 Welcome to economics and beyond I'm Rob Johnson president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with my friend colleague and fantastic Fantastic imagination the fantastic filmmaker Alex Gibney We worked together on his film that won the Oscar in 2008 for the year 2007 called taxi to the dark side He's made the film and Ron the smartest guys in the room going clear recently a series on Netflix called dirty money and Another that you should all pay attention on that on Netflix the innocence files Alex is the president of jigsaw productions. They're doing fantastic work Attracting very high quality people to work with them and I'm very grateful that you join me today Alex Thanks for being here Rob. Always a pleasure to talk to you so Alex This is a this is a how'd I say In the realm of stability and chaos the pendulum has swung quite far. Yes We have a pandemic that's unmasked many things about our health system and about the costs of inequality economy being torn apart bailouts that look like the already powerful are being as our corrupted politics would suggest taken care of and To the detriment of weaker parts of society which exacerbates that inequality on the horizon. There's climate change We've just had a very horrific episode with the killing of george floyd I don't know. I don't know how to create much more chaos to ask you to explain but but Alex. What are you seeing? what what's driving you crazy what really gets under your skin And what are you envision how we can as the as eric burden the animals saying we got to get out of this place It's the last thing we ever do Amen to that And I hope we do I mean I think we're kind of on a knife edge at this moment particularly in this country and You know All of our problems have been laid bare and the question is will we get to a place? where We can begin to fix them in a in a substantive and systematic way That that really reorients are all of our priorities And and I think there's some hope that we could get there The problem I think is really in the short term because you have a person at the head of government Who's reveling in chaos he reminds me in a way of Mao during the cultural revolution who used chaos as a weapon by which he could then you know administer control and authority and And he revels in chaos as a way of bringing attention to himself Because that's what he knows really better than anything. Let's remember he's really nothing more than a really reality show TV host I mean that's what he is he never really was a successful executive He only played one on television. So that's the most chilling thing about this You know, we're teetering on the edge of of fascism and and you see it in the streets You know the the the film that you and I worked on together taxi to the dark side You know, there's a lot of talk in that film during the torture debates about something called command responsibility command responsibilities Is Something It's a criminal. It's a kind of criminal war crime charge against a commander When it's clear that there was quote no effective attempt by a commander to discover and control The criminal acts that he sees and and trump sends messages To the police he sends messages to vigilantes Um, you know, he sends message to his own evangelical base and the g.o.p. And the message is you know We are the wrecking ball we can destroy once and for all the uh the government of the united states except for a strong and powerful military and uh, it's a it's a And and key in that is is destroying any attempt at dissent or free speech. It's all about allegiance to the Personal embodiment of power And power without purpose. That's donald trump. So yeah, it's a scary moment You know, we talked about george floyd the tragic murder of george floyd And I couldn't help but be struck that you know in his autopsy his autopsy is kind of the intersection of um Of three of our great crimes, you know In ascending order, you know, one is they found fentanyl in the system evidence to the to the great opioid Crime and I view it as a crime because it was an it was an attempt by various corporations Literally to make money off of the deaths of over 500 000 americans um through overdoses Then you have the fact that he had covet um, and it It testifies to the kind of bungled um response to a pandemic which could have been utterly prevented you look at other countries that did a very good job We have done the worst job and we were supposed to have the premier health organization in the world the cdc um, but but we had a leader who Who thought that the pandemic wasn't a front to his approval ratings? um, and so he poo pooed it and undermined the people who knew how to beat it um, and then the last thing of course is the fact that The george floyd died of a heart attack an attack of the heart Because uh, somebody's because a policeman's knee was on his neck for eight minutes um In an act of egregious abuse of power and and and anti black violence That was condoned by the officers around him and that's what you've seen in so many of these videos When you see the violence, you don't see other officers rushing in trying to say no hang on man, you know Stop they're either looking by blithely or they're joining in so in the autopsy of george floyd We see the great Crimes um that continue to be committed in our society the crimes of capital the crimes of Of the assault on government and and citizenship and the crime of race which has been obviously america's original sense of slavery so You know in the death of george floyd were confronted with the worst of us and we can only hope That um, there will be an apotheosis because we can see what the problems are We should be able to have the courage To fix them But we have to get through this very disquieting period from now until the election and god willing There will be an election and we all have to get ready to really literally put our bodies Um on the barricades if necessary to be certain that we all have the right To to stand up and be counted. It's it's a scary moment rob Indeed it is and uh, you know, I I always joke that with a name like robert johnson You are attracted to the crossroads But we are we are at the crossroads right now and uh The deal with the devil Looms pretty large But I uh, I think the voter suppression the Use of health To what you might call diminish or skew Who can turn out particularly in key swing states? uh I I There are a whole lot of tools That could be used by one frightened president to try and uh Which you might call rigged the