Narrative Collapse & the Search for New Theories | Pippa Malmgren

What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world.

What you're about to hear is the fourth episode in a podcast series hosted by me and my co-host, Grant Williams, titled The Hundred Year Pivot. In it, we speak with some of the smartest and most plugged-in people we know to help position ourselves, our organizations, our families, and our portfolios for the once-in-a-century economic, political, and geopolitical reordering that we believe is currently underway.

In today's conversation, Grant and I speak with political economist Pippa Malmgren about the wide range of sociopolitical, economic, and technological challenges facing societies. Today we discussed the ongoing narrative collapse that stems from a loss of faith and trust in our political leaders and institutions; the informational overwhelm and confusion that accompanies technological modernity; the lack of credible voices in media; and the decline of journalistic ethics, and how all of this has led to ever more conspiratorial thinking and the adoption and popularization of alternative narratives and theories of reality, some of which have improved our understanding of the world. While most have left us more confused and less well-equipped to find common ground in pursuit of the public interest, premium subscribers to Hidden Forces and the Grant Williams podcast gain early access to all of our podcast episodes in this series.

If you want access to the transcripts and intelligence reports for this and other episodes, which include summary sections with key takeaways, you can access those by subscribing to our super nerd tier at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to info@hiddenforces.io, and I or someone from our team will get right back to you.

And with that, please enjoy this thought-provoking and wide-ranging exploration of some of the most important themes and questions facing society today with our guest Pippa Malmgren.

Welcome everybody to another episode in The Hundred Year Pivot. Joining me, as always on this crazy journey that we've started out on, my co-host and good friend, Demetri Kofinas. Demetri, how are you my friend?

I'm very good, Grant. I enjoy this new style. I think I've said this once before, but this is something that's new for me, coming in largely unprepared for a conversation, then maybe sort of reading a few things and just thinking about it. And I really have enjoyed it; in and of itself it's been a challenge and a personal growth experience for me.

Well, it's been interesting for me 'cause you form such brilliant questions and I watch you. It is actually cool to watch them happening in real time as we're talking to Neil and we're talking to Russell, and no doubt again, when we talk to our next guest in a minute, I watch you wrestle with these ideas and form questions out of them. It's actually a really cool thing. When we first started Real Vision, the very first series of interviews we did was something called V Questions, and the V was like for Roman numeral five. And the idea was really simple: I sat on a chair and I had five questions, four market-related questions and one personal question. And the guests came in and it was just them on a chair, black background, one light on them, like a spotlight thing. And I said to them before, I said, "Right, I'm going to read these five questions to you one at a time, and then I'm not going to say anything else and I want you to react, think about and respond to each of those questions. Be as expansive as you want. If it's a dumb question, tell me to move on, but I'm not going to clarify the question. I'm not going to engage you at all. So you just go." And the first one of those we did, we were just trying to try out ideas, was with my good mate, Dylan Grice. And he came in and he sat on this chair and I asked him these five questions. There were four of them about where the yen was going and where the dollar might be going, and the S&P or whatever it was, four market-related questions. And just watching him hear it, think about it, react to it, and then compose an answer, there was something magical in it. And we watched this first one back and I got hairs in the back of my neck. I was like, "Man, this is really cool, to be able to see the process." And I'm living that again with you, as we've talked to Neil and Russell, it's been really fun to watch you do that.

I really enjoy it. I get very excited exploring intellectual ideas, and the process of clarifying a problem and understanding it better. And maybe another way of thinking of it is like moving the three-dimensional object in space and seeing it from different perspectives excites me. I am sort of in that sense. And I also, I don't know if you do this at all, but I have a list of interviewers that I think are the greatest of all time, who I sort of put at certain levels. And I don't know, did you ever watch Bravo TV? Did you guys have that?

I mean, I have seen it at times, but it wasn't something I actively watched.

There was someone named James Lipton, who hosted a program there called Inside the Actors Studio, who I think is the greatest biographical interviewer of all time. But there were also folks like Brian Lamb, who founded C-SPAN and hosted Washington Journal and other programs on that network, Bill Moyers who hosted multiple shows on PBS. And now you have someone like Peter Robinson over at the Hoover Institute, who hosts Uncommon Knowledge and who does, I think, just an exceptional job interviewing. And I feel like you and I are in the category of people who love what we do, which obviously makes this very fun for us and hopefully for the audience.

Well, and that curiosity is the most important thing, right? If you're not curious about this stuff, then the interview will be terrible. It just will be. 'Cause it's that curiosity that takes you to these questions that you would never have thought of without listening to what the guest has said the first time, and then suddenly it's that natural curiosity. So actually, that's really interesting, let's explore that. And boy, do we have a lot to explore this morning with one of my favorite people in the world, Dr. Pippa Malmgren. She's just magnificent.

I feel like this episode is an opportunity to explore some topics that, not I think, I know, we have both explored on our show. And we've both explored, I don't know if it's sort of like I've hesitated, for example, like UAP stuff, which is stuff that Pippa has written quite a bit about and talked about. It isn't that I've hesitated exactly, it's that it's outside of the framework and I feel like this is an opportunity to explore some topics like that with Pippa. And if I could wish one thing for everybody listening to this is that they'd all at some point get the chance to meet Pippa and actually just sit down and have a conversation with her because she is the most fascinating person. She's a polymath, she's interested in everything, she's curious about everything. She asks everybody, she can find questions, and it's just such a rollercoaster having a conversation with her. You always walk away just edified and energized and confused, and it's just magical, as I'm sure we're about to find out.

It's also a practice in keeping an open mind. I really encourage listeners to use this particular episode as an opportunity to sit with maybe even intellectual discomfort at certain ideas or concepts, and allow those to flow through them and experience that process of exposure and confrontation, intellectual confrontation, and what sort of derives from that from them, 'cause I think it can be really enriching.

That is such a great point. I mean, of all our guests so far, this is the right time to make that point, because it questions and challenges everything. And it may trigger some people, some of the things she says, but the beautiful thing is, when you talk to Pippa, she's questioning it herself. And she has this ability to put herself on both sides of every argument and make the argument, and that's a skill that we can all do well to foster. So what do you say we welcome Pippa and have the conversation?

Let's do it. Pippa, my darling, how are you? It's so good to see you.

I'm so delighted to see you. How are you, sweetheart?

I'm doing great. And I hadn't realized that you and Demetri haven't actually met, you've exchanged emails, but you haven't actually met. So let me make the formal introduction. Pippa Malmgren, Demetri Kofinas, and vice versa.

My pleasure. I'm so delighted to meet you. I'm looking forward to this, Pippa.

Me too. Demetri and I have just kind of... what we've done essentially is we've just each grabbed a shopping bag full of groceries and stepped out of the door and just decided we're going to go for a wander. And we don't know where we're going to go and what we're going to do, but all the things that we've been thinking about and talking about, they're just really big-picture stuff. And we've had conversations with Neil Howe and Russell Napier to start this little journey of ours off, because they were two of the guys that formulated the ideas in their head. But you have always been to me, someone who really thinks about the really big pictures. And every time I see you present, it drives me mad because I walk away thinking, "Now I've got this to think about. I didn't have that to worry about before I got in there." So in trying to figure out where we go with this particular conversation, I'd love to just get an idea from you because you've just moved back to the US after, what, 20 plus years in the UK?

Honestly, it's more like 40, with the-

Is it 40? Because I went when I was like 22, and then I only came back to take the job in the White House. And then I went back to England again, so I'm very Anglo.

And we love you for it. You are welcome in England anytime.

So let's just get a sense from you, as someone who is American to her core but has lived overseas for such a long time and has been part of the US political discussion back when you were in the White House. You've just come back to the country. Give us a sense of your feelings both in leaving the UK and the situation there as you observed it from overseas, and now getting back into the middle of it 'cause you're right there in Washington, D.C. Just give us a sense of how it feels to you now you're back.

And just for a little bit more background, I grew up in a family where my dad served Kennedy and Johnson on the Democrat side, and then Nixon and Ford on the Republican side. So I grew up in a very bipartisan Washington where the chairman of the Democratic Party, Bob Strauss, and the chairman of the Republican Party, Howard Baker, were best friends and played poker illegally every Friday night. And deals got sorted out because they were all very... they had personal relationships. And I think this is a critical component of understanding what's happened just as a... I'm going to start with a detail that's really interesting. So why is nobody friends anymore? It's partly because Washington was the center of the money tap that got turned on, particularly after the financial crisis. But it has been really since the Second World War, an ever-increasing flow of money, which meant inflation really got a foothold here. So property prices kept going up and up and up and up, and basically all these elected officials could no longer afford to have their families in Washington. So they sent them back to wherever their home state is. And what that meant is their children were no longer going to the same parties together. Because that's where the congressmen, senators, the journalists, everybody in politics, would get to know each other, was because the kids were friends and the kids were in the same sports teams. And it created rapport and connection. Today, nobody's kids are in school together, and so there's no point of emotional connection. Plus we have these Freedom of Information Act laws, sunshine laws, that say if you're going to talk about an official issue with someone involved in that issue, you must have a lawyer present the minute three people are involved in the conversation, who is recording what happened. So there's no way to have any private conversations about how are we going to cut a deal here.

