Crazy Town: Episode 69. Hot, Flat, and Totally Phucking Wrong: The Perilous Platitudes of a Pulitzer-Prize-Winning Propagandist

Asher Miller
I’m Asher Miller.

Jason Bradford
I’m Jason Bradford

Rob Dietz
And I’m Rob Dietz. Welcome to Crazy Town, where no two countries with McDonald’s have ever gone to war. Oh crap.

Melody Allison
Hi, This is Crazy Town producer Melody Allison. Thanks for listening. Here in season five, we’re exploring Phalse Prophets and the dangerous messages they’re so intent on spreading. If you like what you’re hearing, please let some friends know about this episode, or the podcast in general. Now on to the show.

Asher Miller 

Hey, guys, Rob, Jason. Do you guys know how important I am?

Jason Bradford

Yeah, no, I do know. You’re the executive director of Post Carbon Institute.

Asher Miller 

No, no, no, no, forget that stuff. No. I mean, I get to hang out with really rich and influential people.

Jason Bradford 

You’re a hobnobber.

Rob Dietz 

Look, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

Asher Miller 

Yeah, I’ve been in the room with more amounts of money than you guys have.

Jason Bradford 

I agree.

Asher Miller 

Is that fair?

Jason Bradford 

That’s fair. I believe you.

Rob Dietz 

Well, I’m a I’m a poor guy from the south. So yeah, it’s probably likely.

Asher Miller 

I’m trying to think. I think that the – I can actually name the time that I was around the most wealth.

Rob Dietz 

Did you meet Scrooge McDuck?

Asher Miller 

Yeah. Well, as a kid. Yeah I did.

Jason Bradford 

Did you break into Fort Knox?

Asher Miller 

No.

Rob Dietz 

Alright. Come on. Lay it on. Who were you with? Where?

Asher Miller 

So I was in this little town in Northern California, which is close to where I lived, called Atherton. And I was invited to go to somebody’s house there. And she was having like a book reading event, a speaking event in her backyard.

Jason Bradford 

Little bungalow.

Asher Miller 

So she had an enormous tent in her backyard. She was a very lovely woman, but definitely part of the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. Right? And she invited all these people to come. And there were like really recognizable figures from Silicon Valley there. The only reason I was invited is because my dad used to live in this world.

Jason Bradford 

Was Ray Kurzweil there?

Asher Miller 

Ray was not there. His artificial intelligence bot was there.

Jason Bradford 

Oh, good.

Rob Dietz 

How many nanobots attended?

Asher Miller 

I couldn’t see them. They were invisible, how was I to know? Yeah. But like John Doerr was there from Kleiner Perkins – the biggest like VC fund that’s funding the climate space. A bunch of other people were there. The reason we’re all gathered together was to listen to the wise sage words of a one Mr. Thomas Friedman.

Jason Bradford 

Yes.

Rob Dietz 

Oooh.

Asher Miller 

So Friedman had a new book out, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded.” I almost said, “Hot, Fat, and Crowded.” That’s just about, you know, the United States: “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” You know, where he was talking about climate change primarily.

Jason Bradford 

In the context of globalization and the change of our. . .

Asher Miller 

Right. So a lot of these clean tech climate inspired or concerned people were there. And because my dad knew the woman who sort of organized this, you know, he thought I might want to go. So I went.

Jason Bradford 

My dad took me to baseball games.

Asher Miller 

That’s your dad’s world?

Jason Bradford 

Yeah.

Asher Miller 

This was my dad’s world.

Jason Bradford 

I saw the Giants all the time.

Rob Dietz 

Did you take his ticket? Or like . . .

Asher Miller 

No, I went with my dad.

Rob Dietz 

Okay. You were his date.

Jason Bradford 

His plus one.

Asher Miller 

Yeah, exactly. And then I actually got to meet Friedman for a little bit. And he was like signing books early on. We got there actually a little bit early because I wanted to ask the dude . . . I wanted to ask him what he thought about peak oil, right? And so I kind of went up to him when nobody was around.

Jason Bradford 

That was nice of you.

Asher Miller 

The host introduced me to him. They’ve known each other for a long time. And his face fell crestfallen when I asked him this question. Very friendly and warm to me, you know. And then I asked him, I was like, “So you know, how familiar you are with peak oil? I’m curious what you think about it.” And he was like, if he could have backed up into the wall disappeared – Have you guys ever seen that meme of Homer Simpson just disappearing into the bushes?

Jason Bradford 

Yeah.

Asher Miller 

It was very much that. He’s like, “Oh my God, get me away from this dude.”

Rob Dietz 

Because you’re obviously a conspiracy theory weirdo.

Asher Miller 

Total nut job. Exactly. It’s like, how did this guy get in? Probably got an earful later. But anyways, that was, you know, that’s probably when I was in proximity to the most amount of wealth.

Jason Bradford 

And the great mind of . . .

Rob Dietz 

Thomas Friedman. I know we’re gonna talk about Tom in a little bit, but can we have a quick aside because we’re living in the age of instantaneous research and I don’t know this place Atherton. So I had to look it up on Google Maps and I see –

Asher Miller 

What did you find?

Rob Dietz 

Well, I see it’s this small spot, right? But nothing. Doesn’t look amazing or anything. So then I go on Zillow and I look at the houses for sale, and the houses that have sold. I mean, it’s ridiculous. $36 million. $22.8 million. Here’s a really sad one, $4 million.

Jason Bradford 

Oh a tear down. That’s a tear down.

Rob Dietz 

What the hell is this place?

Jason Bradford 

It’s always been like that. I mean, I grew up in the Bay Area. I don’t think it was priced that high when I was a kid, but to give you my perspective on Atherton, it’s a lot of oak trees, it’s very pleasant, big yards, big lots.

Asher Miller 

Minimum one acre. They’re all one acre lots.

Jason Bradford 

And a lot of these old, old homes that almost look like estates.  Okay. Well, anyhow, here’s how I remember this. Because my grandparents live not far from Menlo Park and their son, my uncle Danny, at 19 years old was hired by a dude to take care of his lions in Atherton.

Asher Miller 

Not anymore. They’ve all been torn down.  Wait, wait. Literal lions?

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, literally. He had lions in like big closures.

Asher Miller 

That’s awesome.

Rob Dietz 

That is a dangerous job.

Jason Bradford 

Danny had no training and next thing you know, he’s like playing with – There’s pictures of him like hugging lions. It’s great. So these people have money.

Rob Dietz 

Alright. Well probably the next time you hear from us in this podcast we’ll be coming to you from Atherton and our new lion housing mansion estate.

Asher Miller 

This is not what we’re here to talk about, though. We’re talking about Thomas Friedman, right?

Jason Bradford 

Yeah.

Asher Miller 

And so for our listeners who don’t know who Tom Friedman is – I’m surprised if you don’t know. I would like love to hear from you and how you’ve been able to live such a wonderful life without him in your life. Anyways, just a brief. You know, the guy grew up in the 1950s in Minnesota  with family. Wound up getting, you know, his degree in journalism, studied journalism and Middle East Studies in college. Got a job eventually as a foreign correspondent. Went over, I think went to UK first, but then the big thing that happened for him is he got a job being a correspondent in Beirut.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, what a time to be in Beirut. Late 70s.

Asher Miller 

Yeah, in 1979 he got that job. Then he got hired by the New York Times. Became eventually the Beirut bureau chief there and sort of became a really recognized go to expert on sort of Middle East affairs. Wrote a pretty popular book called, “From Beirut to Jerusalem.” And so, you know, he eventually ended up getting the role of being the foreign affairs columnist in the New York Times which he’s had for decades now. And, you know, he’s written a number of books, he has won three Pulitzer Prizes. You know, his original kind of role, or what he was known for was particularly about the Middle East. But he’s now become much more known for other things that he’s written and talked about which we’ll get into.

Jason Bradford 

And he is now, he could afford a house in Atherton. He’s extremely wealthy. He married into wealth. Married into the Bucksbaum family. This is a real estate empire known for something that’s near and dear to all of our hearts here: Shopping malls. Yeah. And you said he was born in Minnesota, so maybe the Mall of America factors into his family somehow?

