only took like six minutes. His penchant

10:02

for oversimplifying this shit,

10:05

it's a, for him it's a, oh man,

10:07

I'm gonna mix metaphors now. I was gonna say it's

10:09

a penchant and then it's a thirst that can't be quenched.

10:11

Oh, you can't do it in the Thomas Friedman episode.

10:14

He's ruined my brain. Oh. Oh.

10:18

Oh. Chapter two

10:20

is called The Ten Forces That

10:22

Flattened the World. I hope that I

10:24

can do justice to how bizarre this chapter

10:27

is. It is 150 pages long. Oh

10:30

my gosh. In isolation, a lot

10:32

of this chapter is perfectly reasonable, but

10:35

he has this way of talking until things

10:37

no longer make sense, right? Like it's

10:40

the same thing with the Columbus comparison

10:43

where like if he had stopped after two sentences,

10:45

you might've never thought about it again, but

10:47

he spoke about it for so long that by the end of it, you're

10:49

like, what the fuck is this?

10:50

What is this about? The first

10:52

section, the first flattener, it's titled

10:55

When the Wall Came Down and

10:57

the Windows Went Up. This

10:59

is about

11:00

the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but

11:02

also Microsoft Windows getting

11:04

popular.

11:05

Oh. Okay,

11:09

I mean, I don't wanna be unfair.

11:11

He talks about like the decline of centrally

11:14

planned economies, right? He's

11:16

very anti-communist and he has all these snarky

11:18

remarks. He says under communism, everyone

11:21

is equally poor and

11:23

under capitalism, they are unequally

11:25

rich. Yeah, it's

11:27

like, again, he's like this perfect little zing

11:30

machine, but like

11:31

that's not really like insightful or

11:33

like accurate about the levels

11:36

of inequality in the Soviet Union. Again,

11:38

for

11:38

some reason, half of this section is

11:40

about how the Windows PC also

11:43

helped like precipitate the flattening of

11:45

the world, but the discussion is like completely

11:47

detached from the Berlin Wall discussion.

11:50

He combines them into one flattener

11:53

and from what I can tell, it's just

11:55

so he can have that cute little title

11:58

about the wall coming down and the windows.

11:59

going up. Even though it doesn't

12:02

make any sense because how would you put windows up on

12:04

a wall that went down? You're

12:08

gonna just apply pure literalism to

12:10

every single thing that he says aren't you? You're

12:13

like no cuteness Friedman. There's only

12:15

so many times you can do this You know what I mean?

12:17

Like if someone just had the occasional

12:20

metaphor like this, you'd be like, alright,

12:22

whatever It doesn't quite work. It's a metaphor. But

12:24

when someone does it 20 times in a row by the end

12:26

of it You're like you can't put a fucking window on a

12:28

wall that came down So

12:34

the next flattener is the Netscape

12:36

IPO Okay He uses that as

12:38

something that's like sort of symbolizes the rise of

12:40

the of the internet of the world wide web

12:42

Pretty inoffensive conceptually, although

12:45

there are like long sections that are like what

12:47

is the world wide web and it was 2005 We've

12:53

yeah, we've all been searching for pornography

12:56

rather than trading it with people in AOL chat rooms

12:58

for like seven years at that point So

13:01

the next one is workflow software Okay

13:03

So we get such insights as quote

13:06

the first big breakthrough in workflow

13:08

was actually the combination of the

13:10

PC and email Okay, that

13:12

was one of many times that I just wrote. Thank

13:14

you Tom in the margin Very

13:17

helpful time Alright, the next flattener

13:19

is uploading Which

13:22

is what it sounds like the ability to upload

13:24

things to the internet where other people can download

13:26

them. He gives the example of

13:29

Wikipedia and blogs

13:31

those aren't even really uploading though If you've been paying

13:34

attention the last three were Netscape workflow

13:36

software and uploading which could probably

13:38

just be consolidated into like the internet Yeah, the

13:40

internet Yeah, and then the next three flatteners

13:43

are also just one thing framed

13:45

slightly differently Outsourcing

13:47

where you move a function of your company

13:49

to another country Offshoring where

13:52

you move an entire operation to another

13:54

country which is outsourcing at a larger

13:56

scale

13:57

and insourcing Where a company

13:59

takes on a function

13:59

function from another company, which is

14:02

literally just outsourcing from the other company's

14:04

perspective. Right. Well,

14:06

the eighth flattener is supply chaining, which

14:09

just means improving supply chains in various

14:12

ways. The ninth flattener

14:14

is informing, which is his term

14:16

for how Google and Yahoo

14:18

and other search engines have sort of given us a

14:20

wide array of information at our fingertips.

14:23

That's just the internet again. It's the internet again.

14:25

It's the internet again. And then his tenth flattener is what he calls

14:27

the steroids. All

14:29

of the

14:29

various technologies that he says are

14:32

turbo charging the other

14:34

flatteners. They include

14:36

wireless technology, voice

14:39

over IP, file sharing, and

14:42

more widespread use of personal

14:44

digital assistance. Again

14:46

basically just the internet again. Over to

14:48

the internet. So those are the flatteners. If

14:52

the metaphor of flatteners with

14:54

steroids isn't quite working for

14:56

you, the next chapter

14:59

is about what he calls the triple

15:01

convergence. Okay. He says that

15:03

three simultaneous convergences

15:06

have occurred to drive globalization.

15:09

The first is the convergence of the ten flatteners

15:11

with one another. The second is

15:13

the convergence of the ten flatteners with new

15:16

business practices. The third

15:18

is the convergence of the resulting new economy

15:21

with new people. Oh my God. From

15:23

China, India, Russia,

15:25

similar countries. Right. Peter,

15:27

I'm exhausted.

15:29

You have the ten flatteners ranging from the fall

15:31

of the Berlin Wall to outsourcing to blogs and

15:33

then you have the steroids that turbo charge

15:35

the flatteners which are themselves also counted

15:38

as a flattener and one of which wireless

15:40

technologies Friedman describes as the

15:42

icing on the cake. Okay. Then

15:45

you have the triple convergence where the flatteners including

15:47

the steroids and the icing on the cake converge

15:49

with one another and also new business

15:51

practices and new populations. And

15:54

all of that is globalization 3.0. This

15:57

is like the part of being John Malkovich

15:59

where he goes. into his own brain. Nothing

16:03

makes sense in there. Later in the book, there's

16:05

a part where he says the next generation of products

16:08

and services are the great synthesizers.

16:10

I was like, it never ends. It never

16:13

ends.

16:15

This is again why these books should not be 600 pages

16:18

long

16:18

because he could have, I feel like he could have pulled

16:20

it off. It was just like the 10 flatteners.

16:23

It's an excuse to talk about various

16:25

ways the internet is changing the world. Fine. It

16:27

seems like he's gilding the lily and

16:29

then throwing in these other like,

16:31

well, this is like the acceleration

16:33

of the flattening and then the unflattening

16:35

and the re-flattening at the same time. It's like,

16:38

Thomas, calm down. That's the thing is

16:40

there are all these little data points

16:42

in here where he's describing some business

16:45

practice that has evolved over the last few years. I'd

16:47

be like, oh, that's fascinating. Then

16:49

he builds it into these metaphors

16:52

in a way where

16:54

you can't actually appreciate them on their

16:56

own because he's trying to just jam

16:58

it into this narrative in

17:01

a way that is clunky and just

17:03

doesn't quite work.

17:04

It's just so fucking annoying. I don't even know what

17:07

the difference between flattening and converging

17:09

is. Several of the flatteners

17:11

and convergences are the same thing from

17:13

what I can tell,

17:15

like outsourcing to India and China as

17:17

a flattener, but then people from India and China

17:19

participating in the economy as a convergence.