So I'd add to that as well. One further thing is cameras. When cameras were introduced into Congress, and I don't remember the year C-SPAN started, but that felt like a moment of wonderful transparency. But actually, what it's done is turned the Congress into a theater where no one can say anything that is off the party line, because it's recorded and all the donors are going to hear it. So suddenly everyone becomes much more glued to the official position of wherever they are on the spectrum and there's just less and less flexibility. So against that backdrop of those things, now we have a really hostile environment. So as an example, my dad, who recently passed away as you know, I took him to the doctor. The nurse walks in and says, "I need to know which way you vote before I'm going to treat you." And we're like, "She's kidding, right?" And she's clearly not kidding. And my dad, who's quick off the mark, he's a bit of a ladies man, he tries to charm her. Totally doesn't work. She wants to know. So he correctly intuits that she is a Democrat, and so he says, "Well, I worked for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson." She says, "Oh, fine, we can proceed." And you're like, you couldn't even raise the point that, "Babe, this is not appropriate for a nurse." Because there is no more sense of that. People are so angry and so polarized. They're either like hardcore Trumpers or they're hardcore anti-Trumpers. And for me, moving back to the US, it's been hard because it's almost impossible to have a conversation with anybody. They're so locked into their preexisting position, and no facts, no arguments, no subtlety will shift anyone anywhere. So it's a weird situation. And finally, I'll say, I've been writing about this, describing the situation we have as an American glasnost, and we'll get into the whole Trump story. But part of what Trump is doing is exactly like what happened in the Soviet Union when Gorbachev introduced this unveiling of truths. And it was deeply uncomfortable at that time, and of course it led to the fall of the Soviet Union. But the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union at that time, the apparatchiks, they were very similar to what you hear in the US today, which is "There's no problem. I don't know what you're talking about that we have to fix this." I was just with a bunch of Democrats last week at a speech and they're like, "There's no problem with the budget. We just have to keep growing. That'll be fine." And they're like, "We're spending more on interest payments than the entire defense budget. Plus we got holes galore all over the place." And they're like, "No, no, no, no, no, we just are totally fine. We just need to grow. No need for reform or change." So it's at that level, you can't even pierce the veil of, do we have a problem? We don't have a problem. Okay, then there's no conversation to be had. So that's a big overview of some of the things that I'm finding.

That's a great place to start, and there's so many ways we could go. It's interesting that the Democrats are now the pro-growth party, right?

I know. I know. That's a change. I mean, is there a problem? I mean, with your dad's blood being red, if she had to take blood, would that have been a problem for the nurse, do you think?

I don't know. I'm still- It's also deeply unethical. She should be fired for that. I'm stunned. It's not a joke. We were so shocked. But there's another element of this, which is, as you said, the Democrats are pro-growth, they're also pro-war. It's super weird. Suddenly the Republicans are the anti-war party, and the Democrats are like, we have to fight to the bitter end in Ukraine, in addressing Taiwan, like multiple locations. And that's another layer of this. But for me, I've tried to understand, okay, what the heck is going on? And I keep being drawn back into the history of the world since the Second World War. And I think part of how we got here is we gave a huge amount of authority to the community that's all about keeping secrets. And so that's the intelligence world and it's the military defense establishment. And they made a lot of decisions about what would be the right thing to do. And that led us into many wars, and a lot of spending that no one can account for. And I was listening last week to Chinese commentators, at the moment trying to understand how are we going to negotiate to a deal with China, which I think we are. I'm very optimistic that we're going to get to a deal with China. But one of them was saying, "You guys were the best economy in the world, and you took all the money you made and you spent it on wars, and you spent it on stuff that no one can know about." And I'm like, "Yeah, that's true." So the secrecy community, of course, don't want any transparency or any conversation or any reform. And they believe they know better than everyone else because they believe more intelligence than anyone else. But I'm not sure that's actually true anymore in an internet world. What is the truth of a situation may be more apparent in open-source information than it is from all these secret classified sources. And that's partly why Trump is saying, "We're going to lift the lid on the classification side. So we'll leave the nuclear codes classified, but pretty much everything else, we're going to declassify it." And the whole intelligence committee is like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait, wait, wait." 'Cause now they're like naked and they got to explain what have you been doing, and they're not used to... So there's a constitutional crisis here about the most powerful element of the US government, which is not accustomed to being accountable or answerable to anybody, including the president.

I have a question, Pippa. So as you were talking, I was just thinking about how the real challenge that I face, and I feel like this is a general problem for people, but it's certainly one that I face in general, is that I have a hard time and increasingly difficult time making sense of reality and filtering signal from noise. In some sense, there does seem to be a sense in which we're losing our minds collectively. There are so many different theories out there competing with each other, some that seem so patently ridiculous, like flat-earth theory. It's an easy one to sort of point to. But then there are other ones where you ask yourself, "Okay. Well, here's this competing theory, but do I really know whether it's true or not? What are the actual sources of my conviction in my previous worldview?" So I feel like glasnost is a great example. So maybe is de-Stalinization, if we're reaching for the USSR, because of how this administration in particular has made enemies with the, quote, "deep state", and there's this narrative around a battle between the Trump administration and the deep state and trying to uproot the previous power structure. Because I feel like one of the things that is really helpful with your writing and your perspective is that you do take sort of non-consensus, I wouldn't say positions, it's more like you play with alternative stories or interpretations of a prevailing narrative. How do you approach trying to assess the underlying drivers of phenomena or of stories? And to the extent that you want to answer it, what do you think is causing this reassessment of what we believe to be true in the world?

I love this question. And I remember first listening to Daniel Schmachtenberger, who has such a great name, Schmachtenberger, and of course he's a philosopher. Because to be a philosopher, you have to have a name like that, right? And he's so brilliant and he talks about sense-making and why can't we make sense of things anymore? So this is really a central question. So I want to give you several strands of an answer. So one, I think Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher, was correct. That when the volume of information that we have to process to make sense of things becomes too large, there's just too much stuff to take into consideration, we humans can't handle it. We get a headache. And so we stop reading, which is a time-consuming process that by definition involves using your eyes to go letter by letter, word by word, line by line, which pushes you into a linear thought process. That gets crushed by the weight, you don't have time. So now you start turning to symbols instead of words, because symbols encompass a massive amount of information. And what are the symbols, right? People are like, "I'm not using symbols." I'm like, "Give me your phone." Your phone is completely full of emoticons, right? Because it's a compression of information. Brand logos are a compression of information, right? If you see the Starbucks logo, you know exactly what you're talking about. So what people start to do is depend on the symbol. And that is why now the question is not, what do you understand? It's are you watching Fox or CNN? That tells you everything. If you're CNN, you're a Democrat. If you're Fox, you're a Republican. Okay, then you only trust that source and you won't take information. You won't bother with information that has the CNN logo anywhere near it or vice versa. So this also stops a linear, rational, logical thought process. By definition, once you move into symbols, this is about emotion. It's about that you're processing and in a different part of your brain and in an emotional way. So that raises the temperature as well. There's a disciple of McLuhan called Leonard Shlain, who was a brain surgeon from Canada who wrote a brilliant book called The Alphabet and the Goddess, back in the early '70s, I think it was. And he says, "Whenever in the course of history we shift from words to symbols or symbols to words, we always go to war." We always go to war. And that's an internal war because the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of your brain are literally fighting with each other now, right? The one side being rational, logical, linear, and the other being creative, symbol-dependent. So you're having a headache in your head as you are struggling with these two ways of sense-making. But we also go to war in a battlefield, and he talks about, for example, how is it that the witch trials happened? How is it that humanity turned on the childbearing part of our species? He says it's never happened in any other species, why would we do that? And he talks about, at that time in history, literacy's been introduced. Everyone's locking into their left brain, the logical, rational, reductive. And who are witches? Those are people who are not logical, rational, reductive. They're not using official medicine. They are relying on ancient wisdoms of homeopathic medicines, for example. And fundamentally, I would throw in, as an economist, what you have here now are competing cash flows. And that creates a fight, right? Think about it this way, if you're dying or your child is dying, you're really ill, who do you go to? In the course of history, you always have two fundamental choices: the establishment, or what is effectively a medicine man or a medicine woman or a shaman or a witch doctor. And the establishment, the Catholic Church. And you pay your money to the priest and the priest gives you blessings, and that saves your life. Or you go to the witch, right? Or the shaman. Even with the Holy Roman Empire, we had this conflict between official medicine versus ancient wisdom medicine. Today, NHS or talking to doctors who have left the profession and have alternative views about, for example, vaccines. Huge fight throughout history between these two camps. So this business of rule books for officialdom, written and it's literary, versus symbols of ancient traditions that are not codified, but intuitively we know they've worked through, '"cause Grandma saved Mom that way." So that's one element of it, is our brains are being affected by the volume of information that one is required to process, number one. Number two, the information is then being accompanied by, I would say, a sheepdog. Every one of us, when we wake up in the morning, there is an invisible sheepdog right there with us. And that sheepdog is an algorithm. The algorithm is designed to give you more of what you like. So Grant, you love sports. I'm sure that your inbox is full of sports stuff. I'm more in the, it's a ball, is this... it's

Not my thing so much. I have to learn this, especially living in America, because it's religion here. But I've never been a massive… I get playing sports, but not watching it on TV. So anyway. My algorithm is not giving me any sports news. And I'm interested in space, for example, and maybe you're not. So I'm aware all these things are happening in space that are important for geopolitics; they're important for our markets. But most people have not clicked on a single space story. So they're like, "What is she talking about? I haven't seen any of this in the news."