Asher Miller 

Could be. That’s the origin story. 

Rob Dietz 

Could come full circle there.

Jason Bradford 

Yes. Yes.

Rob Dietz 

Well, you know, I seem to be the real estate guy in this episode. So he’s kind of known in the D.C. area. When I lived there I knew that Tom Friedman had this giant mansion in Bethesda. So like 11,000 square feet or something. So you’re right, I think Atherton could be a spot for him. I will say this though, he seems to be a sort of progressive mansion owner. So he has solar panels and he’s set up geothermal heating and you know, plants a lot of trees and that sort of stuff. So I can give him some credit for being a little bit environmentally conscious, energy conscious.

Asher Miller 

An 11,000 square foot house. That’s no problem as long as you’ve got some solar panels.

Rob Dietz 

He’s not getting full credit, okay. He gets a little bit. Yeah. But I would also give him some credit as a journalist. I don’t think he’s crazy off base. You guys are probably going to crush me, but I read his book, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” a while back. You guys read that?

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, I’ve read it.

Asher Miller 

Um-hum.

Rob Dietz 

We’ve all read it. So It’s pretty good. I mean, it was pretty good. How he recognized there’s this tension between the old world and a new world. Old world being people who pay attention to community and to tradition. That’s the the olive tree side. And then this disruptive force of the Lexus, which is globalization, capitalism, technology. Seem reasonable.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah. And he’s in the Middle East. So that’s got a lot of that tension going on, right?

Asher Miller 

Was he talking about like the car the Lexus? Oh, yeah. Not LexisNexis?

Rob Dietz 

Yeah, he should have probably chosen a car that’s had more cultural relevance.

Jason Bradford 

But Lexus was big at that time.

Asher Miller 

I bet he tried out a whole bunch of different titles.

Jason Bradford 

Well, yeah. And then he became even more well known by the book that has really taken off in geographic circles, The World is Flat.”

Asher Miller 

It’s the one that Kyrie Irving keeps talking about, right?

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, yeah. This is the backbone of the intellectual Flat Earther movement. But no, honestly, really what he did with that book is he explained to the masses how all this new communication technology that was coming on board with the internet and stuff. And you know, how smoothing out banking and financial transactions, of course, would open up global markets. And not just to commodity and manufacturing trade, which obviously has been going on for a long time, but to services. So you can think of, you know, coding being outsourced to other nations. Or accounting, customer service, even like medical imaging. A lot of stuff can now happen anywhere. So the idea being, the analogy would be like leveling the playing field. The world is now no longer tilted, you know. But I don’t know if the flat thing works.

Asher Miller 

It’s not tilted, it’s flat.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, exactly.

Asher Miller 

Okay, while we’re giving the guy credit, I will say clearly he’s had a talent at communicating things in sound bites and metaphors that, maybe we’ll talk about, are often completely incomprehensible.

Rob Dietz 

Oh we’re going to talk about it alright.

Asher Miller 

But they do really resonate. I mean, like, for example, the argument that he made, you know, that no two countries with McDonald’s ever go to war with one another. It’s like you take this idea of geopolitics or whatever, you know, dynamics between nations, and you distill it down to something like that.

Jason Bradford 

I mean, I think the fries just make everyone happy.

Asher Miller 

I think that that was one of the main elements of his thesis. Yeah, sure.

Rob Dietz 

Well, we’re sitting here giving him credit, I guess where credit is due. That’s fine. But this is the phalse prophets season and we know we’re not here to kiss his ass. Not like he does with the billionaires that he hobnobs with. In fact, in the research for this, there’s a journalist, Alexander Cockburn, who instructs readers of Friedman. He says, “You can open any page in the Lexus and the Olive Tree and you will find Friedman an assiduous bootlicker.”

Asher Miller 

I can only hope to be one day be an assiduous bootlicker. I’d love to put that on like a business card.

Rob Dietz 

You’re like more of a carefree bootlicker than an assiduous one.

Asher Miller 

Aw, I want to be assiduous. You know, absolutely dedicated to my craft.

Rob Dietz 

So let’s just lay out his main ideas and then we’ll get into a critique of them maybe a little bit after that,

Jason Bradford 

Well, “The World is Flat,” that was a 2005 book, right? And I guess, you know, there’s some backstory to this where he met some business leader in India who suddenly kind of like explains about this level playing field and how things have flattened out so to speak. He turns it into this metaphor, and suddenly – What’s this about him becoming like Christopher Columbus? Explain that part. I still haven’t figured this part out? Has anyone?

Rob Dietz 

He’s like a neo-Columbus. See, Columbus sails the oceans trying to get to India and realizes the world is round. Doesn’t realize it but sort of, I guess confirms that it’s round. Well, so Friedman goes to the actual India and –

Asher Miller 

He’s like, “No, the world’s not round. It’s flat.”

Rob Dietz 

It’s a level playing field so it’s flat. He’s the neo-Columbus.

Asher Miller 

He sorta compares himself to Columbus.

Jason Bradford 

He unironically compares himself to Columbus somehow.

Rob Dietz 

It’s a little arrogant. A little over the top.

Jason Bradford 

I’m having trouble following any of this. But anyway, okay. He basically goes through an argument that there’s different eras of globalization. Okay. There’s the round or spherical world era and that lasted from 1492, this is where Columbus comes in, apparently, to 1800. And this shrinks the world from large to medium in size. And this is built around kind of nation states you know. Going global or what we’ll call the colonialism era, okay? So that’s 1.0, having to use these stupid software metaphors still. I hate this shit.

Asher Miller 

Oh my god. And can we just – I’m really struggling. The world which was shrunk from large to medium?

Jason Bradford 

This is like Bangladesh shirt sizing or something like that. We’re in the textile industry. The world is flat. I don’t know.

Rob Dietz 

A lot of metaphors. Just stick with it.

Asher Miller 

Now we’re gonna put the world back in the dryer, right? We washed it on high heat when we shouldn’t have done that. Put it in the dryer. Globalization 2.0, which is from, you know, early 1800s until around the year 2000. It shrinks the world from size medium to size small, right? Are they using wool or something? What’s going on? I don’t know. It was built around companies and multinationals going global, you know, for markets and labor. So I guess he’s saying that’s the next –

Jason Bradford 

That’s 2.0.

Asher Miller 

That’s 2.0.

Rob Dietz 

Okay. Okay. So now, you take that flat woolen Earth, and you apply a heat gun to it. And now you’ve got globalization 3.0, which started around 2000. And you’ve shrunk it again from size small to size tiny.

Jason Bradford 

This is like a Rick Moranis movie or something.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah, Honey, I Shrunk the Planet. And I flattened it.

Asher Miller 

That’s the next book. He’s assiduously writing these ideas right now.

Rob Dietz 

He’s gonna love this episode. “Yeah, I listened to three idiots bloviating, and I got an idea for a book.”

Asher Miller 

That’s a great idea.

Rob Dietz 

So the idea for this one is that it’s not dominated by the West, by white people. It’s dominated by everyone everywhere who can figure out how to plug into the internet.

Jason Bradford 

The dominator culture goes.

Rob Dietz 

You too can be a dominator.

Asher Miller 

The world is flat, we all get to beat each other up. It’s awesome. Okay, so I think part of the thesis here is that, and I talked about this a little bit earlier, is this whole idea of economic integration through globalization.

Jason Bradford 

Integration, integration.

Asher Miller 

And he did make really good points about basically technology. And we’ve talked about rhis before, I know our colleague, Richard Heinberg, has talked about this a lot. That like with globalization, it’s not just having large cargo ships. And then we talked about the shipping containers, you know. There’s that, but it’s also unique computers and satellite imagery and stuff like that to sort of integrate.

Jason Bradford 

And securitization over these networks so you can do financial transactions. We talked about that and how important that was historically.