17:22

I feel like he fundamentally doesn't

17:24

understand why we use metaphors.

17:29

It's funny because I'm like

17:31

a big storytelling structure guy. I think

17:33

the way that you outline chronological

17:36

events is really important and what information

17:38

you give to the audience at what time is really important.

17:41

A lot of stories can be under structured

17:43

where they feel kind of aimless and you're like, why is this

17:45

person telling me this? Then things can also

17:47

be over

17:47

structured where it's like, okay, there's this rule

17:50

and then there's these 10 things and there's the three

17:52

ways that the 10 things interact with each other.

17:55

The kind of whole point of this is

17:56

to make it easier to absorb the actual

17:59

information. But it doesn't seem

18:01

like he's giving you much actual information.

18:03

It seems like he's just kind of spinning his wheels and giving

18:05

you more and more and more metaphors. Did

18:08

you feel like you learned anything? Like does he have interesting

18:11

sequences in this book? I mean the

18:13

book is basically a string of anecdotes

18:15

packed into metaphors and there are times

18:18

within the anecdotes where you're like, oh, that's

18:20

sort of interesting. Like at one point he was

18:22

talking about the bursting of the dot-com

18:25

bubble and how that actually

18:27

helped drive globalization in certain ways

18:29

because allocations of resources

18:32

changed after the crash in

18:34

a way that benefited India. That's interesting.

18:37

Yeah. Yeah. I

18:39

mean there's a lot of good writing about how economies

18:41

are often shaped by market

18:44

crashes. And there are plenty of little

18:46

things like that, right? It was like, oh, this is in and

18:48

of itself not the least interesting thing. His

18:50

problem is that he's just bitten off way more than

18:53

he can chew and his ability to sort of like

18:56

boil this stuff down

18:58

to a clean

19:00

narrative is just not there. I

19:03

was yearning for like Gladwell.

19:06

That is the sickest bird of this book that it made you miss

19:08

Gladwell. Like deliver

19:11

me Malcolm. I mean, look Outliers

19:13

was the first book I read for this

19:15

show and I didn't realize how good

19:18

I had it. We retract

19:20

our previous episode. It's fun. So

19:22

that is the first half of the book basically. He's

19:26

describing how and why

19:28

globalization 3.0 is happening.

19:30

And I

19:32

think maybe we can pause here and

19:35

talk about the concept of bullshit

19:38

because this kept coming into my

19:40

brain. Friedman is super

19:43

light on data. There are no charts

19:45

or graphs in the book. There are only a

19:47

couple of sections where he finds any data

19:50

at all to support his conclusions.

19:53

The primary vibe you get is just like a guy

19:55

talking out of his ass. Just like telling

19:57

you a story and then telling you what.

19:59

you should extrapolate from the story

20:02

without really justifying that extrapolation.

20:04

So I'm going to give you some of my favorite examples. I

20:07

want to be clear.

20:09

I chose these off

20:11

the cuff. These are probably

20:14

not anywhere close to the worst

20:16

things written in this book. First

20:18

one. America in the 1990s under

20:20

President Clinton was perceived as

20:22

a big dumb dragon pushing

20:25

people around in the economic and cultural

20:27

spheres knowingly and unknowingly.

20:30

We were Puff the Magic Dragon and people

20:32

wanted to vote in what we were puffing. Then

20:35

came 9-11 and America transformed

20:37

itself from Puff the Magic Dragon, touching

20:39

people around the world economically and culturally,

20:42

into Godzilla with an arrow in his shoulder,

20:44

spitting fire and tossing his tail around

20:46

wildly, touching people's lives in

20:49

military and security terms, not

20:51

just economic and cultural ones. Oh

20:54

my God, I get it, Peter. I

20:56

see it. I see it so clearly now. What

20:58

the fuck is he talking about? All

21:01

right, so first of all, the overall lesson

21:03

of this is supposed to be that prior to

21:06

9-11 we weren't impacting

21:09

other countries militarily. It's so

21:11

true. But then also

21:13

Puff the Magic Dragon, what

21:15

is this metaphor? It

21:19

really feels like he came up with this cute

21:22

contrast between Puff the Magic Dragon and Godzilla.

21:24

Right. Godzilla with an arrow in his

21:26

shoulder. With an arrow? I don't know where that comes

21:29

from. Who's big enough to shoot an arrow that would harm

21:31

Godzilla? Yeah, my brain is melting

21:33

trying to think of this. Yeah, because all

21:35

he's really saying here is

21:37

that America before 9-11 had

21:39

soft power and

21:42

then that became more hard power after

21:45

9-11, which I guess you could make the argument

21:47

for that, but he's not even really making the

21:49

argument with data or anything. He's just making

21:52

the

21:52

argument with this fucking metaphor. That's why it's so

21:54

quintessentially Friedman. The underlying

21:56

point is super vague

21:59

and probably...

21:59

not correct. And then also

22:02

the metaphor he's using is baffling.

22:05

Like people wanted a vote

22:07

in what we were puffing.

22:08

Yeah, this makes you Miss Gladwell. This makes

22:10

me Miss Huntington. Or Huntington would just like

22:13

say what he fucking means. All right, I'm going

22:15

to send you another one. OK,

22:16

he says, analysts have always

22:18

tended to measure a society by classical

22:20

economic and social statistics,

22:22

its deficit to GDP ratio or its

22:25

unemployment rate or the rate of literacy among

22:27

its adult women. Such statistics

22:29

are important and revealing, but there is another

22:31

statistic much harder to measure that I

22:34

think is even more important and revealing.

22:36

Fucking God.

22:39

Does your society have more memories

22:42

than dreams or more dreams than

22:44

memories? What? Peter.

22:48

You talk about

22:51

GDP, but I talk about dreams

22:53

and memories. Let's talk about your memory to dream

22:55

ratio, baby. This is worse than rich

22:57

dad. This

22:58

is pay yourself first levels

23:00

of just like, all right, man, sure. What

23:03

he's ostensibly talking about is like,

23:05

is your country

23:07

living in its past glories or does

23:09

it have a plan for the future? Right. But he's

23:11

trying to contrast it with other statistics,

23:14

even though it's not meaningfully a statistic.

23:16

It's not that it's harder to measure it, that you cannot

23:19

measure it. Right. It's like saying

23:21

other people measure their health

23:23

by how often they're going to the gym or how many carbohydrates

23:26

they're eating. But I measure it with

23:28

my ratio of excellence to

23:30

laziness. It's like fine, but that's

23:32

a different category of things. I think what

23:34

I see in this is just a guy

23:37

who every time he thinks

23:39

of a metaphor has to put

23:41

it in the book. He's

23:44

never like, I'm just going to say that for my wife.

23:46

I've got I've got a couple of bangers I'm leaving on the

23:48

table. It really struck me that I was like, maybe this is

23:51

why he's a popular op ed writer.

23:53

Because if what you were doing was

23:55

just turning each of these into like

23:58

a punchy little op ed column.

23:59

Totally. I could see how that works, right?

24:02

I could see how someone would be like, oh, dreams

24:04

and memories, sure. It's

24:06

also a low-key indictment

24:08

of the rest of his career, because are

24:10

we a dream society, or are we

24:12

a memory society, is kind

24:14

of a perfect 600 to 800 word op-ed, but

24:18

it's also totally meaningless. You

24:20

can find anecdotes that pad

24:23

that out, but

24:24

these are just totally qualitative

24:27

categories. You can't

24:29

say in any definitive or

24:31

interesting way

24:32

what we are. But there's also a

24:34

degree to which his bullshit

24:36

more directly impacts his

24:38

thesis. One of his worst

24:40

tendencies is that he will squeeze any little

24:43

anecdote that he can find into his thesis.