That is because that little sheepdog is corralling us into ever narrower intellectual pens and narrowing the aperture of the view of the landscape that we get to see. So every day you have to have an argument with that dog, and you have to train that dog, widen the number of sheep that get to be in your pen. And so that's the second contributing factor to why we can't make sense of anything.

And then finally, I will add, and now we'll get into what many will call conspiracy theory, which, by the way, is a phrase actually created by the intelligence community to stop people from asking any questions of them. So I was fascinated. I grew up in the Watergate era, and my dad was working for Nixon. It affected my family life at the time. So I read a lot about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. And I hadn't realized, after those two broke the Watergate story and became so famous for that, Carl Bernstein wrote an amazing article in Rolling Stone Magazine where he said, "I had no idea that all of my fellow journalists were working for the intelligence community. I was surrounded by people who were employed by and paid by the CIA and other intelligence agencies." He clearly is like, "What? I thought we were the third estate. I thought we were independent."

And today, it was so… I wish I could remember their names, but there were two journalists at Politico recently, last year, who had broken the big story on the Hunter Biden laptop. And they had done massive research. They had huge information, and they kept giving the articles to their bosses, and it kept just sitting in the inbox, and the boss wouldn't publish it. And there was always some excuse or another. And only after they left Politico, they were like, "You don't think they didn't want us to write that story?" And you're like, "You guys are journalists. How can you not work this out?" But the answer is it's very, very difficult and painful to tell yourself, "I've been a patsy. I've been used by a system that wants to deliver some information in a certain way, but not other information." In other words, we are living in a curated information environment.

Now, that changed with the introduction of X, and X is not a curated information environment, and it has allowed alternative voices to pop through. And that is totally discombobulating. Not only the general public who are like, "Wait a minute, what? Is that true? Is that not true?" It's also discombobulating all those in authority who had control over what the narrative is, and suddenly they don't have control. And that is creating a massive fight that Washington is the epicenter of.

So a lot of what you said there really resonates with me, and I'm just trying to think about how to be thoughtful and not to ask too many questions at once. I mean, one of the observations I have is that we're going through a reordering of our frameworks, our collective frameworks as a society, which raise questions about objectivity, whether it even exists. I think a lot of people are questioning that as well. Of course, in the last few years, we've seen a lot of people become introduced to the concept of a simulation or a simulation theory, which actually isn't just about computer simulations. This goes all the way back to Plato's Cave or even Descartes' Demon. And how do we know what we know? The question of what is real? How do I know that it's real?

Also, I feel like there are some significant consequences that we're immediately dealing with. And because we're like the frog in the boiling pot, we may not really be conscious of it on a day-to-day basis. And I feel like one of the consequences of this informational reordering, this social overflow of information and the phone is this—I like this term used as a sheepdog—is that we've gone from a much more local existence to a more—I don't know if the term global is quite right—more of an existence determined by our social graph and the curated media streams that we experience. And that I wonder—it seems—and these are all questions for you people, I'm just trying to get them out in a coherent sense—it feels like it's destabilizing in a way because we're no longer tied to our local environment, and our political structures were built on such an environment. We've already seen the economy has adjusted much more readily than our political systems to the remote work and stuff like this. I also feel like—again, what you've touched on here, I think, which is really interesting—is that we've seen a deterioration in independent thinking. And because, again, it's hard to know what's real, what to focus on. And our concepts and frameworks around subjectivity and objective reality, I think are under strain. So I feel like that also opens the door to demagoguery. So I'm curious if you can speak to some of those things, some of the immediate consequences that you feel like—and I would say some of the more immediate perilous or dangerous consequences that stem from this reordering—in your opinion.

I have very strong views on this. The way you've posed the question is exactly right. And that's why we're in a Copernican moment where our fundamental understanding about how this universe works is being challenged by new provable facts that the sun is not revolving around us; we're revolving around it. That's a very profound change. And I went back and I looked at that period in history and realized, wow, it took like 100 years before people could actually say, yes, this is the case. That's three generations it required to get comfortable with this notion. So why are we in that situation today? As you say, the simulation theory is one of them. And by the way, I shared a taxi once because I spoke on a stage with Nick Bostrom, and I tried to have a conversation with him. It was very difficult. He's so brilliant; he just can't talk to a regular person like me. I just couldn't get anywhere, I think.

Was he too focused on the details and he couldn't zoom out? Well, and I wasn't sufficiently up to speed with his version of simulation theory to be able to really grab him. He reminded me of Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan was the same—no chitchat. You had to go straight into a really gnarly technical problem in order to engage him in a conversation. Very fascinating minds, but difficult to engage with. Elon Musk is like this too. I talked to him once, and I remember thinking, "He is solving 15 incredibly hard problems in his mind while he's talking to me. And I am clearly dragging an anchor on the weight of his mental process."

Anyway, it's interesting because our understanding of how the universe works is changing so fast that people are almost having to look for a handrail to hang onto. So I'll give you some examples of what I mean. One is the introduction of quantum physics, and of course, the Nobel Prize for that was only awarded last year. And we do not have standard theories of physics that are comfortable with the notion of quantum entanglement. So what we know about how the universe works isn't matching up with what we're finding out at a time when we have ever more sophisticated data-gathering devices. And not only that, I would say humanity is adjusting to using prosthetics. So the James Webb Telescope, which is now, I believe, 1.5 million kilometers away, is a prosthetic. It is allowing our eyes to see 1.5 million miles away in the galaxy. And similarly, there's the most powerful microscope is the Titan Crius. I can't remember how minuscule it allows you to see, but we have a prosthetic to see deep, deep, deep into the subatomic structure of reality now. And what we're finding is we punch into these new frontiers that all of the things we thought were true, not so true. Maybe there's other explanations. And we're not comfortable with this letting go of an old framework, as you say, when we don't have a new one because we don't have theories yet that fully explain all this weird stuff we're finding.

And I would add to that and finish with this thought: I think we are losing our minds because of René Descartes, and René Descartes introduced this notion of a Cartesian split between the soul and the body. And the soul became the responsibility of the church back in the 17th, 18th century when he was writing, and the body became property of the scientists. And we in the West, in Western Europe and the United States, we believe very firmly there's a split between these two things. So anyone who tries to explore stuff that's not easily quantified, that can't be measured, and quantum by definition is heavily in this realm, we ascribe that and we go, that's mystical, that's magic. And that's not serious. So we can't study any of that. We only are interested in the things that are measurable. And that Cartesian split is breaking down as we punch into the furthest reaches of our universe at the nanoscale and at the macro scale into space. And now we have to reunite this left brain and right brain into a whole and think holistically again.

Now, in Russia, in China, in India, and Africa, they never had a Cartesian split. They are perfectly capable of holding information and studying things that don't fit the scientific method. And for this reason, I think they're making faster progress on a lot of science. It helps explain in part why they're pulling ahead. But for us in the West, to overcome the Cartesian split is as profound as the Copernican moment. And I think that is also why we can't reframe or how do we even take into account, for example, in politics, how people feel about inflation. We're stuck in the arguing whether there is any inflation, but the fact that people felt it was what overturned the political establishment. And I still talk to people in the markets who are like, "There's no inflation. This is all imaginary. We can measure it, and this is how it measures up." And I'm like, "Okay. Maybe." But there are a lot of people who feel they can't fill the fridge and they're paying a fortune for eggs right now. And we're not giving any credence to that story because we've already decided the stories and antidotes are not important; only measurable facts. That is a Cartesian split way of thinking.