Asher Miller 

So I mean, he’s right about that being a game changer. But you know, he was sort of arguing that this economic integration reduces the likelihood of conflict and war, right. So that whole McDonald’s thing, right? No two countries that have McDonald’s ever go to war with each other, you know, is basically kind of that –

Jason Bradford 

This is post World War II, though. Kind of, you know, the reason that we were pushing all this was about integration and countering the Soviet bloc.

Asher Miller 

Yeah. It’s very consistent with another kind of concept, which I don’t think we’ll ever really get into. This is sort of like the end of history Fukuyama stuff.

Rob Dietz 

Also those countries that have McDonald’s also have a really high diarrhea rate. Sorry.

Jason Bradford 

It’s been a while.  Yeah, no one needs that.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah, it’s been a while and McDonald’s. Come on. That’s a pretty easy target. Well, the other thing that Friedman seems to love, too, is technological progress. Completely embraces it. Along with consumption. And, of course, the U.S., which is kind of the happy place for both of those trends, right? High technology consumption, market forces. He really loves this shift to a secondary or tertiary economy, which we’ve talked about before. So you’re not a primary producer, you’re not on the landscape growing food or something.  Something worthless like that. Yeah, you’re computer coding, you’re a CEO, you’re doing something administrative . . . podcasting.

Asher Miller 

I think it’s fair to say that his argument, his kind of exploration on the topic of globalization and technologies is like this is the new world order. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. It’s going to be a global competitive marketplace of ideas. It’s going to flatten opportunities, you know, make it possible for innovation to happen all over the place, and for people to compete with one another in a global labor landscape, or whatever. But the U.S., because I do think that he’s quite focused and quite U.S. centric in his orientation is, and obviously, that’s probably a lot of his audience as well. It’s thinking about, well, you know, if we have to recognize this is inevitable, right? What’s the role for Americans in all of this? And so I think part of the argument is that the U.S. can lead a lot of this. And that if we focus on embracing technology, and we can create – It reminds me a lot of what we talked about with Clinton, you know. We talked about the old teaching the code ethos. You know, that’s how we’re going to get people out of poverty in the United States. And so It’s consistent with that idea of, let’s go ahead and offshore manufacturing, but we’ll be able to increase prosperity and progress here economically by embracing this. And we’ll have high paying whatever jobs.

Rob Dietz 

And sidenote, Clinton is also a huge McDonald’s fan.

Asher Miller 

Absolutely. It’s all full circle.

Jason Bradford 

I thought that was Trump. Interesting.

Asher Miller 

So the real conspiracy. Forget the elders, the protocols, the Elders of Zion. It’s the protocols of the McDonald’s characters.

Rob Dietz 

Ronald McDonald.

Asher Miller 

Hamburglar. All those guys. Yeah.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah. Well, you know, what also I find fascinating about him is he’s not a laissez faire guy. He basically really believes in sort of these new social compacts that embraces these free markets, but makes it tolerable. So you’ve got to put in sort of the buffers and the safety nets. And, you know, he actually came up with this term, integrationist social safety netters.

Asher Miller 

Mmm. Just rolls off the tongue.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah. And the Clinton New Democratic Movement was very much aligned with this. That if you’re going to be an advocate of this free and unfettered trade, and these open borders, this deregulation, the internet, you know, connecting everybody up, you also need to be a Social Democrat. Because if you don’t keep the people who are falling behind from becoming really destitute, then they’re going to eventually create a backlash that will choke off your country, lead to more protectionism again, and you won’t be able to maintain political consensus and openness.  I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment of the risks, right?  Right. So he basically laid out like, if you’re going to do this, you better do this right.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah. Well, and that’s a big leap too to think, “Well, I know how to do it right.”

Asher Miller 

Well, and he said at the same time, “We believe you dare not be a Social Democrat or safety netter today without being a globalizer, too,” right? Because “without that integration with the world, you will never generate the incomes you need to keep standards of living rising.” So he’s fused those two things together.

Jason Bradford 

We have to do this, and we have to do this to become wealthy and maintain our rising standard of living, but we better protect people who are not going to learn how to code etc, etc.

Rob Dietz 

Okay, so the last big issue that Friedman covers, before we really start ripping apart some of these ideas that I want to bring up is his tracking of environmental issues. And he’s been, again, I don’t want to give him too much credit. But he’s at least I think, one of the mainstream journalists who seems to care that climate change is happening and that it has such a disruptive force. And, you know, he has a true concern about the environment. And in 2008, he published another very popular book, you mentioned it earlier, Asher, “Hot, Flat and Crowded.” And according to the book, there’s five mega trends we want to address.

Asher Miller 

In fact, I mean, this is the reason why I was really curious to go listen to him talk and to talk to him because one of those five was Energy and Natural Resources Supply and Demand, right? There’s a growing demand for food, fuel, water, air, raw materials, and the question of how are we going to meet everyone’s needs, right. He also talks about petrodictatorships and the price of oil and the pace of freedom. The price of oil and the pace of freedom actually move in opposite directions in petrostates, you know. And so, you know, dealing with that, I think he’s always been a big believer. And we could talk about this, because there’s major criticisms of his position on the invasion in Iraq. He was wanting to spread democracy, Western style democracy. He was a Social Democrat.

Rob Dietz 

Well, you know, the thing with climate that’s really interesting for him is this 1% case that he cites It’s conservative, not conservative like Trump or conservative politics. But he says, “If there’s even a 1% chance that the predictions around climate change are correct around the catastrophes and irreversibility, then we have to change what we’re doing.” You don’t hear journalists make that kind of call much.

Asher Miller 

And then he also talks about energy poverty. You talked about the billions of people that don’t have electricity and will fall behind making sure that they’re able to access the internet, ensuring that they actually have opportunity to also participate in this flattened world.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, this tiny . . .

Asher Miller 

Tiny, shrunken, flattened thing, whatever. And then he does talk about biodiversity loss as well, right.

Jason Bradford 

Which that’s surprising, right?

Asher Miller 

Yeah. He talks about population, hot, flat and crowded, right?

Rob Dietz 

Well, and the thing that Friedman does though, besides just calling these things out, and this is where it gets a little disappointing as he takes this list, these five megatrends, biodiversity, energy poverty, climate change, petrodictatorship, and energy and natural resource supplies. And then he says, “These are incredible opportunities masquerading as insoluble problems.” You know, so of course –

Jason Bradford 

 They’re masquerading.

Rob Dietz 

Well, thank goodness. It’s actually an opportunity. Well, so you know, he has one solution, core solution, to all five problems. And that is to unleash Kurzweil’s nanobots.

Asher Miller 

Oh really?

Rob Dietz 

Just kidding, it is abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons. So you know, it’s electrify everything and find some cheap, abundant way to get them.

Jason Bradford 

It’s a Green New Deal-y kind of situation going on.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah, huge opportunity for America. Big dollars to be made.

Jason Bradford 

Okay. Okay. So, what we tried to do in that section was lay out his ideas without immediately pillorying them. But I’d like to start –

Rob Dietz 

Did we succeed?

Jason Bradford 

I don’t know how good we were at that.

Asher Miller 

We tried.

Jason Bradford 

We tried. I think we were kind of like jabbing as we went and so he’s probably got a lot of like –

Asher Miller 

Little nicks.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, nicks, you know. But now I really want to like drive it home though.

Rob Dietz 

Oh wow. You just mixed a metaphor there. I like that. You got boxing and driving. And yeah, that’s where I want to start because his writing . . .  Holy . . . He does what you just did.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, I know. I try. I try.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah, good work. So there’s an article you shared, Asher, from Matt Taibbi, who is critiquing “The World is Flat,” and he’s just ruthless on Friedman. He’s like, “Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature length essays.: And he gives an example where Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines. He has a parenthetical, he says, “Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name. If he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams on a Sealy Posturepedic.”

Jason Bradford 

That is so true. Friedman is always name-dropping corporations. Oh my god.

Asher Miller 

Because they send him stock as a thank you.

Rob Dietz 

Then he has this bungled metaphor thing where Taibbi says,  “Here’s What Friedman says: ‘I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, glumly sat at the back of the beeline waiting.'”

