 I'm here again with Daniel Ellsberg, whistleblower, economist, game theorist, and the writer of Doomsday Machine. He worked with the RAND Corporation, and as many people know, was the person who warned us about the disingenuous nature of how the Vietnam War was being conducted. In this episode, we're going to focus on the implications of his book, The Doomsday Machine, and what kind of things we have to do as citizens, as people, to reform expertise, to bring the military industrial complex into line of service of humanity, and to reduce the dangers of a nuclear winter. And this is right at the cusp and the aftermath of a presidential election. Hopefully this guidance and the activism of those of you who are viewing this can help us set planet Earth and human civilization on a better course. Thanks for joining me, Daniel. I remember in 1922, H. L. Minkin wrote an article about the economics profession called the Dismal Science, and he said, I'm paraphrasing, the only people I trust less than theologians are economists. And he said, in part, because an economist can see when he does something what the consequences will be vis-a-vis power. So they are induced to be silent or to avoid issues where power can react to them. But to be truly contributing to the global public good as an expert and as someone who can bring to life trust and faith and guidance, you have to take those risks. You have to take on what you might call the contours of power and find the courage to provide those public goods. And you are a brilliant example of that, and I would want all of my people in the Young Scholars Initiative to explore our credo as we foment critical discourse. And I will ask you if there's ever anybody you've debated on the question of the doomsday scenario that's in your book who you thought had counterarguments that made you pause, or at least they were ethical, but going from a different place, not a corrupt or cowardly place. But I see what you're calling and asking the good part of humanity to rise to for its own sake, for its well-being. And that is, to me, a beacon that economics and other forms of social science and expertise are valuable when used appropriately, when used in a way that recognizes context and recognizes the pressures and recognizes what failure looks like in those silences. I want to read a poem to you, because you were talking about Greta Thurmberg, and my daughters, who at the time were seven and ten, did participate in that school strike. And shortly thereafter, two of my board members from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Drummond Pike and John Powell, were over for dinner. And they both know my children, and they were talking about climate. And my daughter went quiet at the dinner, went to bed. It's uncharacteristic. I drove over to school the next day, very quiet, withdrawn. And we've been talking about the haunting elements, like you're talking about two degrees, three degrees, and all of these things. And she's looking at these men who are experts. Drummond Pike founded the Tides Foundation. His friend and former chairman, John Powell, is an African American who runs the Othering and Belonging Institute at Berkeley. These men were scared. They scared her. And at school, she wrote a poem, which she sent to me. I had no premonition that this poem was going to cross our path today. But as I listened to you, I felt the healing that my daughter, Sarah, is asking for in this poem. What is everything by Sarah? What is everything? Is it all essence? Or is it all answers? Is there more? Why am I all covered up, not seeing past or present or future? Is it all an illusion? Why is it all collapsing, destroyed, all those lives not knowing? Will we ever know? Daniel, if more people in my young scholars initiative around the world follow you example, will we ever know, might be answered affirmatively, with that example, with that courage and with forcing power to face the dangers that are embedded in our political economic struggle that you have illuminated for us today. Any final thoughts? I asked you, who's your adversary that you most admire? And with your courage, you look at my young scholars in the eye and say, read him too and then come back and tell me whether I'm right. As always, Robert, you've raised a question that is, and I haven't heard before, and I've been interviewed a lot in the last 50 years. And it's a very interesting one, and I wish I had a better answer, a happier answer, because I wrote that book, Don't Stay Machine, primarily not to enlighten the public in general. That was a secondary motive for me. I hoped it would reveal to people who are in the arms control community, as we call themselves, experts on both sides, and that it would show them dimensions of the problem that they haven't been aware of. For example, the importance of the delusion, simple delusion that going first is in the world of nuclear winter, better, never the less, better than going second. That is absolutely the foundational pole of all of our expenditures and budgeting and our strategy and everything else, and it is a delusion like the Earth is flat. It's like that, and I hope that that's never been discussed. First of all, very few of them really know the war plans and that the fact that they are oriented to that point of achieving going first rather than second. But some are increasingly, a lot of people in the field have been exposed to civilians to war plans in a way that I was one of the only ones 50 years ago. So they do know to a large extent. So I hoped to have a dialogue with them and hoped that this book might, let's discuss it, almost zero. It just hasn't happened. As one of them told me, people who are in the subject field, we know what Dan Ellsberg thinks. I've talked a lot about this for a while, but there's a lot in that book that I've never gone into because you don't do it in a one-hour lecture. Anyway, they don't read it. The people in the field, I don't have the impression, have