So look, everywhere we look, there's this sense of splitting apart, whether it's left and right, whether it's rich and poor, whether old and young—everyone's being pulled apart. And because of that, there's this feeling that we don't understand the world anymore. The young can't understand the old; the rich can't understand the poor; the left can't understand the right. So you've got this—the scientific community which have never, it seems, been pushing forward at a greater pace than they are right now, aided by technology and computing power and all this stuff. And they are trying to understand the universe on a subatomic level or an astrophysical level, and they are making this progress the like of which we've not seen in our lifetimes. And that's only going to increase in both pace and depth. And at the same time, you have the man in the street trying to understand why he can't afford to buy eggs. So that's another split. And we are being bombarded by all this incredible advancement, all this amazing technology, all these incredible stories. And you can feel people… The UAP stuff that's come up in the last couple of years. You can almost watch in real time the process that people go through, which is, "Oh my god, little green men." And then it's, "Well, hang on a second, that was a cool video I saw." And then it's the congressional hearings. And then just at the point where you can grab onto that and go, "Okay. I'm going to go deep into it like you do," they go to your earlier point, "This is all too much. I'm going back to little green men because it's too complicated. I need to fill the fridge."

It's tough for me to see a way. The left and right divide—I can see a way back from there. I think it's a way through, and we end up back there. I think the rich and poor divide—there's also a way back there. And that's through because we've been through that before. We can get back the old and young again. I feel that there's common ground there in families and communities that will help. But the gap between science and reality, the gap between informational superpowers and computational superpowers and the man in the street is only going to get wider. How do we find a way back from that so that people don't just give up and don't just become so overwhelmed by the incredible progress that they discount it in a world where they can't even trust what their own elected representatives are saying? Yes. And I'd like to separate out this interesting UAP issue, and talk a little bit about that. But before I get to that, because it's a great example of this Cartesian split problem, and we're not allowed to study that. By the way, only last week, the former chief medical officer of NASA came out and said, "Now we're retired. And I got to tell you, it's all true. And all the astronauts have seen it, but nobody can say it because they'll be thrown off the astronaut squad." How many people do you need of this caliber coming out before you go, "Something's going on here?" Which is how I ended up in this subject and really looking at it.

But the bigger issue is the loss of compassion and the feeling of the earlier question as well, that it's not just I'm right, you're wrong. It's I'm right, and the reason you must be wrong is you're either an idiot or you're evil or both. That's the core way we're beginning conversations. The idea that I'm wrong, and you may have wisdom and knowledge that I don't yet understand—this is not a very typical position these days. So one is just there's a mindset that is actually not that hard to change. And I've been playing with an idea which I have not yet written about, and I'm going to test it out on you guys right now. I'm halfway through an article; it's a little out there. But I've been thinking if we're shifting from this rational left brain way of thinking into a more holistic and right brain way of thinking, what's the point of connection? What's the mechanism for getting the two sides to communicate better and opening up this possibility of compassion and understanding—I am not always right. Maybe I have stuff to learn. And the answer is your heart. And I think actually, I want to call it—we have not spent any time on our heartware. So we spend a lot of time building hardware and a lot of time building software. And I've made up this word sharedware, which is a category of product that's both deeply integrated, which cannot be separated. But now I've realized actually none of that works if your heartware is not in the right place, and the heartware is about as a human being, what grace do you afford another person who has a completely different point of view than your own?

So the reason I know about Daniel Schmachtenberger is because when we had lockdown, I had time on my hands like everybody, and I made a decision: I am going to spend time with communities that are the opposite side of the political spectrum from where I live. And I remember joining an online group that he was part of that was full of the guys who organized the protests against the banks in the City of London who are throwing paint on paintings and museums, who are locking trucks down at Hyde Park Corner to protest oil extraction—like those guys. Basically, it was Extinction Rebellion. And I worked for George W. Bush, and I'm going to hang out with the Extinction Rebellion folks because I just want to understand where they're coming from. And I learned a huge amount. I am not an Extinction Rebellion person. I don't agree that this is the right way to go. However, I learned a lot about the world and how to think about it. And I don't think we do this very much. We don't reach into our discomfort zones. We don't try to go figure out why is this opponent of mine over there? So we're not affording any grace or compassion, and that is a heartware issue in ourselves, which I think we can fix. I can spend time… I'll add to that, the more advanced your technology becomes, the more spiritually elevated you must become as well. And that sounds so woo-woo. But at one time during the industrial revolution, we were chaining children to the machines so they wouldn't run away. And then somebody with some decent heartware went, "This is not a good idea," and we stopped chaining children to machines. Similar with this whole slavery movement. We thought that was okay, and then somebody had a heartware moment, "Maybe this is not okay." And today, as Peter Thiel has pointed out, we have weapon systems that are so fast, that are so destructive that we really have to either be angels or demons. We can't even be halfway because if we have any demon element of "I got to kill the other guy," we'll kill everybody and ourselves. We don't have limited-use stuff anymore. We have smashed-the-whole-thing stuff. So he too says we need spiritual elevation in order to handle the technology we're creating. So I think it is happening, and I do detect that there is this spiritual elevation, particularly amongst young people. My generation think this is all nonsense and can't even have a conversation about it in the main. But the younger people are like, "Yes, this is the way. I have to open my heart, and that will lead me and us to a better place," and I think that's right.

Pip, this idea of compassion is such an important one. And this is one of the things that I've been thinking about, and I think that's absolutely right, that's what we need. But unfortunately, compassion comes from civility. It's very difficult to have compassion without civility, and civility in the discourse and civility in society has not only crumbled, but to bring us back to what we were talking about earlier with the sheepdog, it's being amplified and reinforced over and over and over again. I mean, every day, and this is not what—because I don't click on any of them—but I am constantly fed videos of fights that break out at airline check-in desks and fights that break out on the street here and fights that break out here. And this idea that the keyboard warriors can control everybody and abuse people, it almost feels like that's become the default. People are, when given the freedom to behave any way they want because they're behind a keyboard, they're defaulting to that basic human instinct to hunt and kill as opposed to be kind and compassionate and civil. And wherever you look now, whether it is starting at the ground on Twitter or going up to our elected representatives in every country, there's no beacon of compassion or beacon of civility left unless you actively go out seeking it, and you will find them. You'll find them in people like you, but you have to be looking for you. You're not going to be served that. And I just don't know. As I say, I can see ways through a lot of these things, but it seems that the way back to civility and compassion either goes through a much darker place or it's impossible. And I'm curious as to how you think about that particular journey.

And I totally, totally hear you. I think you have to be the change. You have to be the change. So we have to make a personal decision to enter into that way of thinking. And maybe compassion is not the only word to use. Empathy is another important word, which is different from sympathy. Empathy is just the beginning to try to understand where somebody else is coming from. I think this also involves some courage. And I've found as an economist, I've had to draw on my personal courage much more in the last few years than ever before. So I'll give you a very practical example: The Trump tariff tantrum that's going on, and obviously the headlines are full of Trump is a disaster and Trump is ruining the world order and da da, da, da. But when I really look at it and try to separate out the emotional response and look at, "Okay. But what is the policy?" What he is saying on one level is the major American and European corporations were ripping everybody off. They ripped off the American worker and the European worker by moving their operations to China where they then paid the Chinese workers nothing. And then they charged the consumers in the west a fortune. And this needs to stop. We need to remove this rent-seeking corporate world from smashing both the consumer and the creator.

So look what's happened. Since the temper tantrum on the tariffs started, we have all these Chinese workers who've been making, for example, the handbags for the big luxury firms out of Europe. And they are going on Instagram and holding up the handbags and saying, "We make these for Gucci and for whoever. And we have incredible craftsmanship and skill," which they do. And why don't you buy directly from us? And by the way, we've got some design ideas of our own that are cool and interesting, and young people are like, "Yeah. I want to work with these creative artists and pay them what is a reasonable wage for them, but not what Gucci is charging us." And suddenly we have connectivity between the creators and the consumers and removing the big brand name corporates. I think that's very interesting. And that is how innovation happens. And I think that's a good outcome of the tariff discussion, and that's the purpose of it. It's not only to raise the income of American workers, though Trump has to position it that way because of his electoral base, but it will also raise the income of the Chinese workers as they build brands that can go global. And they've already done it, by the way. I always use an example of Haier, the company in China that it's such a wonderful story and nobody knows it. So they make fridges. They came to the US in, I believe it was 1998, 1999, and said, "We're going to make fridges in the US." So when everyone else is leaving the US to make that stuff, they're coming in. People are like, "Are you guys out of your mind?" But the founder says, "No, no, no. The American consumer is the most discerning, most sophisticated, and we have to learn how to service that consumer. We need to learn quality control." And he's famous for smashing 72 or 73 of the fridges because they had some minor scratch on it. And his workers were like, "Oh my God, what are you doing? This is a huge amount of capital that you're destroying." And he's like, "Quality control. This is not quality control." And it became a Harvard Business School case study, which is worth looking at. And then he came to the US, they started to build, and they got into two sectors because no American was going to buy a Chinese fridge at that time. There was just no way. But two categories: wine fridges. At a time Americans were buying wine like crazy, no one was selling quiet and elegant ones. So he moved to South Carolina where they make beautiful furniture, wood-panel furniture. So he combined the wood paneling with the quiet fridge; they flew off the shelves, and he realized students were on the rise. Everybody's going to college. They all want a little fridge in the dorm for the beer. He makes those—a huge success. And that led to buying General Electric's home appliance division for $5.5 billion, which they still run today. Now, could we have more Chinese companies that do this? Yes, I would say we must have more Chinese companies that do this. They cannot raise national incomes if they don't go global. But every time they start to try to go global, we shut them down. Huawei—we arrest their senior people at the airport. Why? Because we make the argument, "You're really an instrument of the state and you're spying." And they say, "Well, we'll shut down Google and meta because we think they are too." And now we have two different arguments. Why don't we separate them? Which is what Trump is saying, and let's allow commercial competition and let's have a separate discussion about spy games and figure out rules of the game there instead of disqualifying everyone because we have spy game worries. Now to say that makes me sound like a Trumper. And now anybody who's blue is like, "Gosh, she's crazy. We don't like her." It's hard because…

You're trying to have the courage to say, "Actually, there may be sense in this policy approach at a time when everyone sells, 'it's all terrible.'" So how do you find your heartware and your courage and screw them to the sticking place, as Shakespeare said? Can I jump in with a question?