24:46

There is a section that starts off

24:48

with, in the fall of 2004,

24:51

I went out to Minneapolis to visit my mother and

24:53

had three world as flat encounters

24:56

right in a row. OK. Right when I read that,

24:58

I was like, fuck yes. Here it comes.

25:00

This is about to be some good freedman.

25:03

He says, first,

25:04

before I left home in Washington,

25:07

I dialed 411,

25:08

directory assistance, to try to get a friend's

25:11

phone number in Minneapolis. A

25:13

computer answered, and a computerized voice asked

25:15

me to pronounce the name of the person whose number

25:17

I was requesting. For whatever reason,

25:20

I could not get the computer to hear me correctly,

25:22

and it kept saying back to me in a computerized

25:24

voice, did you say?

25:27

I kept having to say the family name in a voice

25:29

that masked my exasperation. OK. Eventually,

25:32

I was connected to an operator, but I did not

25:34

enjoy this friction-free encounter with

25:36

directory information. I craved

25:38

the friction of another human being.

25:40

Representative. That's what

25:42

you're going to kill with the phone, Thomas. So

25:44

he's saying that automation of 411

25:48

directory assistance is an example of

25:50

the world flattening.

25:51

Yeah, and also being bad and not working.

25:54

I don't really understand. And I think it is

25:56

part of a mistake that

25:59

he makes consistently.

25:59

recently, which is just folding any technological

26:03

enhancement or innovation into

26:05

the flattening concept. Right. He's

26:08

just saying ways in which the world is changing, basically. Yeah.

26:11

The next two world is flat encounters in this part

26:14

are, one, a friend of his is annoyed

26:16

that his clients prefer email. Okay.

26:19

And two, another friend of his in marketing

26:22

is upset that advertising firms

26:24

are increasingly quote, selling just numbers,

26:27

not creative instinct. So

26:30

one of those is at least about email, I guess. Although

26:33

I don't.

26:33

The story was about his clients preferring

26:35

email bids rather than bids over the phone.

26:38

And it's like, this is about the world flattening or is this

26:40

just like someone is like, can you shoot me an email?

26:42

And this guy's like, this is just boomers complaining

26:45

that things are different. Right. And the other guy

26:47

is just complaining about a trend in advertising

26:50

pitches.

26:51

Welcome to me reading

26:54

fucking nudge, Peter, where you're like, this is not a

26:56

nudge. But yeah, he has this like,

26:58

there's no anecdote too thin

27:00

for him to lean on. And this made me

27:02

think of the

27:05

famous essay on bullshit, Harry Frankfurt,

27:07

where he describes bullshit as

27:10

not simply lies. Right. What

27:12

he says is that people who tell the truth and people who lie are both

27:15

concerned with the truth. Right. The

27:17

people who are telling the truth are trying to describe the truth and the people who

27:20

lie are trying to

27:22

obscure the truth. It

27:25

is people who have no concern for the truth.

27:27

Now, I'm not sure that I would go so far as to say that

27:29

Friedman in general is bullshitting.

27:32

But what I think he is doing

27:34

is prioritizing telling this

27:36

narrative. Right. So he packs every

27:39

story he can into the narrative, no

27:41

matter how clumsy it is. And

27:43

by the end of it, you're not even really sure what like flattening

27:46

actually means. Right.

27:48

Right. It's kind of similar to

27:50

David Brooks's shtick too, where he's like, they eat

27:52

Thai food in blue states and they watch

27:54

Home Shopping Network in red states. And

27:57

then when people debunk it, they're like, yeah, there's

27:59

plenty of immigrants.

27:59

in red states and Home Shopping Network

28:02

is extremely popular in blue states. He's like,

28:04

come on, don't be pedantic. You know

28:06

what I'm getting at. You know the vibes. It's

28:09

like, well, it seems like your kind of whole book

28:11

is a vibe then. You're not really meaningfully

28:13

doing any research. You're

28:15

kind of throwing everything into your book and just leaving people with

28:17

an impression without really

28:19

interrogating whether that impression is true. Right.

28:22

There's this phenomenon that I first noted when we were discussing Fukuyama

28:25

and the end of history. And then we discussed

28:28

when we were talking about nudge. And that's

28:30

that a lot of these pop science, pop politics

28:32

books are correct only when

28:34

you zoom out so far that their

28:37

thesis is no longer interesting. Right.

28:40

So if the claim is, hey, look, technology

28:42

is creating a more interconnected

28:44

world,

28:45

sure. That is true. And

28:47

that's what Freeman can always fall back on

28:50

as the obvious truth underpinning

28:52

the book. But then it's something that no

28:55

one needed a book to tell them in 2005. It

28:59

would be very funny to be friends with one of these opinion

29:01

columnists where every single story you

29:03

tell at dinner, you're like, oh, it's going to be in the fucking

29:05

book. Right.

29:07

You're like, I was at the bank today and somebody's eating a banana

29:09

in line. And then like two years later, you're like,

29:11

oh, god damn it. It's

29:13

not even a good anecdote, man. Right.

29:16

You're like, you know, fucking advertising firms these

29:18

days, they're all numbers centric and you look over

29:21

at Friedman and he's just wide eyed looking back

29:23

at you. His jotting notes furiously.

29:25

Slow down. Slow down. What's

29:28

interesting about The World is Flat is that if you look

29:30

at it with a little more granularity, the

29:32

basic claim is actually

29:35

a little more nuanced than it might seem.

29:38

A couple of years after The World is Flat was published, there's

29:40

this economist critical

29:41

of Friedman, Pankaj Gamawat,

29:44

who wrote a piece for

29:46

Foreign Policy called Why the World

29:49

Isn't Flat. He says, in truth,

29:52

the world is not nearly as connected as these writers

29:54

would have us believe.

29:55

Despite talk of a new wired world where

29:58

information, ideas, money, and people.

29:59

people can move around the planet faster than ever before,

30:02

just a fraction of what we consider globalization

30:05

actually exists. The portrait that emerges

30:07

from a hard look at the way companies,

30:09

people, and states interact is a world that's

30:12

only beginning to realize the potential of true

30:14

global integration. And what these trends

30:16

backers won't tell you is that globalization's

30:19

future is more fragile than you know. Hm.

30:22

What does he mean by that? So what he says is, if you actually

30:24

look at the data about the flows of capital, 90%

30:27

of global direct investment

30:29

is still domestic, and the level

30:32

of

30:32

cross-border migration, for example, is

30:35

surprisingly small. Four percent

30:37

of people live in a country other than the one that

30:39

they were born in. Right. One interesting

30:42

thing is that the volume of cross-border

30:44

flows has consistently increased,

30:47

but the geographic reach of those

30:49

flows has not increased much since

30:51

the turn of the century. So the

30:54

flow of information, capital,

30:56

trade, people is highly regionalized,

30:59

meaning that these things flow relatively

31:01

freely

31:02

within certain smaller regions, but not

31:04

globally. This actually came up a lot in the

31:06

debate over Brexit. The Brexit

31:09

campaign was saying like, oh, we're going to do all these great

31:11

trade deals with China and India, and we'll

31:13

replace all of our European trade. But

31:15

then people pointed out that the UK's biggest trading

31:17

partners are like Germany, Netherlands,

31:20

France,

31:20

Ireland, and America's

31:22

biggest trading partners are Mexico and Canada.

31:25

And it's like, yes, we can do all these things, border

31:27

flows, Skype, moving

31:29

money around, whatever. But

31:32

most of what is actually happening is fairly proximate.

