Tom Friedman Says We’re in a New Epoch. David Brooks Has Questions.

0:01This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:17My name is David Brooks. I am a columnist at The New York Times. I am joined by my friend and colleague, Thomas L. Friedman, who I will start calling Tom from here on out. We've been working together for a long time. Between us, we have three Pulitzer Prizes. Some would point out that Tom has all three, and I have never been nominated. But when it comes to Pulitzers, I'm a socialist. I believe in sharing them equally, from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs. So it's good to be with you in the Pulitzer category, Tom. Always do. One of the things I love about Tom's writing is that he's not just reacting to whatever happened in the last 12 hours.

0:53He does big sweeping columns, which help us explain the times. And so we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about a piece called Welcome to Our New Era. What do we call it? And you repeat the term, the Policene. And we're going to talk about your theory of where we are as a world. Before we get there, there's a great saying in Talmudic scholarship, and I think our ancestors were probably debating the book of Job somewhere back in the shtetl in the 19th century, called find the disagreement under the disagreement. And sometimes when two people disagree, it's because they have just very different ways of looking at the world.

1:29and you and I have discussed this many times that we often come out to the same spot. We have pretty similar views, but we come by very different avenues. And one of the pleasures of reading you is I get the pleasure of agreeing with you and also the pleasure of disagreeing with you at the same time. Ditto. So correct me if I'm wrong. I would say the simplest way to summarize the difference in the way we see the world is you would be more technology first and I would probably be more culture first. Yes. And so I'm going to make my little two-minute critique of the technological viewpoint. Go for it.

2:03And so my view of the problem with the technological viewpoint is technology is obviously very important in driving world events. But it sometimes falls into the danger of what you might call Norman Angelism. And Norman Angel is famously a guy who wrote a book called The Great Illusion in 1910, saying the world is so interconnected, we can never have a world war. Years later, we'll have a world war. And so I think technology explains a lot. it often doesn't explain the biggest world events, like to me, World War II. It maybe had some technological impulse. I'd say it came about mostly because of German humiliation after Versailles and a belief in dictatorships in that era, which was pretty universal.

2:39And so, am I getting this wrong or right? Why do you think technology is so forward, if I'm summarizing your view correctly? And how'd you get here? So, I would say a couple things, David. One is that it's a little bit of a misinterpretation of me, and I get this a lot. Now, when I wrote The World is Flat, let me just back up. I was in China last year, and I was at Beijing Airport. I was coming to a conference, so they sent a college student to greet me. And we're sitting waiting for my luggage. And she said, Mr. Friedman, I just have to ask you one thing. Is the world still flat? And I said, actually, it's flatter than ever in the way I meant it.

3:16What did I mean? I meant that we had created a technological platform on which more people could do more things in more ways with more other people, for less money for more places than ever before. That's what the book was about. What the book wasn't about is what people would do on that platform, driven by culture or politics or something else. And I kind of got conflated into the Norman Angel thing by people saying, well, because the world is flat, therefore everyone will love each other and it'll be Mark Zuckerberg's world of just building wonderful communities. I never, never believed that.

3:49So the better real frame for my thinking, David, it is actually the book I wrote before The World is Flat, which was a book that basically took on the challenge of what is the system that would replace the Cold War system? At the time, there were several big ideas out there. Frank Fukuyama said it'll be the end of history. Didn't work out. Okay. The second was Sam Huntington. It'll be a clash of civilizations. Well, that didn't work out because there are more clashes within civilizations, Sunnis and Shiites, just to name one, than between them. Third was Robert Kaplan. He said it would be the coming anarchy.

4:16Well, we've had a lot of anarchy, but a lot of stability too. I weighed in with the Lexus and the olive tree. My argument was that what's going to actually replace it is a tension between culture, the olive tree, the things that anchor us, root us, and drive us into the world, and this new globalization system. And then to take up the Norman Angel point, sometimes that globalization system will actually restrain behavior. Putin will invade Crimea, but he might not go to, you know, Kiev. China will threaten Taiwan, but they won't actually invade. And sometimes you'll burst through that system. But my real framework is that it's a tension between the two.