Asher Miller 

Poor guy. He didn’t get his first class?

Rob Dietz 

“Waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.” And then Taibbi is so indignant. He’s like, “Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.” So yeah, I mean, you know, look, we all write a fair amount and I’m sure people could pick our stuff apart. But some of his metaphors and analogies, it’s pretty rough.

Asher Miller 

There is a whole subculture. There probably even is like a subreddit of people who just sit and lose their shit over Friedman’s terrible metaphors and, you know, stories. I mean, like, there are all these jokes about him learning something from a taxi driver. In fact, there’s a guy named Brian Mayer, who he created a tool, it’s gone now. You can probably find it on the Wayback Machine, which was called the Thomas Friedman op-ed generator. And all you had to do was hit a button that says, “Generate.” You push the button and then it just spits out an op-ed and is like, here you go. And I’ve played with it. It’s remarkably accurate. And this is way before Chat AI or any of this advanced technology. I mean, we’re talking about, you know –

Jason Bradford 

This might have been the genesis of Chat GPT.

Asher Miller 

In 2013.

Rob Dietz 

This might be Tom Friedman.

Asher Miller 

Poor Tom Friedman, Chat GTP might be coming for you, buddy. Look out.

Jason Bradford 

Well, you know, what gets me about it is he just has this incredible belief that we can manage all this complexity. And that somehow we’re going to make it through even as we go through this great acceleration or whatever in the middle of climate breakdown, blah, blah, blah. So I want to read this quote because this is a perfect quote. It hits the metaphor issues that we’re talking about and the torture-ness of it.

Rob Dietz 

Wow.

Jason Bradford 

Anyhow. Okay, here we go. “Think of participating in the global economy today like driving a Formula One racecar, which gets faster and faster every year. Someone is always going to be running into the wall and crashing. Especially when you have drivers who only a few years ago were riding a donkey. You have two choices. You can ban Formula One racing, then there will never be any crashes. But there also won’t be any progress. Or you could do everything possible to reduce the impact of each crash by improving every aspect of the race. That is, you can make sure there is an ambulance always on hand with a well trained rescue crew and plenty of blood and different blood types.” And okay, this is 1/3 of it. This quote goes on and on with more and more ridiculous stuff like this. I had to stop.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah, well I mean, that construct is patently absurd. I mean, who says that Formula One racing getting faster is progress. We’ve already talked about the myth of progress.

Asher Miller 

But it’s true. I mean, there’s something deep in all of his writings. That is there’s this optimism that we – Look, we if we just all behave ourselves, we can figure this out. We’re all committed to the greater good and come together, we can all benefit.

Rob Dietz 

He loves progress.

Jason Bradford 

You know, you remind me when you’re talking about this of Donald Fagen. And one of your favorite albums is Nightfly?

Asher Miller 

Yeah.

Jason Bradford 

Thomas Friedman grew up in that era. And it makes me think it’s really perfect album.

Asher Miller 

That’s a really interesting point.

Rob Dietz 

What are you guys talking about?

Jason Bradford 

It’s one of our favorite albums by Donald Fagen.

Asher Miller 

They’re these songs he wrote, maybe we could play a clip of this actually.  He’s basically just –

Jason Bradford 

Gushing.

Asher Miller 

He’s just embodying this sort of like 50s fever dream of like people wearing spandex jackets and flying around. Yeah, you’re right. That’s really interesting.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, I think so. It’s like he swallowed that cultural zeitgeist as a kid.

Rob Dietz 

But Fagen was sort of making fun of that. But it’s also weird. Like Friedman’s thing about, I want to have a lot of different kinds of blood there for when you have an accident and you’re spilling out all over the race course. What are we talking about, Tom? That’s progress.

Asher Miller 

Well, let’s talk about the globalization piece. God there’s so much to be said.

Rob Dietz 

There’s nothing to critique there.

Asher Miller 

There’s so much to be said. I mean, I’m just gonna go back to the whole Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, right? I mean, again, what a perfect example of like a trite concept. It sounds just great and people are like, “Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense.” And there’s something to be said around when you have economic integration. It may reduce, and I think this was always the mindset of people that it reduces the risk of conflict, right? Because we’re all sort of tied and integrated together. Right? But we see that people aren’t always rational actors. Oh, and by the way, let’s just point out, is there a McDonald’s in Russia?

Jason Bradford 

There used to be.

Asher Miller 

Is there a McDonald’s in Ukraine?

Jason Bradford 

I don’t know.

Asher Miller 

This idea of – So maybe he’s right because in both cases, in one McDonald’s had to leave.  In the other, they’ve all been destroyed and bombed so I guess he’s right.

Rob Dietz 

But I think that was that was pressure too, right? Like we’re asking McDonald’s to leave Russia to harm them. That means their diarrhea rate just went down, but –

Jason Bradford 

Twice in one episode.

Rob Dietz 

Sorry. So the problem I have with that whole Golden Arches Theory is that it’s almost like, oh, consumption of crap is the distraction from our problems. Like we’re just gonna get focused in on trading goods and services.

Asher Miller 

Hey man, if we all just get ourselves some chicken Mcnuggets and french fries, it’s all going to be good.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah. And elect Mayor McCheese as the head of government.

Asher Miller 

How is that a conspiracy?

Jason Bradford 

I think the other thing about globalization that we have to look at is, it’s been going on long enough that we should have some pretty good statistics on what it’s led to. And, you know, on the one hand, and we talked about this in the Bill Clinton episode, millions of Americans obviously were hurt and upset. And that, we attributed to some of the rise of sort of Trumpism and the new wave of right wing populism in the U.S. And even now on the left a bit, Biden is sort of jumping behind now reshoring, or whatever you want to call it. So it hasn’t worked out in America, but a lot of what you’ll see is like, well, globally at least a lot of these people, they’ve been pulled out of poverty, etc, etc. And there is definitely a rise in sort of GDP in a lot of countries. But what’s happening faster than that, is the rise in inequality. And economic anthropologist Jason Hickel points this out, that the global south contributes about 80% of the labor and resources for the world economy, yet the people who render that labor and those resources receive about 5% of the income the global economy generates each year. So there’s arguments about the data on how many people are lifted out of poverty and how do you define poverty?

Rob Dietz 

Yeah, can we talk about that for just one second because I hate it. The World Bank says that you’re living in poverty per person if you have less than think It’s $2.15 per day. Like? So if you were making $3 a day, you’re not in poverty? What part of the world is this?

Jason Bradford 

Well, you know, I read a little bit about this. And this is very complicated. And I’m uncertain on what’s going on. But it turns out, a lot of the macro economists who take this seriously are also very uncertain. The data are very poor, hard to understand. They’re based upon in-country surveys asking people about what they’ve spent money on.

Rob Dietz 

Just think about it though for a sec. Like, if you have a stat that says we’ve lifted X number of people out of poverty, and it sounds so impressive, but you realize that that means they’ve come from making $2 a day to $3 a day. Like what? It’s not that impressive. So, you know.

Asher Miller 

And at what cost, too? I mean, you know, we’ve talked about this a lot, right? You have these sort of numbers and whatever statistics you want to pull, whatever data you want to pull, that that tells you a really incomplete picture, right? So let’s say somebody, their income has risen. But that’s come at the cost of them having to move from their traditional community where their family is into some mega city to work, you know, there’s not a lot of security in those jobs. They’re now maybe dealing with air pollution and other issues. It’s like, if we look at the totality of quality of life, these income numbers and of course, you know, it’s also like, are we looking at medium income? You see that there are the wealthy in many countries that have grown much wealthier. It’s not just the United States, it’s a lot of the rest of the world as well. So this idea that it’s gonna flatten opportunity for everybody, do you know what I mean? It’s more just the same old Reaganite, sort of like, a rising tide will lift all boats sort of thing.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah. And I guess if you go to a lot of these countries, I haven’t been in quite a long time. There’s all these new neighborhoods with the coders, you know, the people that have – The small percent of the of the country, you know, 10% of the country suddenly is making bank. But like you’re saying, a lot of what isn’t captured in these stats is what happened to the informal economy? What happened to livelihood that was shared in the commons. They don’t really capture this stuff. And that’s getting undermined. And you know, what’s also interesting is, you think of India and a lot of these places when the pandemic hit, there was mass exodus back to these villages. People tried to get out and tried to just survive because they didn’t have money anymore.