31:35

Right. Which is not to say that globalization

31:37

is not happening. It's just that it's much more

31:39

complex and the world is getting flatter. I

31:42

think that that's important because the book is

31:44

about globalization and how

31:46

our world is becoming more interconnected.

31:50

It's one of the most popular books about globalization

31:53

ever written. But also by

31:55

the time it was published in 2005, there

31:57

was actually already.

31:59

sort of like a cottage industry about globalization.

32:03

There's a sort of hack op-ed

32:05

piece that is ubiquitous by

32:07

the end of the 90s that's like, I

32:10

used to send paper mail, and now

32:13

I send email. He's

32:15

pitching this

32:16

flatness concept as if it's novel,

32:19

when in fact, it's actually just an affirmation

32:21

of everyone's preexisting intuitions

32:24

about globalization, which is sort

32:26

of the opposite of what insight

32:28

is. This isn't just academic.

32:31

There are policy decisions that are impacted by

32:34

perceptions of globalization. There are surveys

32:36

showing that people tend to

32:38

vastly overestimate the amount

32:41

of global integration. And

32:43

that matters in a lot of ways. And just for example,

32:46

there's polling that shows that people want to restrict

32:48

immigration less when they

32:50

learn how low actual levels

32:53

of immigration are.

32:54

Yeah, exactly. That's the thing is he's not

32:57

thinking like, I have this impression

32:59

of what's going on, or it feels like globalization

33:01

is happening in this way. I should check into this. I should

33:03

talk to actual experts. I should look at statistics. He's

33:06

basically just reifying how it feels.

33:08

But that's what journalism is supposed to do.

33:11

That's like the number one fucking

33:13

thing you're supposed to do as a journalist, is like this

33:15

thing that feels true, I'm going to double check it.

33:17

Yeah, and it's also just what makes for

33:20

compelling journalism, just

33:22

as a selfish reader. Tell

33:25

me something interesting, please. I'll

33:27

say that about Gladwell. He told me some interesting

33:29

stuff. Even if it turned out to be weird

33:32

racist lies, I

33:34

was compelled, all right? And who

33:36

can fault him for telling you racist

33:39

lies that were

33:39

wrong as long as it was entertaining? So

33:42

I do have a more specific criticism of the

33:44

book and Friedman in general, which is that

33:46

he is like endlessly sycophantic

33:49

and deferential toward corporations.

33:53

And generally just sort of presents his

33:55

narratives through the eyes of elites.

33:59

Again, I've said that the book is... sort of a string of anecdotes.

34:01

And each has a little lesson that you're

34:03

supposed to take away. A huge percentage

34:05

of those anecdotes come through interviews

34:08

with corporate executives. The result

34:10

is that this is really the story of

34:13

globalization as told by

34:15

corporate elites. There's

34:17

a segment

34:18

where

34:19

Friedman is discussing Walmart

34:21

as an example of how flattening

34:24

forces can create tension between

34:26

workers and consumers. He says,

34:29

quote, in pursuit of the world's

34:31

most efficient supply chain, Walmart

34:33

has piled up a list of business offenses

34:35

over the years that has given the company several

34:38

deserved black eyes and that it

34:40

is belatedly starting to address in a meaningful

34:42

way. I am talking about everything from

34:44

Walmart's recently exposed practice of locking

34:47

overnight workers into its stores to

34:49

its allowing Walmart maintenance contractors

34:52

to use illegal immigrants as janitors

34:54

to its role as defendant in the largest

34:57

civil rights class lawsuit in history.

35:00

One can only hope that all the bad publicity

35:02

Walmart has received in the last few years will

35:04

force it to understand that there is a fine

35:07

line between a hyper-efficient global

35:09

supply chain and one that has pursued

35:11

cost cutting and profit margins to such

35:13

a degree that whatever social benefits

35:15

it is offering with one hand, it is taking

35:18

away with the other. And Walmart never

35:20

violated workers' rights

35:21

again. So I read that. I

35:25

was like, actually, cool. Yeah. That's

35:27

true. There is trade-off

35:30

between these things. And this

35:32

was sort of the first time I saw him

35:35

openly taking a company to task.

35:38

But then he writes this,

35:40

which I have sent to you. You

35:43

can read what's highlighted there. OK.

35:45

The successor generation to Sam

35:47

Walton's leadership seems to recognize

35:49

that it has both an image and a reality

35:51

to fix. How far Walmart

35:54

will adjust remains to be seen. But when I asked

35:56

Walmart CEO H. Lee Scott Jr.

35:58

directly about these issues,

35:59

He did not duck. In fact, he

36:02

wanted to talk about it. What I think I have to

36:04

do is institutionalize the sense of obligation

36:06

to society to the same extent that we've institutionalized

36:09

the commitment to the customer, said Scott. The

36:12

world has changed, and we missed that. We

36:14

believe that good intentions and good stores

36:16

and good prices would cause people to forgive

36:18

what we are not as good at, and we were wrong. In

36:21

certain areas, he added, we are not

36:23

as good as we should be. We just have

36:25

to get better.

36:26

This sucks. This is literally

36:28

the last word on the subject in the book.

36:31

Just actually running PR

36:34

for Walmart. Unreal. And

36:37

by the way, the lawsuit, the largest

36:39

civil rights lawsuit in history that he was referencing,

36:42

how did Walmart handle that? They

36:44

ran it up to the Supreme Court and got it tossed

36:46

on a technicality. Walmart be dukes.

36:49

The fact that he would outline

36:52

all of this and be like, let's see what the CEO

36:54

has to say.

36:56

How are you a fucking journalist, dude? I

36:59

loathe this constant

37:01

baby brain naivete of these

37:03

journalists who are like, we talked to a CEO, and

37:06

he said he's going to institutionalize their

37:08

social impact to the same extent they institutionalized

37:10

good prices. But this is a company.

37:13

It's a profit maximizing company. It's

37:15

publicly traded. The CEO cannot

37:18

prioritize social impact over profits.

37:20

This is how we've decided to structure our fucking

37:23

economy. You can't constantly

37:25

pretend that this is not the case.

37:28

I talked to

37:29

the CEO, and he said that Walmart

37:31

rules. There's also a weird

37:34

pooping back and forth element to this too, because when

37:37

I worked in human rights, I always worked on corporate

37:39

human rights violations. And part of my job was

37:42

dealing with corporations directly. I would go to these

37:44

meetings and have to put on a suit and go talk to

37:46

corporate types and go to these corporate dinner

37:48

type things. And a lot

37:51

of C-suite people kind of

37:54

fashion themselves as thought leaders, but

37:56

then a lot of the actual kind of

37:58

punditry that they're doing. and things that

38:00

they talk about at these dinners, it's stuff

38:03

that they're regurgitating from Thomas

38:05

Friedman columns. Right. I guess at some

38:07

point, it's like he's talking to

38:09

CEOs.

38:11

He's also, by the way, talking to

38:13

elite government officials at times. He

38:16

takes their thoughts, pumps them into the New York

38:18

Times with a metaphor. Those

38:21

guys read it.