But the thing is, though, I'm still stuck on the previous part of the conversation because while this is fascinating and interesting, this conversation about what I would describe as a narrative collapse—and I don't know if you agree with that, Pippa—but I feel like that's what we're undergoing. And the reason I think it's important is because it presents a collective action problem. So all of these other things we're discussing, in my opinion, are downstream from collective action. They can be addressed through collective action. And it's interesting we're talking about—I think, yes, that's right, you brought up the Salem Witch Trials and made me think of the Middle Ages—and we went through this thousand-year dark period in society where we lost... Whether we lost the ability to view things more objectively, people can debate whether that's actually true or not. We can get into an ontological debate about the nature of reality and the nobility of reality. But what I think we can certainly agree on is that we lost a shared protocol, or Western society lost a shared protocol for thinking, reasoned and scientific inquiry.

And what's, I think, both fascinating intellectually, but also sort of really scary, is that as we're going through this narrative collapse—and I would argue that a core part of why we're going through a narrative collapse in America especially is a series of traumas: 9/11—and you can see this, you wrote some posts recently where you cited an interview that Tucker Carlson did with a representative of the firefighters in America, and they had a whole section on 9/11, and they brought up again the thermite and claims of controlled demolition on the buildings, and all sorts of stuff. And there's a whole avenue of discussion there, but the point is the 9/11, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and a series of traumas that resulted from the mismatch of the narrative, Abu Ghraib, the lies that took us to war, et cetera, and reality. Same thing with the 2008 financial crisis, and same thing again with COVID—and it feels like that social trauma has opened up a portal to reassess everything. And within that chaos, as we mentioned earlier, lots of competing narratives, many of which seem on their face to be patently ridiculous, like flat-earth theory, for example, are nonetheless gaining a lot of mind share.

And here's where I'm driving this onto the focal point of a question: it feels like what's really interesting—again, intellectually interesting and also scary—is that this narrative collapse is happening at the same time, and you made this really great point about information overwhelm. And what do you do? You seek for ways to compress information, symbols, or demagogues. We're going through a new technological revolution with AI and LLMs, and what are these systems? They're ways of compressing information. Now we human beings used to be far more ambidextrous and accustomed to solving a wide range of oftentimes novel problems in physical space—hunting and gathering, building cabins and fixing their leaky roofs—a lot of these skills in our increasingly intermediated and specialized society have slowly dissipated and atrophied for a lot of people on a physical level, and they don't know how all these systems work. Especially in America, we don't know how so many of the systems on which we subsist actually work; we've delegated that authority, which again is a huge problem when we think about the industrialization and trying to re-industrialize. I feel like we're about to have potentially the same thing happen to our mental aptitude, and it's frightening to me that we're passing through this focal point while we are in a state of mental and emotional trauma. And I don't know how that problem can be addressed, and I'm just curious—again, it's not a great question, but it's like a data dump on you—and I'm curious to what degree that resonates with both of you, by the way, and how responsible members of society who can see this problem can or should respond to it.

So if you don't allow me to ask any questions, then I'm going to question everything. That's the situation we're in, because we weren't allowed to ask any questions about some of these major events, as you say, trauma events, and when we did manage to get a question in, like, "Were there really weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?" No, there weren't. Then your trust begins to fall. And what we're witnessing, and what you've described, is what has caused a collapse of trust. Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, had this lovely line where he said, "I would rather have questions I can't answer than answers I can't question," and we've been in a—"well, you can't question the answers"—environment for quite a long time. I would really date it to the Second World War, again, of narrative control.

Even, for example, during Vietnam—which, again, that's my father's era when he was serving in government at the highest levels—and his best friend, one of his best friends was Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers. And Ellsberg was a Marine who did many secret missions for presidents and found out things that were really shocking, but one of them was, the generals are lying to you, we are losing in Vietnam and we cannot win this thing. And of course, he was viewed as a total traitor, and that was partly what led to the release of the Pentagon Papers. He's like, "I can't fix this situation without the public becoming aware of the true situation on the ground in Vietnam." Once the public understood, then the President changed his view and we got out of Vietnam. But it required someone really questioning, and that was not viewed in a friendly way by the establishment; they wanted the war, for reasons we can discuss later. But maybe we're in a parallel situation today, for example, I think with Ukraine.

And now I'm going to step into landmine territory, but let's think about, what's the official narrative been? Good guys versus bad guys. We're the good guys, easy. But go back and now we're seeing an unveiling of some truths. We've seen the former head of the CIA come out and say, "Well, actually we did build 10 operational stations on the Ukrainian-Russian border in 2014," which implies they had something to do with the Maidan Revolution, which overthrew what would otherwise have been a pro-Russian result in that election process. Do we have a history of overthrowing democracies? Yeah, we do, because of the post-war focus on, "We mustn't allow the communists to be in charge." So you can understand the rationale, but nonetheless, maybe our hands are not entirely clean in the origin. Then there's this whole question of the biolabs, and the official story is Putin keeps saying, "They're biolabs in Ukraine," and the US says, "That's ridiculous; there are no biolabs in Ukraine." Tulsi Gabbard during the election said, "But there are; they have addresses; we know they're there, and they were built by American money and by particular contractors that are associated with the intelligence community." And then Senator Kerry says, "She's a traitor, just wrong, she's lying, she's a Putin propagandist." Then it turns out that Victoria Nuland testifies to Senator Rubio in the public hearing and he says, "Do we have biolabs in Ukraine?" And she says, "Yes, and we have pathogens in them and we're very worried, what happens if they get hit in this war because then they're loose and humanity will be affected, so we got to get this locked down." Which, by the way, Tulsi Gabbard is again talking about now.

And suddenly you start to realize, ah, because I talked to some bioweapons inspectors to try to understand what the hell is happening with the story, is this real, not real? And here's what I got. "Well, yes, we have biolabs, but they're not bioweapons labs," so this is semantics now. I'm like, "Okay, but are they dual use?" "Well, everything in biology is dual use." "So is there a possibility that the Russians could perceive that we were making biological weapons in these labs?" "Well, yes." And particularly since now we know the origin of COVID is messy too, it turns out we were funding the gain-of-function research, which is why Bobby Kennedy has just announced, "No more gain-of-function research," right? So what you were told was a crazy idea turns out is true. So now we want to continue the war in Ukraine even though Putin is right, we did have biolabs, and they are still there, and they still have pathogens and they aren't secure. Okay, do we think it's a good idea to continue this war or do we think it's not a good idea to continue this war? Now we have a split. I am myself more on the side of let's end the wars, because the president, like him or not, has just been elected on an "end the wars" platform. This is where the youth of America are; the voters are clear; nobody wants to go to war. So he's saying, okay, let's cut a deal with all the superpowers, let's cut a deal over Taiwan, over Gaza, and over Ukraine and settle this; that I think that is what's in motion, and I'm actually quite optimistic that that is working. But for people who want the war to continue, and who are willing to, for example, go to war over Taiwan, I keep asking the why? Why is that a better way to go than diplomacy? I'm not getting good answers from that side, and I'm frightened because I'm like, is this really just about weapon sales, really? Is that what the driver is?

So these are the things that come, in answer to your question, is if you don't let me ask questions of these answers, then I'm going to question everything, and that's what the public is doing. So there's been, I think, also a loss of trust in "expertise." And the United States and Europe have been run for many years by technocrats. We've seen a shift towards populism now, which in some sense is a form of demagoguery. And to use your analogy of symbols and symbolism, it leans heavily on symbols and symbolism. There's also been a significant deterioration in the quality of journalistic practices and ethics. And I feel like this, I have not really talked much on my show or thought much about journalistic ethics, weirdly, and as you're talking it's come up quite a bit for me. Because I feel like, again, this metaphor of a shepherd, the algorithm, it's a great example. People need shepherds, and I feel that the lack of credible voices, now... It's a sensitive topic, I get it; anytime you talk about politics or journalism, you end up falling in the tribal camp. I think at least this is a safe space; I feel like all of us are not very tribal and we understand that that's not where any of us are coming from.