Rob Dietz 

Well, clearly the two of you are not market optimists or technology optimists. But you know, who is? Tom Friedman. Especially on climate. This is a weird one. It’s like he has all this recognition that hey, we’re burning too much fossil fuel. We’ve got problems. So what do you do? More of the same. More technology. More market solutions. You know, get entrepreneurs in here building nuclear power plants and stuff like that. So i’s a weird thing with him. He seems to have like two mindsets in every topic that he that he explores in depth.

Asher Miller 

I think, I don’t know. I don’t want to like psychoanalyze the guy. But it definitely seems like he’s a stubbornly glass half full dude. And you could say about me, I’m a stubbornly glass half empty guy. I mean, probably easy to make characterizations of people, but it seems like again, and again, he walks up to the line of looking at the challenges we’re facing. And he actually gives voice to them. I mean, he helped bring climate more into the consciousness of some people. And I think we can appreciate that. It’s just the way it goes about thinking about how we solve that issue is very much tied up with a belief system. But what’s fascinating to me, part of what’s fascinating to me about him is that he actually has stepped a little bit into, I guess you could say our territory, sort of the worldview that we have. In 2011, he actually wrote a couple of columns featuring Paul Gilding. And I don’t know if either of you have had any interactions with Paul before, but Paul actually used to be a PCI fellow. Somebody I had gotten to know over the years. Paul had written a book called, “The Great Disruption.” And somehow, you know, Freidman got introduced to him. And he wrote a column in 2011. called, “The Earth is Full Enough.” Friedman wrote, quote, “You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornadoes plowed through cities, floods and droughts at records, populations were displaced, and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all and ask ourselves, ‘What were we thinking? How do we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population red lines all at once?'”

Jason Bradford 

It’s like we’re at a limits to growth.

Asher Miller 

Yeah. And then in a later column, the same year, following the Arab Spring, you know, he wrote, quote, “Paul Gilding, the Australian environmentalist and author of the book, ‘The Great Disruption,’ argues that these demonstrations are a sign that the current growth obsessed capitalist system is reaching its financial and ecological limits.” Quote, “I look at the world in an integrated system. So I don’t see these protests, or the debt crisis, or inequality, or the economy or the climate going weird in isolation. I see our problem in the painful process of breaking down, which is what he means by the ‘Great Disruption,” said, Gilding.” Quote, “Our system of economic growth of ineffective democracy of overloading planet Earth, our system is eating itself alive.” So I mean, obviously now people I think could see why Paul Gilding was a PCI fellow because speaking a lot of our language. Even though I think Paul has always called himself an optimist, and I think that’s why he called it the “Great Disruption.” He saw that there would be an opportunity in all of these crises, you know, for us to kind of right the ship and get right with the world and with one another. But it’s just so fascinating that Friedman dabbles in this. He goes into this territory.

Jason Bradford 

Well maybe he’s not saying it. He’s giving voice to it through Paul Gilding. And he seems like he’s fully accepting and embracing and calling himself a systems thinker of some kind, right? It’s the opposite of Steven Pinker where he’s like, “Oh just, you know, randomly a bunch of stuff is going come together that’s all bad. We’re calling it the polycrisis but it’s just sarcastic.” Friedman is saying, “No. This is not sarcastic. These are all related.” Okay. Okay. So that was a 2011 sort of flurry of sanity. And then 10 years later, in a 2021 New York Times op-ed titled, “Want to save the Earth? We need a lot more Elon Musks.” Oh God. He basically, you know, he implies that we need to tackle climate change with the same seriousness and urgency and tools we use to respond to Covid-19. And that the scientists and employees and shareholders of these biotech firm brought us these vaccines so quickly, we should just give them boatloads of money.

Asher Miller 

We did give them boatloads of money.

Jason Bradford 

Well, we gave the shareholders.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah, the CEOs.

Jason Bradford 

Because quote, “It will incentivize others to apply a similar formula to stem climate change.”

Rob Dietz 

Because the only thing that could motivate you to stop an extinction crisis would be getting paid getting ready.

Jason Bradford 

Exactly. Yeah. So he basically says, you know, the only path to cutting global CO2 emissions quickly is when quote, “Father profit and risk taking entrepreneurs – “

Asher Miller 

Getting rich.  Father profit?

Jason Bradford 

Well because it’s Mother Earth.

Asher Miller 

Jesus Fucking Christ.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah. “Produce transformative technologies that enable ordinary people to have extraordinary impacts on our climate without sacrificing much just by being consumers of these new technologies.” I might vomit on my computer right now. We’ve been talking about –

Asher Miller 

Well, that’s good for growth because then you need to buy a new computer.

Rob Dietz 

I’m stuck trying to figure out when Mother Nature and Father Profit get together and have a few drinks and next thing leads to another. . . What is that kid?

Asher Miller 

It’s modern industrial world. What do you mean, what is that kid?

Jason Bradford 

It’s Nature Profit?

Asher Miller 

It’s the world we have. Mother Nature getting completely –

Rob Dietz 

So you’re saying Father Profit kills Mother Nature?

Asher Miller 

Abuses, yeah. I mean, isn’t that the story?

Rob Dietz 

I don’t know. I mean this metaphor is . .

Jason Bradford 

Father Profit. Ah.

Asher Miller 

Yeah. I mean, so this to me is maybe my biggest like issue with the dude, which is kind of his view about power and politics.

Rob Dietz 

Hey, remember when we were giving him credit?

Jason Bradford 

We’ve settled in now.

Asher Miller 

I’m beyond that. I’ve moved on. I’m in globalization 4.0 or whatever.

Rob Dietz 

It’s infinitesimally small.

Jason Bradford 

I’m a nanobot.

Rob Dietz 

I’m sorry to interrupt.

Asher Miller 

No, it really drives me fucking crazy. I mean, I talked about it a little earlier, this sort of glass half full sort of thing. Which is, he’s either completely ignorant or is like gaslighting us by sort of saying that look, we can all benefit. All this technological progress and globalization and disruption, it’s inevitable. We can’t stop it. It’s all part of quote unquote “progress,” you know. But we can just make sure that you know, we flatten the playing field and that everyone has an opportunity to compete and benefit from this if we just all follow sort of like the golden rule, right. So he’s tried to defend himself because he’s come under a lot of criticisms for his views on globalization and what’s happened, right? And basically he just doubles down. I mean, in 2020 he wrote a piece called, “How we Broke the World: Greed and Globalization Set Us up for Disaster.” And he’s basically still arguing it was totally inevitable. But he writes quote, “We decided to remove buffers in the name of efficiency. We decided to let capitalism run wild and shrink our government’s capacities when we needed the most. We decided not to cooperate with one another in a pandemic. We decided to deforest the Amazon. We decided to invade pristine ecosystems and hunt our wildlife.” No shit, dude. Of course we did that.

Jason Bradford 

Because It’s profitable.

Asher Miller 

This is what the fucking free market is.

Jason Bradford 

It’s just absolutely astonishing. And he’s talking about buffers. I mean, somehow, okay, he doesn’t get that governments are very slow to regulate. Like the last thing they want to do –

Asher Miller 

And they’re corrupted!

Jason Bradford 

Well think about it. So think about this: Here we have billionaires being created around the world, often partnering with Western corporate interest breaking, you know, the tradition. They’re cutting down the olive trees in his tortured thing with olives and – And now, they get to play power politics in the so called emerging democracies with weak institutions. Somehow he thinks this is all gonna get sorted out when we enter this era of rapid change when all it’s going to do is just lead to corruption and just all the shit he’s now saying, “We didn’t do anything about it.” What the fuck.

Asher Miller 

It’s so – like I said, it’s delusionally ignorant or he’s gaslighting us.

