78: Seduced by Nihilism: The Revolt of the Public Made You Think

“No matter what I believe to be true, there always seems to be another side to the question. If you were to put me to the torture, I’d probably confess that this is my analytic ideal: to consider the question from as many relevant perspectives as the mind can hold.”
Welcome back to another episode of Made You Think! In this episode, Nat, Neil, and Adil talk about their key takeaways from The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri. With technology giving us access to more information than ever, the overall trust level between the public and the governing elite is at an all time low. 
We cover a wide range of topics including:
The relationship between sources of information and their level of authority Nihilism resulting from a lack of trust in authority and the current system
How cancel culture may keep people from taking action on their passions Power relations between the elites and the public The move from criticizing people to criticizing the systems themselves And much more. Please enjoy, and make sure to follow Nat, Neil, and Adil on Twitter and share your thoughts on the episode.
Links from the Episode:
Mentioned in the show:
NASA Begins America’s Mars Exploration Approach (30:08) Palmer Luckey - All In Summit (30:41) Anduril (30:55) Manhattan Project (33:38) IRB (34:53) Ben Shapiro’s on cancel culture (40:56) National Enquirer (42:02) Nat’s thread on taking action (43:25) Roe v Wade (48:31) Occupy movement (55:33) V for Vendetta (1:00:24) Pocket Casts (1:24:34) Stitcher (1:24:34) Books Mentioned:
Revolt of the Public Seeing Like a State (0:53) (Book Episode) (Nat’s Book Notes) The Fourth Turning (9:03) (Book Episode)  The Dictator’s Handbook (1:11:33) (Book Episode) (Nat’s Book Notes) The Iliad (1:17:39) Chaos Monkeys (1:25:50) People Mentioned:
Alex Jones (15:01) Dan Carlin (15:06) Joe Biden (19:14) Donald Trump (19:30) Joe Rogan (21:21) Elon Musk (23:44) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (25:53) Nassim Taleb (29:56) Jason Calacanis (30:50) Neil Ferguson (38:44) Ben Shapiro (40:37) Jeff Bezos (42:00) Greg Abbott (45:30) Beto O'Rourke (52:00) Andrew Yang (52:13) (Episode #47, #48) Antonio García Martínez (1:25:50) Show Topics:
0:43 In today's episode, Nat, Neil, and Adil are discussing Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri. This will wrap up our crypto series, and if you're interested in more like this, be sure to check out some of our previous episodes!
4:02 Adil goes over some of the core ideas of the book, with one of them being the relationship between sources of information and their authority. When there’s fewer sources of information, each source has greater authority. So if there’s only one source, they are the sole authority. There’s been an increase on news sources, and with so many sources, it opens up more opportunity for contradiction between them.
7:10 Negation; Many elections have been won by negation rather than inspiration. As we gain access to more and more information, it can become harder to trust authority. There’s a need for a new system of trust and authority to emerge that can exist within this hyper-access to information we have.
12:09 In the Choices section of the book, there were two parts: 1. What individuals can do 2. What government can do. Gurri frames our current paradigms around authority as being emergent from the Industrial Age. When the public needs answers, they turn to institutions rather than individuals.
"That passive mass audience on which so many political and economic institutions depended had itself unbundled, disaggregated, fragmented into what I call vital communities: groups of wildly disparate size gathered organically around a shared interest or theme."
16:33 How can you influence people in a subtle way? Adil makes a pyramid analogy, where the elites are at the top and the public is at the bottom. The elites are interested in increasing the distance between the top and the bottom, however the author argues that in order