38:22

They make policy based on it,

38:24

and then they talk to Thomas Friedman again. It's

38:27

hard not to see that perhaps Thomas

38:30

Friedman is a pawn in the games

38:32

of powerful people. Right. If

38:34

he's just going to regurgitate what they tell

38:37

him, that can be useful. When Tom Friedman

38:39

is going to publish your little screed

38:42

about how Walmart's going to do better

38:44

in his book, that's useful for

38:46

a CEO. I cannot believe he actually

38:49

listed out all of the problems with Walmart

38:52

and then was like, the CEO told me they're going to do better. I

38:55

cannot fucking believe it. That's insane. I

38:58

also, I guess I knew this

39:00

because he's constantly talking to CEOs

39:02

and other people and interviewing them. I

39:05

want to point out that if you look at the

39:07

book, he is interviewing

39:09

tons of people. His acknowledgments

39:11

are extremely lengthy. He

39:14

put in a

39:14

ton of legwork. I

39:17

don't want to say that he's phoning it in,

39:19

really. He's not just doing

39:22

this cash out book. He's trying

39:25

very hard, which

39:27

is what makes it even worse and more

39:29

embarrassing. That's so dark,

39:31

dude. This is the best

39:34

that he can do, basically.

39:35

I'm going to spend

39:38

months and really put

39:40

my whole pussy into this book, as

39:42

the kids say. What kind of kids

39:44

are you hanging out with? This is on gay Twitter. This

39:46

is what they say on gay Twitter. She really put her

39:48

whole pussy into that chorus. You've never heard

39:51

this? You say the kids. You just mean gay

39:53

24-year-old men. Yes, 100 percent.

39:55

The gay

39:57

41-year-olds who thirst follow them.

39:59

actually part a little closer to the end

40:02

of the book where

40:03

Friedman is talking about

40:05

how we should be sort of conceptualizing

40:08

the government's role in a globalizing

40:10

world. And he says,

40:12

the social contract that progressives should

40:14

try to enforce between government and workers

40:17

and companies and workers is one in which

40:19

government and companies say, we

40:21

cannot guarantee you any lifetime

40:23

employment, but we can guarantee you

40:25

that we will concentrate on giving you the tools

40:28

to make yourself more lifetime employable.

40:30

We're teaching people to code. Right. In

40:33

the flat world, the individual worker is going to become more

40:35

and more responsible for managing his

40:38

or her own career, risks,

40:40

and economic security. And the role of

40:42

government and business is to help workers

40:44

build all the muscles they need to

40:46

do just that. Okay. Now

40:49

Friedman considers himself a progressive,

40:52

but I do think

40:53

that he is envisioning a

40:55

much more atomized world,

40:58

right? He believes the welfare

41:00

state as it is constructed is

41:03

inadequate to address globalization 3.0.

41:08

And I find that relatively disconcerting. Again, this

41:10

is a guy that's just talking to CEOs

41:13

and elite government officials about what's

41:15

happening. And part of his takeaway

41:18

is like, well, we might

41:20

have to

41:21

transform the way that government

41:23

aids people

41:25

to make it less about giving them money

41:27

and more about giving them skills. It's

41:29

funny how all of these big ideas, books

41:32

lead to just cutting welfare

41:34

for people regardless of what the

41:36

actual topic is. It's like, wow,

41:38

going to have to make some tough choices.

41:41

That's probably a good transition into the second part

41:43

of the book, which is

41:45

really dedicated to the downstream

41:48

effects of all of this globalization.

41:51

He says that we will experience the great

41:53

sorting out, essentially the

41:55

process by which globalization creates certain

41:58

winners and losers. He

42:00

starts to talk about America experiencing

42:03

what he calls a quiet crisis that

42:05

consists of several parts, which

42:07

he calls our dirty little secrets.

42:10

Number one, the numbers gap, which

42:13

is the relative lack of young scientists

42:15

and engineers in America compared

42:18

to China and India. Number two

42:20

is the education gap, meaning that American schools

42:22

don't push or invest in math

42:25

and science education enough. And

42:27

three is the ambition gap, meaning

42:29

that our youth are less ambitious

42:32

than youth in China and India.

42:36

The evidence for which Per Friedman is

42:38

one teacher who told him that his

42:40

students were lazy and another

42:42

teacher who said that her students were lazy. Finally,

42:45

finally, we're talking about how the kids don't

42:47

want to work anymore. It always eventually

42:50

gets to the lazy kids. This

42:52

is also the part of the book, the

42:54

very long part of the book that is basically

42:57

like we need to become a STEM country.

42:59

We need to pile

43:02

resources into science and engineering.

43:05

If not, we're screwed, right? Because manufacturing,

43:08

we're getting out competed. So what do we need

43:10

to do? We need to be the managers

43:13

and IT experts, et cetera.

43:15

We need to sort of like educate our way

43:18

to the top of the global hierarchy. He

43:20

says, quote, every young American

43:23

today would be wise to think of himself or herself

43:25

as competing against every young Chinese,

43:28

Indian and Brazilian.

43:29

That's a fucked up way to think about your

43:32

life. Competing

43:34

it's these little, these spry little Chinese

43:36

kids, like 14 years old. A

43:39

fucking weird way to think about the world.

43:42

Later he says JFK wanted to put a man

43:44

on the moon.

43:45

My vision is to put every American man

43:47

or woman on a campus. He

43:51

does love his little phrases. He loves

43:53

it. I want to put a man on the campus. I

43:56

would love to just watch an editor

43:59

go through a Thomas.

43:59

Friedman book draft and just write, do

44:02

you need this? Right

44:04

next to everything that he doesn't need to

44:06

say. Remember how I said he talks

44:09

to CEOs about where

44:11

business is going?

44:13

In this part, he talks to the Chinese

44:15

vice minister of education. And

44:18

that person is obviously like touting

44:20

Chinese education. And he's like, oh, my God,

44:23

they're good. And I was like, you're literally

44:25

absorbing propaganda and telling

44:27

it to me like, whatever. So

44:30

you're starting to see like his pivot

44:32

in this book, what started out

44:34

as a book that's just like a shallowish

44:37

dive into the many ways that

44:39

globalization has impacted the world becomes

44:42

a book about how

44:43

to retain America's

44:45

global hegemony. Right. And

44:47

that's what like actually becomes

44:50

the takeaway of the book. Right. Not just

44:52

like this stuff is happening and it's interesting,

44:55

but we must act now or

44:57

we will be overtaken by India

44:59

and China. Right. And built into this

45:01

is like a lot of pretty

45:04

aggressive fear mongering about like America

45:06

is getting weaker. Other countries are going stronger.

45:09

And he has a chapter called

45:11

This is Not a Test,

45:13

where he compares the modern moment

45:15

to the Cold War. OK. So he

45:18

says what this era has in common

45:20

with the Cold War era is that meeting

45:22

the challenges of flat ism requires

45:25

as comprehensive, energetic

45:27

and focused a response as did meeting

45:30

the challenge of communism. I

45:33

am

45:33

sending you a couple of paragraphs. I

45:36

know it's long. This is his

45:38

Cold War comparison. He says

45:40

getting Americans to rally around compassionate

45:43

flat ism is much more difficult than

45:45

getting them to rally around anti-communism.

45:48

Economics, as noted, is not like war

45:50

because economics can always be a win-win

45:52

game. But sometimes I wish economics

45:55

were more like war. In the Cold War,

45:57

we actually got to see the Soviets parade their

45:59

missiles in Red Square. We all got to be

46:01

scared together from one end of the country to

46:03

the other. Don't you wish that we had

46:05

an all-encompassing

46:07

pervasive sense of fear in this

46:09

country? About like Chinese

46:12

people and Indians getting educated. You

46:14

know what I miss about the Cold War? Always

46:17

being scared. But today, alas,

46:19

there is no missile threat coming from India.