Jason Bradford 

I think he believes this shit. I think he believes this stuff. I mean, but you think about, he comes from the United States, which did have institutions that were we were proud of in the 50s and stuff, and we thought we trusted them. And we thought corporations were going to do good. Think about this whole Clinton era, we thought, you know, “Oh, corporations will do good.” You can do the Clinton voice. “We just gotta let them know that we . . .” I don’t know how to do Clinton.  Anyhow, he believed this stuff, you know. But it’s completely bullshit. Anyone who thinks about power and influence and knows anything about history would just go, “Of course it’s going to be corrupted.”

Rob Dietz 

I’m pretty concerned about your blood pressure level.

Asher Miller  

That’s why we’ve got different blood types on the side of the road.

Rob Dietz 

Just waiting there.

Asher Miller 

Everything is ready to go.

Jason Bradford 

At least we have the dog in the room. There’s a dog in the room because she gets anxious and I look at her and I feel a little better.

Rob Dietz 

Okay. Well, that’s good. I hope Tom has some dogs. Look, we can all agree with Tom that America is the best. It’s American ingenuity and pull yourself up by your – I don’t know. What a wrong metaphor here? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps or something. So he has this thing where we got double down on America as the leader of this, whatever is this magical solution to climate, right? So I find that it’s weird. It’s like a comparison to people who are calling for more technology, right? It’s like technology got us into this mess. What do we need? More technology. It’s the same deal. Like, America got us into this mess. What do we need? More America. More capitalism. Everyone getting a Dodge Ram and drive over some olive trees.

Asher Miller 

Yeah, I mean, his view on – And like I said, maybe It’s partly that he’s thinking about his audience. But just the idea that the United States can somehow engineer how all this plays out and can benefit from it, And that’s our role. I mean, it’s what led him to be such an ardent supporter of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I mean, he was championing that because he thought, “Yes, we need to bring democracies.” Back to that sort of whole vision of like, you know, globalization, free markets and social democracy around the world. As long as we get to be the ones to spread it and benefit from it.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, okay. Well, now that we’ve learned enough about this guy, we can apply the taxonomic framework that I have developed through a great deal of research. And so there’s a little bit of difficulty here, but I think it becomes clearer eventually. But if I work through my key, there’s a dichotomous key, and so there’s a couplet. And 2a on the key, you get to read it online when you go look at my paper, “working hard to convince you everything is all right.” That’s the species Man Schiller, okay? And then there’s, “Admits we do have problems. Big ones even.” And then if that’s true, there’s a whole other set of species.

Asher Miller 

Wait, do you have to choose between 2a or 2b?

Jason Bradford 

Yes. And that’s where you can sort of like . . . it’s a little difficult with Thomas Friedman. So sometimes what you do when it’s not certain, you go both ways and you look at the species description and see what applies there.

Rob Dietz 

Oh, so it’s like when Mother Nature gets with Father Profit.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, there could be hybridization. He could be a bit of both. Okay?

Asher Miller 

Human 4.0.

Rob Dietz 

So what’s the second one?

Jason Bradford 

Well, okay, and then you get down to, “Problems we have created are solved by continuing to do what we have been doing, which is growth and innovation, but agnostic on details.” And that’s the species Double Downer. Yeah, so I think he’s more of a Double Downer than a Man Schiller. But boy, he acts like a Man Schiller in many ways.

Asher Miller 

I think most people would say, who is Thomas Friedman? He’s a fucking Man Schiller. Right? I mean, if you looked at this . . .

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so the Man Shiller species, if you listen to the description, which is “homo excusautio.” That’s the Latin binomial. A high status professional well paid to gaslight you into believing the shitcakes you see everywhere are actually made of chocolate.         

Asher Miller 

Yeah. I like chocolate.

Jason Bradford 

So in some ways, he kind of fits that. But then the Double Downer is a person who reviews all the evidence we are in a completely unsustainable path and decides the best and only action is to do more and much more of what got us into this mess. And I think that’s . . . He really is a Double Downer.

Rob Dietz 

The thing is that I think in his topics, he’s a Double Downer. And in his profession, he’s a Man Schiller.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, I can –

Asher Miller 

Except I have one issue with the Double Downer thing. I think you said that they’re sort of agnostic.

Jason Bradford 

Well, they’re not focused on a particular saver technology. They kind of believe in market forces. So you let the innovators and entrepreneurs sort out how to solve the problem.

Rob Dietz 

Like he said, we need more Elon Musks and Tony Starks out there in the world.

Asher Miller 

It’s true. But he’s also saying we need to make sure that we apply the golden rule so nobody gets too fucked over. That’s why he got an ambulance on the side of the road and everybody’s blood type and all that, right?

Jason Bradford 

Well, I appreciate all the scientific effort you’ve poured into this research. Let’s talk about some of the implications from Tom Friedman and his promotion of all these things around globalization and doubling down and man shilling.  Yeah. And he comes from, I mean, the Double Downers are really good at doing what he does. And so there’s a lot of people like him. They can write beautifully about the dangers inherent in our high-tech globalized human dominated world, our addiction to oil, climate change, all this stuff. And so they get the problems. They get the crises. But then, they don’t get it because basically they’re always going about the progress myth, and we’ve just got to do more. And, you know, Pinker was the classic, we talked about – Harare also is another good Double Downer that we are not going to cover in this season, but he would have been a good one. Anyhow, that’s the taxonomic treatment and It’s open to debate and discussion, of course. I can change it, but I’m not going to.

Asher Miller 

 I think we need to try to answer the question that maybe some of our listeners are asking, which is like, it’s a pretty elevated status to become one of our false prophets.

Jason Bradford 

It is, yes.

Asher Miller 

You know, I mean people didn’t see this, but we had an amazing bracket that we had built. Do you know what I mean? So this is like the equivalent of the Final Four when you think about the dozen or so people that we picked.

Jason Bradford 

This is elite status. In the world.

Asher Miller 

So yeah, that’s some pretty rarefied air that we’re putting this guy in. So why would we actually just spend time talking about Friedman?

Rob Dietz 

Well, one of the key reasons is his profound influence. I mean, the guy is unbelievably influential. There’s this anecdote that was reported by Dan Parker. And it’s from an executive –

Jason Bradford 

Who’s Dan Parker?

Rob Dietz 

Some kind of journalist. But there’s This executive at Pfizer who read, “The World is Flat.” And then after reading it, he began outsourcing jobs to India because Friedman gave him the conceptual framework.

Jason Bradford 

That’s incredible.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah, but but then, this is even better. More importantly, Friedman’s book gave him a specific list of companies and people to call.

Jason Bradford 

Oh my god. That’s amazing.

Rob Dietz 

So It’s like a how to manual on outsourcing.

Asher Miller  

That’s awesome. That’s great.

Jason Bradford 

Well, and kind of the environmental side, okay. A friend of Friedman is named Glenn Pickett, who is the Senior Vice President at Conservation International. And he summed up the value of Friedman having written “Hot, Flat and Crowded” by saying that quote, “Honestly, just by having written it, he’s effective. Half the pages could be blank, and some people wouldn’t notice. But the effect would have been made, which is, ‘Wow, Tom Friedman has brought this issue into his worldview so I need to take this seriously.'”

Rob Dietz 

He should release a blank book and see how it does.

Jason Bradford 

All that matters is that there’s a title and, you know, people see it when they’re in the airport, or whatever, and it’s his name on it, and people are gonna go, “Oh, important topic.” So I get that.

Asher Miller 

And I think he’s particularly influential with a certain demographic, right?

Jason Bradford 

The New York Times readers.

Asher Miller 

Yeah. And I would say, basically, well meaning liberal elites, you know. And if you think about the way that he views the world, and how he talks about it, is like, we can all benefit from this. We can benefit even from the climate crisis. There’s huge opportunities, you know, in all of this. Globalization, you know, technological disruption. These are all things if we get ahead of it, you know, we can find benefit and we can consume happily and cleanly, or whatever it is. Just like he does in his 11,000 square foot home. And not feel too bad about it as long as we, you know, follow the golden rule, set up some good things, and you know, if it hasn’t worked out so well so far, it’s just because, I don’t know. For some reason we didn’t pay attention. You know, like, we didn’t do that part of the equation.