But I brought up Tucker Carlson earlier, and I think it's a good example because he had that conversation about 9/11, and when this individual who—going back to the point of expertise—is a firefighter, but has no discernible expertise in explosives, that he's put forward at least, or structural engineering, makes the unequivocal claim that the buildings—all three, towers one, tower two, and building seven—were controlled demolitioned. Offers no real evidence for it. Actually, just to interrupt, I'm so sorry, so let's be clear who we're talking about: Curt Weldon.

Sure, thank you. So Curt Weldon was the deputy chair of the House Armed Services Committee, so one of our most senior intelligence officers in the country. He was loved by both sides, Republicans and Democrats, but he'd been a lifelong firefighter, and he was very close with that community. And he went up to be at the World Trade Center on 9/11, and it was his mates who went up to whatever the floor was, the 68th or the 70th floor. And he doesn't say in the interview it was a controlled demolition; what he does is he says, "The story of what happened doesn't match the acoustics and it doesn't match the experience of the very skilled firefighters, and we need to ask better questions." And then, for me, the killer bit was he goes on to say, "And then we launched the war in Afghanistan on the grounds that Bin Laden was in Afghanistan," but he had four intelligence sources come to him and say, "Bin Laden is in Iran and he's being protected by the Iranians." So we now are sending all these Americans to have their limbs blown off by IEDs looking for someone who we already know isn't there; that's his allegation, and he's angry about the inability to ask any questions about all this. And of course his daughter, by the way, got raided by the FBI, which created headlines that meant he didn't get reelected. And then it turned out she was never charged with anything and that there wasn't a story there. So he's coming out 25 years later and he's angry, and he's informed, and that's just to put it in perspective. Well, I would encourage people to go listen to it. My recollection was that he was pretty explicit about the claims around thermite, that firefighters—and the reason I brought up his firefighter credentials was because that was essentially the basis of his claims around 9/11; he mentioned that fellow firefighters heard explosions, that when they went up to the top of the building there was hardly a fire, and then it collapsed. And Tucker seemed to sort of nod along, and no one questioned this. And I want to bring it up because it's a great example because it also brings us to—it's not as good an example as the UAP story or the UAP conspiracy, which truly has no good explanation. I mean, that is a great example of where I cannot—and I would love to ask you about this, because I know you write quite a bit about it. The 9/11 example, it's true. You look at building seven collapse and it looks like a controlled demolition, and you're like—

By the way, by the way, the killer for me was that the BBC reported the collapse of the building 20 minutes before it collapsed, while it's still standing in the background behind the journalist; you're like, "What?" I bring that up because you watch that and as a lay person you're like this. But then if you think that through and you say, okay, what would be required in order to actually have three buildings wired, prepared for a controlled demolition, it would require a very large conspiracy, presumably, and what is the tangible benefit? In other words, what is the cost-benefit analysis that you would run to say you're going to fly planes into buildings, and then—as if that's not sufficient to justify a preemptive military action or a war on terror—you would control demolish it. My point is simply to say that I would have felt that for someone like Tucker—and this is true in general, our journalistic standards have deteriorated—I would have expected it, and certainly 10 years ago or 20 years ago you would have certainly seen more pushback, and you would have asked the person to put forward a competing theory. And I feel like that isn't something that we see much anymore; we just see everyone goes into their camps, especially on the right. I would actually say this is very true of the right, and again, it's not a criticism of the right, or this is not a way of absolving the left for their contributions in doubling down on official narratives and supporting the power structure, but it seems that on the American right, the narrative weavers are very focused on dismantling the narratives, dismantling institutions, but not really proffering a competing narrative, and I find that to be rather dangerous because it creates that vacuum that we talked about earlier, and in that vacuum what comes out, who rises from there to present order to the public? Does that concern you?

And then I'd love to, after that, I'd love to really broach a conversation of UAP if we have a chance, because I just, I'm really fascinated by the topic. It's like what I said about science: how do you let go of a paradigm framework that you know isn't correct any longer, but you don't have a new one, you just have a bunch of information that the old one is not right. So you don't have something to swing to, and until we get a new paradigm that comprehensively explains how the universe works from a quantum physics angle that everybody's comfortable with, nobody wants to let go of the framework they're currently hanging on to. Well, what do you think? I mean, so one, we talked about simulation theory; it might sound ridiculous for me to put it forward, but actually I've put it forward in past on episodes on UAP because actually if you just wanted to spitball stuff, right, the simulation hypothesis would actually solve the UAP conundrum.

It does, exactly. Similarly, it would solve the 9/11 conundrum in this particular case. And I don't know that it's fair to call it a conundrum, because I'm not a structural engineer; maybe if I spoke to one they would give me a good explanation for why building seven was able to collapse that is much more compelling than a broad conspiracy and rigging the building, and then for no apparently justifiable reason just collapsing it. How do you make sense of these types of discrepancies or disturbances in the matrix? And the matrix is the right word. I am studying deeply various forms of simulation theory; I am finding myself drawn into the discoveries in the realm of physics. This is not my natural comfort zone, but it's like you can't make sense of the world if you don't understand how it works. And I remember when I was very young my mom came in one day and she said, "Oh, they found the first subatomic particle," and they were called quarks at the time. I mean, I must've been 10 or something, and she started crying and she said, "They've named them truth and beauty." And she was so moved that we would call these new findings something of such a beautiful nature. And maybe that, for me, made me realize, oh, we're connected to this stuff, that we're all stardust, aren't we? And understanding the nature of our stardust is part of what makes us human. Well, who am I? What am I made of? Where am I? What is this stuff? What is this wall behind me? I know a lot of people don't think about these things, but that's where my brain goes. So I'm still studying. I don't have any definitive answers on any of this. I think it's fascinating that so many very brilliant people are struggling and talking to each other about these competing theories. So it's a discovery process. It's uncomfortable because you want an answer, but there isn't an answer yet. We're getting better answers every day though, because we have better data gathering, we have better instrumentation, we have better supercomputing. We have AI, which is vastly accelerating the process. The chips that are being created today, this famous story about the new Willow chip from Google, which they say solves a problem that in the past theoretically would have taken every computer on Earth 10 septillion years to solve, which means a period that's longer than the entire history of our universe. And today, the Willow chip can solve that same problem in five minutes. Now, maybe there's some hyperbole there, but the speed at which we can solve problems is so accelerating that you should be asking like, "Wait, how does stuff work exactly?" Because we're getting better answers all the time.

So I'll just say that, I don't have an answer, but now I no longer start with, "Well, that's ridiculous." I used to start with—like when I grew up, if you said there was water on the moon, you were certifiably insane. Today we know there's actually quite a lot of water on the moon, and a lot of other stuff too, and there's a proper space race to get to it between particularly the US and China. So you're not certifiably insane. So now I'm less inclined to say that's ridiculous. Or if I feel the instinct to say that's ridiculous I'm like, "Oh, this is going to be interesting. Let's see, let's explore." That's how I got into the UAP thing, which literally six years ago I would've said, "Don't be ridiculous." And then some mates of mine from government days said, "You need to look at this." And I'm like, "What? This is just stupid." And they're like, "You need to look at this." And then I started looking and I'm like, "Holy moly, Congress is passing whistleblower legislation; they don't do this on a whim." We have whistleblowers testifying to Congress; I start digging around and a lot of serious scientists are involved in this, and holy moly, maybe our understanding of reality is not what I thought. That's how I got into it. So Pip, we'll come back to the UAP stuff because I think that there's a whole thing to do there.

But before we get to that, and this is one more thing I'd like to insert, and I'm going back to a phrase that you used at the very, very beginning of this conversation that stuck in my head because it brings me back to something Neil Howe said to us in the first episode of this conversation, in that you used the phrase "constitutional crisis." And when we spoke to Neil, we talked about the fourth turning and we talked about how one of the characteristics of a fourth turning is the tearing down of institutions that are no longer fit for purpose and how that's an important part of the process because we then get to rebuild them in a better, more trusted, more useful fashion. And Neil stopped me dead in my tracks when he said—I talked about the IMF and NATO, obviously it was a clear one, the UN—and Neil basically said, "Well, what about the US Constitution?" And I hadn't thought about that as an institution, but of course it is the institution that is and defines and has defined the United States of America, and in the last couple of weeks we've had Donald Trump talk about running for a third term, very flippantly, and as I keep saying, he's selling Trump 2028 hats at his merch store, and all this stuff, which is off the cuff, but he clung onto it for a few weeks realizing, I'm sure, about the press he was getting, but he didn't say, "I'm ridiculous." And if his motivation is to get more coverage, it worked, but there's some fundamental damage done by that. And then we have this past week him saying, "I don't know if I need to uphold the constitution of the United States." And Steve Diggle and I were talking about this, and as Steve said, he says, "It's literally the thing you read out when you hold your hand up is 'I will uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.'" So when we talk about constitutional crisis and we talk about the institution one year shy of a 250th anniversary, how do you assess the state of the Constitution as an institution that defines America? Is it under threat? And how do you think about that?