4:51That's my real worldview. Now, one more point on this, and then we'll get to your column. What about the argument that the reaction to technology, and I would say the counter reaction, is often more important than the actual technology? And so one of the things I've learned just over the course of my career is that don't only look at the people who everyone is focused on, look at the people who are silently watching. And so by 1968, you would have seen the hippies, and you would have seen the new left, and the peace movement, and you thought, man, this is going to be a liberal era. But quietly, in the hallways of Yale University, there were two guys named Dick Cheney and George W.

5:27Bush, and they were saying, this is disgusting, these people. They're taking us off the rails. And they turned out to be more powerful. And when you get a technological advance, you always get a nostalgic counterreaction. You know, in some ways, the counterreaction is more important than the actual technology itself. Well, I actually agree with that, which is why so much of my writing is also about community and things like that. You know, the head of Anthropics is in the other room. And I was just listening to him, and he was talking about the power of computing. And, you know, this piece on the policy scene actually follows one that I did on AI ethics.

6:01And what I said is that the faster, more powerful, more integrated, complex the world gets, the more everything you learned at Sunday school matters more than ever. and asking the head of Anthropic, you know, I said, if you ask me, what's the most dangerous statistic in the world today in your world of AI? And it wasn't anything with chips. It was the Gallup poll that fewer people than ever are going to church. Because if we're going into a world where we're all much more empowered and all much more interconnected, then what you learned in Sunday school matters more than ever, starting with doing to others as you wish them to do unto you.

6:34But it's even more complicated. If we don't endow those values into this new species we have spawned, artificially intelligent being, all hell is going to break loose. So you're right. I've got a lot more David Brooks in me than you realize, but it comes out. I start in a different place, but as you know, I end in the same place you are. And so that would be my response. Okay, we're going to do a David Brooks exorcism. That's right. We're going to get rid of any versions of me that are polluting you. I'm proud to have a lot of David Brooks in me. Okay, let's get to the column. Yeah. So you've got this term, the policy.

7:14Just give us a summary of what the argument is. You know, one of the things I wanted to do in this column, there was something I've never done, which is that I have some real thought partners around the world. I'm really privileged over the years. And I consider myself an acorn collector. That's what I'm really good at. I see stuff out there. But I'm not smart enough to crack them. And I've developed this set of partners over 40 years who are just so much smarter than me. And we crack acorns together. So two summers ago, I actually was in Aspen, and my friend Craig Mundy from Microsoft, former chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, who's been my AI tutor since the world is flat, came and tutored me on AI.

7:47He gave me my introductory tutor to AI. And what a great thing. Craig's a supercomputer designer. And he explained to me that the goal of AI was polymathic artificial general intelligence. That's an artificial brain that's mastered chemistry, biology, physics, baseball, Mozart, you know, and the New York Yankees, and can then reason across all of them. I'd never heard that term before. A week later, I get a call from my climate tutor, Johan Rockstrom, talking about polycrisis. I said, well, that's interesting. I've just been with my AI tutor. He's talking about polymathic. Now you're talking about polycrisis, the idea that the world isn't a binary thing of hot and cold.

8:20It's that climate change triggers deforestation, triggers crop loss, triggers internal migration, triggers state collapse, a polycrisis. Anyways, at the same time, I started giving a speech on foreign policy that Secretary of State Blinken started citing. And the speech was, think about two secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger, Tony Blinken, two Middle East October wars, October 73, October 2023. Henry Kissinger, here was his world. Kissinger, to do his job, to put together the first disengagement agreement between Syria, Egypt, Israel, needed three dimes. I'm dating myself here. A dime to call Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel.

8:56A dime to call Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt. A dime to call Hafez Asa, the president of Syria. Three dimes, Kissinger airplane, three months, Kissinger magic, and he produced the first disengagement agreements, the diplomatic equivalent, David, of tic-tac-toe, three across. Fast forward 50 years later, Tony Blinken. Tony Blinken saw double everywhere he went. He had to deal with inside Hamas and outside Hamas, political Hamas and military Hamas, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In Lebanon, he had the Iranians, Hezbollah, and the Lebanese government. Syria had the Syrian government, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia.