Rob Dietz 

It’s because we chose to mow down the Amazon. We chose all those things you said, Jason,

Jason Bradford 

I know. It’s ridiculous.

Asher Miller 

But think about that audience, right? It’s about sort of giving people who, frankly, are living quite comfortable lives, you know, with their professional managerial class jobs, reading the New York Times permission to be both concerned about these issues, but also feel like it’s all gonna work out if they buy right and we all just collectively do the right thing.

Jason Bradford 

Vote right and buy right.

Asher Miller 

We sort of take care of people. You know what I mean? He lives in a bubble. And they live in a bubble. And it’s a bubble reinforcing itself. I really want to find another metaphor to enforce it with. Ponies!

Rob Dietz 

A rocket ship blasts through the bubble and then the ponies jump off the rocket ship.

Asher Miller 

There we go.

Rob Dietz 

And there’s lots of blood.

Asher Miller 

The thing I want to, again, you know, sitting here psychoanalyzing the dude, probably unfair, probably wrong, kind of fun. I gotta be honest.  Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s go.

Rob Dietz 

As long as there’s a real topic to get into, I’m good.

Asher Miller 

So here’s one. According to another report, a guy named Garrett Graff, quote, “Friedman wants to be remembered for getting it right when it counts. He says he wakes up every morning a column was published worried that he’d screwed it up.” Quote, “I spend most of my time agonizing about whether I got it right.” But here’s the thing, I actually think that he’s more driven by fear of losing his access, and becoming maybe irrelevant or dismissed by kind of the Davos set. You know, these folks that he has access to and hobnobs and gets to interview and speak with and all this stuff than he is about getting things wrong.

Jason Bradford 

The thing is, you know, the classic thing about con men is that they listen to you get your patterns, try to understand you, and then they mirror it. And then they ingratiate with you by figuring out what you already like. So they’re not genuine. So I guess you’re saying like, how much is his writing and his worldview motivated by the fact that he’s telling people what they really want to hear who are already wealthy, already you know . . .

Asher Miller 

I think he’s telling an audience probably what they want to hear. Which is people that are worried about some things in the state of the world, but don’t want to actually really face what’s required to deal with them, or change anything in their lives. But I was talking more specifically about his access to the very powerful. And he’s basically carrying water for them. You know, he’s channeling what they’re saying about innovation opportunities, and all these things, you know. And if he starts digging deeper like Paul Gilding was talking about, those people are not gonna like that. He’s not gonna get a phone call back.

Jason Bradford 

But he can throw a couple of columns out like that. But as long as most of his work is . . .

Asher Miller 

Yeah. As long as he doesn’t really rock the boat too much.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah. The thing that strikes me about him even more than the power relationships is something that we harp on a lot here in Crazy Town, which is all about systems thinking. And it feels like Friedman has some ability to think in systems but then he just totally trips it up and loses it. In that article you were talking about Jason, where it was called, “Want to Save the Earth? We need a lot more Elon Musks,” I actually went and read that.

Jason Bradford 

Okay, sorry.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah. Well, it’s only a six minute read. So, you know, it’s not too too big a chunk of life.

Jason Bradford 

It’s like a wrestling match.

Rob Dietz 

But the way the article goes, he’s lamenting the Glasgow Climate Summit, and saying, no one’s taking climate seriously enough. We’re not addressing it fast enough. Okay, check mark. I agree. And then he, as you said, he said, if we were serious about it, we’d treat it like Covid-19, and all these companies would invent a cure, right? Or invent a vaccine. And, you know, he just rhapsodizes about Pfizer and Moderna and computing power and the awesomeness that came from that. Well, I mean, okay. Systems thinking error right here. Is it possible that globalization and overconsumption and all this corporate stuff might have just played a small role with originating and spreading the disease? Is it possible?

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, maybe. We should think about this.

Rob Dietz 

We should look into this. Right. Okay, and then he says we need more risk taking entrepreneurs. You know, not so many Greta Thunburgs, but more Elon Musks. And he goes and visits with this CEO who talks about how satellites are now enabling us to put natural capital on every company and every country’s balance sheet.

Jason Bradford 

God I hate that shit.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah, so systems thinking error number two right there. He’s got the systems and the subsystems completely wrong. The economy is not the container for everything. It’s not about a big balance sheet that you put the Earth on. Nature is the container!

Asher Miller 

That’s why we shrunk it so much. Right? So we can get it on we can put it on a balance sheet.

Rob Dietz 

We can put it on a marble instead of on the earth.

Jason Bradford 

Wow. Well, these balance just got . . . Mother Nature just got put on the balance sheet. That’s huge.

Rob Dietz 

Those are very flat balance sheets.

Jason Bradford 

So now we can sell that off for profits. God. So yeah, the worst of capitalism got us into this mess and now let’s do more of that basically. That’s why he’s a Double Downer.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah. Accelerate your way out of this. Get in a Formula One race car and drive through that brick wall.

Jason Bradford 

Well, I loved how this guy, Roberto Gonzalez from SF Gate concludes in an article about him. He says, quote, “Ultimately, Friedman’s work is little more than advertising. The goal is not to sell the high tech gadgetry described in page after page of the book, but to sell a way of life. A worldview glorifying corporate capitalism and mass consumption as the only path to progress. It is a view intolerant of lives lived outside the global marketplace.” And that is just what kills me about all of this. That’s what makes me really mad and sad. And I want to open up the window and say, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore kind of thing. Right? I mean, what about all the people who want nothing to do with global market capitalism? I mean, there were the COP-something meetings about biodiversity, right? And what are we doing? We’re saying, please, indigenous people, the last you know, tribes that are protecting the forests and stuff, please keep protecting them so that the chainsaws don’t come in and the cattle ranchers don’t cut all the forests down and the palm oil plantations don’t expand and the mining interests don’t get in there. Please save these last remaining places. But in Friedman’s view, no. This is unimportant.

Rob Dietz 

This is not useful.

Jason Bradford 

They should stay integrated. The world should be flat for them. We should connect them to the internet.

Rob Dietz 

We need to get them $2.15 per day.

Jason Bradford 

Exactly. You know, and if I were to imagine the lowest ecological footprint people on the Earth, it would be these tribal, like Yámana Indians and Guyana or whatever. Or some Romanian peasants. I love Romanian peasants right now. I’m on a kick with them. What is their ecological footprint? Right? So what you want to do, you who are so worried about climate change and the overheating of the planet. You basically want to say, get off your land, go into city, become a wage laborer, and buy a bunch of stuff and go to McDonald’s. I mean, what the hell

Rob Dietz 

I have something that can help you here, Jason. You don’t have to go outside and yell you’re mad as hell. You can run the insufferability index for our buddy Tom Friedman.

Jason Bradford 

Oh that’s right. You know, when I first started this I thought, he’s not going to get that high of a score. I don’t know anymore. Okay, so as a reminder, the insufferability index is based on a 0 to 10 scoring system. You know, Nelson Mandela would be down at the bottom. Voldemort would be up at the top. Intention – so are you malevolent, power hungry, selfish? That’s a 3. So high scores are bad, remember. Are you well-intended with a good awareness of the polycrisis – 0. Personality – are you an asshole narcissist, you know. Are you a nice guy? Pretty much not a jerk. Ideas – complete wackadoodle really. Or, you know, basically Richard Heinberg and you kind of agree on things. And then there’s a score bias. So I’m pretty biased against the guy. So I guess he gets a one automatically for that.

Asher Miller 

Yeah I mean, you know how they say you should never go to the grocery store when you’re really hungry. Like it might be that we’re scoring after we’ve just ranted after we’ve spent some time sitting in a fetid pool of bullshit.

Jason Bradford 

Why did he bother me so much? I mean, is he any worse than Pinker, or . . .

