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[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com
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[Music] hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of conversations with Tyler now I'm going to introduce zip but actually I'm not completely sure of the fully correct pronunciation of her last name so zup would you please say your
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name for us correctly so I will but I have to let you know there's no ground truth so you can just make it up and there would be nobody who knew what it was supposed to be so you could have gotten away with whatever you wanted it
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to be but it is zip to thank you very much zap is starting as a professor at Columbia University in a new job she is the author of The renowned Twitter and tear gas the power and fragility of network protests a highly influential
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book and over the course of the last two years she has become one of the Central American public intellectuals on the issue of coid 19 having been right about virtually everything ahead of all the curves correcting the public health
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authorities when they were wrong confirming them when they were right and she knows many many other things as well zap welcome to conversations with Tyler thank you for that very kind introduction my first question now the lab leaked debacle that it became
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unacceptable in mass media to talk about the lab leak for a while how at its most fundamental level would you explain how we came to make that mistake I think two things happen and one of them is the easiest one because it's kind of quite
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easy to see in other things too which is that uh at the initial phase of the pandemic with the Trump Administration to put it politely bungling the response and also occasionally adding you know overt racism to its bungling there was a
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great reaction I think to anything they suggested that looked like they were just trying to deflect blame right in fact people have forgotten about it but president Trump went through a period during which he denied the pandemic was
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a big deal and praise China's president for a couple of months before it had exploded in the United States but when it came to the United States with its full exponential Force he switched to saying well it was China's fault and I think that created a big backlash among
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not just the scientists but the public because it really did seem like just deflecting the blame in many ways and plus you know the attendant racism and sort of calling the virus various racist names who didn't help the situation so
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that's I think the one that's most obvious the second one I think that's not as obvious to people is that the world of Urology is not that big and the Chinese lab in question the Wuhan Institute of Urology and there couple other labs in
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Wuhan uh they're very much part of the scientific establishment globally right I know there's been you know some speculations about the sort of the whole bioweapons thing and I just have never been very interested in that because if
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you're going to do an actual bioweapon a Corona virus is not your proper pathogen the kind of scientists who work on Corona viruses are genuine normal scientists most of the time and deeply deeply embedded with the Western Scientific establishment especially
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since SARS the other nearness we had in 2003 that didn't become a pandemic because of a lot of reasons had created a lot of inj interest so you had this double whammy there you were once there was the sort of the Trump angle but there was also this
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defensiveness around both the field I think because you're asking a field I mean I'm an academic and if somebody came to me and said would you like to think about the fact that your field may have inadvertently perhaps you know even
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in the mildest potential case spark something that killed millions of people of course defensiveness is very human in that and people sometimes see you know China versus us but as I said in reality these SCI the scientific establishment
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that we're talking about in this particular case is very very much integrated with the Western Scientific establishment publishing in nature science sell all those big things so I think there was a sort of desire to protect their colleagues which once
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again these are human plus if a lab incident of some sort or a field incident of some sort could be implicated that really would bring the push for much more strict regulation on the kind of research we do and I'm just talking about even the more benign
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scenarios right you know somebody screwed something up they might not even known about it because for example there have been a lot of calls for moving the high-risk pathogen Labs outside of cities right outside of populated places
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and when I floated that with a couple of you know lead virologist they were really a gasp at the idea they thought well how are we going to hire people if you put it Us in the middle of nowhere nobody wants to work there and as an academic you know who also likes to choose where she works I sympathize with that but that's a big conflict of interest the very field who has been quoted most in this is the most conflicted field because they both have
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colleagues and a vested interest the people you don't hear from a lot are the BIOS safety people who are actually the actual experts in this you know it's them we should have been speaking to where people are kind of perhaps
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independent in some ways from all of this and as the defensiveness grew it became really hard from what I heard from a lot of people in the field to say if you thought it was like a viable thing it should be investigated you didn't even have to believe what had
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happened because there's so much obfuscation you don't really know what happened because the people people who are loud were in relatively powerful and gatekeeping positions so do you really want to sort of in the middle of a pandemic do you want to go to work on
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the pandemic stuff and do your work and get future grants or do you want to like raise your hand and say yeah my field needs more regulation and perhaps some investigation into whether our research practices were implicated and something
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so horrendous that's not going to make you very popular with your colleagues so I I think that's how it was set up the Turning Point probably not as visible to people outside is the who investigation you know I wrote a New York Times