9:26In Yemen, he had 18 tribes. in Iraq, he had 18 militias, and in Israel, he had 18 parties. Tony Blinken wasn't playing tic-tac-toe. He had a Rubik's Cube, and he was trying to get one color aligned on all sides of the Rubik's Cube. And if you've ever tried that, it's really hard. His world had become incredibly polymorphic and polyamorous. Last example, I'm thinking about the community and the time I grew up, Minneapolis in the 50s, St. Louis Park. Everything was binary then. You're either a man or a woman. You're either white or black. You're either Christian or Jewish. You're either at work or home.

9:57My world was entirely binary. Fast forward to today, my little town, St. Louis Park, the mayor is a Somali woman. The new mayor of St. Paul is a Hmong woman from Laos who defeated an African American guy. And the elementary school around the block from me now has 30 different languages in it, which is 29 more than when I was there. My universe there has exploded into polymorphism. So, the net effect of all that is I came back to Craig and I said, Craig, we are not in the Cold War anymore. We are not in the post-Cold War. We're not in the post-post-Cold War. What do we call this era? And he suggested we call it the polyscene.

10:34Okay. Now, the New York Times audience wants us to have a long conversation on polyamory, but we're not going to give them that satisfaction. We were both married to women named Anne, and I don't think either of them would like that. Exactly. It'd be loved or wise. But let me challenge you on two things, and it's the same challenge, but it's on different spheres. Yes. First, on the domestic. And the core of my challenge is that the world, either it wasn't that simple in the past as simpler than it is now. No question. Or that we were in a weird moment that you and I both grow up in. Yes. And that was just a weird moment.

11:06Right. Which I've come to believe a lot more, but go ahead, please. So the domestic, you talked about your childhood in Minneapolis or St. Paul. St. Louis Park. St. Louis Park. And so I grew up in Greenwich Village in New York City. And when I was in fourth grade, we heard a loud boom. and it turned out there was a radical group called the Weathermen who were building bombs in a townhouse right by my school and they blew themselves up. And New York was so violent in the 1970s, there was a serial castrator who was nicknamed Charlie Chopoff who was castrating kids. And it wasn't even a big story because there was so much chaos.

11:39So the simple world, I'm not sure it was that simple. And I grew up in a different place, but go ahead. So it's easy to think the past was simple, but it wasn't that simple. And then on a grander global scale, we both grew up in the Cold War, and it was a world of, you know, binary superpowers. But that was a weird historical moment. And our mutual friend Robert Kagan sometimes suggests we're just going back to the world of great power rivalries. If you're dealing in Thucydides' world in rivalries between Greek city-states, it was pretty damn complicated. If you're Machiavelli dealing with the rivalries in Italian city-states, pretty damn complicated.

12:17If you're Queen Elizabeth trying to balance power in her era, Queen Elizabeth I, pretty damn complicated. And then you go back to the 19th century, meternation, all those people. Aren't we just gone back to normalcy? So it's a good question, and I will respond at two different levels. One is that I do believe we grew up in a—born in 1953, in my case, in this period of incredible income compression and incredible political compression. Okay, that is, Minnesota politics I grew up was very binary and very, very moderate. Okay? So I think we did grow up in a unique time. But here's where I have a pushback on you, Dave.

12:50It's true what you said about Queen Elizabeth and all of those things. But wasn't true that individuals in Queen Elizabeth's time had a phone that could reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before, and could call in an airstrike in their backyard? Or develop a weapon, a drone, that could actually threaten Queen Elizabeth's army. The new thing to me today, which is the basis of the policy scene, is the degree to which the world has become sharded. And it's become sharded because each individual now has a tool to express their voice and express their power like never before.

13:22And we're all connected. And it's that combination of sharding, empowerment, and connectivity that I really think is new, even from the age Bob Kagan is talking about. Right. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay, let me try my theory of where we are today. Right, I want to hear it. Because I think it'll—I want to understand how it fits within yours. I think it does, but I haven't connected the dots. So my theory is that, you know, you go through historical tides, and there's something will sweep over at least Western history and maybe global history where a lot of countries are affected by the same ideas all at once.