Rob Dietz 

I think this is the problem you guys are having is, especially you, Jason. It’s like, by the scoring system you just laid it out, he’s pretty low scoring on those first two. When I read his stuff, I think he’d probably be okay in the bar. I wouldn’t ask him about peak oil. That’s for damn sure. Because I don’t want to –

Asher Miller 

He would name drop so much. Come on.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, he’s kind of middle of the road for that.

Rob Dietz 

Well, but I think my point with you guys is he has ideas that are right in line. You know, you’ve read passages today where it’s like, okay, I agree with that. And so, what’s so frustrating is that he then comes away with this, okay so let’s fuck it all up even more. Let’s have more globalization, more technology, more . . .

Asher Miller 

So here’s the thing. Intentions – Okay, I’m gonna give the guy a little bit of credit. I’m gonna give him a 1 on intention.

Jason Bradford 

I was gonna do that too. He knows what’s going on in some ways.

Asher Miller 

I think he actually believes this optimistic shit that he spouts.

Jason Bradford 

Yes, and he knows a lot about the world and climate change and the polycrisis.

Asher Miller 

I think he is in a lot of ways well intentioned. Maybe not to the point where he’s gonna really look in the mirror and change his ways. But yeah, I’m just gonna score him fairly low on that as a 1. Personality – I don’t know, man.

Rob Dietz 

I mean, you’re the only one who’s met him. So you probably have a lot more to say.

Asher Miller 

Maybe I’ll put him right in the middle. I’m gonna give him a little bit of credit. And then maybe I’ll put him at a 2, not a 3. I do have to think about like, this is a sliding scale a little bit, and when I think about some of the other people we’re talking about.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah exactly. Yeah, he’s not the worst of the worst.

Asher Miller 

He’s not the worst so I’m going to give him a 2 there. Ideas – See I actually want to score him pretty high on that. And that’s why I think you’re so mad, Jason. Because the guy is maybe not the biggest asshole in the world. He certainly has access to a lot of information. He can call anybody in the world and they would take time to talk him through anything that he wants to understand. And what does he do with that? He turns it into shitty metaphors and platitudes, right? So we can keep doing the same bullshit that we’re doing and then admonished other people because they didn’t do it the right way. So I’m going to score him pretty fucking high on that. So let’s see . . .  1, 2, . . . I’m gonna give him a good solid 6.5.

Rob Dietz 

Are we allowed to go halfsies?

Jason Bradford 

I think so.

Rob Dietz 

I think he’s about a 5 in my world.

Jason Bradford 

I think 5.5.

Rob Dietz 

I’m surprised at you, Jason.

Jason Bradford 

Well, you know, to get a 3 you’ve got to be I mean, you’ve got to be completely whacked. That’s like QAnon. That’s like Kurzweil. So it’s hard to score like as high as an 8 or 9. I mean, it’s really hard.

Asher Miller 

Yeah, it’s true. Fair enough.

Jason Bradford 

Okay, so. Fair enough.

Asher Miller 

We’re gonna put him somewhere in the middle.

Jason Bradford 

He’s a middling insufferable.

Rob Dietz 

Congrats, Tom.

Asher Miller 

That would be so upsetting to him.

Melody Allison 

Other podcasts ask for a lot of stuff. Buy their merch, join their patreon, donate your left kidney. No, we’re just asking you to share the show. If you’re like me, and you find it funny and thought provoking, then please tell three friends, hit that share button, and get some other people joining us in Crazy Town.

George  Costanza 

Every decision I’ve ever made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be. If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.

Rob Dietz 

So the first thing if you want to do the opposite of Tom Friedman is to get your goddamn metaphors. No, that’s not it. It’s get your goddamn metaphors and analogies straightened out. You as a writer, Asher, should be able to appreciate this. You do not want to put the gift horse’s mouth before the car.

Jason Bradford 

Never do that. Never do that.

Asher Miller 

Yeah. I would say don’t rely on pundits in the mainstream media to form your views on the world, right? Like, there’s a certain worldview that you’re gonna get from that and maybe test yourself, get multiple sources, employ some of your own critical thinking. It’s very worrisome when someone says with a straight face how wonderful it is that Tom Friedman could write a book and a half of the pages would be empty and it would still be really impactful. That’s not the route we want to go.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, no, that’s really interesting. It’s so hard. I mean, the things that I know a lot about, I often read mainstream news sources and I go, “Oh, no, they just completely got it wrong or missed something.” And sometimes there’s great reporting out there. So try to find ways to support the folks that really do a good job. But it is hard to tell unless you’re kind of an expert. It’s really hard these days. I think Friedman seems kind of trapped in this, like, love of the wealthy and powerful, maybe. I don’t know. He really likes swims in that world, and seems to really appreciate it. And maybe that’s his identity now. So I guess, be well aware of power dynamics in your life. And it doesn’t always mean you know, you’ve got to like call truth to power all the time. But it does mean maybe watching out for the the corrupting influence of power. And are you doing things only because that’s what you think is expected of you? I’d say be careful with those things.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah. And on that front, if you want to explore the idea of power in more detail, our colleague Richard Heinberg, wrote a really amazing book called, “Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival.” If you like this medium, podcasting, Melody, our producer and I were part of the podcast version of that book. So you can find that and of course that features most strongly Richard Heinberg and his views. And he’s sort of a do the opposite of our friend Friedman. The other thing that I want to add with doing the opposite, and I talked earlier about thinking in systems and how Thomas Friedman goes off the rails on that front. I remember reading a backlog of articles by Donella Meadows, the great systems thinker, part of the limits to growth study. She’s been dead for quite a long time now, but when she was alive, she wrote, “The Global Citizen,” a column that was syndicated in newspapers. And I found the backlog of that thing online, read through all of them. I mean, it was years after she had written them, but they were still relevant. I hope they’re still relevant today. Something tells me that they are because she is able to think in systems and I think that’s one of the most important things, the skills ways of thinking. You mentioned critical thinking, systems thinking goes right along with it as a way for us to interpret the world around us.

Jason Bradford 

Yeah, and I, you know, I probably bring this up a lot, but I have to do it again in this context because Friedman drives me a bit crazy with his just push for, there’s no choice but global commodification of everything and it’s inevitable that the olive trees will be destroyed and we’ll have a Lexus factory. That kind of stuff. Anyhow, I guess getting away from the global commodification of everything system, figuring out a way to live more in place, develop skills, livelihood skills, etc, etc.

Asher Miller 

Basically, the opposite of Double Downing, right?

Jason Bradford 

Yeah. Yeah, sure. Down shifting, or whatever you want to call it.

Rob Dietz 

Single upping.

Asher Miller 

Single upping? That’s the opposite. Yeah. Well, before you do that, I would just say just make sure you cancel your membership to the Flat Earth Society.

Jason Bradford 

Okay. Yeah, that’s it.

Asher Miller 

You gotta work on that.

Jason Bradford 

That tiny flat earth? I gotta just forget it. I’m canceling that. Okay, that’s fine. It’s round again.

Asher Miller 

Well, thanks for listening. If you made it this far then maybe you actually liked the show.

Rob Dietz 

Yeah, and maybe you even consider yourself a real inhabitant of Crazy Town. Someone like us who we affectionately call a Crazy Townie.

Jason Bradford 

If that’s the case, then there’s one very simple thing you can do to help us out: Share the podcast or even just this episode.

Asher Miller 

Yeah. Text three people you know who you think will get a kick out of hearing from us bozos.

Rob Dietz 

Or if you want to go way old school, then tell them about the podcast face to face.

Jason Bradford 

Please for the love of God if enough people listen to this podcast, maybe one day we can all escape from Crazy Town. We’re just asking for three people. A little bit of sharing. We can do this. It’s becoming more and more clear that the quickest path to fame and fortune is by telling the untruth to the ultra wealthy, which is why enrollment in bootlicker boot camp is growing so quickly. Through intense drills, you will learn to say the right things to ingratiate yourself to the financially well endowed. Take advantage of our proven methods to earn the trust and confidence of people who love having their boots licked and find the influence you need to become a member of the Davos set. Bootlicker Boot Camp: Smell the Leather.               ..