system that he got elected by saying the system was rigged. Yes That's right. And that whole rig thing is really interesting. I'm working on a film now that will come out in september of this year And it's a kind of a careful look at um Uh What happened with trump and russia in 2016 and and also looking at aspects of the 2016 election Which seemed appropriate just in advance of the 2020 election And that term rigged comes up early But it was never designed It was always designed and and and it was quite consciously being used and fed Into the system by the russians. I'm not saying that there was active Collusion between trump and the russians But it was being fed into the system by the russians during the spirit trump picks it up But the the strategy was never to um You know propose it as a serious possibility. It was always intended to be there to denigrate Uh, hillary clinton's inevitable victory, which is what everybody including vladimir putin and donald trump You know thought right up until the very last moment was going to happen So it was a cynical attempt to cast doubt and now The rigging has become Uh a mechanism of power in the hands of somebody who is using it, you know purely as a pr tool So it's it's scary the way these things can come around when you uh You how do I say? You're a great diagnostician your your ability to see things Choose important problems illuminate Sometimes how truth is stranger than fiction embrace the contradictions I How how does the piper come and play music now? How do What's your scenario for the constructive path? Out of this mess. What are the necessary ingredients? Well, that's a really a tough question and and sadly probably my My greatest weakness is to see the solutions, you know I'm trained to look at problems and to examine them and expose them And maybe not so good at at solutions. But you know, wait a minute. Alex, you and I are grandparents now. We got to do that No, I You taught me that I was I was I was coming around to it. I know we have a responsibility to do what I'm just saying I I I'm not touting myself as as one who's so great But but here's here's a little moment of hope that I found and you and I were speaking about this the other day And it's a peculiar anecdote for some of the grand strategies that we're talking about But it's a really hopeful and helpful one. I think and that is Uh, you know, I was watching this documentary called the loft which was the loft of Eugene Smith Uh, the great magnum and life magazine photographer and and he he he had a loft in on sixth avenue in new york And he would invite a lot of jazz musicians over It's where he took a bunch of his photographs and had a lot of his equipment But he also had microphones everywhere And it's where Thelonious monk was Hold up for a while practicing for His great town hall concert. It's called a big band concert. And there was one player. I think it was the um French horn player couldn't get the part right for a tune of his called little rooty tooty and uh And and monk called the break, you know, because he kept getting it wrong and he didn't go over him and Criticize him like michael jordan would have done and as you saw him do with scottie pippin and and uh, denis rodman and the last dance and uh, he didn't even give him encouragement But while everyone was silent while this guy was sitting looking at his music Monk went over to the corner of the loft And quietly tap danced the part so that he could get the rhythm And as soon as he saw that tap dance, he was like, oh, I get it now So to me what that little anecdote about a musical moment and about art, which is so important. It's all about Teaching and learning, you know, one of the one of the hardest things we're having You know, one of the hardest things we're, uh, faced with now is seemingly our inability to learn or even our refusal To admit that we need to learn You know, look at the pandemic. I mean, we are the worst But we're not learning. We have you know, we have the knowledge We can we can look at what other countries have done and apply them here and instead we just say no no America is great Well, let's just face it. You know, one of the things that we could do is to you know engage in that notion teaching and learning In a really profound and basic way but also What we've lost since the Reagan era government is not the problem Government is not the solution. It's the problem is this is this ability to see government as an extension of An ideal that is to say this is the mechanism for how we can make ourselves truly great And that's what it was in Roosevelt's new deal It's a vision for what a society can attempt to be um And somehow we need to recapture that and we need to recapture it by By by looking at problems and thinking about ways to solve them in imaginative ways Rather than simply saying oh You know things are always going to be this way. So let's just get used to it Which is Trump's solution to the pandemic. It's like just get back out there and and and and and die if necessary Because the pandemic is with us. We've got to have our economy back But there are a lot of sensible ways to get back out there um And you know, it was interesting In another film. I'm working on is something that is You know about the response of the pandemic and I and I started to read this book by Michael Lewis And forgive me for just blathering on here, but I'm in a roundabout way trying to circle your question um You know, he wrote an interesting book called the fifth risk, which was all about the transition You know from uh, obama to trump and On the day when when uh, the incoming administration is is supposed to come visit sort of like a school visit You know to all the different departments all the department heads were waiting for the trump people to show up and nobody showed up because they didn't really care And and and this book is kind of a vivisection of the utter contempt for government But there's a lovely quote in the book where he talks about uh willful ignorant and louis says Here's where the trump administration's willful ignorance plays a role If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost You're better off knowing not knowing the cost if you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems It's better never to really understand those problems There's an upside to ignorance and a downside to knowledge Well, it seems to me that the reverse of that is to begin to understand our problems. I mean, that's the way forward Um, not to pretend that they don't exist, but