read it. The responses I get, the feedback are from laypersons in this field like yourself. I might say you had courses in it, if you hadn't pursued it. So it's been very disappointing in that respect. It hasn't led me into the arguments that I would have liked to have. And I haven't been exposed to these people because someone with a clearance won't be in the same room with me, essentially. I think if they were to treat me in a respectful, dignified way or something, it would raise questions about whether it was all right, what I'd done to put out top secrets to the public, and that would threaten their clearance. And so, in other words, take my Rand colleagues, I lost all of my friends in the defense department of the Rand Corporation. They all had clearances and they could not afford to have any relations. And essentially, they never came back with one or two. So, in short, to that answer, I have to say, a cost of being a whistleblower is the loss of your relationships with the people who knew what you knew, knew that it was bad, but did not decide to speak out about it. And even knowing you then will threaten their own access to jobs. So the costs of telling the truth are very significant truths that your bosses don't want told and that threaten your job. And they are significant. And now the question your daughter raised, if I may say, what's the chance that that truth, if made aware, if other people are made aware of it, will lead to change? And the answer is in several stages here, much less than one might hope, definitely less than you hope, less than you might expect. The chances are not large. The systems you're looking at benefit people in power who have the power to keep them the way they are, however dangerous. And they and they use the power that way. And they use it against people who will tell the truth. So the chances, as Greta Thunberg says, she doesn't have anything yet to show. I think one of her strengths is her Asperger's, as she says, she's an Aspie, which keeps her focused and keeps her eye on the ball obsessive, you might say, and not distracted by the fact that people thrust honors at her in the absence of any actual change, which is what she's trying to do. So the chance of actually getting the change is not large. But it's not zero. It is not impossible to change this. In part, we just don't know enough to say in social matters, in matters involving human beings and society, we don't know enough to say what's possible or impossible and have confidence. We do make that judgment all the time and have to. But to have confidence and reliable that this can't be done or that the doom is inevitable, I don't think it is inevitable. It can't be proved that we can't change this. It's not likely, but it's small. It's small, but it's possible. In my own case demonstrates that the Pentagon papers themselves when revealed to the public changed their minds, but their minds weren't determining the course of the war. They didn't change Nixon's mind and the war kept on. The war kept on. That's what I was concerned about. But Nixon's concern that I would tell truths about his own policy, the Pentagon papers ended before he came into office. He feared very reasonably I had documents to prove it, which would have made a difference. I didn't, unfortunately, but it was very reasonable of him to think I did because some other people who had those documents could have given them to me. I knew them. They left the government in protest against the expansion into Cambodia, the Cambodian war, so they could have given me the documents if they'd taken them with them or they could have made them public. But as one of them, Roger Moore's, an aide to Henry Kissinger, told me later, we should have thrown open the safes and screamed bloody murder because that's exactly what it was. But his greatest regret and shame in life, he said, was that he had not done that. OK, what if he had the chance of making a difference was not large, but not true? And in fact, Nixon was so afraid reasonably, not paranoid, that I would confront, challenge his strategy of threatening nuclear weapons and expanding the war and could prove it that he took criminal actions against me, which amazingly were discovered. The Watergate people were caught, they testified eventually. Not only was my trial ended, but much more significantly, he was charged with the crimes against me and his impeachment hearings, which led to his resignation and that made ending the war possible. Because by that time, he was the one keeping the war going because he'd started in foolish beliefs that he could win it and then couldn't quit because that would admit that he'd been wrong and had led to the deaths of many lives. He had to be removed non violently. And he was amazingly no one, no president had ever resigned before. I and my wife, who were helping me on this, working in others who were were one link in a chain of events, each one of which was necessary. Had they not occurred, my link in the previous links would have had no effect. But if Alexander Butterfield had not chosen to reveal from sitting inside Nixon's office that he had a taping system that could document his lies, the war would have continued. Nixon would have stated, if other people had not refused to fire the special prosecutor in what was called the Saturday Night Massacre, two people resigned rather than fire the special prosecutor. That caused enough public attention that they had to get another special prosecutor after all. So all these things were necessary. There was a chain of events. Each one was unusual because it involved some personal risk for the person of their career. And with that chain, it actually it did shorten the war, couldn't have been predicted, it was extremely unlikely, but actually it did do that. And there's other examples we could give, miracles happening. Gorbachev and the downing of the Berlin Wall. I think someone below the age of 50, I don't think they can imagine what it meant