Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Jack Hopkins Show podcast, where stories about the power of focus and resilience are revealed by the people who live those stories and now the host of the Jack Hopkins Show podcast, jack Hopkins.

Speaker 2: 0:19

Hello and welcome to the Jack Hopkins Show podcast. I'm your host, jack Hopkins, and welcome to the Jack Hopkins Show podcast. I'm your host, jack Hopkins. Today I am excited and I do mean excited to have Dr Matthew Pate as my guest. He's an internationally known criminologist, editorialist and author of three books on crime and world affairs. His studies of punishment, race and policing have appeared in dozens of academic and world affairs. His studies of punishment, race and policing have appeared in dozens of academic and popular publications. He has taught for 15 years in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Albany, where he also received his doctoral degree.

Speaker 2: 0:59

Dr Pate had a 25-year career in law enforcement, where he served as a detective in vice intelligence, in narcotics and as a SWAT operator, and also serving as an instructor. Pate has a forthcoming series of editorials and essays available starting next week, actually linked on Blue Sky and available on Mediumcom on Blue Sky and available on mediumcom. So, without further ado, let's get right in to this episode with Dr Matthew Pate. All right, so, dr Pate, I've got.

Speaker 2: 1:35

Look, when I have somebody on the show that has as much knowledge as you do on the topics that we're going to be talking about, my mind just spins with an endless list of questions, because a lot of times and this is the case today I'll have somebody on the show and when I look at what we're going to be talking about, I get excited because I realize I'm about to learn a good deal about this topic and I didn't even know prior to that how badly I needed to learn some new information, right? So let's talk about this in general and I'll let you kind of boil things down. What kind of challenges do we face when we get into an escalating situation of the top 1%, the billionaire elite, controlling more and more of what's going on, and of course, that includes the corporations, the corporate world? What happens to country under those circumstances?

Speaker 3: 2:50

A lot of things and you know we'll go through it. There is a persistent and strong connection between the hyper concentration of wealth and nation or state fragility, which is to say, as a nation's wealth becomes concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. No-transcript, and you know if we need a course correction, however defined, you know, to at least start talking about that.

Speaker 2: 4:07

Right, you mentioned state fragility and that's, admittedly, that's a term I'm I'm not familiar with. I've not really heard that used in conversation.

Speaker 3: 4:18

Uh, yeah, in in academic circles, you, you hear uh that a lot, and and it is kind of a controversial term because some people think it implies judgment, but in the purest academic sense it's really just a measure of stability or success. And I think to understand this first we need to talk about what a state is or what a country is. Now everybody has kind of an intuitive notion of oh yeah, that's what a state is or what a country is. Now everybody has kind of an intuitive, you know notion of oh yeah, that's, you know that's what a country is. But just kind of tick through a list of things.

Speaker 3: 4:55

Most nations have kind of a collective, political or shared, you know, social identity, social identity. Most nations have a kind of a we, the people, if you will sort of orientation about the collective it has. Nations or states have defined territory. They have a discernible government and hopefully a government that enacts a system of laws that regulate things about the society. And also you would expect infrastructural things, communication, transportation, utilities, even hospitals, things like that, and also participation in the international community, recognition by the international community and, lastly, nations typically have, and at various levels, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and the way to understand. That is, the nation isn't just governed by a series of warlords, but there is sort of one top-down say like a criminal justice system that can impose sanctions, and so that's what a state is, and so fragility by extension kind of asks well, what should a state do?

Speaker 3: 6:36

You know, what do you want out of your country? And a lot of different researchers have taken a stab at defining that, and one index that I like is called the Fragile States Index, put out by the Fund for Peace, and what they have are I believe it's 12 indicators, broad areas of social function, social function, and 180 countries are rated and ranked with regard to their relative fragility or stability, and some of these things we've already talked about. You know stuff like you know is there a discernible government? Is there a stable bureaucracy? Right, what do individual freedoms look like? Press protections, does the state have a monopoly on violence? But then it too can be subtle things like nepotism and corruption within government, susceptibility to external influence, penetrability of the national borders, plans for succession, and then you get into things that are resilience measures, like what if there was a famine or a natural disaster? You know how resilient is the nation in responding to things like that?

Speaker 2: 8:10

So when you talk about fragility and I think I have a fairly decent understanding now of what you mean when you say fragility when we look at our nation as a whole and I suppose this extends to the world as a whole as well, but we'll focus on the United States what does that impact? What does the given fragility of the state impact?

Speaker 3: 8:36

in terms of our lives. What's the Tolstoy quote about? All happy families are happy in the same way, but you know unhappy families are all different.

Speaker 3: 8:50

You know much damage to Tolstoy, but really that's the truth when talking about fragile states, because that can manifest in so many different ways. But you can talk about loss of territorial control or monopoly on violence, erosion of the legitimacy of the government to make collective decisions, the legitimacy of a government or a regime, inability to provide reasonable public services, and that gets into things like in your major cities is there dependable potable water and electricity? Are there hospitals? What does the road system look like? And then, lastly, it's just an ability or relative inability to interact meaningfully with the international community. Okay, and we can get down to a little granular level how that manifests in the US and other places.

Speaker 2: 10:13

Yeah, it occurs to me that any time, whether it be after a war, when the US or even a natural disaster you mentioned infrastructure and its importance, and I think we have a tendency to. We hear it so often and we take what infrastructure provides us for granted that we fail to remember just how central and critical it is. So when the United States goes in someplace again after a war or natural disaster, the thing you always hear first is that we're going in to set up and restore infrastructure.

Speaker 3: 10:58

So can you speak a bit more on how critical infrastructure is, in this context, a very simple example in the United States there's been vast flooding in the east. Well, the National Guard and other responders went to those areas via the interstate highway system. You know that is a critical piece of infrastructure. Or the fact that we had standing bodies of people who had prepared job descriptions and equipment suitable to address various aspects of those situations, address various aspects of those situations that we had a discernible kind of playlist of. These are the things that we need to do to get this area stable, get the people the help that they need and get them on the road to recovery, and a large part of humanity doesn't have anything that looks remotely like that.

Speaker 2: 12:14

Right, yeah, I've been to and lived temporarily in areas that didn't have this kind of infrastructure and in some of those areas I mean, you dare say it's primitive.

Speaker 3: 12:32

You really wonder how these people can eke out this meager existence that they seem to be able to do. That they seem to be able to do is, you know, a real testament to the human spirit that these people exist, in many instances because they are, if not largely forsaken by their political leaders, by the world writ large and so yeah, we are very lucky to have the things that we do, even if they are imperfect.

Speaker 3: 13:35

Sure. And, that being said, do you have any idea where, how well we operate along a number of continuum? And we can look back at the Fund for Peace's failed state index, failed state index and, as I say, they rate and rank 180 countries Just to give you an idea, in 2023, norway was the least fragile or most stable country and Somalia was the most fragile, and that, probably, you know, accords with sort of an intuitive understanding of what those places are like. You know, no surprise.

Speaker 3: 14:14

The countries of Western Europe and Scandinavia tend to be among the most stable. The MENA countries, sub-saharan Africa and in the Middle East tend to be among the least stable. You know Syria, afghanistan, haiti, myanmar, venezuela more fragile. So the US? We want to know where we are there. We're at number 39. Between Poland and Barbados, the UK is about six positions ahead of us. Canada is number eight, so in the top ten, and Mexico is about the middle of the ranking at 85.

Speaker 2: 15:08

Okay In terms of and I'm sure there are many things, but just on the surface, what's something that separates Canada and the United States in that 39th to 80th you?

Speaker 3: 15:21

know there will be differences in virtually all of the measures, but I would say that press freedoms, the penetrability of the political system from lobbying and outside interests you know I could talk for a long time about the damage of Citizens United, things like that, but then we could talk about press freedoms and, you know, consolidation of markets and things that we probably should talk about. To understand that, and often differences may not be visually apparent you know you go to Toronto or you go to Vancouver and it may look different, but OK, seattle. Or you know San Francisco. Or you know, ok, I'm in a major, you know a major city that seems to function in a fairly similar way. You know, in either place, you know yeah.

Speaker 2: 16:38

So and this next one understandably, it's going to be a touchy topic for several I don't know how many, of course, but I can only imagine that there are going to be some listeners, some viewers that are going to feel a little on edge about this question. But I'm going to ask it because I think it's relevant and I want to get an idea of how much significance it has. And here's the question when we talk about state fragility, the thing that comes to mind for me is I see, one factor that contributes heavily to that is cooperation and cohesion within that nation-state. Is that a pretty good or?

Speaker 3: 17:31

a fair assessment of that. Yeah, I think the degree to which there is a continuation of government and even if there are political divisions, strong political divisions if the bureaucracy is not deeply threatened by those divisions, then there's a relative stability that exists. To be a little glib, you might have just an absolute loony at the top of the control pyramid, but if the people that make sure your Social Security check still goes out and the mail runs and planes don't fall out of the sky and food doesn't have poison in it, if they're still in place and functioning, then there's some latitude at the top and that's really kind of the core, you know, of stability and in time, poor leadership of course has corrosive influences.

Speaker 2: 18:56

Poor leadership of course has corrosive influences, but we have a certain well again resilience to poor leadership that a lot of places wouldn't Right. So now this leads me to the real core of the question, and I want to preface this by saying I'm somebody who and I think I live in a way that demonstrates this, rather than this just being words I have a full understanding of the beauty and the contributions that come through diversity right and the contributions that come through diversity right. I understand how our freedoms and that fit together and know that that's one reason so many people want to come here because of the system that we have. My question is is there a cost that comes with that in terms of state fragility? And again, let me clarify why I am asking Because, in my mind, when you bring such a diverse yet incredibly polar opposite on some religions together, that that cohesion and cooperation factor I, in my mind, is is going to drop, and so that's that's the basis of my question. Do we well? Is there, um, is there a trade-off?

Speaker 3: 20:20

certainly there can be, but I don't think there's an inherent tradeoff and actually I believe it's a great sign of internal strength and the enemy and in fact feed on a culture of opposition where the narrative is they don't believe like we do, so they can't fully be American. They don't look like we do exactly, so they can't fully be American. They bring customs to the US that don't look like Norman Rockwell, so maybe they can't be.

Speaker 3: 21:11

And so that serves their identity politics by trying to create a limited vision of what America ought to be, what America ought to believe and who we ought to include, and it also makes convenient but erroneous villains.

Speaker 2: 21:35

It makes it easy to take your eye off the real problem and the real uh interests that uh are manipulating and uh to use kind of a strong word and uh or perhaps influencing and threatening your interests and interesting and, and, dr pate, that takes me back to something you said earlier and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was when you were talking about how you define a state, and, if I'm not mistaken, the very beginning of that is defining what you want it to accomplish, or the outcome. If we bring that mindset and philosophy into my my question, a lot of the answer to my question then I think, as you're pointing out, comes down to how we are defining, uh, what we want. It is fair to say that the definition is changing, and so a lot of the resistance that we are getting, particularly from the far right, uh is is they don't like the idea that the definition is changing. So, in terms of of the new definition, uh, it it shows strength. They only think it shows weakness because they're holding on to the old definition.

Speaker 3: 23:07

How much of that makes any sense to you. You know, when you vilify people who largely cannot defend themselves, particularly as marginalized or stereotyped groups, they make a good target because they are by definition kind of silenced. But it really retards the strength of what I think is best about America. You know, we, the people, I think is best about America. You know, we, the people, and we is a really broad term and it has from our very beginnings, even in the colonial era, been a very inclusive, even if awkwardly so, enterprise and it becomes sort of a throwaway point, but it's very central to our identity.

Speaker 3: 24:20

The strength is in the diversity of ideas. You know, that's really the richness of the American experience and you know if you want to social engineer, you know a narrow band of that. You know that's fine but that goes against the core of the American spirit.

Speaker 2: 24:47

Yes, I'm thrilled with your answer to that question because in my mind and I didn't want to state this until I let you speak on where you stood in my mind as it applies to diversity and the fragility of the state, for any trade-off there might be, it's clearly overshadowed by the benefit of the strength that is created from that diversity.

Speaker 3: 25:19

Yeah, I mean we could look at this from kind of a systems perspective, if you want to, systems that are incredibly regular. You know, without perturbance don't grow, they just sort of spin. But it's those, those little perturbances, it's the, it's the addition of the um. Uh, you know, new ideas, the new cultures, the new um perspectives that challenge that, you know, uninterrupted spin, that make us ask is this who we want to be? You know, and, uh, right, you know, it's. It allows the american system to learn and become better than it had been. Uh, by virtue of new ideas that are not inherently challenging or critical of what some people take to be the status quo or some imagined historical idea.

Speaker 2: 26:32

Yes, you know, I don't know if you knew this or not. I'm a former Republican. I left the party 2018 issue.

Speaker 2: 26:44

It was in the first Trump administration and having been a Republican and grown up and lived in rural America, I know very well the lens that people who are Republican now or or even a notch higher MAGA Republican now or even a notch higher MAGA I know the lens has a lot to do with fear. What they see gets interpreted or filtered through that fear lens which really twists it and shapes it. My question is this the far right and in some situations I guess you could just say the right period they think of these changes as something that comes as the result of leadership on the left or Democrats manipulating these changes, creating these changes, sitting down in a board meeting, so to speak, and saying okay, here are some changes we're going to implement in terms of how the country thinks. From my way of thinking, leadership simply responds to the way systems are changing on their own. How far off am I on that? Rather than being the creator, they're working with what changes the shifting?

Speaker 3: 28:15

system, I would say that it is reciprocal.

Speaker 3: 28:24

New inputs require new responses and those come in different sizes and proportionality, and you mentioned, say, for instance, corporate responses, new markets, different markets, different products, different ideas that go along with the change of society or the evolution of society.

Speaker 3: 29:00

And you know, as you say, the right has suggested some things that I think are inherently unhealthy, which is and you talked about fear, and you know fear of a critically thinking population is chief among them, population is a chief among them, and I'm not talking about critical race theory or critical theory period, but but the uh right intellectual ability to discern and logically, uh, you know, and rightfully uh, construct arguments, deconstruct arguments. You know that kind of faculty, because people who can do that are less easily led, and so that transmutes into this fear of science, fear of this imagined intellectual elite. Now, I was having a conversation a few months ago with someone who I know to be a very smart and very professionally accomplished person and well-educated, and they were talking to me about being a professor and they very frankly and sincerely asked well, don't you tell your students what to think? Think, you know, believe me, if I had that power over humans, teaching criminal justice classes, is not where I'd throw that lot, and so that gets into disbelieving science.

Speaker 3: 30:43

Disbelieving evidence and positioning science. Disbelieving evidence and positioning science. Positioning rationality, positioning diversity as diametrically opposed to this political identity that they've constructed. That's more about fear and obedience than any kind of robust civic participation.

Speaker 2: 31:14

Yes, you know it's interesting that you talk about the question that you were asked about being a professor. I don't think I saw this or experienced this as much on my undergrad, but with my graduate degree I often encountered a professor who had a different frame of reference than I did and to varying degrees it leaked into their teaching. But here's what I got out of that. It made me a better student, and I'll tell you why I think that Because if I wanted to be actively involved, they were offering me opportunity after opportunity to ask more questions. And you know what happened. They're not on every question that I asked, but on some.

Speaker 2: 32:08

When they provided me with more context and background information on it, I found my former position had really been in error. It was not bolstered with the kind of evidence and examples that there was. So while a lot of people frown on that when it occurs and think, oh my God, it's terrible, they're only teaching people what to think if those people are half dead and barely there in class and they're not engaging with the topic. That's kind of my opinion on that. An engaged person with the ability to think critically is not going to walk out of there having been bringing yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3: 32:56

We're not turning out Marxists.

Speaker 1: 32:58

Brainwash.

Speaker 3: 32:59

Well, at least not as often as we usually do.

Speaker 1: 33:05

Right, but being facetious there.

Speaker 3: 33:09

No, if I could inculcate some great body of knowledge, it would be in grammar, syntax, usage, spelling, things like that. But to get to your point, I am often, in those challenging questions from students, forced to defend, reconcile and maybe alter my beliefs because they have found you know well what about this and you know, okay, all right, now I have to think about how that fits into what I thought was supported by the evidence. And you know, that's good, Absolutely.

Speaker 3: 34:00

And I think that most often happens in graduate school. And I think that most often happens in graduate school, but I've had undergrads that you know, ask tough questions and, you know, made the ride home difficult.

Speaker 2: 34:15

Well, yes, and it's interesting that you say that as well, because I used to provide trainings mostly for corporations out on mostly on the East Coast as well, although I did hit some other states, but I was dealing with audiences of some pretty sharp people, right, and I don't hesitate to say all in terms of overall IQ. There were many times when I found myself at the front of the room in front of people who undoubtedly had higher IQs than I did. I knew more about this one sliver of life than they did, but even so, they would ask me questions that oftentimes I didn't have the answer for. But you know what happened? That ensured that the next group I did a training for was going to get an even better training, because now I've got the answer.

Speaker 3: 35:18

Or at least you're prepared for the question in a way that you weren't Right.

Speaker 2: 35:26

I knew what to research.

Speaker 3: 35:28

I have classes that I've taught for a decade and the class that you know and and what I'll teach this spring may not look very much like what I taught you know four or five years ago, because I've learned, you know, new information has adjoined what I thought I knew about it and, through the input of students, made me change my game, and I like that. I don't like going into it assuming that I'm just this sage on a stage, font of wisdom, and you will chisel into your tablets each syllable in violence. Yeah, the other thing is the willingness to say I don't know, I never thought about that.

Speaker 1: 36:28

Sure, absolutely. Let me get back to you.

Speaker 2: 36:31

Right, that was always my stock. Answer to that is you know what? I don't know, but I'm going to find out. And then, usually from that person, if it was a situation that I knew was going to take some research, I'd get their email address or something and once I I'd promise them you know what, when, when I've got that answer, I'm going to send it to you because I think that's, that's an important question, and and and that that takes a lot of the. Uh, you know a lot of the. You know a lot of times, as I'm sure you've experienced as a professor, not all questions are asked with the intent of actually learning.

Speaker 2: 37:13

Some of them are asked just to kind of put you on the spot and embarrass you. When I experienced somebody asking a tough question and I humbly just said you know, I don't know, but that is a good question, I'll get back with you it kind of brought the temperature down in the rest of the room because they realized being asked a question that I didn't know the answer to wasn't going to be humiliating to me. I was going to find it interesting. So it's interesting how the dynamics of that work.

Speaker 3: 37:52

I think if you'd like to see where most of the world's pedantic, mean-spirited gotcha questions come from, go to an academic conference.

Speaker 2: 38:07

Right, go to an academic conference. I had a little delay there, but it caught up to me. No, that's great.

Speaker 3: 38:17

Yeah, it's pretty obvious. When a question isn't asked in good faith and if you give an answer, that is disarming, that gives you the space to move on.

Speaker 2: 38:35

Right, oh, without question. So let's look at then, when we've got the hyperconcentration, yeah, and, and state fragility, let's go into, okay, yeah, yeah, more of that.

Speaker 3: 38:50

let's circle back to some of that a little deep and and, uh, you know, sort of our starting thesis was that when wealth becomes too concentrated in a society, uh, it can be unhealthy for that society, it can induce fragility, and I think that that comes from three kind of discernible spheres. One we could talk about is the consolidation of production, and you know, capitalists like to talk about the free market economy and competition, but the reality is that the choices you have today between truly competitive companies are becoming more limited, greatly reduced almost by the day in terms of the things that you and your family buy on a regular basis just to live and survive. You have mergers, buyouts, bankruptcies that have fully changed the face of global commerce. The global food supply industry I guess you could call it or global food industry is a great example. Four companies control almost half of the global commercial seed supply. Four companies control, I think it's a little over 40% of the global agricultural equipment market. Uh, just can, uh, rather leviathan companies, uh, control most of the retail, wholesale, retail end of food delivery. Uh, and and I'm thinking about, like Nestle, pepsico, unilever, dan and General Mills, kellogg's, mars, you're talking about 80 plus percent of the global food supply filters through their footprint structure.

Speaker 3: 41:01

But then you can look in other areas like semiconductors. But then you can look in other areas like semiconductors. 20 years ago there were 25 large semiconductor manufacturers in the world. Today there are three. Healthcare that's another area that we could talk about. That has just been transformed by consolidation and mergers. There have been, you know something, over 2,000 mergers, say, about 41 million more people than there were in 2000 in the US. We have 2,000 fewer hospitals, you know. And so that you know tells you something about service delivery models and the profit you know mode and yeah, and to be clear, businesses are, you know, you know corporations are in business to make money and make money for their shop call. So that's, you know. There's no inherent evil there.

Speaker 2: 42:18

It's just the parameters under which we allow that happen, that, um, where that might induce fragility or not be optimal for, uh, the well-being of society yes, when I was growing up for let's, obviously this span covers more than just my growing up years, but for, let me put it this way, for a period of 50 years of of my life there was a local hospital in this little rural town that I'm from. All of the doctors in town had their own little offices somewhere else in town, right, and everybody chose their doctor. Now those doctors would for most things Right. Then, along about that 50th year, a corporate entity came in, bought that hospital, tore it down and built a larger, nicer hospital. Everybody was excited oh my gosh, look at this nice facility, look at this. But here's what happened Within the first six years that hospital eliminated, deleted their OB department. Because the corporate entity looked at numbers differently than the local hospital said look, we have pregnant women who come here, so we have to have an OB department.

Speaker 2: 44:09

The corporate entity said we don't have enough pregnant women who come here, so we don't need an OB department. So just that little slice of rural America. And I could tell you other changes that have happened as the result. But if I go back and look at losing that little rinky-dink hometown hospital and the setup we had, I'm not sure I can say we've advanced because we have a nicer, newer facility, because we've lost some of what we had before. Yeah, there is this kind of organic existence.

Speaker 3: 44:43

When you had, you know that small town hospitals, maybe that hospital couldn't afford some of the equipment and some of the specialized staff that the newer hospital provided? Sure, but there's inherently some tradeoffs, and the OB department was one where people who get to decide that kind of thing decided well, there's just not enough of a market. Well-being and health as a marketplace and not a human right, you know that should be available to everyone, not based on income bracket, but by virtue of existence. Now, of course, that's my bias, right there you know my plug for universal health care.

Speaker 3: 45:44

Of course that's my bias right there, my plug for universal health care.

Speaker 2: 45:54

But 32 of the 33 most developed countries in the world seem to make it work Absolutely. When I was 21 years old I mean literally the day I was waiting on my license to come in the mail when I turned 21, I sold health insurance for a couple of years and at that time they had just. This was 1986, they had just introduced, like long-term health care, nursing home. Essentially, you know that you could get, so that was a hot right in Medicare supplements were the big two.

Speaker 2: 46:31

Now, one day and this was back in the we would purchase leads from the company. I don't know, I think they were a buck, a piece or something for each territory, we would go to buck a piece or something for each, each territory, we would go to and we literally would go door to door with these leads knocking right.

Speaker 2: 46:51

and one afternoon I ran into this I suppose she was pretty close to to 80 and she was out working in her garden and, uh, I started chatting with her and I ran into something I'd never heard of at that point in time. I think I would say maybe she was from Poland. At any rate, where she had come from, they had universal health care and she introduced this concept to me as part of her spite for what I was there for and it was unthinkable to me. It was like are you kidding me? The fact that you exist and live there, you can just go to the doctor. And wow, I thought, what are we doing? You know well, I guess at that time I was an example of what we were doing. Right, I was an agent for an insurance company who was profiting on the concept that we're not providing universal health care and there were multiple layers above that that were making money.

Speaker 2: 48:10

Is that, in the end, is that what it's all about, or is there? Is there another aspect and benefit To the corporate narrowing of things down? I know power and money, but is there anything else?

Speaker 3: 48:30

If I understand. You know, consolidation of services, yeah, okay, perhaps there is a discernible benefit just depending upon the industry that you're talking about. But I think any time you look at a person's well-being and you consider it in terms of a market interest, you have gone down, in my opinion, a fundamentally unethical road that's contrary to most of the things that we say, we believe as Americans. You know in those things that we, the freedoms that we cherish the most, you know taking care of one another in a robust sense that you know. How is that not prioritized?

Speaker 2: 49:30

Right, that's a great point in terms of the conflict there that you pointed out. I grew up in, I guess, what you would call a Christian family. My parents were not. They weren't over the top, I mean. They just they essentially just went to church on Sunday, right, but religion wasn't discussed at any other time. They just went to church. But I probably although at the time I had no idea that such a term even existed or what it would be called but I probably, as a young teenager, 12, 13, maybe- in my mind became agnostic, that nobody could answer, and I thought that for something to be taken seriously, at least some of those questions should be able to be answered.

Speaker 2: 50:34

So that was kind of my thing, but I bring that up for this reason. It's something else to watch Republicans playing so tightly to religion, and particularly the evangelicals, and yet the moment they step out of that context and I use context intentionally because I think for them it is a context, it's not something they apply to the entirety of their life. And and I think I'm confident in saying that because when I watch what they do and how they live, they do not live in accordance to the beliefs they claim to to. To place such importance on how does that fit into state fragility?

Speaker 3: 51:29

Well, you know, just to pick at a number of things in there, the conflation of Christian identity with Republican politics is largely an invention of the late 70s, early 80s, with the rise of people like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan, where religion, frankly, could be commoditized and used to foster, create a dependable voting bloc.

Speaker 3: 52:14

And that is in no way to disparage people's sincerely held beliefs and their right to hold them. But when it folds into the political sphere, you know, there becomes an area where you know which is which and which is driving which, and so I think we really have to be careful there. And so I think we really have to be careful there. And, as you have indicated, there seems to be a disconnect between many leaders on the right in terms of their personal lives and decisions and sometimes personal public personas and what you might want if you were a conservative Christian. And how they reconcile that, you know, is through things like Supreme Court appointments and Supreme Court decisions that they feel match their identity politics. Yeah, so there's that? And I don't think that there is. I don't think it would be good for society to not have interfaith discussion and not to have some disagreement, because, just as we were talking about in education. If I have to defend what I believe, then hopefully I grow stronger in what I believe.

Speaker 2: 54:23

You bet, you bet, and I think to your point again. Just coming back religions, the one thing in common that I think could be useful to society is that all of them acknowledge some kind of higher power. Right, they may not agree on what that higher power is or how you go about serving that higher power, or if you even should go about serving that higher power, but I think, as you kind of alluded to, I think maybe it kind of brings people together in that way, in that at least unconsciously, they go okay. Well, this is somebody that at least acknowledges the possibility of a higher power. I can tell you, as an agnostic, and if you take it a step further to just full-blown atheist, I probably create the most awkward atmosphere around people who are, you know, fairly religious.

Speaker 2: 55:35

I almost think they could deal with a Muslim person more effectively than they could someone who's's agnostic or atheist, because at least with somebody, with an abrahamic god, yeah, you know, you might sure you, you, you might know enough about the framework of their religion to to connect a couple of dots and go okay, we're apart, but here's a couple of dots that connect. It's hard for them to find dots that connect with someone who's agnostic or atheist. Would it be fair to say I'm going to put the lower of the boom on myself?

Speaker 3: 56:21

would it be fair to say that, uh, atheists and and agnostics, if they existed in great enough numbers, might stress well, um, state fragility, I don't know, um, um, at least in some reckonings, all systems have, uh, you know, systems have a point at which they will behave differently than they have been tipping points, I think you might call them. And so you want to ask how much influence that is different than the steady state thing is necessary to push it into a new state. I would in some ways kind of dispute your characterization about a higher power. I think I would pull that back a little bit and say that I believe that most people are searching for some kind of meaning or a guiding principle, something that so that we are not just atomists, you know unfettered by any, you know overarching, you know system of being, and so it's tough to say, I don't know.

Speaker 2: 57:55

Pardon, I would agree with that, by the way. I would agree with that, by the way, that kind of the way you've redefined that, because, yeah, they're searching for meaning, not necessarily.

Speaker 3: 58:11

As a criminologist, you know, I've talked to a lot of public groups and and I think you'll see how this connects when a town is facing a crime problem, what is the go-to solution? Well, let's hire more cops. Clearly, that is the solution to hire more police officers. In my career, you know, I designed a set of experiments to see just how many police officers it would take to take a fully criminogenic, which is to say completely eaten up with crime town and to make it wholly quixote, wholly without crime, and the number that it required to impose the order the new order was so astronomically high and would be so onerous in terms of public observation and surveillance and maintenance that no one would want to live there, even if you could afford it.

Speaker 3: 59:29

You know so. So you know it's hard to know what pushes a system from one state to another, but you know, in in our discussions of state fragility, you know that's that's something that that's right to ask. You know what's what's too much, where's the ledge. You know and we talked about corporate mergers, as you know a way that has limited options that the public have in terms of the things that they buy, even the things that they want or know to want. You know services available to them, yes, and you know the nature of the goods and services that they're taught to value. You know, and you know Right, and so I think that that's a really important aspect of, you know modern economics, modern society and our culture is asking who controls access to this thing that I believe I need in my life and under what terms?

Speaker 2: 1:00:49

Yes, I find it fascinating that when you were talking about, when you looked at like the crime rates and you did this, you calculated, okay, what would it take in numbers of police officers, and then the end result showing that no one would want to live there. To clarify, I think what I hear you saying is that doing what would be required to have no crime going on would actually drive away more people than the current crime rate with the number of officers that currently exist. Is that fair to say? They would find the current crime rate more acceptable than what it would take.

Speaker 3: 1:01:33

Probably it would be the less onerous thing, I guess, up until the point you became the victim. But I think the bigger point is that in terms of public safety and neighborhood function and things like that, you can't sort of into order. And if you look at neighborhoods that are relatively crime-free neighborhoods, where they do the things that you think about shared experience, involvement in each other's lives, they have a high degree of what some social scientists call collective efficacy, in that they function as kind of this whole organic thing. Well, that has to develop internally and you can encourage that development and that's easier to maintain than we're going to bring in this thing. That's going to be the force of order. That's resource intensive, heavy-handed, nobody wants to live like that and it wouldn't feel like a neighborhood.

Speaker 3: 1:03:03

So things that are organically grown, you know, toward the middle, you know, affects the criminal justice system, interacts with people differently based on their socioeconomic status, relative affluence, things like that, where the middle class is an interesting case because they tend to be self-regulating in a way that doesn't reflect strong rulemaking. And that's not to say that that's absent in poverty classes or much more affluent classes. But so don't, don't mistake that at all. You know that goes badly quickly. But what I'm saying is I have a shared economic and social experience that tells me that moderation of appetites is the most effective social strategy. But if those around me aren't engaged in that, I might come to a different conclusion. And I might be talking about the poor. I might be talking about the very wealthy, the poor.

Speaker 3: 1:04:45

I might be talking about the very wealthy and so people who regulate themselves in the way that we commonly think middle class people regulate themselves. Be that, true or not, is the real sort of national, endogenous force of order that keeps that balance.

Speaker 2: 1:05:09

Yes, I think there's something in that that I use as a reminder to all of my children. I've always told them very few things in life will impact the direction of your life than the people you spend the most time around. You can have your own philosophy, you can have your own set of guides for going through life, but if you're constantly around people who do not, it's going to skew the outcome.

Speaker 3: 1:05:50

Yeah, and that holds true regardless of affluence, and I think that's a very important lesson. One thing that I would say, and I want to be very clear about the crime-poverty connection One of the reasons we see greater crime in impoverished areas is because we have, as a society, decided that it's okay for it to happen there. And let me explain that. It is my belief that crime happens where, and only where, we think it's okay to happen. Otherwise, we would commit sufficient social resources to do the things, whatever they might be, that would retard the likelihood of crime. Whatever that support, whatever that enforcement, whatever that infrastructure was necessary to support those people, then crime wouldn't happen there.

Speaker 1: 1:07:09

Right.

Speaker 2: 1:07:10

Right, that's a fantastic point, and on that I want to say, you know, if there's one thing I pride myself on, it's really being focused on self-awareness, on on knowing myself, with an emphasis on the not so great things about myself.

Speaker 2: 1:07:30

Right, everybody loves to know the great things about themselves, but where I've grown the most is in a direct connection to the number of things I've not wanted to look at but that I've looked at and said, yes, this is true about you.

Speaker 2: 1:07:51

And I wanted to lead in with this because I'm sure you're familiar with some of the books written by Malcolm Gladwell, and I can't remember I think it was in Blink, the example I'm going to cite, but the discussion on implicit bias and how it applied to police officers and the speed with which they would react and pull the trigger based on race. I have enough self-awareness and enough knowledge about the human mind and specifically implicit bias, to know that as a police officer, if I were to be a police officer, I would absolutely, because of where I grew up, be wrestling with implicit bias, because of where I grew up, be wrestling with implicit bias, and it would, whether I wanted it to or not. It would leak into my unconscious reactions and behaviors. How do we? Is the answer to solve that and I already know the answer.

Speaker 3: 1:09:27

So this is a rhetorical question is the answer to just hire nothing but black police officers in black areas? And you shake your head. No, I know that implicit bias maybe doesn't have the scholarly currency that it did a few years ago, and so that is sort of the predicate. You know might weaken the whole discussion, but what I will say is the way that human beings interpret their world. We learn about something we learn about you know. Here's a horrible, throwaway example we learn about a chair. You learn what a chair does. You learn you know how it functions, how you use it, and you don't have to relearn fairness every time you see a new thing that might fit into that diagnostic category of glory.

Speaker 2: 1:10:24

And then we join new inputs to that fabric.

Speaker 3: 1:10:33

My friends in psychology and neuroscience probably recoil in horror at that description. So all due apologies, sure.

Speaker 1: 1:10:42

Yeah, you have to you know.

Speaker 3: 1:10:43

So all due apologies. Sure, yeah, you have to. What role is their discernment? What role is their not just implicit but explicit bias, and what you believe about the nature of the people that, in this case, as a police officer that you're serving a you know and um you know, that that gets into a whole um.

Speaker 3: 1:11:12

You know we could talk many hours about the crisis in american policing and, uh, how we want better police officers, which I think as a nation, we, you know, believe we do. You know, how much do you want to pay to make that happen? And that's really what that comes down to. And I'm not talking about paying individual officers. Again, you know it's kind of like crime. You have bad cops where you don't do the things necessary to have good cops.

Speaker 2: 1:11:46

Right and to clarify where I was going with that, at least with the research that Malcolm was using at the time. He wrote Blink on implicit bias the one reason fresh in my mind as to why just hiring all black police officers in that area is not the solution because implicit bias also impacted the behaviors of black police officers. In other words, the studies showed that the black police officers also treated other blacks as more potentially dangerous as other whites. So it's easy Sometimes I hear when they're interviewing somebody after a tragic shooting or something, and just people from the neighborhood or something, and I've heard a couple of times the comments we need more black police officers, something. And I've heard a couple of times the comments we need more black police officers. And I understand how that can make sense to somebody, that that's not privy to the research, but we know that that's not really the answer. We can agree that the changes of some type need to be discovered and implemented, but I don don't think personally we really know exactly what those changes are at this point, do we?

Speaker 3: 1:13:09

As a single determinant of a functioning race, it's probably a very poor one, you know, while in America we tend to want the bureaucracy to look like us. You know, however, defined with has sufficient reference point to my experience that where empathy and discretion enter the process, that they will fall to my desires or needs. And that's not talking about manipulation, that's just talking about being understood as a person in this context, faced with whatever decisions that have to be made. And so it's an infinitely kind of complex set of inputs, of input, you know, and it all comes down to. You know, in the case of police, you know police officer gets out and you want to immediately feel like you're going to get a fair shake.

Speaker 3: 1:14:37

And a huge portion of our nation doesn't have that. A huge portion of our nation doesn't have that and in fact is all but certain that whatever they get out of the interaction, they're going to come out on the bad side of it. And American policing has in many regards done that to itself. And you know and I say that as somebody who was a cop for 25 years in a pretty hard place, but my anecdotal experience may not generalize but we all want to believe that when we interface with the government, that we're being respected, that our rights are being protected and, on an individual level, that we're being heard. You know, and that takes a lot of forms yes, and you know of the challenges that modern American police have, you know. I think those are among the greatest American police have.

Speaker 2: 1:15:48

I think those are among the greatest. I won't go any deeper than this question, but on the surface, in your opinion, do you think police unions should be endorsing any presidential candidate that has the ability to impact?

Speaker 3: 1:16:05

Absolutely not.

Speaker 2: 1:16:06

What's your thoughts?

Speaker 3: 1:16:08

on. Um, okay, policing should be a politically neutral enterprise, even though it is comprised of individuals who are anything but that. We, we all have our own sensibilities, proclivities, beliefs, philosophies, you know, and that will be reflected in our vote. But when you start to say okay, we, as the umbrella for this service, you know, endorse this candidate or that candidate, that creates a type of seeming disenfranchisement for people who don't also ally with that candidate. I don't think it makes good politics and I think it injures the police themselves more than anybody else.

Speaker 2: 1:17:08

Right. So I asked that question so we can come back then to the higher overarching topic of state fragility, because in a sense, for example, when a police union endorses a particular candidate, you've got this overarching entity, the union that just by observational connection alone represents, whether they want that to be the case or not, every officer that somebody sees on the street.

Speaker 3: 1:17:43

there's just that assumed, that assumed, you know oh, they must agree because this is who they endorse, just isn't those right.

Speaker 2: 1:17:54

So when we do, we get into that same thing. Then with somebody like elon musk, peter thiel, uh, jeff bezos, when we examine state fragility, where we have these people who own large sets of our industrial and agricultural and right on down the manufacturing and retail, when they get involved in politics, I think that represents a problem, just as the layperson on the street. But to somebody such as yourself who has studied these areas in depth for years, can you take us deeper into the challenges we can talk about.

Speaker 3: 1:18:46

You know Musk, bezos, airtel, you know Koch family, whoever you are, the people that exist on the extremes of the wealth continuum. But if you pull that back, just say one level to people who are commonly on major corporate boards of directors, then that's. That's a place where you know we might want to also be concerned. I don't know what else I learned in ninth grade civics class, but my ninth grade civics teacher taught me a concept called the interlocking directory and I don't know, that's probably not a term that's very common to most people, but the basic idea is that if a person serves on more than one board of directors, there's this kind of interlock between those boards because of their participation.

Speaker 3: 1:20:00

And you know, you might serve on the board of Apple and I might serve on the board of Apple, but then I also serve on the board of, you know, gm and you, who control the interests of the corporation, who don't necessarily have to overtly coordinate between boards or industries, but by virtue of their presence a kind of coordination emerges.

Speaker 3: 1:20:55

And when you take that in consideration of the talk that we had about how you went from 25 semiconductor manufacturers to three, you know you went from you know, a dozen airlines or more than that, down to four things like that then there are fewer boards and the interlocks become closer. And you also have to look at some of the people that are typically on these boards, people not just captains of industry, if you will, but retired political figures, retired military figures, folks that have influence in the sphere of bureaucracy, so that then the corporate world becomes entwined with the bureaucratic world in an ever-shrinking number of players so I've always thought maybe this is right, maybe this is not, but from from my view looking in, the most profitable time for any politician is after they have established themselves and been privy to the inside workings, and then leave and become a consultant or go to work for, uh, some large entity.

Speaker 2: 1:22:29

Uh, it could it be that for a lot of these guys that the only reason they want to get involved in politics in the first place is to leverage that power for later? Who?

Speaker 3: 1:22:39

knows what, what's contained within the constellation of desires to be in politics.

Speaker 3: 1:22:45

Sure, you know, I suppose that there are all kinds of motivations and goals you know that we might talk about. But yeah, clearly it's an on-ramp to a post office affluence for a lot of people, apolliphus affluence for a lot of people, and they are in those board positions because of their prior. You know, public service, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that and there might even be a public good in that, depending upon the industry and you know other factors and you know other factors. But interlocking directorates can complicate board members' fiduciary duties, can create antitrust issues amenable to price fixing. Price fixing, you know, and I'm not saying that an interlocking directorate is what caused eggs and gas to go up. But it's not like one supplier of eggs and gas, eggs or gas immediately said, oh, we're just jacking it up, and nobody else played along, you know.

Speaker 3: 1:24:04

And so there is this kind of there is a system that has concentrated power in an economy that has concentrated production and that then flows into direct political influence. You know, again thinking about Citizens United, that basically opened up a floodgate of money into American politics, and often industrial groups, corporate associations, will supply language to members of Congress that you then later see almost verbatim in bills that are offered, and so they have a very position to strongly guide public policy. That then introduces an element of fragility.

Speaker 2: 1:25:38

Yeah, when you mentioned the airlines, you know you said one time there were 12 different airlines and now three or four. The one that, uh, immediately surfaced in my mind is you know, we I think most people look at that and and very easily come to the conclusion that, wow, we've. We've got far less choice. But something that's not quite as obvious or as visible when that happens is we've also got less leverage.

Speaker 3: 1:26:07

That's right. If you know, I don't like a brand of something. I now only have so many other options and if you're talking about food, those options may be false options because you know both brands that I like may be or, deciding between, might be owned by the same company this dr pate was.

Speaker 2: 1:26:41

It's been several years ago, um, I went into a location where they had both a kentucky fried chicken and a taco bell, right, and I go in and I I order my drink and I I go up to get my drink and I remember looking at the, the choices available, I remember thinking, well, I guess taco bell and and kentucky fried Kentucky Fried Chicken have chosen to carry Pepsi products. Well, I didn't know at the time that Pepsi owned Taco Bell and so it was the illusion of choice or that's how I perceived it in that nobody else here, including Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell, they didn't even have a say in the drink because they are effectively Pepsi, and we see instances of that same kind of thing more and more in society.

Speaker 3: 1:27:40

You know, and just the fact that you had a Taco Bell right beside a Kentucky Fried Chicken, which would seemingly be two competitors.

Speaker 2: 1:27:50

you know different types of food, you know what have you, but nonetheless two different restaurants, right you know, acting actually in kind of a symbiotic way through the, you know the presence of the Pepsi ownership Right right, yeah, I remember my first thought was what an odd combination kentucky fried chicken and taco bell. Well, it, it it was. It was never meant to be a logical, it was just that they had this. They'd looked at the numbers and said here are two, uh, fast food restaurants we should own, and hey, in some locations like these small rural, let's just merge them and offer both and sell a ton of our product, pepsi. Because yeah, so yeah, is that what we are looking at in terms of if this is not reigned in some way, is it just going to be more and more?

Speaker 3: 1:28:54

reigned in some way. Well, is it just going to be more and more? Uh not. Not that I take a lot of deep meaning from uh uh silly movies, but you think about uh uh demolition man, where all restaurants had become taco bell, you know.

Speaker 3: 1:29:05

Or uh idiocracy, where you have, you know, brondo, you know, and, and so they've become sort of these state products. You know, and I don't think we're headed down that road. But choice, apparent choice, artificial choice, you know, these are some things that we have to think about, to concentration of control and concentration of wealth, which I believe the evidence shows, fewer media companies, or media companies that are owned by someone with a very strong political agenda. You know that, that that seems to have a distortive effect, you know. And so when you have then the presence of oligarchs, you have the presence of nepotism, who are allowed to penetrate into this system that doesn't have the balance that we would like to believe. That it does, you know you start to have problems. That it does, you know, you start to have problems.

Speaker 3: 1:30:33

And we talked about religion before. You know where. Very often, you know, a party and not just in the US will invoke a state religion or a de facto state religion and conflate that with patriotism. And really that's not about faith or religiosity, that's about a form of control and boundary maintenance in the population. It also, then, our side has the moral high ground than any enemies that we identify become easier to demonize.

Speaker 2: 1:31:24

That's why this hyper-concentration of wealth is such an interesting topic for me. I've always kind of had I've applied this more in the area of psychology, but now I see how easily it fits into this category as well. I've always kind of had this philosophy of the highest frame determines the game and meaning. I'll give you an example of that. I was in the Middle East in 1993, and I went to a pizza hut I think this was in Dubai, if I remember correctly, and everything you know pizza hut. Everything looked the same. What you could order looked the same. So I ordered a large beef and mushroom pizza and everything going on is exactly like I see it here in the United States, until I took that first bite and I immediately recognized the difference. The cheese used was goat cheese rather than, you know, from a cow, which is a much sharper cheese, which I found interesting. It was different, but it was actually quite good.

Speaker 2: 1:32:38

But my point is there was a higher frame in this instance than corporate Pizza Hut. The highest dictating frame was cultural and religious faith and what the Musk, bezos, thiel, when we look at these guys as possibly and maybe already, but at the very least possibly and eventually reaching the pinnacle of the highest frame, and I mean even higher than, say, the United States Supreme Court, in that they are essentially manipulating and driving the decisions and rulings of the United States Supreme Court. Are we? You said earlier we're not there yet we're not, but how close are we to situations like that? Two points One.

Speaker 3: 1:33:54

to circle back to your cheese. If you've ever been to the World of Coke in Atlanta, one of the sections that they have is where you can try products that are not available in the US but are very successful in other foreign markets but are very successful in other foreign markets. And you find just how broad, you know, the human palette and preference is. You know, and so for a big multinational to be amenable to. You know, local preferences. You know smart business.

Speaker 3: 1:34:29

You give them what they're used to, what they would like in the configuration that you can deliver, you know, as your product. But to go to your question, one of the greatest dangers I see is the creeping privatization of government function and you know, as a criminologist I'm particularly sensitive to how this has happened in corporate corrections, Fully corporate-operated prisons, private prisons, private immigration detention centers. But it's not just that, it's private probation and parole services have become a thing. The phone systems in jails and other correctional facilities become a profit center. The food services, the laundry and linen services, things that were once the purview of the state, have now been privatized to connected vendors. Corporate corrections industry is involved in policymaking and support of candidates. It is no coincidence that get-tough legislation in the 80s and 90s mirrored the rise of privatized correctional facilities. You know, thus ensuring that more and more things were criminalized, criminalized at a greater level, thus ensuring success. You know, downstream of the product that they had to offer, the product that they had to offer.

Speaker 3: 1:36:36

And I know some people are going to say, you know, that's an awfully jaundiced or cynical view, but the data certainly support that view, however you might want to characterize it. And we see this also in education. You know, in Arkansas, here we're struggling with private school vouchers and the problems that that creates. But it's not just, you know, giving people wealthy enough to send their children to private schools a rebate for that. It's things like standardized testing services, learning management systems, which is how online education is delivered.

Speaker 3: 1:37:27

Campus bookstores are now, you know, run by, you know, barnes, noble or whomever, and so what we see is an increasing privatization of formerly public function, and you can see how this manifests in things like there's been a 50-year decline in public wealth and a concomitant growth in private wealth, particularly at the very top end of the wealth distribution. So that gets to the handful of the handful of people that you know we have been talking about, and nearly all of this is traceable to the early 80s. You know phrase that was popularized run government like a business. Well, that, you know that was the soft on ramp. It's not really running government like a business. Well, that you know that was the soft on-ramp. It's not really running government like a business, right, that was more of a projection of the true long game intent, which is to run government as their business.

Speaker 2: 1:38:50

Yes, when I was in college, I worked at a funeral home and at that time, particularly in the rural areas and and uh, the town I grew up in is surrounded by other rural communities, small rural communities every funeral home was right. It was owned by an individual, right, they'd gone to mortuary school and they established a business. Maybe it was a father and son, maybe another partner, but it was just kept on the local level. While I worked there, almost on a daily basis, they were being inundated with people wanting to sit down and talk to them about buying the business. But they weren't other individuals. They weren't other people who had just graduated mortuary school. They weren't other people who had just graduated mortuary school. They were big corporations.

Speaker 2: 1:39:54

Because at the time when I worked there, particularly because it was a rural community and it was just a member of the community that owned it If there was a family who didn't really have the means to go in and write a check right off the bat, he'd work with them. He'd say, okay, if you can, that's gone. And that's gone because now, while it appears that there are still all of these rural individual funeral homes, the building hasn't changed. Everything looks the same, except they're all owned in this area by one company. The deals are gone. There's no more. Pay me what you can.

Speaker 3: 1:40:40

You know another area we see this is in property ownership, rental property ownership In particular. There's been a huge concentration of ownership in the American rental market over the last decade or so. Again, it's kind of that local example where you might have a couple who has an apartment building, or a couple or a handful of rent houses, things like that. That's no longer kind of the dominant model and that places the relationship between the renter and the owner in a fundamentally different. You know light and you know, and that goes to kind of core problems that extend, you know, from this mindset. You know where you get the disenfranchisement of labor, where minimum wage stays what it has been for a very long time, weakening of environmental controls and just a general subversion in many ways of the public good subversion in many ways of the public good. You know worker protections. You know, again, renter's rights, things like that. That.

Speaker 2: 1:42:02

It's kind of a mission creep spurred by privatization yes, when I, when I left the navy oh gosh, almost 25 years ago and I and I came back to the community that I I had grown up in and, as I was growing up as as was just part of life here, uh, I hunted and fished, right, and I've been, I've been gone a quarter of a century and I came back and all of the places that I used to fish and hunt, I could no longer fish and hunt because corporate entities had come in and purchased all of these huge farms that the landowners used to say, oh yeah, just just let me know what day you're going to be there, just so I know you're there and you, yeah, you can hunt or fish.

Speaker 2: 1:42:55

That's pretty much gone now. Uh, so, as a result, I haven't hunted or fished in years because I wouldn't even know who to begin to contact. Ask, and they'd probably say hell, no, don't, don't come on on that land.

Speaker 3: 1:43:08

You know, and this is a rabbit trail that we could go down, uh, for a long time. But one of one of the things that happens as a result of of that kind of development is the commercialifferentiated series of interstate exits that have the same 15 or 20 business franchises all along the way. And so I think that that, from a cultural standpoint, poses a kind of danger to the American identity, because it makes us consumers almost as the first thing, and you know, and then members of a unique community. Second, and you know that may overstate, but that's something that I noticed and you know. I think that that's one of the great things about the US is being able to have those unique experiences you know, in those tens of thousands of towns that you know may function, sort of as little towns tend to function but have a uniqueness and a character that's worth celebrating, worth preserving. But when you introduce economies of scale, those businesses just don't thrive and you get what we get Right.

Speaker 2: 1:45:07

I've always kind of looked at a lot of what you've been talking about today, kind of the metaphor that I've used in day-to-day life. We all have kind of got these established norms in our mind of what certain things cost. For example, you can go into a convenience store and you can get a big fountain drink, maybe for between 99 cents and a buck and a half, right, that's just kind of wherever you go. If you go in a restaurant and get the uh order, the same thing, maybe it's 275, three dollars for a cook. You know, we, just we kind of know this is kind of what you can expect.

Speaker 2: 1:45:49

The exception to that or it's not the only exception, of course but if you take your family to disney world, for example, the moment you walk into that gate and for the length of time that you are in there, none of your previous expected norms apply, right they? It's a new ballpark with new rules, and if you want to get a large Coke, it may be 11 bucks, 12 bucks, right Now. Am I right in to think that you can kind of use that as to how to understand as fewer and fewer corporate entities gobble things up? We become more of like a West Coast to East Coast theme park, in that you come into the gates and your previous accepted norms for prices no longer apply. This makes me think of two things norms for prices no longer apply.

Speaker 3: 1:46:51

This makes me think of two things. You know it was George Bush, I guess, maybe in 96, was it that was on the spot because he couldn't tell you what a gallon of milk cost, you know. And that speaks to this kind of detachment that you know, the one percenters if you will have from the norms of everyday life. And I get asked when I'm talking about this kind of thing, I get asked a lot always been people who were really rich. You know who influenced government. How is this any different? And the difference is scale.

Speaker 3: 1:47:36

The robber barons of York are peasants compared to the new class of centibillionaires. They have so much money we had to have a different term to describe the amount. You know I think Robert Reif talked about this a few days ago, said that you know the 12 richest people in the US control over $2 trillion worth of wealth and if they were a country, they'd have the 11th largest GDP in the world, ahead of Brazil. 12 people. So they have this outsized ability to mold and influence the economic and political system to ways that are advantageous to them.

Speaker 3: 1:48:43

You know, and you know we were talking about, you know, kind of the malleability of rules earlier. We're sort of circling, that it's. You know very quickly and you don't have to be very affluent to know this that criminal justice processes that you're going to be subject to are largely dependent on your relative affluence Whether you get strict letter of the law, sort of formal treatment, or, if conditions loosen up for a variety of reasons, being able to hire a better lawyer instead of a public defender, having the social, economic, political connections that minimize your liability. And that extends everywhere, everywhere, when you're talking about the truly wealthy people in the world. I saw some kind of ridiculous BuzzFeed article a while back about sort of outrageous things that people who had worked for billionaires saw and I had never considered it. But the one thing that's more valuable to to that strata than anything else is their time management.

Speaker 3: 1:50:19

they don't open their own doors, they don't drive themselves anywhere they don't put their own food they may not buy their own clothes, that they have a legion of people who facilitate their life out of the mundane things that the rest of us labor to have enough money to have the luxury to do. Sure, there's a thing that kind of comes out of that when you have that level of access, that level of resources and access, you come to quickly learn that not many rules attach to you. You know, save for the ones that you make for yourself. Not many rules attached to you. Yeah, save for the ones that you make for yourself. And we're seeing that certainly in a lot of American political theater lately. And on a certain level you kind of say, okay, why does that matter? Let them buy a gigantic yacht, let them buy, you know whatever a rocket trip. What does it matter? How does that hurt me? Well, it does and it doesn't, you know, on a certain level.

Speaker 3: 1:51:50

But as we've talked about manipulation of public policy, and you know, and this strata of people tend to be kind of authoritarian in their dealings and so when they're integrated into the bureaucracy, even at the highest level positions, they don't have a decision or a life matrix that mirrors common people sufficiently to trust them, in my opinion with.

Speaker 3: 1:52:22

You know important public policy, you know directives, you know, just to talk a little more about it, you know, as somebody who's trained, either unclear or don't seem to fly. You know, and you know, as I said, it's normlessness, but it might also be thought of derangement or even an insatiable will. You know, the malady of the infinite is what Durkheim called it. And Durkheim said let me get this right. One does not advance when one walks toward no goal, which is the same thing when his goal is infinity, which is the same thing when his goal is infinity In a society which, fastening us in its image, fills us with religious, political and moral beliefs that control our actions. So you have these people that live in this anomic reality of no fetter and then suddenly they are, you know, charged with creating or guiding public policy. That becomes a problem.

Speaker 2: 1:54:14

Yes, and I think on just the man on the street, the man and woman on the street. As I pay attention to the things that people host on this topic, what I see more often than not, I think the problem they have that's even bigger than just this person has that much money is, is that part of how they've acquired this much money has come through bending the rules or creating new rules. So I I I get this sense that if, if people were acquiring that much, using the same laws, same rules, same guidelines that everybody else operates under, that there'd be more people saying you know what, fair enough, um, you, you may or may not have had different advantages in life, but at least you're using the same rules that apply to me. So good on you now. Clearly, that wouldn't be everybody's feeling, but there would be more people thinking that way I.

Speaker 2: 1:55:27

But when people look and say, look, this guy didn the rules, the laws that existed were stifling his company's growth, so he went in and got the law changed. Now the argument they have, of course, is that it was done legally right, it was legal. Done legally right, it was legal. But I think the fact that morality and ethics are not part of this discussion or the process. We see that's where the man and woman on the street have had it up to here. My question to you, dr Pate what solutions are there, or are there really not any big, impactful solutions at our disposal there?

Speaker 3: 1:56:21

has always been a disparity in wealth in uh larger organized societies and uh larger organized societies, and sometimes that negatively impacts the vast majority of people and sometimes it's less so. It's not that there aren't people in you know we talked about Norway who have a great deal of money. Certainly they are, but they are not allowed, through lawmaking and a system of taxation, to have outsized influence. Their political structure is less amenable to those kinds of corrosive forces and when you have a system, as we have in the US, where it is virtually pay to play in terms of policy, you have to expect what we get. I say this a little tongue-in-cheek, but pretty quickly we're closing on an era of lords and peasants and certainly it will not resemble feudal Europe and there won't be land divided into fiefdoms, but there will be corporate fiefdoms. There already are corporate fiefdoms and you know, you're right. They bent policy to help, you know, their company succeed, which is a rational thing to do. Why wouldn't you? You know this law makes it harder for me to make a profit. Let's change that law.

Speaker 3: 1:58:37

Your factory or the river catches on fire or species are made to, you know, uh, you know killed into extinction. You know things like that, um, you know, and then you start have to. You have to have, uh, as you suggested, more ethical balancing tests. What do we really want as people and who do we really want to be as a people? And I think history well supports that. Great fortunes are seldom made without great exploitation, even if that exploitation is not readily visible. You'll notice in Walmart that 30 years ago had a legion of Made in America signage all throughout the stores and wore that as a great badge of courage. You don't see that anymore. One, the American worker was too expensive, but that chain has figured other ways to subvert that. But two, the exploitation of foreign factories is easier to hide of foreign factories is easier to hide.

Speaker 2: 1:59:59

I was watching a podcast last week sometime where Mark Cuban was the guest, and there was a comment that Mark made that really stood out. It really jumped out at me as something that, boy, this would be great to see in so many other people billionaires namely. Somebody was asking him about a couple of different opportunities where there was big money to be made, and the fact that he didn't get involved, and there was more to it, but part of his comment and, I guess, explanation, if you will, as to why he didn't he said he goes how much money do I need, you know? So he recognizes that, sure, he has the acumen and the skill to make even more, but his emphasis was on all the time that he spends with his kids now, and that that's where his real joy comes from, and he's got enough for countless lifetimes to be able to do that. So his point is how much more do I need? I'm doing what I want to do.

Speaker 2: 2:01:21

The opposite end of that, though, is somebody like a Musk or a Bezos who says there's never enough. If $266 billion is good, then let's double it and go over $500 billion. That's the mindset that is, I think, to me what's going to get us in trouble, and that's a mindset, I think that is one that is absent the moral and ethical aspects. I don't know that. I won't speak for Mark. I don't know that his comment was because he's looking at it from a moral or ethical standpoint. I think, at the very least, though, it's just one of those how much money does a guy have to have before he says you know?

Speaker 3: 2:02:16

another comment, which essentially was when you don't see anybody above you, then reality becomes distorted and perhaps your passions turn inward and self-destructive. But I think that's where they are. There's not an upper limit. No, I don't know how you address that. I know how you address that on a policy level you go back to Eisenhower era, 80% tax bracket, an era when we didn't quite have as many billionaires. Because I am and this is just my ethics and moralizing, but I'm not certain that a nation controlled by and populated by, you know, a couple of thousand billionaires is necessarily a moral good, interjecting my value system in it, and so what we end up with are far fewer Mark Cubans who look about or Melinda Gates. This was enough. So let's start doing some other things, you know, and I think that that probably takes an emotional maturity that people given to authoritarian decision making don't possess right, and one.

Speaker 2: 2:04:13

Coming back to Mark, here's another comment that he made that I, I think, really gives us a window, a look into his honesty about where he's coming from. Uh, you know the the pharmacy, right, that, yeah, he's. Um, I think he said he partnered with somebody else, but essentially it's. It's a place where a lot of americans can go find the drug that they take and get it for if they don't have insurance. I can go there and get it much cheaper. But he, he volunteered this.

Speaker 2: 2:04:48

Nobody in this interview it's not like they prided out of him. He said I just want to make a point. He said I, I didn't do this for some purely altruistic reason. I, I had I had done the numbers, realized that I could do this for a lot less and still make some money, and, and so that's what I did. So I, I'd like that. I, you know that that's not something we're going to see from Bezos or deal or or. It tends to be that they're obscuring the realities of what's going on, whereas Mark is like, hey, look, yeah, I. Part of this is that I could make some money. But in doing so, what brought his attention to it in the first place was a need that people less fortunate than him had, and and that gets it.

Speaker 3: 2:05:45

Yeah, yeah, I mean that that gets into um, what do you want your impact to have been? What is your legacy? And that gets complicated when you start talking about terrific fortunes. The Sackler family is a perfect example. You can't go to a museum in a major city that doesn't have a Sackler Gallery or wing. They were tremendous patrons of the art that advanced art in a way that few families of the modern era ever have. And they also made that fortune by poisoning the American public with an opioid epidemic that they knowingly and willfully put upon the population.

Speaker 2: 2:07:15

Yes, yes, as we kind of wrap things up here, I think it's kind of thing we can run out and do tomorrow or in the next five years to change this. And here's why I say that's almost comforting. Here's why I say that's almost comforting, because to the degree that a society believes there is a magic bullet and that nobody's doing it, to that same degree there's going to be an unease and an angst and a frustration about it. And so I guess, looking at it from a psychological perspective, sometimes in life and I'm not saying that this is necessarily the approach we should take on the entirety of this subject, but there are some aspects of this that sometimes you just get to a place where you have to accept that this probably isn't going to change in your lifetime. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be part of a forward-pressing process to enact a change at some point. But I think more is accomplished when the people involved are willing to work hard without expecting that the returns come in their lifetime.

Speaker 3: 2:08:45

Small policy moves can have big influence and that's how we move the nation forward. I am probably easily described as some big government leftist, but that's because I have a faith in the bureaucracy and the continuation of that. You know the small-minded rule followers who you know safeguard us from abuses, and you know abuses and you know make, make the. You know keep the interstates repaired and make certain that the back of that Taco Bell is in fact clean, or what? Yeah, that regulatory influence and then provision of service, which is the true goal of government. That's where my faith lies.

Speaker 3: 2:10:01

I have to feel that the American people will eventually get enough of this. The MAGA era is a magic freak and a lot of people are still impressed at the rabbit that's come out of the hat, but that will end soon enough and I doubt that there is a second person that rises from those ashes, because the more reasonable people in the Republican Party know what kind of a mule they've hitched their wagon to and don't want to do that anymore. Because, for you know, a century, uh, republicans and democrats were able to govern together, drawn, you know, along some you know line of morality or religious order, because that's not how you govern in a, you know, a free society.

Speaker 2: 2:11:32

Yeah, I don't think there's anything that you've said today that I agree with more completely than the statement that you don't think they'll. They'll be a second version of donald trump come along. My position has long been that this has been the result of a perfect storm, with a very rare individual coming along at the right time with just the right pathologies, if you will, and the idea that he could die and somebody just like him who can do the same. And I think to your point or I think this is something you would also agree with that's not to say that there aren't people out there as rotten as Donald Trump. It's just saying they don't have that right combination to be able to pull off what Donald Trump has pulled off in the last eight to ten years.

Speaker 3: 2:12:41

I absolutely agree, and the other thing that we can't ignore is Donald Trump in many ways is a media construction. He is a product. You know he is a product, that's been allowed to free associate and run his mouth to the detriment of the nation in my opinion, but I don't think that the media has the stomach to make another one of those, at least not in the short term, because it's ultimately bad for business, if nothing else.

Speaker 2: 2:13:28

Oh, you bring up a great point For all of the decisions that Elon Musk has made in his life business decisions that have put him in the position that he's in now billions and billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars thing that's related to business that I don't think he could even approach is making msnbc, cnn, uh, nbc, abc. He couldn't make them the amount of money that donald trump has made them, because one he's just not and believe me what I say interesting about donald trump I don't mean right, he's not as fascinating, right yeah

Speaker 2: 2:14:20

right, sure, sure they're, they're. They're not going to make the hundreds of millions of dollars they've made running episodes of interviews with Elon Musk. They're just not. And I think Trump I think that's one thing that he's very much aware of and holds over everybody's head is that, while there may be people who far exceed him in intelligence and every other area, they just can't put a finger on what that magical element about him is and what he's able to do in terms of the media. They know they can't do it themselves, and so they're tied to him. They're tied to him at least in that way. They need him in terms of the party remaining as vivacious and bold and in your face as they've become you know, for better or worse, he has been a very effective standard bearer.

Speaker 3: 2:15:36

You know you have to give him that. Yes, he has been a very successful product. You know, even if the product you bought isn't the one you thought you were buying, he has nonetheless been incredibly successful. He has nonetheless been incredibly successful and so you know certainly credit where credit is due in that Now we do have to interrogate the things about him that are appealing to such a large percentage of the population. Why are they appealing and what does that say about that segment of the population and their vision?

Speaker 2: 2:16:22

for america, you know. But but yeah right, a couple of things come to mind on that. He he's. I've looked at him as, uh, the cabbage patch kid of politics, right, there was a time when people were lined up and fighting each other to get into the store to get a cabbage patch kid.

Speaker 2: 2:16:42

Now you can get you know, nobody's fighting over a cabbage patch kid anymore, and there will come a time when nobody's fighting over Donald Trump anymore either. I think his true test as it fits into what you've so brilliantly shared with me today on this whole topic of kind of the corporate and billionaire takeover of our economy, of the United States as a whole it's going to be interesting to see how he is able to manage these relationships with Musk, thiel, bezos. Right now, of course, they're catering to the one thing that assures success with him, at least for a while, and that's his ego. The second thing they're bringing is money. When you can flatter him and provide him massive financial resources, you have his ear Up until the point he feels like you've stabbed him in the back and, from what I've seen the last eight years, once he's moved you to the shit list, that's probably where you will remain.

Speaker 3: 2:18:05

People who are narcissistic tend to demand great loyalty without a willingness to extend it. You know, and, and so that's absolutely what we see right here.

Speaker 3: 2:18:19

I think I would add a third position to the switch uh, he will have no use for you when you have upstaged him. Uh, you know, so there's. So there's that too. Am I concerned about the next four years? Yes, very much so, you know, for a whole constellation of reasons. But again, I just hope that the workaday people that you know keep the wheels turning are allowed to stay in place, and I believe that they're.

Speaker 3: 2:18:55

You know ridiculous things like getting rid of the Department of Education. That's not going to happen. You know it sounds good and it panders to a segment of the population that's been taught to fear educated people, you know, and taught to fear science and see it as a threat. You know that's sloganeering, that's propaganda, that's, you know, a glittering promise, but that's not reality, because giant bureaucracies like that support important functions throughout the nation at almost every level. You know, yes, you know, a long, long time ago, when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, first term governor of Arkansas Clinton was governor of Arkansas, first-term governor of Arkansas he did some things that raised it was either the license fee or the registration tax on vehicles and that caused such a moral outrage that one thing, that he was defeated by frank white, the next uh election cycle. You know so um. The american public can be wildly fickle over very small things and uh you know, you know um so, um, I I have faith in most of us to keep the ship right.

Speaker 3: 2:20:35

And one thing I would say, because I've talked about, just to circle back, talked about fragility a whole lot today and what that looks like, and I think it's important to say you know, is the United States, according to many of these rankings, the most stable country on Earth? Probably not. But is the United States on the doorstep of becoming human? No, no, and that's just not going to happen. No, and that's just not going to happen. And so it's not about guarding against some kind of abject failure, but finding a way to be a better version of the nation that we could be, that we know is out there, that is more inclusive, that doesn't look at difference as a threat, that values education, that does the things necessary to you know, make neighborhoods crime-free, no matter where they exist, you know, or you know, to guard against as much harm as possible.

Speaker 3: 2:22:04

And so you know, that's where my faith lies and that's where I think we have to focus our efforts in being a better version of a pretty great place.

Speaker 2: 2:22:25

I agree with so much of what you just said. One thing I might add to that is one of the reasons I guess I do agree with you in that not all of these horrible things that Donald Trump has said that he's going to do are going to happen. Is this One reason our large sect of our society believes those things are going to happen is because the media has reinforced those things happening, and the media reinforced those things happening because those were the stories. They were salacious the most.

Speaker 3: 2:23:08

Uh you know they were engaging and you know, here again we circle back to media consolidation, and while things like your podcast and you know thousands of other outlets that you know give a deep exploration to social issues are out there, um, you know, the places where people traditionally got their news, uh are not as balanced in the way that maybe they once were, and and so you know that that has changed the economy of news, uh, and you know, yeah, oh, tremendously.

Speaker 2: 2:23:53

I one I don't know who was right off the top of my head, but I recently had a guest on and, and I'm not sure the context we were talking about this in, but we, we shared stories about how, for example, I was born in 66, so I grew up in the 70s for the most part, and in the 70s everybody in the nation had the same, pretty much same, very few television channels to choose from. So during this period everybody's pretty much watching the same shows, everybody's reading off the same sheet of music, so to speak. Everybody's reading off the same sheet of music, so to speak. And so I think that in and of itself fostered more unity, in that there were more things to identify with people and we know the role of sitcoms and movies and how they impact society and shape even political policy.

Speaker 2: 2:24:55

So now it could be a situation now where, if you take the people on your block on a given evening, none of the households are watching the same television show. So it's like we've we've been fragmented, uh, at least in in that respect, uh, in terms of what we watch and what we listen to and the people we talk to. That kind of becomes our, our own self-created world. Well, to your point. Coming back to the news, um, there was, there was a time you were either getting your news from Walter Cronkite or Harry.

Speaker 2: 2:25:35

Reasoner. Right Now it's almost unlimited, especially if you get into the online news or the podcast-type news. I mean there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of places all putting their own spin.

Speaker 3: 2:25:56

There's some benefits and there's some drawbacks. You know, obviously that's sort of a nothing observation, but it's kind of the tyranny of too many choices in one respect, you know. But it also provides a variety of perspectives that we didn't have. You weren't being told the news by, you know, one middle-aged white man or another, Speaking primarily to middle-aged white men Right, right, you know and so that really didn't yeah reflect, uh, the diversity of our nation.

Speaker 3: 2:26:36

You know, even then, um, but um, then it becomes how do you teach the american uh news consumer to be a smarter? Well, a smarter consumer, to discern difference. And that comes back to those critical thinking skills that we were talking about at first being able to evaluate evidence, being able to, um, you know, follow logic or identify where logic has fallen off, those kinds of things. And you know not to blame social media, but social media has not increased those sales.

Speaker 3: 2:27:31

And you know it makes errant ideas much easier to spread. Uh and um, you know, uh, as, as, as the demotivator says, uh, sometimes none of us is as dumb as all of us, you know right, right.

Speaker 2: 2:27:53

Well, the way I've described that to my wife on it kind of jokingly, but there's an element to it, uh of, there's an element of truth to it as well. But in discussing the impact, one of the impacts I think, social media has had on society, I always say until social media came along, I had no idea how many different ways I disagreed with so many of the people that I know right, and I mean before, it was pretty simple.

Speaker 2: 2:28:23

You just said, oh yeah, he or she is a friend of mine, and that in and of itself created this bubble of unity. But then social media came along and it's a public diary for a lot of people and you get these intimate looks at their life and it's easy to focus on the differences rather than the sameness and, as you point out about so many things, there are benefits to that as well, but I think the number of variables that it dumps into the equation is so quick.

Speaker 3: 2:29:01

I think it is naive to assume that those variables are benignly assigned or that things are just happenstance. You know, and uh, you know yeah while you're interacting with your quote unquote friends, you know um there are many things happening in in the background. Uh, yeah, yeah, you know that, and and and that's not some kind of kooky conspiracy theory, but that's you know things are being banned and aggregated and measured and reconciled and, you know, marketed to and you know a lot of that's.

Speaker 3: 2:29:48

you know a lot of that's very useful. Maybe I didn't know I needed those shoes you know, or whatever it is.

Speaker 2: 2:29:59

I'll give you a recent example, and one I found quite funny, but it speaks directly to the point you just brought up. I don't know if you're familiar with it all. It's an old kind of christmas themed movie. It's called. It happened on fifth avenue.

Speaker 2: 2:30:16

Oh, and that, that's kind of a favorite old movie of mine that I watch every christmas season and my wife and I were watching that one evening and, um, the gentleman, uh, mr, uh, aloysius, uh, that comes in, but he's the hobo, you know, and he and he comes in and he gets into the wardrobe of the man who owns the house and and he's got this robe on and it's got silk and you know it's a, it's a very uh loud robe. I'm I'm talking to my wife on, uh, right after that scene and I said I said honey, I said I think I'm gonna get get myself a robe just like that, and of course she laughed the next morning. So this was 10, 30, 10, 30 pm. The next morning. I came in, sat down at my laptop, fired it up and on my laptop were ads featuring a rogue.

Speaker 1: 2:31:20

You and.

Speaker 3: 2:31:20

I should visit again when we'll talk about the surveillance society.

Speaker 2: 2:31:28

I'd like that. I'd like that. That would be a fascinating episode. Yeah, we'll like that. I'd like that. That would be a fascinating episode. Yeah, we'll do that. Well listen, dr Pate, we had originally talked about doing an hour and here we are at two and a half hours, but it tells me that you and I are probably a couple of people who could sit and talk endlessly about things and enjoy every minute of it.

Speaker 2: 2:31:51

Talk endlessly about things and enjoy every minute of it. So let's make it a point to have you back on at some point in the future and we'll talk about another area of life that impacts us all.

Speaker 3: 2:31:59

I would love it, jack thank you so much for the invitation to come on your program. I've been a fan for a long time. I love what you do here and it's just been a real honor to be a part of it.

Speaker 1: 2:32:11

So thank you.

Speaker 3: 2:32:14

Thank you.

Speaker 2: 2:32:15

Oh, likewise. Likewise, I can say I'm walking away from this with a lot to think about. I learned a lot and I just love the fact that I get to have people such as yourself come on and sit down with me one-on-one and get to learn from you and pick your brain, and that's always a pleasure. So I truly appreciate the time you've committed to me. Today I'm in debt to you. For sure, we'll get back together soon. In the meantime, sir, keep doing what you're doing what you're doing and we'll talk about it more in the future.

Speaker 2: 2:33:00

Thank you.

Speaker 1: 2:33:00

Thank you.