to really invest in understanding them. I I don't know why i'm free associating on this But you know one of the great ways of predicting a covet epidemic Or a covet outbreak happens to be shit I mean, I mean literally shit where they've discovered that covet is transmitted in fecal matter And so if you examine carefully the sewage of a particular city You can predict when there's going to be an upsurge in covet. Well, that's you know really trying to understand problems really getting And so I think You know, you and I have talked a lot about the political economy and capitalism, you know Why are we not? Investigating Some of the fundamental flaws of how we measure What capitalism is supposedly doing for us, you know, we measure it by the stock market Well, the stock market has been going up just as the company as the country has been going up in flames So you've got to wonder what that's about and then You know, what's gdp? I mean gdp doesn't measure Income inequality. It doesn't it measure environmental damage, you know, all these things that we take for granted kind of like The way You know It's an inability to learn So I kind of feel like if we were all a little bit more humble and willing to listen and to learn And this is part of the problem of our 24 7 news cycle too where it's not about learning really. It's just about being buffeted with data that That never permits you The opportunity to absorb it and and and and think through it and come up with solutions So, you know, I don't know but I've been obsessed with this idea of of Taking a moment of pause Learning and trying to come up with solutions. But god knows we need To reckon with what is it we want and then if we we can figure out what we want. How do we get there and god knows If we could find a way to reinvigorate government with a sense of possibility rather than And and but sadly we're going to have to build it back up seemingly from its foundations because Trump has been taking Trump and the GOP since Reagan. I've been taking a wrecking ball to it yeah, well, I'm Fascinated as I'm listening to you The philosopher steven toolman comes to my mind. He wrote a book called cosmopolis and the book talked about the evolution from the 30 years war to the end of ronald reagan In a fire to distill what I learned from the book it was the fault lines associated With the framework of the cartesian enlightenment Which worked well with the natural sciences, but when it was adapted to the social sciences created all kinds of masks and blind spots And as these fault lines emerged Particularly To world wars and a depression The tendency Of many people Amidst the dread and the fear Was to lurch backward toward the familiar Rather than to plow forward Into the evolution that those fault lines had revealed and to be repaired And he he wrote the book really towards the end of the reagan administration as Seeing them as the reaction to the civil rights movement and the various parts of the 60s And the anti-war movement that was what you might call threatening the way in which America was organized and the nostalgic spell that reagan dispensed over american society Caught fire and and he was explaining that as a what you might call a repeat performance throughout history right and and so I I I do think You're right that learning and teaching Are important, but the thing you said toward the end, which I thought was rarely right on target Is the learning in the teaching And what you might call the reliance upon expertise is also suffering from a collapse of faith in the quality of integrity of And the public nature of what experts do right And so we are in a very difficult situation because even the teachers and learners Have a hard time getting traction When our elite universities what michael sandall calls the tyranny of merit Right leave us in a place and you know I went to mit and you went to Yale right but but they're basically Saying now we have what? A professor. I think his name is just der schweets Wrote we have a bunch of people getting educated To belong to an elite as servants, which the title of his book was excellent sheep And so we're we're in a difficult place. We're real learning Deeply human penetrating learning right you don't find that in the economics 101 textbook. No and the lateral pattern recognition and the depth I mean we have made some progress largely through technology That the access to evidence-based work has become less expensive and therefore easier for people to do and Dispels more myths, but but you know as some people say Facts are like sacks unless you put something in them. They don't stand up That was a line from e.h. Carr the famous author of the 20-year crisis But but the idea that interpretation still matters the facts don't speak for themselves Which facts you choose to illuminate and so forth? Uh Doesn't allow evidence-based analysis to get us completely out of the woods But uh, but I think we're we're in a difficult place Well, you have to have a moral framework. I mean you have to have a moral ethical framework um You know, I just felt like scotty pippin and I passed you the ball and you dunked it with what you said That's right a moral framework man. Yeah, that was the dunk right there Because without the moral framework, then you're right the facts don't matter Um, you know the phone book is a series of facts Um, there it's a list. It's a rather well organized list of facts, but they don't take us anywhere So so so so that is necessary and and and yet the it's it's a it's a tricky moment because The the reliance on cheap expertise or on or on theories or it's like the unwillingness of experts to examine Or re-examine their own Um frameworks is a serious problem Um, and you know examining how how we measure capitalism that would be one way of doing it and and you know that far better than I um, but uh at the same time It is really important to be able to explore within a moral framework Um data and evidence and reporting. I mean, I'm I'm a documentary filmmaker I believe strongly and you know in the idea that you go out and listen to people And you try to say what happened based on what it is you see and what it is you discover Um, and and that's where you hopefully come up with uncomfortable truths And it's the uncomfortable truths that are hard, you know, that's why And and and I can't remember whether we were talking about this before we started or whether we've You know But um, you know, we're in the midst of a pandemic. We're all told about you know, how people are supposed