13:51And so in the 1770s and 1780s, you have the democratic tide. You have the American Revolution, the French Revolution, you have John Locke and the ideas that bubble up to the democratic revolutions of 1848. Then around early 20th century, you have a totalitarian tide. You get the Russian Revolution. You get the Nazis. You get the Chinese Revolution. And people believed that democracy was inefficient. We have scientific means to manage society, and we're going to do it from the top. And they tried that. Good luck to you. Then in the 1980s, you had the liberal tide. You had Margaret Thatcher. You had Ronald Reagan.

14:23In China, you had Deng Xiaoping. You had Mikhail Gorbachev. And liberalism seemed to be the wave. Since 2013 or so, we've lived in a global populist tide. And you get Donald Trump, Viktor Orban. I don't need to tell you, the AFD, and Nigel Farage, Latin America. I mean, it's just everywhere. Japan, South Korea, they have versions of it. And so how does the policy, and I think the global populist tide has been caused by a rejection of elites, a loss of faith in societies, and a sense that a lot of people feel they're not respected and not seen. And so my explanation is, as you'd expect, cultural, but it has an economic element.

14:59I think it's a class revolt, among other things. But so how do we fit these two stories together? So, as you said, we're going to end up in the same place. I think we're here for our third civil war, David. It's fearful. Yeah, exactly. So, let me start with what is a bedrock thing in my identity? I think it's in yours, too. For me, the human beings are driven by the two most powerful emotions driving human beings are, one, humiliation and dignity, the quest for dignity and the revulsion of humiliation. That's why I changed my business card back in 2015 from New York Times foreign affairs columnist to New York Times humiliation and dignity columnist.

15:37Because I felt that's really what I was covering, whether it's about China or Russia or Palestinians or anything else. But the second thing, the second most powerful human emotion, I believe, is home. It's a quest for home to be anchored in the world. As my friend Andy Karzner describes it, to be anchored in a community where people are connected, protected, and respected. Best definition of home I've ever heard, okay? So I believe we have had three civil wars, basically, over home. The first was, I can't feel at home if I'm a Southerner and I can't enslave a Black person. And I can't feel at home if I'm a Northerner and you are enslaving a Black person.

16:12So it was a struggle over who gets to belong and be home in this world. Second one, 1960s civil rights movement, was about the failed reconstruction and the fact that we didn't deliver on the promise of liberty for all. I think we're in our third civil war now. only it's not just about race. It's about what I call race, pace, and price. Okay, first of all, it's again about race, only in a very different way. Now it's, I don't feel at home in a minority-majority country where I, as a white person, this is what some argue, don't feel at home where the mayor of St. Paul is among refugees. Okay, that applies to a certain number of people.

16:48The second is about the sheer pace of change. The fact that about 20 years ago, well, back in the late 70s, My aunt and uncle grew up in a small town in Minnesota, a Wilmer, Minnesota. And I visited Wilmer for 50 years. One day around 1975, my aunt comes to a family event in Minneapolis. She pulls me aside and says, Tom, I have to tell you, I was in the grocery store on Saturday, and I heard someone speaking Spanish. I heard someone speaking Spanish. It was her first encounter with the other. And she never forgot it, and I never forgot it. And today, Wilmer, Minnesota is roughly a third people of color.

17:27That's how fast the pace of change of who belongs here in terms of ethnic identity. Then they went to work and their boss rolled up a robot over their shoulder and seemed to be studying their job. So people's sense of home, people's sense of cultural norms, which are what anchored you at home, and people's sense of work, which also anchors you at home, all got disrupted. That was pace. The last is price. There's a whole generation that can't afford a home anymore to get anchored in the world, to be connected, protected, and respected. So our civil war right now, our third civil war, I believe is about identity, belonging, and a place called home.