It's very, very interesting because what you've described is one side of the story. There's also the view that the reason we have all these massive holes in the budget that nobody can explain is also because we've had elements of government who have been doing their own thing without any congressional oversight or having to confer with the president. So everybody likes to use this term, the "deep state." I actually break it a little bit into two categories. I think the deep state is like that British program, *Yes Minister*, right? It's technocrat officials who think they know better and they run circles around the temporarily elected officials. But there's something deeper than the deep state; it might even be like a counter-state which has control over weapon systems and that feel that they can do what they want, like, for example, build biolabs in Ukraine and then deny they've done it and initiate wars on that basis. That is a bigger issue in my mind, and then their inability to explain where's the money and what have you been doing with the money, and their view that it's perfectly okay to have a trillion dollars missing from the defense budget, that that's just an accounting technical issue, it's not waste, fraud or abuse, and their unwillingness to address it. And then you can go to another extreme; I'm sure you've heard of Catherine Austin Fitts, who also was recently on Tucker. She says, "It's not 1 trillion; we're missing 21 trillion." 21 trillion is like another country, right? That's a whole economy. So where is the truth on that? I don't know exactly, but this raises this question of is the deep state really what we're talking about or is it something darker? I don't know, and is that a constitutional crisis? So this is where, again, the UAP issue comes in, when I started to clock that the secrecy around much of the spending is so great that the president is not informed, whether they're Democrat or Republican. And if they ask, they are told that it's a need-to-know basis and they do not need to know. And you're like, "That is a constitutional crisis right there." So that to me is exactly why this UAP issue is not just...

Fascinating, from the perspective of, "If we're not alone in this universe, if there is intelligence in this universe, that's obviously a magnificent question for mankind." Humankind has to now contend with that. But a narrower, more specific question is: it's revealed that there's lots of stuff that goes on that the congress and the president are not informed about. Now, that also is a constitutional crisis. So that's the way I've framed it in my mind.

Well, what does that mean if the constitution is in crisis? Is it any wonder that Americans are in crisis left and right? Because between that document and the Bill of Rights, that's the very foundation of America? And if you have a foundation that is weak and is potentially vulnerable? As an Englishman that has always admired and loved the United States, I see in America... And I first went to the United States on its 200th anniversary. I was, what was I, nine years old, and I was there in 1976. All the celebrations and all the stuff going on. So it's weird for me to be looking at this 49 years later and seeing a very different state of affairs in the lead up to something that should be and will be celebrated, but against the backdrop that... I don't know. It worries me a great deal because without America as America in the world, I do wonder what falls apart that it's holding together, even if we can't see that it's holding together.

It's interesting. I hear you completely, the way you've described that. I'm like, "Actually, the problem isn't the Constitution and the Bill of Rights." Our fundamental documents are remarkably sound, considering the passage of time. The problem is the immense weight of laws and regulations that have been placed on top of it. And the fact that in the US we have no mechanism for ever removing a law or a regulation; we only add them. And the Congress is a machine for writing not just legislation, but really bad legislation, where they throw all kinds of nonsense... It'll be a bill on abortion, but it has embedded in it something about immunity for some corporates from litigation. And honestly, when I worked in the White House, I realized no one has read all of the words in a thousand-page piece of legislation. No congressman, no senator. They've read the bit that is relevant to their interests, but who understands this comprehensive picture? A few members of the staff. Very, very, very few. And so is there all kinds of nonsense in there that has to do with fundraising and things that are not about the fundamental truths of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights? Yes. So we've got decades and decades of all this noise piled on top, and that has caused the underlying infrastructure of the Constitution to become a little shaky. So I just wonder where is the problem? It's maybe not with the foundation; it's with this stuff we keep adding on top. And look at, for example, even all codes, building codes, the tax code, everything. It's almost impossible for a regular person to even understand anymore. You have to deploy professionals, employ professionals to get a grip. And that's not how the Constitution was designed. It was designed to be very simple, very elegantly simple, and we've made everything very, very complex.

I mean, that speaks to this loss of faith in expertise and in technocrats because there's a loss of common sense in the operational aptitude of government. It's become operationally dysfunctional. And I think it's interesting, this talk about a constitutional crisis. I think also flows nicely along this idea that we're going through a narrative collapse, which leads to a collapse in identity and a collapse in institutional trust because what is a constitution? It's the founding and governing principles of a society. And I feel like we're really questioning a lot of those things, and a lot of the narratives that supported those institutions and practices, and principles are dissolving.

I'd love to ask you about the UAP story since it's something that you've covered. I mentioned it in the context of 9/11 and narratives around collapsing controlled demolitions, although it's not a really good example because the controlled demolition explanation... Again, it's not something that I've spent enough time on, but it's not sufficiently compelling to me to sort of be comparable to the dysfunctional experience of trying to understand the UAP story. Because I feel like the UAP story truly confounds my ability to proffer an explanation, and it challenges my most basic understanding of how government works. I'm framing it this way because I want this to be a portal for empathy to the audience, perhaps who also feel this way in how I asked this question. I remember who was a David Grush who was testifying before Congress, and he was talking about having biologics. Basically, it sounded like alien DNA or non-human DNA or something like that, biological material that is not of this earth. And that contractors, it sounded like he was suggesting private contractors are housing this material either on behalf of the US government or possibly at one time on behalf of the US government. It's not entirely clear. Again, this gets us into a conversation about shadow networks that operate in parallel to the official constitutional bodies. And it raises questions about where the power structure really is. This gets into secret society almost type stuff. So he's talking about biological material. He's making all these allegations as a whistleblower, but we can't get to the bottom of it? This is the thing I don't understand. So congress is like, these are the people that are supposed to be the most powerful people in the country. The legislative branch is supposed to be the most powerful branch, and these individuals are elected by the people of the United States. This is the pointed question: why is it that our elected representatives, including Harry Reid, who was at the center of this disclosure process, how is it possible that allegations that are so life-altering and mind-altering cannot be investigated and explained in a clear, coherent manner?

So you've answered the question in a way. The subject is so mind-blowing, it's so challenging to our notions of who we are, that there's an element of "Congress doesn't want to explore this." They're forced to, but there's this theater going on of not actually pursuing the story also because that would involve challenging this military-industrial complex. Are you touching on the same principle behind the theory for why people on the Warren Commission just went along or people on the 9/11 commission just went along? Are you basically saying that they're afraid of this sort of dark power structure that would be able to actually threaten their lives and their families?

Well, I think there's an element of that. I think that threats are real. I once sat next to the original writer of House of Cards at a dinner, and I turned to him and I said, "I think that you lighten it up and dumb it down a little because if you wrote what really happens in Washington, people would be terrified." And he said, "You must be from Washington." I said, "I am." And he said, "You're right, because if I wrote what actually goes on, people would freak out." So let's think of House of Cards as the light gentle version of what happens in Washington. Now, we can begin with that, right? People are like, "What? House of Cards is outrageous. People are killing each other." I'm like, "There are a lot of dead bodies in Washington as well." And there are a lot of dead bodies around this UAP question. And not all physically dead. Some are character assassinations. You're like, "Wait, why? What's the big deal? Who cares? It's interesting." And the story that nobody can know because the public is not ready. This huge ontological crisis will happen. I don't think that's actually true. And I also don't think these folks care that humans have an ontological crisis. So there has to be another explanation for this. And I think there are other explanations for this. We were talking earlier about how it doesn't really make sense to have secrets anymore because the public already knows everything, and the CIA and the intelligence community don't really have that much of an edge over the public internet. So how is it possible that the government could be hiding information that's so revolutionary about aliens, interdimensional beings, non-human intelligence, but the public and everybody else just doesn't have any evidence?

Well, they're not hiding it. That's the point. It's coming out all over the place. And now you could look back at history and say there's been a series of... But I'm saying why is that the focal point of the investigation, the government as opposed to the phenomenon, which should be ever-present? No, I love this because I agree with that, and I don't think... Look, we've already had the announcements from government that this is real. We've had a White House press conference where they've said the phenomena is real. We've had Pentagon press conferences, Air Force press conferences. So in their view, they've already told us. Most people missed it because they're not watching it closely enough. And they're like, "Okay, we're done. We told you it's real." But the next question is, "Well, what the heck is it?" And that's where the code of silence comes down. And the reality is what's the history? The history is every individual who's not an official, who comes forward and says, "I had this weird thing happen," we don't believe them. It's like the Weinstein phenomena where women for decades were saying, "I'm having a problem with this guy." And everybody was like, "You're imagining it." Why? Because he's so powerful, you don't want to go up against that thing. But now we find out actually he was systematically being abusive, and that's why he's in jail. Why do we disbelieve? And especially, it's a very interesting question given that our entire legal and justice system relies on the account of witnesses. So now we have so many witnesses, and we say they're all nuts. So that can't be right.