to How we're all supposed to wash our hands far more vigorously You know, there was a hero in vienna a gynecologist named ignant semmelweis and uh He was perplexed by a mystery Which is why one clinic which was run entirely by male doctors had a much higher fatality rate in Of mothers when they were giving birth and then the clinic which was run entirely by midwives And you can say well We can guess what the solution was but he found very concrete result Which was that you know that the male doctors were teaching Students in the mornings and they were handling cadavers and they weren't washing their hands And they were infecting moms in the afternoon And he tried to present this and it was an uncomfortable truth because it called everybody to account And as a result they drummed him out of vienna so So expertise is tricky, you know, it's it's the cheap expertise that And that becomes conventional wisdom if you don't keep reexamining yourself all the time It's that willingness and that's the hardest thing of all That's why you know, I've been a lot interested in in the notions of mindfulness You know where you're you're trying to use meditation to get outside yourself so that you're not as susceptible to snap judgments Which which have their revolutionary place, but as you as we can see in the way the police are acting toward Peaceful protesters not so useful in other instances, but that mindfulness puts you in a place of being Able and willing to Engage that you may have been wrong You know, Trump is never wrong ever And he could he could change his mind twice in a sentence, but In terms of being right or wrong. He's always right. So this expertise thing expertise in in in terms of A kind of incontrovertal incontrovertible canon, which then almost becomes religious. That's huge danger seems to me but But we depend on people or we should depend on all of us to be able to look at the evidence which is so Necessary now Do you am I blabbering? Yeah? No, no, no, no, I think uh I'm actually you're going right into my well because I have been I gave a talk in bruge belgium a little over a year ago Where I talked about the only way a person Can be satisfied with their life Is if they go introspectively through meditation in the case of me and and what I was recommending to examine The feelings of their own neediness And then to define a purpose In their life so that when they come out And their consciousness of their neediness doesn't make them easily distracted Getting in front of other people's parades or just seeking applause or money or status and then Having what you might call a whopping midlife crisis later on or being ashamed because the distractions of your neediness rendered you ineffective and you waste your time on earth so I think I think the The mindfulness It's like defining your own True north and listening to your own compass about what matters But I do think all of us Are embedded in society and have you talked about teaching and learning Some of it is about developing the discipline But some of this about the mentorship the guidance the institutions and what it is they teach Or try to convince you Yes, it's a meaningful life or right and wrong and I think that meditation Is almost a way in which you inoculate yourself from superficial designs You know, it's an interesting Issue that comes up a lot in Of filmmaking and particularly in the role of a producer or an executive producer When you're confronted with Um Not I shouldn't say confronted but when you're engaged with another filmmaker Who is doing their best to make a film? And you can see that there are things that that filmmaker is doing that you wouldn't do it that way The hardest thing in the world is to be able to try to reckon with what it is that they're doing And try to give them some help Uh To follow their path Rather than uh the path that you might follow And it's a really intriguing and important, um exercise um because um There's probably useful Wisdom or expertise that you could dispense and you could say well, here's how you solve the problem x y and z But as we know from our kids and our grandkids That's rarely useful. It's like you want to be able to ask the question to put them back in a place Where they then solve the problem themselves, which ultimately is far more useful Uh, then then then dispensing an answer which may not even be the right answer um So You know, that's one of the things we're trying again I say with some humility trying to do at our company Where we we're trying to work with other filmmakers and trying to put them in a position to to make the films They want their way and and sometimes, you know with our networks. We we run into Problems that way even on dirty money, which is a series. We've gone two seasons now. It's a series of which i'm enormously proud um because it should be it basically takes on corporate crime and corruption um and um But each director directs their films their way And and I was absolutely adamant about that and I think the the network had times that ultimately You know, network Netflix was extremely supportive, but at times, you know, they they felt a comfort in in In observing a kind of house style where everybody would do it the same way that way they could Everybody could apply the same rule book and rubric to to the critique But it's a harder thing when you're trying to reckon with how those filmmakers are telling the story and know that They have their way and so how do you? How do you how do you find a way to celebrate that and and help them? You know find their voice most effectively I guess and and it's not just, you know Finding their voice, but I mean every one of the one of the great things, uh, you know my I had a wonderful professor who taught the bible At college and I wrote a paper that I thought was so great and And and and innovative and interesting and he said yeah, it was interesting and it was fun But I couldn't quite tell what you were saying And and the mark of a you know the mark of a of communication the mark of a good paper Is to be able to communicate clearly what it is you're trying to say so so to those filmmakers to be able to Help them Say In their voice the way they want to in a way that's clear to other people You know that's the that's the trick and that's you know getting back to this whole teaching and learning thing Um that I that I think in this period is so important because because because god knows now um, you know writ large Uh how important it's going to be For there to be many voices to which we all