to see on television the Berlin Wall being breached. That was like landing on the moon, seeing that just was impossible. We knew we'd been trying to put a man on the moon for 10 years at that point. So finally it happened. The Berlin Wall, that was forever. Here it was, people were hacking away and it was coming down. And a lot of people like my son were marched in front of the television. Their parents told them, imprint this on your memory. You're seeing something astonishing. And then Nelson Mandela becoming head of South Africa, having been imprisoned for what, more than 20 years, becoming a head of it, nonviolent without a violent revolution, a miracle, impossible. I'm saying not unlikely, it was impossible. So these were events and now the nuclear winter is very far from impossible. And you could say it's unlikely in any particular year, but it's possible. That's a possibility we could eliminate, actually. It would mean getting rid of a lot of missiles, not all of them, actually, but 95 percent. And so is that impossible? Well, doing it politically could be regarded. There are people who say, no, not worth it trying. Not going to happen. And the odds are with them, but it is possible. And it will take people who think in ways that they haven't been taught to think in ways which will raise questions about their credibility, their reliability, their readiness for promotion. And raise those questions or maybe just really risk their marriages, their careers, their access would not. These risks can be taken. That's what's called moral courage, but it requires risk of ostracism. And it turns out that's much more rare and difficult for a human than risking their life much more. And people who will risk their lives in combat do not risk their their jobs or their ostracism, they do not risk angering their superiors. That's humanity. But we do have the capability for seeing the truth and for passing it on. And I won't even go into it now, Robert, but it's I've been interviewed a thousand times or more, really, in 50 years. And I haven't had occasion to and no reason but to compliment my interviewer in the way that I am feeling for you, having just spoken to you for a couple of hours, but you've sent me material to read by you. And I'm just struck by it entirely. In fact, the idea of new economic thinking. Well, I wouldn't have had as a former economist in that subject. I wasn't very hopeful about new economic thinking. I thought of that profession is pretty far gone. Thank you. And simply an ideology to argue against government regulation or any kind of nationalization government programs, actually, on the economy. I think economics to a very large extent was has been for, you know, since Adam Smith and others saying the government keep your hands off our profits. And, you know, corporations, basically. Anyway, yes, you are looking in ways now that give me real hope for the profession. In fact, and you now tell me, you know, you are encouraging, inspiring other people to be the same and not only to look in new ways, but I can tell you ways that I personally find very promising for my own past work, which I'd given up economists moving in that direction. Because it's a kind of critical thinking that just was not to be encouraged by the by people who fund professorships. And and and hire people to the Council of Economic Advisor. So. Good luck. Thank you. I really wish you best. Well, I will say, first of all, as I said at the outset, we will make another session together about the various dimensions of economics and your dissertation, which I just I just ordered. It hasn't been delivered yet. But I will be reading that, talking about ambiguity, talking about contexts and environments where you can't probabilistically determine. And it's on level. I think your awareness there helps you to go inward to do what is right and create self-affirming prophecies and change the probabilities that are not quantifiable to change the truth. I don't think that I never felt that my focus on decision making under uncertainty, which was my academic work, I really informed very much what I learned in the in the government and afterwards and led me to take the actions that I did. I'm just saying I experienced miraculous surprises, some of which were not so happy, you know, disasters, experience, experienced disasters that were not foreseen as you're looking at it. And the question are my previous understanding and that of my colleagues. So it's a reality. That's a reality where I find people that you are criticizing, ignoring it. It's how could they do that? But as I say, I've seen what humans can do and good and bad and the bad is really bad. Yes, yes. Well, I want to close with a couple of things. One is I want to encourage people to read the doomsday machine. And one of the most beautiful passages in the spirit of the apple doesn't fall far from the tree was when you revealed that your father had resigned as an engineer from a company because he didn't want to contribute to the nuclear buildup, which was it was a marvelous thing. I think it surprised you at the time to learn that, but it was just it was a beautiful window into what you might call some of your essence. Secondly, as I mentioned at the outset, you and I have both encountered Detroit and as I was listening to you during this session, I often get insights from musical lyrics and a protege of Stevie Wonder, who was from Detroit, is a woman named Andra Day. And her song is the favorite song of my younger daughter, Dylan. And it's called Rise Up. The lyric of the chorus is and I'll rise up. I'll rise like the day. I'll rise up. I'll rise unafraid. I'll rise up and I'll do it a thousand times again. I'll rise up, highlight the waves. I'll rise up in spite of the ache. I'll rise up and I'll do it a thousand times again for you, for you, for you. There you go. That's what you do for us, for us, for us. Thank you. And I look forward to our next conversation. Thank you, Robert. Bye-bye.