46:22

The hotline, which used to connect the Kremlin

46:24

with the White House, has been replaced by

46:26

the helpline, which connects

46:28

everyone in America to call centers

46:30

in Bangalore. Nicely done, Thomas. While

46:33

the other end of the hotline might have had Brezhnev

46:36

threatening nuclear war, the other end

46:38

of the helpline just has a soft

46:41

voice eager to help you sort out your AOL

46:43

bill or collaborate with you on a new

46:45

piece of software. No, that

46:47

voice has none of the menace of Nikita

46:49

Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the table

46:52

at the UN, and it has none of the sinister

46:54

snarl

46:54

of the bad guys in From Russia with Love.

46:57

There is no Boris or Natasha saying,

47:00

we will bury you in a thick Russian accent.

47:02

No, that voice on the helpline just

47:04

has a friendly Indian lilt that masks

47:07

any sense of threat or challenge. It

47:09

simply says,

47:11

hello, my name is Rajiv. Can

47:13

I help you? God, dude.

47:15

Wait, come on. You got to read the last line. Oh, fuck.

47:20

I didn't even see that. No,

47:22

Rajiv. Actually, you can't.

47:26

God, Peter

47:28

is every paragraph like this.

47:30

He just extends it and goes and goes.

47:33

The helpline, the comparison

47:36

between the line between

47:38

the Kremlin and the White House

47:40

and a call center helpline.

47:43

Again, if he thinks of

47:46

anything, any comparison,

47:49

any metaphor, it is in

47:51

the book. There is no editorial

47:54

process to speak of. It's

47:57

so fucking bizarre. Like, A,

47:59

You sort of forget that he is advocating

48:02

for a heightened sense of fear

48:05

and terror about all of this. Yeah.

48:08

But that's what's happening, right? He's basically being like, oh,

48:10

we should be more scared by

48:13

the fact that

48:15

people in Indian call centers are helping

48:17

us out. Yeah, it doesn't even make sense to say, no,

48:19

Rajiv, you can't help me. He is. He's

48:22

helping you. He can. If you

48:24

want to contest your Comcast bill, you call

48:26

and Rajiv is like, oh, yeah, we'll get that fixed.

48:30

It just is like a metaphor that completely breaks down and doesn't

48:32

make any fucking sense. It's like these two things

48:34

are the same, but actually they're the opposite of each other because

48:36

one of them was missile threat

48:38

and the other is just like me calling

48:41

a phone number. People helping

48:43

you. Yeah. Is this unfair? Is

48:45

it unfair to show you all of his metaphors? Maybe

48:48

it's rude of me to center

48:51

so much of my critique around the fact that every

48:53

time he tries to say something,

48:55

he can't say

48:57

it good. He

49:00

can only say it through

49:02

these completely

49:05

asinine metaphors and

49:07

comparisons. Then he mentions like it's

49:09

not like Nikita Khrushchev. It's not

49:11

like from Russia with love. It's not

49:13

like Boris and Natasha. I don't need three

49:16

examples of things that it's not

49:18

like. I get

49:21

it on the first one. Also did

49:23

you notice that he basically compares the harsh

49:25

and scary Russian accent to

49:27

like the soft Indian lilt? You

49:30

might notice that his accent is less scary.

49:32

Like what the fuck dude? Putting the casual xenophobia

49:35

aside, I have

49:38

a little bit of sympathy for this because sometimes

49:40

when I'm editing the show, I'm like, okay,

49:43

this section doesn't make that much sense, but there's

49:45

a good joke at

49:45

the end of it and I want to leave it in the show.

49:48

I feel like he's doing the thing where like

49:51

you could tell he thought of the helpline hotline thing.

49:54

It

49:54

was like, damn that whips. And then he has

49:56

to build this whole fucking preamble

49:59

to it. I wish economics were more like

50:01

war. In the Cold War, we had, and then it's

50:03

like, duh, duh, duh, and then he finally gets to the fucking

50:05

helpline metaphor. It's like,

50:08

okay, that's why you were saying

50:09

all this. You thought it was cute. That is the

50:11

best explanation of why the book

50:14

exists.

50:16

One of the more interesting things I read about all of this was

50:18

an academic article by Kathleen Abowitz

50:21

and Jay Roberts, who point

50:24

out that this is essentially just

50:26

a replication of a moral panic that we

50:28

had in the early 1980s

50:30

about how American students were being

50:32

overtaken by students in Russia

50:34

and Japan. That panic

50:36

was driven by a report. Ronald

50:40

Reagan formed a committee

50:42

to evaluate American education, and

50:44

in 1983 they put out a report

50:46

titled, A Nation at Risk, an

50:48

Imperative for Educational Reform.

50:51

The report very famously declared that,

50:54

quote, the educational foundations

50:56

of our society are presently being

50:58

eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity

51:01

that threatens our very future as a nation

51:03

and as a people. That report, very

51:06

influential,

51:07

continues to drive a lot of education

51:10

policy, despite the fact that other

51:12

government-initiated reports have

51:15

called many of the conclusions into

51:17

question. One of the things

51:19

the report found was that SAT

51:21

scores had been steadily declining

51:23

for like 20 years, leading up to the early 80s.

51:27

In 1990, there was a report that

51:29

said, yeah, that's because

51:31

poor people are applying to college in greater numbers.

51:34

We had increased access to

51:36

the SATs. If you segment

51:38

out the populations, the

51:40

scores are going up, not down. You

51:43

can maybe say that Friedman is identifying

51:45

some real trends here.

51:47

He's also

51:48

tonally and substantively

51:50

replicating a moral panic that we have experienced

51:52

before, where you have people

51:54

fretting about being overtaken

51:57

by these foreign others.

51:59

places, Russia and Japan with

52:02

India and China. Right.

52:03

Although I have to say branding

52:05

wise, the war on mediocrity

52:08

is incredible branding. Oh, yeah.

52:10

I actually think that we do have a huge

52:12

problem with fucking mediocrity in this

52:14

country, but it starts at the top, not at the bottom.

52:18

That's

52:18

where I would aim. It's like people running institutions

52:21

who just like suck shit. There's definitely

52:23

a lesson you can learn about mediocrity from Thomas

52:25

Friedman. It's just not this one. The

52:28

fucking New York Times opinion page will be the

52:30

first stop on that tour. So

52:33

we can't wrap up Thomas Friedman

52:35

episode without talking about

52:37

the Iraq War. Oh, yeah. I'm going to send

52:40

you a clip that I know you have seen.

52:44

Now

52:44

that the war is over and

52:46

there's some difficulty with the peace, was

52:48

it worth doing? I think it was

52:51

unquestionably worth

52:53

doing, Charlie. I think looking back

52:56

at the 1990s, I

52:58

can identify that there are actually

53:01

three bubbles of the 1990s. Oh, no, three bubbles. There

53:03

was an ASVAC bubble. Classic Friedman. There was the corporate governance

53:06

bubble. Lastly, there was

53:08

what I would call the terrorism bubble. Oh,

53:10

God. And the first two were based on creative

53:12

accounting. The

53:14

last was based on moral creative accounting. What?

53:18

The terrorism bubble that basically built up over the

53:20

1990s said flying airplanes into

53:23

the World Trade Center, that's OK. Oh,

53:25

the Arab mind. And blowing

53:27

up Israelis in a pizza parlor,

53:29

that's OK. And that

53:31

built up as a bubble, Charlie. And 9-11

53:34

to me was the peak of

53:36

that bubble. Peak of that bubble. And what we learned on 9-11

53:39

in a gut way was that that bubble

53:42

was a fundamental threat to our open

53:44

society. Bubble threat. Because there is no

53:46

wall high enough, no INS agents

53:48

smart enough, no metal detector efficient enough

53:51

to protect an open society from

53:53

people motivated by

53:56

that bubble. And what we needed

53:58

to do was go away.