listen as opposed to the one voice of donald trump Which is the society that he wants to engender So, um, how do we get to that place and yet find enough common purpose to be able to move In the direction that takes us all someplace good Look, I know there's a woman that I've interviewed in the past named andria gabor And she has written A book called after the education wars But she also wrote the biography of w w edward dimming Oh, yeah And dimming he was famous in japan Yeah, and and his approach was Not to have one voice from on high but to Intrust and inspire the people who worked on the line Because if you believe they cared about the cause And they were down there intimate and familiar with the process They would evolve the process in a creative way And where dimming applied this as we'd seen all of the you know zucker birds and gates foundation and all the kind of Top down approaches to education And gabor found a group About the size of new orleans in texas That adopted what i'll call a dimming approach By putting their faith in the local people And why do I bring this up because alex what you were talking about as a mentor Is that the director's heart Is not just a metronome that's following your leadership There's creativity in that heart And by your respectful mentoring You're enlisting that heart along with yourself And you together I think will discover things in the creation of art in your case film Yeah That that process of unleashing the other person's passion awareness Is something the audience will feel yep And it can be deadened by what you might call a A coercive or overriding mentor and I think I think this Listening to the many voices in our politics listening to the many voices in how we structure education It takes power out of the hands of the oligarchy or whatever you want to call it But it makes the system that's much more responsive Absolutely. I mean I I remember To take it away from the philosophical and get get get into the brass tax territory for a moment because you mentioned dimming And I obviously I grew up in Japan as you know partly And and I made some films about Japanese manufacturing And one of the fascinating things about the Japanese assembly line You know which was engendered in in part by by dimming and and his quality control theories that were Greatly absorbed by the Japanese not so much for a long time by the by the Americans was that you make small innovations Toyota Old man Toyota had a great phrase. It was mistakes are precious by which he meant, you know You know when you find a mistake It's it tells you a lot because then then then you deepen your knowledge You don't pretend that there wasn't a mistake you you invest in the mistake and fight figure where to fix it But that if you would go down the Japanese assembly line, you would think that you know at a place like toyota It would be this kind of rigid You know singular monolith In which you know everything was predetermined But along the way there were all these funny little rubed rubed goldberg solutions that they had to solving little problems that were Um, there were suggestions made by people on the floor that were slowly But surely adopted that made the whole assembly line a kind of living breathing organism of Of innovation What a concept Yeah, yeah and I guess see The question right now Is that we have a structure? It's been founded on a very different system of management and control and What you might call meritocratic where Those who Pass the tests or come with the degrees or whatever are somehow Viewed as entitled To make the decisions on behalf of society, right? But it's it's hard. It's hard, you know highly unequal society to be a decision maker Where if you please the powerful positions chairs at universities affirmation in Large organs in the press all come your way. Yep, and if you stand up to those things You're more you're more than on your own. That's right You're swimming against the tide People are trying to take you down Yeah, so it's a uh, it's not a passive environment. No, and it's very difficult All we have to do is look at whistleblowers. I mean, you know, we like to believe that we we like whistleblowers But we really don't we like the people who go along I'll never forget when I was going on the stump for enron You know it at almost Every stop Somebody Would ask a question like what the hell is that whistleblower thinks she was doing anyway? As if she was the problem and they weren't asking about how could ken lay be such a bad guy or how could jeff skilling You know be so crooked. They were asking about her the whistleblower and um, Sharon Watkins and I thought what a strange idea, but but it kind of testifies to a natural um enmity that that we seem to be hardwired for toward people who make us feel that We aren't as as good as we should have been like we don't like to be shown up by somebody else, right? And and it takes an enormous It takes a whole mind shift to be able to be inspired by that instead of to be threatened by You'd like to think that somebody who's trying to make the world a better place is somebody you should celebrate Right so But it's we are um, you know evolutionary biology is teaching us a lot about The gravity that sometimes keeps us on the ground, but at the same time we're learning a lot more about how we can fly Maybe that's the hope for the future You know, um, we can fly so long as we recognize there is such a thing as gravity um So, um You know that's the That's the hope Well, it reminds me of my uh board member and uh senior person at the financial times julie and ted When I started the institute for new economic thinking I said What is it that I should uh Focus on she's a cultural anthropologist phd by training and she said rob. It's real interesting But the way to discern Where the structure of power is is to study the silences To study what isn't said what isn't explored what isn't challenged Will reveal to you Where the structure of power is that needs to be taken on right? I thought that was a fantastic insight. I agree And uh, she she also gave me a wonderful quote Uh from a man named renais char it was in a book by her mentor pierre bordeaux And uh the quote was the spirit in the castle Is contained in its drawbridge And uh, I I think right now We're finding out a whole lot about the draw bridges that have been up for a very significant segment of society Yeah, the moat is deep and the draw bridges are high Right Yes, and the and the spirit in the castle Is hollow is not is hollow and not generous