So for me, a pivotal moment in my understanding of this issue was this fellow Ryan Graves who was not just a Navy pilot, but he was the commander of his squadron, and he was a top gun instructor. And he said, "We were going up over Norfolk and San Diego, and every time, not once in a while, every time we were bumping into these things that were flying at insane speeds, we can't explain that move in ways that defy physics." And what has also come out, but he didn't articulate so much, is that it interferes with the instrumentation of our aircraft, including messes with the engines. Luckily, our Navy pilots are really good. If your plane starts falling out of the sky, they know how to pick it up again. But he's like, "This is dangerous. My people are being put in physical risk." But if you go to the Pentagon and you say, "We see these things," they're going to fire you. You're going to be gone. So he cleverly went, "Okay, we're going to triangulate with FLIR cameras, our most sophisticated cameras with the targeting cameras, with RADAR, with infrared, and we're going to triangulate with also multiple sets of very senior pilot eyes. We're going to triangulate." And it turns out the data all matches up. There's something there. So for the first time, this is nobody's imagination. We have evidence there's something going on. Then he sits and he goes, "Okay, I've got these facts, truths, data, but they're still going to fire me." So the only way to put it forward is to present it as a health and safety issue and to say, "Look, we've got billions of dollars of equipment at risk and millions and millions of dollars of pilots at risk, and they can't ignore a health and safety complaint," which is true. So that's how it went forward. And sure enough, Pentagon can't ignore a health and safety complaint. So this is the beginning of it getting traction in our modern era. And since then we have more and more coming out. The thing is, why are we waiting for government and particularly the US government? We can all explore this. But now we come back to the Cartesian split, which is scientists are either, they're mainly stuck in what I call scientism, which is I say, why don't we bring science to this subject? Why don't we bring our best scientific methods to study this? And they're like, "No, this is mystical magic. This is crazy. This is not worthy of our attention." So they won't bring the science to the subject. They're being into scientism, which is, we already know the answer is it's, "You're nuts." So I think the question is why are they all in that frame of mind? We devote science to many obscure remote possibilities. Again, back to we spend a lot of time and science and money on the creation of the COVID virus on this remote possibility that it might be a biological weapon. We needed to be prepared for that. That's a pretty remote thing. We spent a lot of money on that. Why are we spending money on this remote possibility? And by the way, all these black swan super remote events keep happening, so we need to spend more insurance money on understanding these remote possibilities. Anyway, I haven't got a good answer yet from anybody on why we shouldn't study this given the volume of testimony and information that we already have.

And then I'll finish... If you give me a minute, I'll stop for a second to see where you want to go, but I'll talk a little bit about, I stumbled into this, and then I went to my dad who worked for so many presidents, and I said, "Dad, you're going to think I've lost my marbles, but I got to tell you there's this weird thing going on." And to my surprise, he said, "Yes." And I've been involved with it since 1962. And that led to my father doing a very long elaborate interview with Jesse Michael on his American Alchemy about his experience of this subject. And he's probably the most senior person who was directly involved. And what a shock and surprise to me to find my own father was at the center of this. And that's one of the features of the subject, which is so super weird. It's not just that there's this phenomena that you can see with a camera or whatever. It's also that everyone who comes into contact with it seems to also start having weird spiritual experiences, synchronicities, strange stuff. And that's a story all of its own. But it certainly came as a total surprise to me to find that my question out of the blue that seemed insane six years before was answered by my own father. Pip, that is a podcast all of its own. And hopefully, at some point along this journey, we will actually have an entire conversation about that.

But just to wrap up today's conversation, which has just been fantastic, and you've done it to me again. Now I've got to get on a plane this afternoon, and I know instead of watching movies and relaxing, I'll be thinking all this stuff. So thank you as always. But the people listening to this podcast, you are... Of all the people that I know, you seem to be the single best equipped person to be able to take this information in and seek out not just answers, but questions. And that's one of the things you do so brilliantly. You seek out the questions to ask. So perhaps if you wouldn't mind, just if you have any tips for people as to how they can be better because ultimately everybody needs a much more open mind, but in terms of practical advice as to how you do what you do, because you're just an absolute phenomenon at doing this stuff, and I marvel at it all the time privately, but publicly, I'd love people to get a sense of how you're able to do the things you do.

I am so grateful for your kind words. Thank you so much. Sometimes I've sitting here by myself with my computer thinking, "Wow, I'm really on the outer edge of possibility right now." And you do start to- And you are, Pip, but you go there. You go there, and a lot of people don't. So I think I'll come back to this concept of heartware and it's software in ourselves, and how do we upgrade our own heartware to be able to deal with this? And so some things I would suggest are: whenever you have a really firm convicted view on something, it becomes very important to challenge yourself and to really explore the opposition and move into that to try to stress test your own ideas. And it's hard, but it will only make your ideas stronger if you go through that process. It's like tempering steel. Throw yourself into the heat of that debate in order to strengthen what you are made of. But you may also find that ideas that you held to be absolutely firm start to break under that pressure, and you will end up in a better place if you go through that process. So that's one thing. Another thing is: when you look at the news to think about that sheepdog by your side and what is it choosing on your behalf? And how could you play tricks with that dog and throw the ball into a different part of the field and make it chase that and bring you back some stories from this other part of the fields. And that's a very useful way. Every day, there's that dog sitting with you. I think as well that back to heartware, the bringing of anger and this fight mentality, how do we park that and instead drop into a more empathy-led space? Just for the purposes of hearing the other side of the conversation. I think we have to open our ears, right? It's that old story, two ears, one mouth, where mainly a lot of people are mainly on transmit. Listening is a massive skill in this overwhelming environment. And I have to admit, I think... Look, I get paid to talk. And ever since being the chief currency strategist at Bankers Trust, any dinner party I go to, everybody is like, "Pippa, what do you think?" Right? It's very easy for me to play that role of, "I'll give you some answers," but I've realized actually I prefer being able to drop into listening. I need to be a better listener. And I suspect most of us are better talkers than listeners. Those are a few of the things that I think are so foundational that they will change all the other stuff that we've talked about if you begin with that. Again, you have to be the change yourself.

Pip, it was amazing. This has been so much fun. And I'm so glad to give people even a little insight to the conversations you and I have had over the years because it's a nonstop cavalcade of ideas and stuff, and it's the perfect conversation for this idea with Demetri. You guys are so great to do this series, really. It's also cool because Grant and I had talked about how one of the things that we were excited about is that we were going to not only interview people that we both had interviewed before, and that by interviewing them together, it would inspire us to ask you questions and be excited about the interview, whereas at least for me, once I interview someone once, most of what I'm excited about, I feel like I already addressed, but also that we're going to have people on the podcast that each of us hasn't interviewed. So I was trying to do my best not to ask too many questions and take up too much time, but this was very thought-provoking for me. And I think that the value I've gotten from reading your work in anticipation of this interview is that it is very gaseous and it invites you to think about phenomena in a manner that you haven't necessarily. It's back to your point about not having a rigid framework and question your priors. And also provides you, in my opinion, something you've written consistently with a different perspective, a different take on something that I feel like you... When I say you, I mean us. We, me. May already feel like I know the answer to. And so I've found that to be very helpful.

Oh, I'm so, so delighted. We need to drop into less certainty. Absolutely. And as a token of that work, just point people in the right direction to read more of it because I know after listening to this, there's going to be plenty of people that want to read more of it and understand it better.

That's kind. So I write a column on Substack called Pippa's Pen & Podcast. I put things up on X. I put things up on LinkedIn, but my place I really write is that, and I'm working on a book right now that's drawing my father's wisdom into the picture as well because we were collaborating on it before he passed away. So that'll come out probably next year.

Fantastic. Pip, listen, as always, it's such a joy to talk to you, and hopefully I get to see you in person soon.

Exactly. We have to figure that out. So wonderful. Thank you, guys. Great speaking with you, Pippa.

Well, mate, that was another just terrific conversation. For those of you listening out there that aren't familiar with Pippa's work, do yourselves a favor. Go to Substack. That's the best place to find her is Dr. Pippa, that's drpippa.substack.com. Pippa's Pen & Podcast. Subscribe to her work and get the stuff coming in. You'll find her on Twitter @drpippam. LinkedIn, I wouldn't have the first clue how to find anybody, but you'll definitely find Pippa on there too. I think she's pretty active on LinkedIn every now and then. But do follow up because as you just heard, she's someone who will have you thinking about things that you weren't thinking about before. And to the whole point of that conversation, Demetri, that is perhaps the most important thing we can all do right now. I think it's extremely helpful to expose yourself to not only different ideas, but also to speak with people who tend to view the same phenomena from different perspectives. Not only because you might be missing something, but because the very act of doing that is clarifying and makes you a better thinker. It's a skill like any other.

I think it's exactly right. Well, my friend, we will do this again next week and see where that takes us. But in the meantime, everybody out there, thanks for listening to us. We'll see you next time. Nothing we discussed should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. So while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets.