0:02
Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
Search this video
0:02
Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
0:07
Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
0:13
The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
0:36
We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
0:49
And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
0:56
With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
1:02
Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
1:11
Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
1:17
All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
1:26
This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
1:31
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
1:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
1:39
It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another episode of infinite loops.
1:44
And today I have a very special guest recommended to me by [Rory Sutherland], who said, this is the man talk to if you want to hear some really great ideas, how we in the Western world can help reestablish some semblance of sanity in our governing institutions.
2:06
My guest is Nicholas Gruen, who is the CEO of Lateral Economics, as well as a counselor to enumerable Australian prime ministers.
2:25
In fact, he's been called the best public intellectual in Australia. Wow, that's impressive. Welcome.
2:34
Nicholas Gruen: Hi there, Jim.
2:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: How are you?
2:36
Nicholas Gruen: I'm very well and if you are surprised to hear that last thing that you said, you're not the only one.
2:41
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I always laugh whatever I see someone else described, it reminds me of the Mark Twain story, probably [apocryphal] but the guy was such a Twain fan and he was going on and on and on praising Twain at way above where he should have [crosstalk] great man, like Twain.
3:02
Nicholas Gruen: After an introduction like that, I can hardly wait to still hear myself talk or something like that.
3:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes, exactly.
3:07
We are Very simpatico sir.
3:07
So the first thing I'm going to ask you to do, because it really was striking for me when we were talking earlier about what we're going to talk about today.
3:15
Is I'm going to ask you to read that passage from the fellow who worked in government, because this really sets the tone, in my opinion.
3:25
Nicholas Gruen: Yeah, I think it does.
3:27
So I'll just read it out.
3:27
"I spent 10 years of my life writing.
3:32
I wrote neighborhood plans, partnership strategies, the local area agreements, stretch targets, the sustainable community strategy, sub-regional infrastructure plans, funding bids monitoring documents, the council plans and service plans.
3:44
I have a confession to make, much of it was made up.
3:50
It was fudged, [spun], copied and pasted, cobbled together and attractively formatted.
3:55
I told lies in themes, lies in groups, lies in peers, strategic lies, operational lies, cross-cutting lies.
3:59
I wrote hundreds of pages of nonsense.
4:04
Some of it was my own, but most of it was collated from my colleagues across the organization and brought together into a single document. Why did I do it?
4:10
I did it because it was my job."
4:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Wow, I mean, the reaction that I have again upon hearing it is, this does not surprise me. Nicholas Gruen: Exactly.
4:26
[crosstalk] Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I don't think so, right?
4:27
And so there is such a disconnect in all Western democracies I think.
4:33
The America, Australia, the UK, doesn't really matter what we're talking about. Nicholas Gruen: Yeah.
4:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What has happened is we have seen...
4:40
You wrote a wonderful essay but I felt we need the eggs and we're going to get to that in a minute.
4:49
But what I want to talk first about the problem as you see it and I love your idea for solving this problem.
4:57
And I think that I can add a few things there because I did quite a bit of research after you and I talked the first time. Nicholas Gruen: Cool.
5:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so the problem seems to me, I'm going to let you outline this, but at its heart, democracy is defined by conversation, the willingness to give and take and also the idea that the discussants really all, even if the right, left, center do desire the best policy to emerge from their discussion.
5:28
And clearly that's not happening, but I'm going to throw it over to you to actually outline this much better than I just did.
5:40
Nicholas Gruen: Yeah, well, I mean, my way...
5:42
There are various ways to put it, one fairly powerful way I think is to say that, democracy has been fast [foodified].
5:46
So various food vendors I suppose from the beginning of time but certainly say since the fifties, realize that they could exploit certain features of our makeup, which were very good for us on the African Savannah.
6:06
That we like clean stuff, we like fat, we like sugar, we like salt and they...
6:06
And fast food manufacturers make pretty good food, but it's got some things in it which have been optimized so that if you eat a lot of it's poisonous. It slowly does you harm.
6:19
And I guess my way of thinking about our whole world, not just democracy, but more and more parts of culture have been colonized by this process of endless competitive optimization.
6:43
You and I were born at about the same times, so we both saw the Beatles.
6:43
I certainly don't want to present the Beatles as the high, necessarily the high point of popular music.
6:48
We could go back to Swing, Blues, these are very authentic forms of popular culture.
6:53
And now we have auto tune, I haven't got anything particular against auto tune, but we have one pop song after another.
7:09
That is tremendously, highly optimized.
7:14
And in a sense, and I would certainly make this claim of our political culture.
7:14
It's really not inhabitable by human beings.
7:19
It's not a culture, it's not something which is a vehicle for us to express ourselves at all.
7:26
It's completely colonized by people who are trying to achieve something.
7:33
Many of those people believe passionately in what they are trying to persuade. People of...
7:40
Many are extremely cynical, many and the ones that have got the most money are the most persuasive in many ways, but it is not a culture that people feel they can hear themselves in it.
7:49
More so if they don't have a university degree, so 95% or more of their representatives have university degrees and in America, probably around half of the electorate have degrees.
8:14
The ones that don't have university degrees speak in ways that are detected by the upper middle class and the graduates and they're now accused of racism and sexism and all the rest of it.
8:28
But that's a kind of an extreme, I think, I mean, I suppose I don't want to just blame the internet for this because here's my big fact which tells you why it wasn't the internet.
8:39
The Internet's made it a lot worse, but here's my big fact.
8:42
Between 1968 and 1988 on American network news, presidential soundbites went from, I think it was 48 seconds to nine seconds. That's it.
8:53
Democracy is over, if you watch Nixon and Kennedy and then watch not even Hillary and Donald, but I [smudge] even say Clinton and George H. W Bush.
9:10
These are people who've been rehearsing for days.
9:10
They have focus groups watching what happens to the worm.
9:16
I don't know whether, you know what I mean by the worm but the... Jim O'Shaughnessy: I Do. Nicholas Gruen: ...
9:23
little pleasure button when they say certain things.
9:23
So, if you've just had a...
9:23
And I've watched those worms, most of us have and if you've just had a difficult question named at you, then we can watch the worm and the worm, while you squirm, the worm goes down and then you start hitting your talking points and everyone goes, "Yeah, he's doing pretty well now."
9:43
Well, that's not debate, it's not really anything.
9:47
It's a simulacrum, it's something which brilliant...
9:47
It's like a cuckoo laying its eggs in another bird's nest.
9:53
It hits all our reflexes and this is like trolling on the internet.
9:53
It hits all our reflexes and we respond really quite reflexively, but it... No one's there.
10:05
Someone is just trying to manipulate us.
10:05
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Indeed and what's so interesting to me about this, as I researched your stuff is, this is what I spend most of my career studying because in investing people are taking advantage of the same human OS, that by the way, that we all run, we're all human beings, unless we something else we don't know about.
10:26
Nicholas Gruen: Absolutely, yeah.
10:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And what happens is that Cialdini, in his book Influence, was probably one of the pioneers of how you do this stuff.
10:36
But the real granddaddy was a nephew or cousin to [inaudible] named Edward Bennett, who was the first to figure out, "Oh my God, if I just put it in this order and I use these words, I'm going to win."
10:52
And so many people are under the false impression that this all started with the internet. Nicholas Gruen: Yeah.
11:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, it didn't. This started at...
11:02
There is a great documentary made on the BBC called The Century of the Self, that I would recommend to you and our listeners.
11:09
Because it really looks at what we're talking here, the hijacking of our base code, if you will, in that human beings are used to being tribal.
11:16
And even though that worked out really well when we were on the Savannah, it doesn't work out well in an incredibly and technologically advanced system.
11:29
So the problem is not simply to politics.
11:38
The reason it's so much more important though, is that McDonald's for example, optimizing to their... And by the way, this...
11:43
Maybe you haven't heard this one, but this one's a doozy.
11:49
In their internal documents, McDonald's executives refer to their customers as usable users.
12:01
I mean, when I first saw that I was like, "You not supposed to say that out loud guys." Nicholas Gruen: Yeah.
12:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But so, the proposal that you have put forth, which I've heard elsewhere, but I don't think I've ever heard it as well detailed as you do in your writings, is this idea of isegoria or equality of speech, right? Nicholas Gruen: Yeah.
12:27
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Where what's been happening, and I'm going to let you go because you do it very eloquently.
12:29
What's been happening is that we've been slowly doing the opposite of at George Orwell recommended we do.
12:35
And we have been using euphemism land language and epitomized in Orwell's...
12:43
The department of plenty, because everyone was starving.
12:50
Had there been the department of love because everyone was being tortured.
12:55
And so we're not there yet, but when you look at the current theme that world democratic...
13:03
And I don't mean in party, I mean, democracies have been advocating is, "Build back better."
13:11
What the fuck does that mean? I don't know. Nicholas Gruen: Yeah. Okay.
13:13
So I think I wanted to...
13:13
I actually think the line that you had me quoting earlier is that, I want to explain that in a more special and targeted way.
13:18
And I think what's happening in politics is somewhat different. Politics is...
13:23
Political campaigning is a bunch of people doing everything they know how to manipulate you. They will... the most...
13:33
if you are in favor of abortion on demand, you are pro-choice.
13:36
And if you are in favor of preventing people have abortion having abortions, you are apparently pro-life.
13:41
Well, who could be against either of those things.
13:41
So we are in this world of constant...
13:48
A hyper vigilance about the way words sound.
13:48
And it turns out as Orwell observed that you can more or less kind of airbrush out any meaning from that.
13:55
And that's largely what happens.
14:03
So for instance, if you take a government report in any of the English speaking countries and I don't know about elsewhere, if you take a government report, I mean, I can't read government reports because they, you don't know what they're saying. They...
14:16
With the government decided to improve this and it's a kind of complete bland out.
14:21
So this is over a very, very wide front.
14:27
The number of PR flex outnumber the number of journalists by four or five to one and their incomes are going up and the journalists incomes are going down.
14:35
And in fact maybe we can talk later about the fact that, the answer doesn't seem to be in journalists either.
14:47
Because journalists in our culture are a particular kind of entertainer and a particular kind of...
14:54
They're playing a particular role themselves.
14:54
So essentially you have this discourse in which nobody needs to be lying, actually telling lies.
15:01
Although you've taken it to a new level in the United States rest, as far as your commander in chief. [crosstalk].
15:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: We're number one, we're number one.
15:15
Nicholas Gruen: That's right.
15:15
But you don't have to do that, to give people the sense of severe undernourishment when they listen to any political speech. And so I first as...
15:26
So what I think can make a huge contribution is the...
15:26
What another democratic institution we have, that we've kind of barely noticed because it sits quite visibly.
15:39
It's hiding in plain sight somewhere else. And that is the jury. And the more...
15:43
and so I remember we had a woman, we still do have a woman in parliament and this was quite a long time ago. And we had a thing.
15:48
We called it, our Republican debate, where our prime minister was talking about getting rid of the monarchy in Australia.
15:57
Australia is more or less a functioning Republic, but it's got a kind of Monty Python show at the top called the Royal family. And there you are. And what...
16:06
Two things were happening, we were get...
16:06
There was a woman called Pauline Hansen who was studying the politics of...
16:09
Let's call it folk resentment.
16:09
A little bit Trumpy and she wasn't nearly as charismatic as Trump, but...
16:15
And she was picking up about 10% of the vote.
16:20
And we were having this debate about getting rid of the Royal family and having a president.
16:25
Now I'm perfectly fine with getting rid of the Royal family and having a president.
16:29
The only thing is all it was going to change was appearances, that the system would function very much as it had functioned before.
16:35
And at the same time, you're getting the beginning.
16:42
So this is 1996 and at the same time, sorry, yeah. 1996 no, the Republic.
16:46
Yeah, that's right, 1996.
16:46
And at the same time you have this rise of this resentment and this word, this Greek word that I've stumbled into much more recently, the word is isegoria, I-S-E-G-O-R-I-A.
16:58
And it was a Greek word for a political concept we don't have.
17:06
So we have the political concept of freedom of speech and isegoria means equality of speech.
17:13
And the way I saw the role of this politician was that she was representing...
17:17
I didn't like this woman, but she was representing the voices of people who couldn't be heard otherwise.
17:23
And one of my iron laws of electoral politics through our system of media and so on, is that no matter how good or bad a particular voice is, it's always toxified through this system.
17:41
It always pays her to be more extreme than probably she would like to be.
17:41
And if she isn't, if she doesn't do that, she doesn't get on the TV and she won't be in parliament next time. And so on, it goes.
17:53
And so I thought to myself and I wrote this rather naively, I just said, well, "I think, I'm happy with the Republic, but I think we should have a hundred randomly selected Australians."
18:03
And they could make a third house of parliament.
18:09
We could make them completely advisory, because our Senate a bit like yours is a...
18:09
It's not quite as blocked as yours.
18:16
But in fact, it's quite well, it's rather good our Senate because the majority party very, very rarely has a majority, but it doesn't have your reckon a filibusters and all that sort of stuff. So you... So the lower...
18:24
So the government is formed in the lower house.
18:28
The lower house determines who the prime minister is, the head of government and then they have to negotiate most things through the Senate.
18:38
And so it would actually be quite powerful if a group of randomly selected Australians, a hundred of those were to deliberate on the same things.
18:45
And I'm pretty sure that when our prime minister Abbott, abolished our carbon pricing regime, our budget is now I think, 11 billion Australian Dollars a year poorer because he got rid of the carbon pricing.
19:06
Now he didn't really have any idea what he was going to do.
19:06
It was just a cool thing to say that this was a terrible tax and he was going to abolish it.
19:10
And so people would've figured that out, give them some time they would've figured it out. So that was my idea.
19:21
And now the more I have thought about this and I've been thinking about it pretty seriously for about five years.
19:26
I see great riches in this and great simplicity. So...
19:32
And I'd also just like to make clear, I'm not arguing that because it's sort of pointless for me to get this bright idea and say, why don't we just get rid of everything we've got and we have this new system.
19:40
So I'm not really suggesting that.
19:40
But what I am saying is that this...
19:44
So let's go back to the jury and let's describe it differently.
19:50
Let's say that there are two fundamental ways to represent the people, three.
19:50
One is they can represent themselves through direct democracy and we even have the technology for that now.
20:02
And I think that would make things worse, not better.
20:02
We can argue about that if you like, but later on.
20:05
So there are two other ways to represent the people. One is an election.
20:11
We know that well, and we instinctively think that's the only way.
20:11
How could you have a democracy without elections? Well, let me tell you.
20:15
Athens, had almost no elections and you can say, well, it was a direct democracy, if you were a man and you were a local and you weren't a slave and so on.
20:27
But there's another better answer, which is that the ecclesia, I think which was the assembly, met once a month, and you can't run a government with 6,000 people getting together once a month.
20:37
So what they did is, the equivalent of Athens as the local council, [inaudible] the place to ran the show, was 500 randomly selected citizens who sat on this body for a year, and they just got rolled over again, and again.
20:55
And this is why Aristotle talks about democracy.
20:55
I love this description of democracy and it shows us how far we've got from it, which is, he described democracy as a system in which people take turns in governing and being governed.
21:08
So there isn't a governing class and a governed class.
21:16
That's what he would call an aristocracy or an oligarchy.
21:16
So that's a critical thing.
21:22
So there are all sorts of characteristics about this way of representing the people, and they're all profoundly different to the electoral way of representing the people.
21:37
And so they can become a fantastic check and balance to the electoral system that we have at the moment.
21:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree with this idea entirely.
21:46
I think it is spot on and could be almost revolutionary in what it would lead to.
21:54
And what I think it would lead to, is for there to be a public voice that is well heard throughout the land, that differs substantially, on many issues facing a country today.
22:12
And it's applicable by the way, across the spectrum.
22:12
And I think the reason for that is something that you get into quite well in one of your essays.
22:25
And that is the idea that juries operate differently.
22:25
And I love the idea of Aristotle Plato because...
22:34
The worry I have honestly, is that our base code as humans is very difficult to overcome or reprogram.
22:42
And a great example of that is Plato, as you know, Athens and Sparta died for supremacy in Greece for hundreds of years.
22:51
And they were literally diametrically opposed systems.
22:58
In Athens, they welcomed foreigners, they had a democracy, ideas were cherished, discussion and all, very, very open. Sparta.
23:06
You wouldn't want to be brought up in Sparta, because literally Sparta was, "We are going to mold you in one way, and one way only.
23:19
And you are going to basically spend your entire life preparing to die for Sparta's honor." And they didn't.
23:25
In fact, when they wanted a song for Sparta, they had to import somebody from Athens, because they didn't have any poets in Sparta.
23:32
But Athens under Pericles during the golden age, won these wars for the most part and then suddenly Sparta won.
23:44
And Plato one of the great thinkers of his day, a contemporary more or less of Aristotle, got very, very frightened by the chaos and mayhem.
23:52
And he wrote a book called The Republic. Nicholas Gruen: He did.
24:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And if you read The Republic, it is not what we would call a clarion call for democracy and freedom of the people.
24:04
It is quite the opposite and it was influenced by Sparta.
24:10
The reason I'm going into this is because, what we have to constantly remind ourselves of is we are all human beings.
24:15
We all respond to the same programming, so to speak.
24:21
And one of the things, as I read your work, that I got very excited by it and I just immediately started thinking, "We have to steel-man this."
24:30
And you know what that is. Right.
24:30
So most people will put up an argument, especially of their opponents, and it's a straw-man.
24:36
They pick the worst aspects of their opponents and it's a straw-man.
24:42
I prefer to steal-man an argument, even if it's my opponent's argument. Right?
24:48
Nicholas Gruen: Absolutely. Of course.
24:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think that that is going to be a much better...
24:50
In the conversation you're going to end up with better ideas coming out.
24:52
But so I have several questions.
24:52
So number one, what I worry about when I hear this argument is, "Oh, that's just idealism." Right?
24:58
I mean, people have jobs, they have families, they have all these things.
25:04
You're going to pick somebody at random.
25:10
Well, what if he can't get off work?
25:10
What if she says, "I'm a nurse and what I do is critical and I can't do this." ?
25:16
Which by the way, when you're picking a jury, you often do hear that.
25:20
And one of the topics here in the United States is, how can I get out of jury duty? Right? Nicholas Gruen: Yeah.
25:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so my first question, and I'm hoping that you will enlighten me, a, how do we get a population that might be unwilling to participate, even though it's in their best interest for them to do so to participate?
25:38
The second thing is how do we avoid the very same manipulators from manipulating the jury selection process?
25:48
In US, you can make quite a good living being a consultant to a lawyer on jury selection.
25:57
And during the process, lawyers can eliminate a certain number of potential jurors.
26:05
And so I began thinking, well, of course that's going to happen here too.
26:10
So let's start with those two.
26:10
How do we convince people that they really need to participate?
26:15
And secondly, how do we protect against the clever manipulators up here manipulating our selection system?
26:23
Nicholas Gruen: So the first thing is, if people get a letter from the governor, so of the equivalent in Australia is the premier of a state, they're very flattered.
26:32
And they know that it's a bit of a joke to be flattered because they've been randomly selected, but we feel good about.
26:42
It's like getting invited to a party.
26:42
And a very substantial number of people accept.
26:48
Now, these people should be paid.
26:48
The way in which these juries that are being run at the moment is a sort of a formula.
26:55
They vary in different areas.
26:55
But a fairly common pattern would be to say, let's get a group of say about 45 people together.
27:01
We want them to have about four days of learning about a particular issue, mandatory sentencing or something like that.
27:13
So for instance, in Oregon, they have citizen review.
27:16
So you have a citizen initiated referendum that is written into the constitution.
27:16
And they have now got a system in which if there is to be a citizen initiated referendum, there is a citizen review.
27:29
And that is 24 people who meet and instruct the people at their disposal to inform them of the contents of the referendum. And they deliberate.
27:37
And they put out a statement of what they think, and a pro and a con.
27:45
And then they say how many people voted for the pro and how many people voted for the con.
27:51
So the attendance is pretty good.
27:58
I can't give you an exact figure, but it's pretty good.
27:58
In politics there'll always be sore losers, but you don't hear people who are trying to tell you the truth, saying this is a terribly biased system.
28:08
As far as the possibility of jury, the sort of thing you're referring to in legal jury selection, I presume this all comes from challenges for cause.
28:21
So people line up and you do all kinds of research to try to characterize this person appearing in front of you, male, female, black, white, English speaking, non-English speaking, or English is a second language and so on.
28:35
And that's how people try to manipulate those people.
28:43
None of this is contemplated in this situation.
28:43
Finally, I would say that once this system became mature...
28:52
And I think we have to contemplate a long period of voluntarily building this thing alongside government, without government's permission.
29:04
But once it became properly accepted, then you can do what you do with juries and say, this is compulsory.
29:11
I personally don't mind, especially in the current circumstances where it's advisory, I don't mind the likelihood that there would be a something of a bias towards a lower income people because relatively speaking, the jury pay will be more attractive to them.
29:29
But I don't think that's a big effect because people on high incomes typically have a higher level of education and they get interested in this stuff.
29:35
I can tell you from my own experience with this stuff in Australia, the response of people who've been involved is pretty extraordinary.
29:49
So one of the ways I put this is that, we human beings, you and me, Jim, we are the only species on the planet that is a sort of problem solving species.
30:05
We survived on the African Savannah by getting into groups, jury size groups, and saying, "We're a bit worried about the lions. What the fuck do we do?"
30:11
It's that we wouldn't have said that in Australia, obviously.
30:16
Well, because there's no lions.
30:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But however, you do have.
30:18
What is it, eight of the 10 deadliest animals or- Nicholas Gruen: Yeah, very much so.
30:24
All kinds of nasty things.
30:24
All kinds of nasty things.
30:27
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I thought it was really funny.
30:27
I love Australia and we went to New Zealand afterwards.
30:31
And what they do with the bags, as you know, but many of our listeners won't know, is they wrap them up in like classic where nothing can live in.
30:43
And then they literally inspect them to make sure that one of those nasty beasts hasn't made it's way on the aircraft over to Zealand.
30:48
Because they don't have any.
30:56
They don't have [crosstalk].
30:56
Which is really interesting from an evolutionary point of view. But I'm sorry.
30:58
I'm [inaudible] interrupting.
30:58
Nicholas Gruen: So, when people come out of one of these processes...
31:00
If they're badly run, you don't quite get this result.
31:05
But just competently run citizen jury processes that I've known about.
31:05
I would say after you get a result, and 80% of people will vote one way and 20% the other, or maybe it'll be a bit different to that.
31:16
And about 95% of the people come out and they say, this was a good process.
31:22
About half of those say it was a very good process.
31:22
And half of those again, think it's a kind of life changing good process because they go, "Why isn't politics like this?"
31:36
I hear are these people across the table, and I thought I was going to hate them because they've got colored hair or carry guns or whatever.
31:41
And I didn't hate them at all.
31:47
I didn't agree with them about some things, but they're just like I am.
31:47
They're just normal people.
31:51
And so to give you an example, in Melbourne, they had a citizen jury in Melbourne do it, which the Melbourne city council, Melbourne's the city I come from in Australia...
31:58
The citizen jury did a 10 year budget.
31:58
That was their task, and they constructed a 10 year budget.
32:04
I think there were 42 of them.
32:04
And I think I'm right in saying that of those 42 people, three of them stood for local government the next opportunity.
32:16
So this is an incredibly generative process.
32:16
I don't think many people who knock on doors and take part in the freak show, that is our electoral system, they're falling out of that system in droves, that the quality of our politicians is much more on the right, I must say, than the left, has just plummeted in the last 15 years.
32:42
So the more I see this, the more I think about it.
32:42
As I said, we are the problem solving species.
32:47
These juries, they can be big juries or little juries, but these juries are the canonical form in which human beings have old, for goodness’ sake.
32:53
We just got built for this.
32:58
And instead we have a love, and it's a much more scalable love of theater.
33:04
That's something else that the Greeks discovered.
33:04
And that you can entertain thousands of people in a theater or millions of people with television screens and computer screens.
33:09
And so that's the other medium.
33:15
But theater's a very different medium it's much more susceptible to manipulation.
33:22
In fact, it's now wall to wall manipulation.
33:22
If there's virtually nothing in it that you can get your teeth into, the copy repositioned in 24 hours. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
33:31
And very much the case here in the United States to the point of which I stopped watching any television news of any kind of decade ago.
33:41
And I will dip in occasionally.
33:41
I must tell you the last time I did it, I was absolutely horrified.
33:50
Because literally it's like, we'll go lies and it doesn't matter what tribe you're fighting for.
33:57
Claude Shannon sort of a hero of mine, father of information theory.
33:57
And he said that information to be truly understand would give you some novel information or [crosstalk] Nicholas Gruen: Exactly, it has to surprise you. Yeah.
34:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It has to surprise you. Right.
34:13
So he did quote that in a standard political speech, there would be zero information.
34:16
[crosstalk] Nicholas Gruen: Which shows you how long standing these tendencies have been.
34:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Absolutely.
34:26
So I guess the next question that I would ask if I was playing devil's advocate and arguing against this would be, what about the idea that says, "Well, yeah. Sure.
34:31
It's good to have common folk talk about various issues facing the [inaudible], but we really goodness, we're in such an advanced world these days.
34:46
We really ought to have everything being decided by experts and professionals."
34:54
What would your argument to that be?
34:57
Nicholas Gruen: Well, I mean there are a lot of things to say about that, but the thing I'll say in most of these cases is, let's not let status quo bias run away with this.
35:09
Our politicians don't know very much either.
35:09
I think you'll be familiar with this analogy.
35:14
The Wankel engine, the rotary engine that Mazda produced may have been a superior engine, but the reciprocating engine had a hundred years of global development on it.
35:26
And so what's happened is, we got these politicians and they don't know very much, and they're a bit better educated than your average person.
35:31
And so they have to build a structure to advise them and so on.
35:36
So it's basically exactly the same with a citizen jury.
35:43
You build systems that enable them to get independent advice. I like the idea of...
35:48
In fact, nobody else that I know of.
35:48
The people who argue for sortition are very given to the egalitarianism of sortition, and so am I.
36:03
But I think that a basic equality between people is the first spiritual fundamental of human beings in a healthy state.
36:10
The second fundamental of human beings in a healthy state is a sense that one can excel.
36:17
One can become distinguished.
36:17
One can try by discipline, by talent to be as good as you can be.
36:27
What I would like to see is mechanisms in a citizen jury, in which let's say they sat for a year or two years...
36:35
So I'm talking about, say a standing citizen's assembly.
36:41
Let's make it interesting and make it Arizona, because I know some interesting things are happening with the electoral system in Arizona.
36:50
So every two years people get selected and they say, "Here's a good wage, same wage as a parliamentarian will get.
36:54
Do you want to take this job on?
36:54
And the people who will take it on will be in this position."
36:59
At the end of the two years, what I'd like to see is for...
37:06
Let's say there's a hundred of them.
37:06
I'd like them to select the best 10.
37:06
And I don't want them to be in the citizen assembly next time around, but I do want them to be part of a kind of honored [inaudible] people who can help advise the newcomers, who can help develop the institutions of [inaudible] for the benefit of the people.
37:27
Now, let me tell you one other thing, because there was a wonderful, a miraculous, brilliant way that this was done in the south Australian citizen assembly.
37:43
There were 340 people, and they were deliberating on nuclear power.
37:43
And the organizers realized that they need a spokespeople, but they didn't want to hold an election because these things are kind of supposed to be an alternative to elections.
37:56
So what they did was they said on the fourth day...
38:02
People had got to know each other pretty well.
38:02
On the fourth day, they said, "Who would like to be a spokesperson?"
38:07
About 15 people stood up. They said, "All right.
38:13
Point to the third person on your right.
38:13
You can sit down now with the people third on you who've just been pointed out. Stand up."
38:18
Then what they did is they got that effectively random sample from the group.
38:23
And they spent an hour in a room working out the criteria, according to whom spokespeople should be...
38:30
The criteria you would follow to get the best spokespeople and the next out identifying the people who, in their opinion, best exhibited those characteristics.
38:40
Now you see what's happening here, this is not competitive.
38:40
Can you imagine in a company or in the public service, how different incentives would be among those people who'd really like to be in that group of the best people?
38:52
They'd behave completely differently.
38:57
They wouldn't be elbowing people aside, punching down and kissing up, they'd be trying to be of service to each other.
39:07
There are all kinds of possibilities here and we just have to use our imaginations and then build.
39:12
Start doing stuff, see how it works out.
39:12
This was a lovely little bit of icing on the cake for this selection mechanism, was that at the end of the period of selecting the spokespeople, they realized that they had perfect gender balance and that was not one of the criteria.
39:30
Well, that's the way to get gender balance.
39:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Interesting.
39:33
Here in the United States, I am a trustee of a group called Common Good, which has very similar goals as the ones you're outlining here.
39:45
One of our frustrations is exactly what you point out about the political class as it exists today.
39:53
Our founder, Phil Howard, he's done endless shows, introduced speeches, got several TED Talks, et cetera. We offer our ideas ...
40:01
we're nonpartisan, so we offer them to any member of the political class.
40:09
The challenge, as long as at least I've been associated with it, is everyone yeses us, if you know what I mean by that.
40:23
Nicholas Gruen: Yeah, of course.
40:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh yes, that's a great idea.
40:24
Oh yes, that's a great ...
40:25
Yeah, and then nothing happens.
40:25
So I wonder if this side-by-side jury or assembly of people chosen by a lot could have an effect where ...
40:32
Well, you mentioned one and I can't remember which state, but I read the piece where you outlined it, where mandatory sentences were discussed and- Nicholas Gruen: That's Oregon in the- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oregon, okay.
40:49
Prior to going into that, the public opinion polls were 70% in favor of mandatory sentences with the result of the discussion with the randomly selected people was three out of 24 people, I think I'm doing that right. Nicholas Gruen: You are.
41:05
Jim O'Shaughnessy: [inaudible].
41:06
Nicholas Gruen: You've got to assume, the best guess is that 70% of those people went into the citizen review in favor of mandatory sentencing. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
41:16
Nicholas Gruen: And a tiny fraction ended up in favor of it.
41:18
What's remarkable is that if you get a simple description of what the mandatory sentencing was, sounds fair enough.
41:23
It was for the fourth, I think it was the fourth time you are convicted of drink driving, you have a three month incarceration.
41:27
Or maybe it was the third time.
41:27
Then the fourth time a felony sex offense, you're in for 20 years.
41:33
Now, having that described to you sounds okay to me, but the fact is when these people said, "All right, well, what happens if this person's 15 and they have sex with a 14-year-old, that'd be felony sex offense, wouldn't it?"
41:49
They'd get into the detail which you will never ...
41:49
You'll be crucified in electoral politics even trying to get into the detail because people will say, "Well, there you are.
41:57
You're just logic chopping, you're being smart.
41:57
Are you in favor of incest or not?"
42:05
Read my lips, all this [inaudible].
42:05
You need people to say, "Hang on a minute, I've read this bit and you are saying that in these circumstances, a person goes to jail for three months. No, that's wrong.
42:17
It's only way you can do this, and there are now probably in the ...
42:24
I suspect in the United States more than anywhere else, but it's true everywhere, there are untouchable issues.
42:28
Drugs is one because to deal with drugs properly, you don't ...
42:35
it just doesn't go over on the radio, on the tele, very well.
42:35
Funnily enough, when that's litigated between the right and the left in electoral politics, I don't like the sound of what the left say because they say love, and forgiveness, and stuff.
42:46
This needs to be hardheaded.
42:51
But it turns out that if you just pile people into prison, there's nothing hardheaded about that.
42:57
It's cruel and stupid, it doesn't work.
43:00
Drugs, incarceration, guns, just some of these areas that are just ... All kind of tax issues.
43:07
The United States is the only country in the world without a ...
43:07
Well, I think the only developed country in the world without a value added tax as opposed to these pretty wacky sales taxes that you use.
43:15
It's just a no-go zone, there's just no point.
43:15
There's all these things that it's an open secret we could make quite a lot better, but your opponents would have you for breakfast, and so they're just stuck.
43:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Several really good points there, and especially the one around drugs and prohibition.
43:34
I support a group called MAPS here in the United States which is advocating for the medicinal use of psychedelics to help cure things like PTSD. Many U. S.
43:50
soldiers are suffering horribly from PTSD.
43:50
Actually we are making quite a bit of progress on that, but that is a reframing issue because I have often said, look, even when you go out of your way to say I'm not talking about recreational use of LSD or Psilocybin.
44:11
Although, by the way, both of those drugs are not in the least bit addicting.
44:11
What I find humorous is that the drugs that are most addicting, alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, Oxycontin, are quite legal.
44:29
Nicholas Gruen: And very profitable. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes. Bingo.
44:33
But the idea also of prohibition, which we did in the United States.
44:33
The thing that I like about what you were saying is ...
44:40
Because I thought about this after reading your stuff and writing my notes, I don't think prohibition would've happened in the United States if a randomly selected group of regular Americans was able to discuss it and then make a recommendation.
44:58
Because what happened with prohibition is that ... There are a few things.
45:04
Number one is at that time of prohibition, the Volstead Act, America really did have a serious drinking problem, and especially of lower class people.
45:11
People would get a pay packet on a Friday, they would take the money and go get drunk as skunks, and then they'd go home and beat their wives.
45:22
That's a problem, and so absolutely the problem existed.
45:30
What can come out of a conversation, I believe, is so the first order of thought thinkers were, yeah, well let's just make it illegal.
45:35
But out of the conversation in one of these Citizen Advisory Councils that are randomly selected would emerge, in my opinion, the second order and third order effects of prohibition.
45:49
The second order effects of prohibition was that it horribly destroyed the police force which became incredibly corrupt because of bribes.
46:06
It created the mafia as we know it in the United States by trying to deny human beings something that they had partaken in for all of human history.
46:18
My point is that even though the proponents of prohibition were absolutely correct about the United States having a problem, and it did, they were absolutely wrong about the solution to that problem because they didn't give enough thought to the ancillary effects of such a law.
46:39
I think that the idea of the max or required prison sentences, three strikes and you're out, we call it here in the United States.
46:48
Again, back to the group I'm involved with Common Good, our founder Phil Howard has pointed out in his many books and talks, one of the key elements that is causing all this, in addition to what you are saying, is we have taken all responsibility away from the individual.
47:10
The thing is, that isn't a human way to do anything.
47:10
Because your average human, at least as I have encountered them, wants to do the right thing by and large.
47:15
I'm not saying there aren't bad actors, there are.
47:23
But your average person in the world, I would say, wants to do the right thing, the fair thing.
47:29
The Rawlsian idea of the Veil of Ignorance, which basically deposits that, okay, well, if you're making laws, let's think about it from the point of view of if you don't get to be you, maybe you were born in Afghanistan, maybe you were born in Kenya, and that gets people thinking about it differently.
47:53
I guess the question that I would have and would really like your input on is do you see ...
48:02
If this is a sitting body, it needs to rotate, right? Nicholas Gruen: Correct.
48:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's not just humans, by the way, it's everything all the way down to ants.
48:09
Dominant hierarchies are a thing and they are built into us genetically and trying to conquer them would be a fool’s errand, in my opinion.
48:15
That's why I like the rotation idea.
48:23
Let's say we can wave a wand and that this happens, or let's take a recent example.
48:29
The UN put up something snarky about Elon Musk and his wealth and they said 6 billion could solve world poverty.
48:38
Musk who is sort of our incredible P.
48:38
T Barnum these days came back with a challenge which was, I'll give you 6 billion today- Nicholas Gruen: If you tell me exactly what ...
48:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: If you tell me in exactly how it's going to be spent. Crickets.
48:52
Nicholas Gruen: Yeah, that's right.
48:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But it got me thinking, wouldn't it be great if we could get Elon Musk or one of these other Titans of the industry to peel off, I don't know, a $100 million and start Wildcat juries.
49:09
Talk about the idea of a Wildcat jury, because it was also something you and I discussed about what's going on in [crosstalk].
49:14
Nicholas Gruen: I got quite close to running one of these things, and this is one of the ...
49:16
Now most people who are keen on citizen juries, they often participate with governments in running them because they're expensive to run.
49:27
Then the downside of that, of course, is that they get things to do the citizen jury on, which is safe for the government and so on.
49:33
It's a pretty unsatisfactory state of affairs, so I'm trying to think of sortition as a kind of political activism.
49:49
Now, there are lots of ways in which it's very different as activism because it does something which when it's been done well in history, is one of the most miraculously successful things, which is to give away power in order to get it back in spades.
50:11
If you'll allow me a digression, you may be familiar with the English civil war in the 1640s where they had a big fight with the king, they chopped his head off.
50:20
There was mayhem for 20 years, it was pure misery.
50:20
Then his cousin, his first cousin, I guess ...
50:25
No, it would've been his nephew, so that was Charles I.
50:26
The restoration is in 1660, and then James ...
50:26
Charles II comes in, and Charles II's brother is effectively dislodged from the monarchy of the United Kingdom.
50:35
This is 1688, it's 40 years after Charles' head's been chopped off and the difference is that, basically, people are terrified of civil war again.
50:49
The parl has far more authority in parliament, there's a lot more institution building.
50:55
And so, they're basically able to flip the switch from a monarchy with pretensions to being an absolute monarchy, and that was always the problem, to a constitutional monarchy.
51:07
By giving away power, the British state became vastly more powerful.
51:16
There's this marvelous expression, as a finance guy you might like this if you haven't heard it before.
51:21
An expression, a free nation deep in debt, you know what that means? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
51:28
Nicholas Gruen: Basically the moment people knew that if they could lend to the king and if the king didn't pay them back, they could take them to the courts in England and get their money back.
51:41
Well, interest rates collapsed for the Dutch monarchy and the English monarch because they're the two monarchies that you can sue and get your money back.
51:47
And so, they end up with this vast wealth.
51:53
This is the business of giving power away to get power.
51:53
There you are, that's a digression.
52:00
But I do think that backing citizen juries is a real winner for politicians who aren't ...
52:07
Politicians are on a sort of Merry-go-round and they're trying to look after a thousand interests.
52:12
If they got themselves more comfortable with giving some power away, they would find things would improve a lot.
52:22
There's this marvelous story of Franklin Roosevelt who at the end of a meeting said to the people who'd come and met him, "Well, you've persuaded me. You're right."
52:29
They said, "Well, when are you going to do something about it?"
52:33
He said, "I just told you you've persuaded me, I'm right.
52:36
Now you have to make me do it."
52:36
That's electoral democracy.
52:36
Anyway, so we got good evidence that in Britain, you get a swing of about 10%.
52:43
Britain on the question of Brexit is a bit like mandatory sentencing.
52:52
It sounded good, but if you get people in a room and they spend a few days going through it, they realize that they've been overly emotional about it and you get about a 10% swing against it.
53:08
In the last year before Brexit was actually engineered, I was trying to organize what I called Brexit Deliberation Day in the United Kingdom via a person who I know Kevin Rudd, who was prime minister for three years in Australia.
53:23
We approached George Soros and he had a million pounds and he had to decide whether to give it to us or give it to the anti Brexit campaigning.
53:33
Of course, we can't tell him that we'll campaign against Brexit.
53:39
We had no intention of campaigning against Brexit, and if the citizen juries had said actually Brexit's a good idea, I'd be the first to say, "Good, that's democracy."
53:48
I may not think that they're right, but that's just fine and dandy.
53:48
That's one of the reasons why if you are reporting to a board and the board says, "Well, is this going to work for us?"
53:59
And you say, "Don't know."
53:59
Had we been able to do it, the idea was to fund with a million pounds 10 citizen juries around the country.
54:05
I'm pretty sure, I'm very, very, confident.
54:12
I bet you about a hundred to one, I think the odds are, that you would get a major swing away from Brexit and that would've had an effect.
54:22
Would it have changed things?
54:22
Probably not, because for various reasons people were so of revved up by then that it was maybe inevitable.
54:27
That's what I call a Wildcat citizen assembly, you could do this on redistricting, you could do this on Senate filibusters.
54:35
What is it, Tennessee ...
54:41
Where's Joe Manchin from?
54:41
Anyway, you could have a citizen jury and you could put to the citizen jury the dilemmas that he's having to think about.
54:45
The other idea I had talked to you about, which I got some ...
54:52
Let's not get too carried away, but I've got some good contacts in the United States.
54:56
Somebody who ran McCain's operation, and then the guy, Joe Trippi, who made Howard Dean the front runner in 2004, I think it was.
55:14
I was talking with another Australian prime minister when Donald Trump was in the White House of having a ...
55:20
of getting funding from a philanthropist.
55:20
Then I think you could crowdfund this, when people saw what it was, they'd be really in favor of it.
55:26
The idea was to simply using the mechanism I had talked to you about with regard to a large citizen jury appointing a delegation of the best.
55:38
That would be the delegation that would be a people's delegation to go to Glasgow, the conference of the parties on the greenhouse ... on global greenhouse.
55:49
They would have a people's agenda, and the government would have a government's agenda, and it would be very interesting to see the difference.
55:59
We are still an open society and these things, when people can see legitimacy, that's influential.
56:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I agree.
56:06
I think it's a great idea, as I told you when we originally talked about it.
56:06
I think the idea of getting some original funding from a philanthropist.
56:12
I also love this idea of crowdsourcing the funding.
56:22
Nicholas Gruen: Absolutely.
56:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Because if you crowdsource it, you really want it to be that way.
56:28
Nicholas Gruen: That's right.
56:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That is making your case for you right there.
56:33
If you crowdsource something and it is overwhelmingly successful, that is sending a very strong message to the political class. Nicholas Gruen: Yeah.
56:42
This is where I was appealing to this idea that about 25% of people coming out of one of these functions just become ambassadors for life about this.
56:49
They'll bore dinner parties for the rest of their life about how, this is how we should do things.
56:56
Now, I've also had some experience.
57:02
I was involved with Rory Stewart in planning his mayoral campaign in London and he's keen on citizen juries.
57:07
Now, if you focus group this, people don't react well to it because they go, "Oh, you are suggesting another committee.
57:13
We don't need another committee.
57:18
We need someone to do something."
57:18
So people have to see it working.
57:18
They have to feel their own voice rise up in it.
57:24
And then I think they will say, yes.
57:24
You know, in the words of that scene in "When Harry met Sally," "I'll have what she's having."
57:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's a great scene.
57:34
And, another thought that I had after we spoke originally and I started reading all your stuff and thinking about it, was when you look at the polls, which are pretty much useless in my opinion, because of the way you can skew them- Nicholas Gruen: Yeah.
57:52
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So what's interesting about this to me is that, I think that these either standing or Wildcat juries on advisory things would demonstrate, a) conversation changes people's minds.
58:00
Conversation in a, in a light where people aren't shouting at each other. Right?
58:14
Nicholas Gruen: Well, no.
58:14
Conversation changes people's minds, unless it is their job for their mind not to be changed.
58:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Think bigger. Yes.
58:19
Thank you for the correction.
58:21
Nicholas Gruen: That's the system we have.
58:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right. That's right.
58:24
And it beautifully made by the quote you read at the beginning of our discussion. So, the incentives ...
58:26
I've always believed incentives determine outcomes. Right? Nicholas Gruen: Yeah.
58:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: If your incentive is to lie, cheat and steal, and that's going to get you what you want, you're going to lie [inaudible]. Right?
58:38
But as the incentive of giving agency, I love this idea because what happens is just the very set up, the way you've set it up, it allows for people to have these conversations.
58:56
And, even when we steel-man it, and we talk about addressing dominance hierarchies, and we talk about how it gets funded, and we talk about all of those things, I think that what has to happen is twofold.
59:10
And I think you'll agree with me, but if you don't, I want to hear why you do disagree with me.
59:16
The first is you, this isn't a one and done. [crosstalk]. Nicholas Gruen: No.
59:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: If I were like setting up this program, these need to happen consistently for probably a decade. Honestly?
59:26
I- Nicholas Gruen: Well, no.
59:30
We've had parliaments or in your case congresses, since the American Revolution, so I am proposing these are an integral part of our democracy, and that we are about a great cultural labor.
59:41
Our democracy has always been a great cultural labor.
59:48
It's seen a lot of trouble over the last 50 years.
59:48
It's cultural, as I've put, it has become uninhabitable.
59:54
But the Soviet Union had a democratic constitution.
1:00:00
It was just that nobody took any notice of it, because powerful people decided what the truth was.
1:00:05
So, this is always the case.
1:00:05
You can't specify it in a constitution.
1:00:05
It can help to have a bunch of rules in a constitution.
1:00:12
And that helps make it hard for people who want to wreck the place.
1:00:17
But, if the culture is weak enough, the pieces of paper aren't worth jack shit.
1:00:22
So- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:00:24
I probably need to specify what I was talking about.
1:00:24
They have to happen everywhere and for a long time.
1:00:29
What I meant by that is to get people, just regular people who, as you pointed out a moment ago are opposed ...
1:00:36
It's like, "What the fuck?
1:00:36
We don't need another committee."
1:00:41
But actually watching them operate, I think, would change minds in as little as five years.
1:00:47
And, the thing that I love about it, is that coming out of it and almost necessarily, is this idea of the demystification of waffle words and language. Right?
1:01:02
So I used to say that in Christianity or Catholicism, the Mass ...
1:01:10
Well, Mass was always said in Latin, and that was because the priest didn't want the lay people to know what they were going on about. Right?
1:01:15
And so, we've seen that go over to the waffle words and the speech policing of making people basically state one thing and believe quite another.
1:01:26
I think that this would not just rectify the problems that we see on the political front. Right?
1:01:32
But it would all also at least contribute, in my opinion, to the stopping of preference falsification, because- Nicholas Gruen: [crosstalk] So say what you mean by ...
1:01:43
I think I know what you mean, but just clarify what you mean by "preference falsification."
1:01:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, preference falsification is something that I have seen and it's becoming increasingly common, at least in the US.
1:01:51
And it's terrifying, because it is, even among friends with no one listening, people will say what- Nicholas Gruen: Oh, they'll lie about what their ...
1:02:03
They'll lie about their- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes. They'll lie.
1:02:06
They'll just outright lie.
1:02:06
And, obviously, that is not healthy.
1:02:06
And so, the thing that I think that these groups could help do is to remove that. Right?
1:02:12
Because the very nature of it is one where common language and simply stating what you believe is almost required, I think? Nicholas Gruen: Yeah.
1:02:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so, I think that from that point of view, this just becomes something that ...
1:02:31
I'm very interested in this and my follow up is going to be ...
1:02:36
I'm going to talk to people about it and see if there's enough interest.
1:02:42
And I probably will do this for common good, would be to fund, so at least locally ...
1:02:46
Because I love this idea.
1:02:46
And if no one else is going to do it, I think it would be a worthy thing to philanthropically support.
1:02:54
But I definitely believe that it shouldn't be completely underwritten, because then ...
1:03:02
Well, of course, then "O'Shaughnessy's interests on Wall Street ...
1:03:07
" And, "What he's going to do is just try to get all the people for ...
1:03:14
" It will be an automatic ad hominem.
1:03:15
Nicholas Gruen: Well, yeah.
1:03:15
You can't ever, especially in today's ...
1:03:17
I'm not too worried about this.
1:03:17
I had to go through that with the prospect of getting Soros money.
1:03:22
And, I'm not too worried about it because you simply say, "Here are the governance documents.
1:03:27
Here are two quite prominent ...
1:03:27
" Usually politicians on the moderate left and moderate right.
1:03:33
" They say it's all squeaky clean. This is the process.
1:03:39
Come and watch the balls come out of the barrel as we pick the people.
1:03:39
Have a TV show about that."
1:03:45
You might be amused to learn Jim, I've cooked up a reality TV show version of this.
1:03:50
And I'm quite serious about that, because imagine if instead of these panel shows where a few journalists talk smack about what the public wants and they don't actually have any idea ...
1:04:05
And what they're really doing is they're doing that horse-race calling about which politicians are doing better in hitting their talking points.
1:04:14
Imagine if you had a weekly program and the weekly program every week was an issue with a bunch of ordinary people.
1:04:20
And now, put them in the Big Brother house.
1:04:28
Have them a week going through a process, lots of interviews going in, interviews coming out.
1:04:34
Find out who changed who's mind and why? Who's moved?
1:04:43
There's so much in this and you could easily imagine it also as a program that ...
1:04:43
I sure this is true in America, it's true in Australia.
1:04:50
From time to time, a political program that is on TV once a week is an agenda setter.
1:04:55
Now imagine during an election campaign, in the last eight weeks you do one of these on health, one of these on education, one of these on electoral reform, one of these on guns and so on.
1:05:11
The other thing you can do is ...
1:05:11
Let's say it's four days with these groups and then you have the politicians talk.
1:05:16
So a spokesperson from one party and a health spokesperson from one party, a health spokesperson from another party.
1:05:20
They come in and talk on day one and they spend an afternoon with the group.
1:05:26
And then they come back four days later.
1:05:26
And then we hear from the group which one was more impressive, which one was more persuasive, which one had holes in their argument, which one was a lousy schmoozer and couldn't actually tell you what they were going to do.
1:05:45
Like, get rid of Obamacare and somehow magically have a health insurance system for everyone.
1:05:51
So, I think, someone with some money could make a big impact on politics in this way.
1:05:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: [crosstalk] I agree.
1:05:59
I think that's a great idea about the reality show.
1:05:59
And we'll be talking more about it, because I'm going to study this much more than I've had the opportunity to.
1:06:07
I'm looking at my clock and I don't have my school Marm young man here to "tut-tut" me.
1:06:12
But, we've been going for an hour and a half- Nicholas Gruen: We have.
1:06:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, this has been a fascinating conversation, Nicholas.
1:06:19
I think your ideas are spot on.
1:06:19
I think that it is timely, because my guess is that almost everyone listening to this podcast is going ...
1:06:25
Well now, it's a self-selected group, I understand that.
1:06:31
But, but they, they might get fired up about this, because there has been great dismay in this [crosstalk] Nicholas Gruen: Yeah.
1:06:39
If they agree with what I'm saying.
1:06:39
It they are like a person in a desert and they get the glimmerings of an oasis.
1:06:43
We've got to find water, because we are in an uninhabitable space.
1:06:50
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it. All right.
1:06:51
So, at the end of all my podcasts, I ask my guests.
1:06:51
And I think I can guess what you're going to do, but I don't know.
1:06:56
So, at the end we, we give you the following proposition.
1:07:01
We are going to make you the Emperor of The World for one day.
1:07:07
Now, we do have some rules. You can't kill anyone.
1:07:07
You can't put anyone in a Re-education Camp. But what you can do ...
1:07:15
Have you seen the movie inception?
1:07:18
Nicholas Gruen: No, not really.
1:07:18
I think I was on a plane and I watched a bit of it and then I thought, "Oh, no.
1:07:21
I'll watch it- Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, the idea is quite simple.
1:07:23
If you can incept somebody, what you do to them is you give them an idea that they wake up thinking is their own idea.
1:07:34
And, they immediately start putting it into action. What two ideas ...
1:07:34
And remember, you're going to incept this in everyone on the planet.
1:07:40
What two idea are you going to incept in their minds, that you think would make the world a dramatically better place?
1:07:52
Nicholas Gruen: Oh, well, I could have taken this way back to a very theoretical idea, but let me try this.
1:07:55
It might get a bit beyond me in the last little bit, but I think everything human beings do has a private aspect and a shared aspect.
1:08:10
You and I, having this conversation, we're working on a joint product.
1:08:10
And what has happened, is we've got this idea that we're individuals.
1:08:16
Well, of course we're individuals.
1:08:21
We become individuals through that process of sharing our world with other individuals.
1:08:27
And so, that's a very theoretical idea.
1:08:27
But the idea is really ...
1:08:27
I suppose it's easier to say that when they put you in the box, you really want to have had some good relationships.
1:08:37
That's the simplest way to put it.
1:08:37
Not stuff, but relationships.
1:08:41
But I mean something more than that.
1:08:41
That we can't much ourselves, because everything that's worthwhile, we pour ourselves into it with others. It's shared with others.
1:08:49
And if it's not shared with others, you may as well be on a hallucinogenic drug, which is a good thing if you've got PTSD to try and cover from or something like that.
1:09:02
But it's a completely private and, in that sense, meaningless experience.
1:09:06
So that's a very theoretical answer, but I think we've ... Yeah.
1:09:13
And, I can stamp that idea out from a conversation to a club, to your workplace, to a nation.
1:09:19
And we've become obsessed with competitive mechanisms of selection.
1:09:28
And they're fine, but there are other mechanisms of selection and they're going to be magic for us, because we've way OD'd on these other mechanisms.
1:09:33
And so, there's this low hanging fruit and it's fairly visible.
1:09:38
The jury is just an intimation of how much better our world could be.
1:09:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Mm (affirmative). I love it.
1:09:49
I love it, because what I translate when I listen to that in my mind is, truly engage with other people and live life for those experiences that hopefully make everyone better off.
1:10:04
Nicholas Gruen: And it turns out it's like falling off a log.
1:10:09
We just have been keeping that from ourselves. It's just more fun.
1:10:13
It's just more fun to have fun with people than to try and make a billion dollars. You know?
1:10:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:10:20
Nicholas Gruen: If you gave me the choice between the money I have and a billion dollars, I'd take the billion dollars.
1:10:24
But I wouldn't sacrifice much for it, because I've got a great life.
1:10:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:10:30
Well, on that wonderful note of agreement, this has been fantastic.
1:10:33
I really appreciate you're taking the time to be with me.
1:10:33
And, you've given me a new thing to study that I might actually present Common Good and see whether we can get something going here.
1:10:35
Nicholas Gruen: Well, let's do it again.
1:10:36
And just tell me if you want me to do something, because I'm in for the long haul on this one, I can tell you.
1:10:38
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it.
1:10:38
Thank you very much Nicholas. This has been fantastic.
1:10:39
Nicholas Gruen: Thanks Jim.
1:10:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Cheers.