Right Yes, and that and that's what we're being challenged to overcome right now. That's what we're being Uh Challenged is too gentle a word This it's being thrust at us. Yes, and the level of deep discomfort Is Is an impetus to change But it it's like you said The resistances Are are very formidable Well, it's moments like this You know it's moments like this where where we are testing and we are being sorely tested and There is there is hope that we can come out of this on the other side Having seen so clearly What the problems are And and began to be willing to address them You know, it was so evident at the beginning days of the pandemic Um That one of the key problems was the fact that we didn't have a um Uh a national health system so If you don't know whether the person next to you has covet or not because that person Doesn't have the money to get tested What kind of system is that? You know, it's it's literally a system that threatens your livelihood and your your life Because you haven't been willing to be generous enough and sensible enough to make sure that everybody has access to health care And as a result now the person right next to you could be diseased because you and and infect you because you Because your drug ridge was up Yep, yep, and what's interesting Is when What i'll call the unsustained unsustainability comes home to roost The people in the castle They can feel the rot they can feel the the collapse of morale And the question goes back to what you posed earlier Are they going to be learning and teaching? Or they're going to hunker down to the familiar as steven toolman suggests one of my favorite books ever It's by the poet muriel ruchizer. It's called the life of poetry and the uh First part of the book is called the resistances And it's about in the first chapter is called the fear of poetry Poetry with all of its ways of what you might call permeating your defenses and so forth And suggesting new dimensions of imagination Is something many people We do not call it aspire to ingest Expand their awareness But at those fearful times The drawbridge is pulled up And i'll just read you a quick note at the start of the book. She says A way to allow people to feel the meaning of their consciousness in the world To feel the full value of the meanings of emotions and ideas In the relations with each other and to understand in the glimpse of a moment The freshness of things and their possibilities There is an art which gives us that way and it is in our society Now an outcast art She wrote that book in late 40s And it's it's worth reading every Every paragraph of this book. I'll get you a copy. I love that but but it's uh This this question of Which you might call the receptiveness of the mind The reinvigoration of morale the bringing down of the drawbridge The inclusiveness All of these things now It's like they loom so large even in relation to six months ago. Yes The challenge is screaming at us. Well, the challenge is screaming at us But it also seems like the solutions are right there staring us in in the phase two You know, we all blithely talked about income inequality um And and now you see, you know, where covet goes, right and And it catches on in Um in the poorest corners of our society. It's just obvious Covet is teaching us this mindless virus is teaching us more lessons Than we could possibly have imagined um Yes And I remember alex at a time when we worked together The hideousness of torture We walked around with various people in the national security community people at west point People who were willing to give their lives For their country their sense of purpose their sense of honor and They were appalled Some of the people who helped us research for that movie they were appalled At this grotesque use of torture, which your film documented Because well at one level it was very tangible for them They knew if they were out in the world and we were doing that to soldiers on the other side It would it could be done to them. Yep But that that since there was something deeper though, I mean Which ultimately I found really potent and that was You know if you look at the Geneva conventions, you know, uh on the on the one hand, you know, you could Some people did for me. It's like well in a war, you know, what do you care about torture? I mean who gives us your you're killing people. So why should you care? um, but there's something quite potent about the idea that if you capture somebody Um, you're then Subject effectively to the golden rule You need to teach that you need to treat that person as if that person was you right and and that's A very powerful idea that there were rules That that sometimes there are conflicts that must be settled effectively by sanctioned murder war Um, but that when you get somebody under your total control You have a responsibility and an obligation to treat that person as if that person were you Wow, that's a powerful idea that I didn't expect to find when I started that film Um, but a lot of those soldiers, you know, really believed it and and I was I was always struck You know in the rollout for that film that how many soldiers um We're in we're engaged by it and thanked us for it um Because they felt that they were fighting for something important and that by being forced to become less than human um to succumb to forced drift and uh The worst angels of their nature You know that that, um It was not something that they wanted But but that they felt that they were being pushed in in that direction and sadly a direction that the human being is wired to Uh, ingest like a like a bad drug, you know hate is a powerful narcotic um And and so to to see that the military had this kind of expansive view Of humanity in the midst of war was was was really surprising me and of course there was the issue of discipline too But but but that one, you know, the golden rule idea Um as being the reason that you go torture was was pretty potent Well not to mention the fact that When a country Does not practice the golden rule and you're a soldier Who it's responsibilities to give up your life in defense of that country and its ideals correct It's awfully confusing very confusing and and and thus guantanamo. So you have you know Nothing could have been a more effective recruiting tool for for Nothing is still a more effective recruiting tool for terrorists all over the world than guantanamo You couldn't invent a better one If you tried even though that wasn't the intent of inventing guantanamo Um, but a rule, you know a place outside