53:59

over to that part of the world, I'm

54:02

afraid, and burst that bubble. And

54:04

what they needed to see was American boys

54:07

and girls going house to

54:09

house from Basra to

54:11

Baghdad and

54:14

basically saying which part

54:16

of this sentence don't you understand?

54:18

Do you think this bubble fantasy

54:20

was going to let it grow? Well, suck

54:23

on this. He's

54:26

really cooking there. This is another thing that you

54:28

wouldn't understand

54:29

is funny until you've read the whole book. But when he says

54:32

like three bubbles, I was

54:34

like, Tom, you son of a

54:36

bitch. You've done it again,

54:38

Tom. Can't stop him. You can't stop

54:41

him at all times. He's thinking of metaphors. But

54:43

also

54:43

it's the same thing where it's completely fucking

54:45

incoherent what he's saying. He's basically

54:47

saying that like Muslims have a culture of

54:50

violence. And so

54:52

we're going to go over there and bomb them to

54:54

fix their culture. This clip is

54:56

somewhat famous because he is literally

54:59

characterizing the Iraq War not as

55:01

an effort to oust Saddam

55:03

or to protect anyone from WMDs,

55:06

but to enact revenge on the

55:08

Muslim world for fostering

55:12

illiberal ideas. And I think that that

55:14

was so revelatory. He's just

55:16

sort of putting it on the table and being like, yeah,

55:19

this was revenge on Muslims. Everyone

55:21

was sort of like, so you fucking admit it, right?

55:23

Because at the time, the justification was all about

55:26

saving these populations from their dictator.

55:28

We have to get him out of power to save these people. And then it's like,

55:31

these people are basically fucking animals and we should just

55:33

kill them until they behave better. And

55:35

keep in mind, this

55:36

is where

55:38

Friedman cut his teeth, right? Lebanon,

55:41

Israel, Middle East expertise, ostensibly.

55:44

Meanwhile, he was, like many pundits,

55:47

deeply incorrect all the

55:49

time throughout this era. He

55:51

said the Afghanistan War was over in January 2002.

55:55

Some highlights from his columns over

55:57

the years in 1990.

55:59

In 1999, during the bombing of Iraq,

56:02

he suggested, quote, blowing up

56:04

a different power station in Iraq every

56:06

week so no one knows when the lights

56:09

will go off or who's in charge. Okay,

56:11

that'll fix it. In 2005, he

56:13

wrote about Iraq, quote, if they

56:16

come around, a decent outcome in Iraq

56:18

is still possible and we should stay

56:20

to help build it. If they won't, then

56:23

we are wasting our time. We should arm

56:25

the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis

56:27

of Iraq to reap the wind. A

56:30

couple months into the Afghanistan war, he

56:32

wrote, quote, think of all the nonsense

56:35

written in the press, particularly the European

56:37

and Arab media, about the concern

56:40

for, quote, unquote, civilian casualties

56:43

in Afghanistan. It turns out

56:45

that many of those Afghan civilians,

56:48

again in quotations, were praying for

56:50

another dose of B-52s to

56:52

liberate them from the Taliban, casualties

56:54

or not. Hey, he's

56:57

sort of mocking the idea that there were civilian

56:59

casualties,

56:59

presumably being like, come

57:02

on, they were terrorists or something. But then at

57:04

the same time saying that civilians

57:06

wanted this

57:07

to happen. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. It

57:09

doesn't make sense. There's like this fundamental

57:11

contradiction. And all of this I bring up because

57:14

a good chunk of the final chapters of the

57:16

World is Flat is dedicated to

57:18

Friedman's belief that the ostensibly

57:22

insular culture of the Muslim

57:24

world is a threat to globalization.

57:26

Wait, really? Yeah.

57:28

He's got like a Huntington turn at the end.

57:30

It's in his final chapters titled

57:33

The Muslim Question. Oh, no,

57:35

I'm kidding. I'm kidding. You

57:40

got to be careful, Peter. That actually sounded pretty pretty

57:42

real. It sounded pretty plausible. Sorry.

57:45

Yeah, he calls it. He calls the Muslim culture

57:48

an unflattener. And he

57:51

talked at length about how this is something that

57:53

the Muslim world needs to reckon with.

57:56

I think that his writing about the Iraq

57:58

war and about the Middle East.

57:59

and war in general is

58:02

actually really illuminating because the through

58:04

line between his war coverage

58:07

and this book

58:09

is that his primary goal

58:12

revolves around retaining

58:14

American hegemony in the coming

58:17

century. Right. Like at first glance

58:19

you might think that there's a tension or

58:21

inconsistency here where like this guy is writing

58:23

about our interconnectedness with the

58:25

rest of the world but then he's championing these

58:28

brutal campaigns of vengeance

58:30

in the Middle East. But I actually think it starts

58:32

to make sense once you realize that

58:35

his primary concern

58:37

is American power. Right. He's

58:39

not writing this book as like a student of technology

58:43

or something. He's writing it as someone who wants to

58:45

ensure American supremacy

58:47

whether that means funding science education

58:50

or destabilizing the Middle East. He's

58:52

also doing a very similar thing to Nudge where

58:55

he's pretending to be doing this cool

58:58

descriptive project like this is just

59:01

how human nature works. I'm like we should make

59:02

policy according to human nature but then once

59:04

you get into the guts of it and it's like actually

59:07

we should do a bunch of like crazy libertarian shit. Like

59:09

underneath it is this extremely ideological project.

59:12

Right. And it seems like he's doing the same thing like I'm just

59:14

describing how the world is becoming more interconnected

59:16

and then whisper voice

59:19

like the Muslims are really the problem with this.

59:22

But if that doesn't follow from the premise at all. No.

59:25

I mean he has all of these ideas

59:28

about like how interconnectedness

59:30

will foster peace in the long

59:32

term. And then he gets to this section of

59:34

the book that's like now let's talk about

59:36

how Muslims are a big wrench in all

59:38

of this. Right. I'm

59:41

going to send you something that is so long.

59:44

I'm sorry. Oh, god, Peter. I can't do

59:46

the episode unless we say it.

59:49

You make me go all

59:50

the way through this fucking excerpt. I'm

59:52

going to say something before this. I don't even know if it

59:55

makes total sense to put it here at

59:57

the end of this episode.

59:59

I want you to listen to what I'm saying because we've read a lot of excerpts

1:00:02

here. This is the worst thing

1:00:04

in this book. Okay. I have

1:00:06

a screenshot version of this that is the

1:00:09

entire page is highlighted because I started

1:00:12

trying to highlight sections because I was like, well, I don't

1:00:14

want them to read all of it. It's too

1:00:16

long. And then I just I realized that I was highlighting all

1:00:18

of it. Just kept going. And so I was like, well, now it looks

1:00:20

stupid. I'm just gonna highlight the whole page. Okay.

1:00:25

He says, what if regions

1:00:27

of the world were like the neighborhoods of a city?

1:00:29

What would the world look like? I'd describe it like

1:00:32

this. Western Europe would be an assisted

1:00:34

living facility with an aging population

1:00:37

lavishly attended to by Turkish nurses.

1:00:40

The United States would be a gated community

1:00:42

with a metal detector at the front gate and a

1:00:44

lot of people sitting in their front yards complaining

1:00:47

about how lazy everyone else was, even

1:00:49

though out back there was a small opening in the

1:00:51

fence for Mexican labor and other

1:00:53

energetic immigrants who helped make the gated community

1:00:56

function.

1:00:57

Latin America would be the fun part of town, the

1:00:59

club district, where the workday doesn't begin

1:01:01

until 10 p.m. and everyone sleeps until

1:01:04

mid-morning.