18:03And I think it's going on all over the world. You know, Ben Gvir, the leader of the nationalist front in Israel, nationalist group in Israel, his ads in the last campaign where he just bought a side of Eged buses, the main buses in Israel, and all it said was, who is the landlord here? Who gets to be at home? Along comes a guy, a political genius in his own way named Donald Trump, and says, I have a metaphor that can cut across all three of these lines, and it's called a wall. I'm going to build a wall against those people who don't make you feel at home in your own home. I'm going to build a wall against the pace of change of those things that make you not feel at home in your own fold.

18:38And I'm going to bring down the walls to home ownership, the last he's failed to do, but et cetera. So that's kind of how I think we meet somewhere in a very core way, because, again, these quest for humiliation and dignity and a place called home, I think matter more than ever, which is why I say Dorothy got it exactly right. There's no place like home. Yeah. The great Brooks Friedman confluence has indeed happened. I agree with you completely. But it's easy for people like me, I'll just speak for myself, who believe in progress. Yes. And who basically believe a lot of these inventions, including AI, are wonderful and more positive than negative, to be condescending toward those who we would call reactionary.

19:22And so how do we not make it seem like they're the backward, primitive, intransigent ones and we're the modern, enlightened, pluralistic ones? David, remember, I was a little Jewish kid from Minnesota who wanted to cover the Arab-Muslim world in the 70s. Not a natural thing, okay? And my secret for survival was to learn to be a good listener. Because I discovered two things happen when you listen. What is what you learn when you listen? Because all the stories I got wrong were because I was yapping when I should have been listening. But much more important is what you say when you listen, because listening is a sign of respect.

20:00And what I learned was if I just listen to people, and I mean deep listening, not just waiting for them to stop talking. It was amazing what they would let me say to and about them. So I could go into a room with 30 young Arab students, and they got my columns printed out, some things on Israel. They're ready to carve me up. You spend an hour listening to them. And at the end of the hour, everyone's got their cell phone out, and they want a picture with you. Because so many people are just starved to be respected and heard. And so that became my survival mechanism. As you know, I'm not out there saying, you're all great, you're all wonderful, it's all the other guy's fault.

20:34I'm in everybody's face. but I will listen and I do it both because not to get things wrong but much more importantly because that's what unlocks a conversation and it all goes back to respect. Yeah. There's a great book I recommend to our listeners called Crucial Conversations by a whole bunch of authors. The lead one or at least one of them is a guy named Joseph Grenny and in that book they have a sentence in any conversation respect is like air. When it's present nobody notices. When it's absent it's all anybody can think about. Oh, I love that. And I just think that is profoundly true. Now, there are two topics I want to cover that are implicit in your column.

21:08And one is AI. Yeah. I guess in the next room we have the CEO of Anthropics. So, I'm going to go. Just came from it, yeah. Well, you know, the simple question is, and I've had trouble understanding this. I use it every day. Yes, you too. I find it moderately useful. Yeah. I think my physicist friends find it extremely useful. But the stuff we write about is subjective. Yeah, yeah. So, my question is, really, I'm just going to be basic. How big is it? And what's it going to do to our governance? So I'm in the category of it's the biggest thing ever. And the way I would explain it is a concept that Craig Mundy and I developed.

21:43We divide the history of the world into just three basic phases. So the first is the age of tools, literally from the dawn of man to the printing press. And humans, we analogize to H2O molecules. So we call it the age of ice, okay, because humans were very separated as H2O molecules are in ice, and they move very slowly. Technology is heat. So we get the printing press. It melts the ice into water. Water begins the age of information. Ideas now flow. People flow. Capital flow. The age of water lasts from the printing press through the computer age, okay? We are now entering, we have more technology, AI.

22:18We're entering the age of vapor, okay? And vapor is going to go into everything, David. That's why it's different and why you have to understand it. It's going to go into your glasses, your watch, your toaster, your refrigerator, your car, your microphone, this chair, which will say, God, that question made Tom Friedman really uncomfortable, you know, very soon. AI is going to go into everything. And that's why I just spend a lot of time trying to understand it. But you get overwhelmed by it. So, as I, as a journalist, think about AI, I just want to focus on one thing. And for me, it's the ethical question.