of the rule of law A country that is all about the rule of law invents a special location where the rule of law does not apply Wow And then you expect to be the the country that is the exemplar Yeah, well, I want to I want to jog your memory to a night When That film That powerful film and I will always tell people to go At the end credits and look at your father while he was still alive who had been involved in Interrogation but not forced interrogation I believe under general macArthur. Well, he was he was literally on okinawa during the battle of okinawa Now he was interrogating japanese prisoners. I still have the interrogation logs Wow, and his But he was also he's outraged. Yes His outrage which you captured on film shortly before the end of his life Was is is just spectacular But there's another there's another scene That lives forever in my mind Which is the person Who performed the forced interrogation under orders? I believe his name was damien corsetti. Yes And we had a the I remember we had a dinner downtown at one of drew new porn's restaurants And on the way to the theater He said I need to talk to you And when we got to the theater This this is a man who went to jail But By not practicing the golden rule under orders from his superiors It seemed to tear him apart psychologically and then he was scapegoated like a renegade bad apple right But he looked at me when we got into the theater Getting ready to sit down And he was going to sit not right next to me, but over a couple rows and he said If I can stand it Watching myself in this film I would like to get on stage with alex and the producers for the q&a Yep, I don't I just about melted down to watch this guy Profiled as both the perpetrator at the center and as a victim What you might call redeeming or cleansing himself By looking it in the eye Was a Tremendously powerful experience It was it was a hugely powerful experience Damien who's Who who had the word ill monstroso the monster tattooed on his chest And was used for his heft sometimes to sit on prisoners When was part of this brutal system that we had begun to employ all over was willing To see where he had been and what he had done And reckoned with the contradictions and the humanity and and then to stand there afterwards And and I remember you know a couple of people were like well And and the audience gave him a huge round of applause And and which discomforted some people but not me I mean, I I think we're you know, we're talking about teaching and learning And and one aspect of that is is a reckoning is and and a sense of redemption It's not excusing, but if you can go through That journey where you recognize what you have done And you Take account of it and you come out the other side And you have become changed that is a powerful idea. I mean we can't There's where I fear that some on the left, you know are too fond of scolding and not enough Enamored of the idea of of redemption Justice we need But redemption, you know, must be possible You know, if you really are learning, right? So yeah, I and That was a that that was very potent, you know, we we developed an interesting relationship with Damian I want to I want to interrupt you for a second I'm going to ask our listeners To rewind For about 75 seconds Because you were describing Damian But you were also describing the recipe For the united states of america right now What are we Responsible for redeeming For looking in the eye For correcting before we hand it off to our children And without that Same courage And unrelenting clarity that Damian demonstrated to us America won't get there That's right. I agree. I agree a hundred percent That there is light at the end of the tunnel But only If we examine In great detail Our responsibility for the darkness of that tunnel That's our only way out to the light And And that's our challenge That's our challenge. It seems like one that we can meet Yes, but alexa i'm uh I'm i'm I'm inclined right now To create a message for your grandson Or all your grandchildren What you do Is you find the dark tunnels And what you do is you shed light On the way to that light And that's a necessary part Of the journey Because if we skip Beyond The diagnosis of the true uncomfortable causes particularly in the face of like we talked about earlier in this conversation Of elite pressure and power We never have the reckoning That leads to redemption. That's right So your historic style And I know this from our friendly discussions over time It doesn't feel as satisfying as good news because we want The grandchildren to have good news. We do But it's only the guy That goes down into that mine with his camera and his light That illuminates the tunnel That can bring us through to the other end And that's what you do Dirty money Hard knocks One of the most amazing Episodes of how conscious Evasion of the rules Does tremendous damage And then is imitated And then government officials justified according to things like the balance of payments or plus And when you're Film underscores The level of tight toxic nitrous oxide in kindergartens in rural germany That Is the kind of courage and depth of examination which you have a gift for that is necessary To rooting things out right now That film was a real A real journey for me because it you know, I put my daughter in that film who has Exercise induced asthma undoubtedly from the from the Knox that she ingested in southern california when she was growing up and I remember her fainting literally at my feet in the midst of a Soccer game and we didn't understand that that her exercise induced asthma was so bad that that actually you know She was literally passing out But what was so interesting to me about what volkswagen did with their cheating scandal was that the expertise at the top and the germans after all were great engineers And particularly vw was a place that attracted all the world's best engineers So at the top the absence of a moral framework to get back to what we were talking about the was was Layed out to the employees as this We need to be number one in the world that is to say in terms of selling the most cars We don't care how we get there And the engineers internalize it. They come up with a cheating system that allows them to foil the american pollution of controls So that they can sell the perfect car, which was the one I bought But in the meantime, it's spewing unbelievable amounts of knocks into the atmosphere Literally killing people and you can codify how many people have died worldwide By an ox. So