1:01:04

It's definitely the place to hang out, but in

1:01:07

between the clubs, you don't see a lot of new

1:01:09

businesses opening up, except on

1:01:11

the street where the Chileans live.

1:01:15

The landlords in this neighborhood

1:01:17

almost never reinvest their profits here,

1:01:19

but keep them in a bank across town. The

1:01:22

Arab Street would be a dark alley where outsiders

1:01:24

fear to tread, except for a few side

1:01:27

streets called Dubai, Jordan, Bahrain,

1:01:29

Qatar, and Morocco. The only

1:01:32

new businesses are gas stations, whose

1:01:34

owners, like the elites in the Latin neighborhood, rarely

1:01:37

reinvest their funds in the neighborhood. Many

1:01:39

people on the Arab Street have their curtains closed,

1:01:42

their shutters drawn, and signs on their front

1:01:44

lawn that say, no trespassing,

1:01:46

beware of dogs. India,

1:01:49

China, and East Asia would be the other

1:01:51

side of the tracks. Their neighborhood

1:01:53

is a big teeming market made up of small

1:01:56

shops and one-room factories. and

1:02:00

SAT prep schools and engineering

1:02:02

colleges. We're like

1:02:04

halfway through. Nobody

1:02:06

ever sleeps in this neighborhood. Everyone

1:02:08

lives in extended families and everyone is working

1:02:11

and saving to get to the right side of the tracks.

1:02:14

On the Chinese streets, there's no rule of law,

1:02:16

but the roads are well paved. On the Indian

1:02:18

streets, by contrast,

1:02:19

no one ever repairs the street lights, the roads

1:02:21

are full of ruts, but the police are sticklers

1:02:24

for the rules. You need a license to open

1:02:26

a lemonade stand on the Indian streets.

1:02:28

Luckily, the local cops can be bribed and

1:02:31

the successful entrepreneurs have their own generators

1:02:33

to run their factories and the latest cell phones

1:02:35

to get around the fact that the local telephone poles

1:02:38

are all down. Africa, sadly, is

1:02:40

that part of town where the businesses are boarded up,

1:02:42

life expectancy is declining, and

1:02:44

the only new buildings are healthcare clinics.

1:02:47

Fucking hell, Peter. It's

1:02:50

so fucking annoying. It's like, just

1:02:53

say what you mean, man. It's not even a

1:02:55

metaphor half the time. He's just described.

1:02:57

He starts off with the assisted living

1:02:59

facility and the gated community

1:03:02

and you're like, okay, this is a metaphor, I guess.

1:03:04

By the end of it, though, he's just describing

1:03:07

the countries in the African

1:03:09

neighborhood life expectancy is declining. You

1:03:12

don't need the metaphor. Just say life expectancy

1:03:14

is declining in Africa. What

1:03:18

the fuck is this, dude?

1:03:19

There's no rule of law in

1:03:21

the Chinese neighborhood. You're just talking

1:03:23

about China. You

1:03:26

don't need the neighborhood thing for that.

1:03:29

The Arab street is a dark alley, except

1:03:31

for Dubai, Bahrain, Qatar,

1:03:34

and Morocco. This is not you. Stop

1:03:37

doing the metaphor, please. I think what

1:03:39

you said earlier is that it's not clear that he

1:03:41

knows how metaphors work.

1:03:43

Metaphors are supposed to simplify

1:03:46

situations or describe the nature

1:03:48

of something to say that the factory

1:03:51

was hell.

1:03:51

It condenses all of this

1:03:53

other information. If you're going to say

1:03:56

the factory was hell and like hell,

1:03:58

it was hot.

1:03:59

loud and everybody hated it. You

1:04:02

don't need the middleman at that point. You're just describing

1:04:04

the factory. The factory was like a neighborhood

1:04:07

where my boss was yelling at me all the time. It's

1:04:10

not a metaphor. It's not really a metaphor. Yeah.

1:04:13

These are the sorts of like little things that you encounter

1:04:15

in Friedman's writing all of the

1:04:17

time wrapped

1:04:18

up in what we haven't even discussed

1:04:21

as the most ethnically insensitive

1:04:23

shit I've ever read. Like are

1:04:25

you fucking kidding me? There's parties in

1:04:27

Latin America every night. He literally

1:04:30

ripped through every region of

1:04:32

the world and was like a little

1:04:34

bit rude about all of them. Yeah.

1:04:37

Fuck, man.

1:04:38

This

1:04:40

also just like isn't smart. He's just like

1:04:42

repackaging conventional wisdom

1:04:45

bullshit. That's why I thought it was worth

1:04:47

ending on it. A, because we have to talk about it.

1:04:49

I mean, obviously. I lost my fucking mind when

1:04:51

I read it. And B, because

1:04:54

this is someone who is purporting

1:04:57

to be able to describe the world

1:05:00

in an insightful way.

1:05:01

And this is what he has to say about

1:05:04

the entire planet. This is his description

1:05:06

of every continent. There's

1:05:08

just like nothing there. There's

1:05:11

no real insight. He is bullshitting.

1:05:14

Alexander Cockburn in 1999 wrote

1:05:16

a takedown of Friedman that was devastating. One

1:05:19

line of it. Friedman is so marinated in

1:05:21

self regard that he doesn't even know when he's being

1:05:23

stupid.

1:05:25

Just right like

1:05:27

right to the heart of Thomas Friedman.

1:05:30

Got him. But the other side of that is like Friedman

1:05:33

has sway in elite circles and

1:05:35

like was reportedly relatively influential

1:05:38

in the Obama administration. I don't

1:05:40

know. This isn't someone that everyone

1:05:42

agrees is dumb.

1:05:45

I think that there is a market and has

1:05:47

always been a market

1:05:49

for people who are good

1:05:52

at making you feel like you learned something

1:05:54

when you didn't. Put together this cheeky

1:05:57

little metaphor and people are like, oh, that's.

1:05:59

That's a way to look at it, right? Right.

1:06:02

People are up late in Latin America? Amazing.

1:06:06

Yeah. You ever think about the neighborhood metaphor?

1:06:09

The United States is a gated community, and

1:06:11

the Middle East is a place where everyone

1:06:14

sucks and is stupid. If

1:06:16

it were a neighborhood, I'm saying that's

1:06:19

the type of neighborhood it would be. Peter, it's

1:06:21

very funny to me that when both of us do our

1:06:23

generic asshole voice, we

1:06:25

both do New York accents. But yours

1:06:28

is your actual accent? No,

1:06:31

my accent is a combination of New York

1:06:33

and Philadelphia, full of the nicest

1:06:36

people on Earth. Yeah,

1:06:38

I don't know where I

1:06:39

adapted my... Were you

1:06:41

adapted? You just

1:06:43

did it. I don't know. I guess it

1:06:45

is just the strongest... It's

1:06:48

just the dumb guy that I grew up knowing

1:06:50

to some degree. This

1:06:53

belligerent man nearby

1:06:56

was generally either a Philadelphian or a

1:06:58

New Yorker, and I think the New York accent is just a little bit

1:07:00

easier to do. I think it's the person you're still in

1:07:02

danger of becoming. That's where all my bad voices

1:07:04

come from. This person

1:07:07

lives inside me. When I'm 80 with

1:07:09

dementia

1:07:09

or whatever, I'm just going to be this belligerent

1:07:12

character from the Sopranos, and people are

1:07:14

going to be like, he was a nice guy and he didn't

1:07:16

have this Brooklyn accent. It's not real.

1:07:20

That's how I started saying hella. I started

1:07:22

saying it as a joke, and then it became like 80% of my personality. Be

1:07:25

careful.