they're literally making money by killing people And then to in the middle of that film we discovered that that actually they Had designed a series of almost Hitlerian proportions where they were literally gassing They were they were proposing initially to gas people to to literally hook a human being on a bicycle up to A room that was connected to a tailpipe of a car And then when when they were advised that that would be a bad look They decided to get a bunch of monkeys and gas the monkeys And you realize the kind of what's that great phrase about economic actors aren't rational. They're rationalizers So in so in the midst of of this A mission which was to be number one they rationalize the most extreme And brutal behavior, which was literally to kill Monkeys and people In the service of of becoming number one And that was really a an eye-opener for me and it's not and and you begin to understand It's not like saying because good because people get defensive about these films and say I know people who work at Volkswagen They're very nice people You know that that's really not the point We're all nice people and we all have the capacity to do bad things too But it's the incentives that are put in place By a system and and the moral framework At the top, which if it's wrong Can lead to terrible fact-based Analysis of how to solve the wrong problem. So I hadn't thought of it until you brought it up But it seems like that that film seems like a pretty good metaphor for all that we've been talking about Well, I was just going to roll in with Watching the people like the public officials in las vegas the deputy governor in texas and others acting like We got to get rid of all of these quarantines and lockdowns Because we got a we can we can kill people we got to revive the economy and that dilemma between health And what you might call earnings in cash flow Is the intention right now and I see people What you might call unconvince By the notion of protecting people You know, I'm glad you brought that Up because that's something I've been thinking a lot about Because It's such an important thing to unpack the idea that okay, let's just lift The lockdown and let people die so that we can have an economy It's such a false dichotomy First of all the kind of economy that they're talking about is not the kind of economy that we want That is to say we can all agree that an economy is actually another way of saying the way that people survive So if you destroy the world economy, you're literally You know causing Enormous damage is it's not you can't blithely say that that an economy isn't important. It's how we eat But but the economy for these people is the economy where all the all the benefits rise at the top and You know if I was like I always think about you know if If you got an invitation to the trump household for thanksgiving it would be So you could watch while he eats the whole turkey and and and um the But You don't need to to say it has to be either health or the economy. It must be both Right, that's the teaching and learning moment. It must be both But in order to get back to a full economy south korea never shut down their economy They didn't have to because they were smart about it, right? and and if you if the federal government had been willing from the get go To engender um a production program that that ramped up massively on covid tests Uh ramped up massively on n95 masks Um to protect healthcare people Um, you know had a contact tracing program the selective quarantine program You can get back to them. You can get back to that moment of opening up that everybody wants, but you do it safely So I I find I'm troubled by that in a couple of ways because I I do find Now there's been this weird um It it almost became an unfortunate left right divide in my view Where the left is supposed to be saying no who cares about the economy It's the safety of people and the right is supposed to be saying who cares about the safety of people It's the economy. It's a false dichotomy You know the economy is important the safety of people are important They're both vital to to to to going forward But what kind of economy what kind of safety and and and what do we do to make them both happen? That's what we should be focusing on um and uh Because because I think you know there is a way forward and and all we have to do is look around the world Look what new zealand is doing look what australia is doing look what south korea is doing Look what germany is doing scandinavia has done a pretty good job out. You know sweden is controversial But um But it takes government leadership and and that's where scientific expertise devoid of political Bullshit You know it's hugely helpful where we're daily briefings aren't given by politicians They're given by scientists who are letting us know letting them know how they're doing Wow, you know the the the the current president of south korea is there because the last President failed so badly. I believe it was mers Um, and there was a political cost. I can only hope there'll be a political cost in in this instance But yeah, yeah That that I've been thinking about a lot that that kind of false dichotomy between the economy and safety It must be both and there's a way to have both But it entails A certain amount of hard work and some risk Uh, but not the kind of reckless risk that the governor of texas was proposing You know let the old people die. It was basically what he was saying. Yeah. Yeah well, I think uh I We should probably bring things to a close here, but I wanted to say alex For the young people that listen to this For the young people that are curious about visual media And about your great chain of success I want to underscore From knowing you for many years Some will call you a filmmaker But in this technocratic scientific Ritual You're actually a moral philosopher It's how you choose your questions It's how you shed light And it's how you explore And without that grounding In the poetry of your heart You wouldn't be what you've become I learned a tremendous amount from you And I from you always inspired by you And I'm I just want to thank you for being here today And I want you to promise me that as we turn the corner In whatever direction and we don't know yet But I'd like to I'd like to continue the conversation But I'm very very proud to be your friend Likewise right back at you All right, man. Thanks. Okay Rob many. Thanks Bye. Bye and check out more from the institute for new economic thinking at inet economics dot org Thank you