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article about the origins of coid and I didn't really go into the who investigation it is a debacle it's going to go in history books into how bad it is it is essentially you know just sort of typing up what the Chinese officials told them
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almost uncritically um I mean I realized they were limited in what they could do because an Origins investigation you can't just do it if the Chinese government isn't cooperating but it wasn't that that would have been an
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understandable limitation The Who report we got was almost like a PR exercise in how it phrase things what it was certain about how it repeated assertions what it didn't question it didn't it could have done things like well we've been told
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this but we couldn't verify or could have questioned a few things in the report but the final report written after the scientists had left the country too in my view was disgraceful that it was allowed to go out like that instead of saying you know what we can
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really do a great investigation here's the limitations and I think that really got a lot of scientists who had been just kind of waiting and thinking this is not that big a deal in terms of you know we got the actual pandemic to worry
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about to think you know what if we do this and let this be what going to stand for science it's just going to actually damage science because letting that kind of report appear as the voice of Science and if we do find something out or as we
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do at the moment we keep finding cover up from the Chinese side uh which is not at all sort of reflected in what's going on in that report it makes science itself look bad and that's how we got to the March letter in the journal science
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the scientific journal sence science where 18 very prominent people sign something saying you know what we need an actual investigation whatever it can do the report was too certain and both hypotheses are viable I I would say the
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way they think about it would be that the existing evidence base such as it is it's very limited and full of contradictions and a huge cover up is compatible with almost everything like almost anything you can imagine the
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existing evidence base is compatible with you can think what's more likely or less likely based on your own you know personal preferences but there's no evidence-based to rule anything out almost and that I think got to be the turning point if that's a fundamental
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mistake we made back then what's a fundamental mistake we're making now and what are the political economy roots of that mistake so I think one fundamental mistake we're still making right now is letting this be you know Republican
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versus Democrat China versus not China thing instead of a fundamental problem of BIOS safety it's a little bit like nuclear weapons and nuclear physics and nuclear reactors they can be really powerful and useful they might be very
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crucial for know fighting climate change with the new kinds of energy we can use but if you don't have it as a safe thing right if you have questions about its safety people are not going to want to use it countries are going to say no not
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in my backyard and we see this like I think Germany recently Essen stopped whatever it has it's just not going to have any nuclear reactors that's partly because of Chernobyl it scared the living lights out of people and for good
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reason so and I think the fundamental mistake we're making it is not treating this like a biosafety crisis because we have one pandemic in 1977 that was indeed triggered because of a vaccine trial gone wrong and that was essentially covered up at the time
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too the scientists knew that it had to involve something like a vaccine trial but you got almost no public discussion off it till 2008 almost 30 years later partly because the scientists were thinking you know what now it's not time
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to you know create a suspicion around vaccines or any of that in 1977 you're at the height of the smallpox campaign and then we have this one which is unclear I if we have one more incident of any kind it's just going to be horrific both for our research project
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and what we can do with it so I think what it ended up happening is that there's a few people who keep getting quoted in media who are actually a small number of vocal people and there's a climate still where you can't have a sensible
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conversation and that means that it's gotten Republicans versus Democrats or crazy scenarios versus you know a sensible oversight and investigation and I don't think that's good because you know our medical technology is really
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powerful you know that it's got all these great things like look at our vaccines and if you have a really powerful technology and a really powerful science you have to figure out like does this power come with brisks it's very similar to nuclear physics I
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think in that way if you don't figure out the risks and the downside it's going to come bite you anyway without you knowing it so even if this one had nothing to do with the lab it would have been a good good time to say just the
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fact that we can't be sure should make us act and make sure that we never find ourselves in this position again now what can we do to make mainstream media less risk averse so if you think back to last March Dr fouchy he's criticizing
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masks right he's even telling people it's fine to go ahead and take your cruise see you're editor of the New York Times should you just come out and contradict the nation's leading public health authority when when we're relying
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on that same person to correct some possibly larger mistakes of President Trump what's the right role for the media in this and how do we align their incentives in a superior way so because we screwed it up this is a really difficult question because I ended up
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writing on our heads essentially criticizing CDC and the wh on masks in March 2020 before any like at the time people were still saying you know masks could infect you make things worse and never in a million years I thought I'd
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start my own personal pandemic you know criticizing Global Health authorities or the CDC that was a really weird situation and I have to say I did not like it one bit I knew they were wrong around early March I have links to Hong
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Kong I was researching the field there's a lot of infecti specialists in Southeast Asia who way ahead of us partly because they've been through SARS and partly because they really are way ahead of us and I started tweeting out the argument on why they were wrong just
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on the sort of science side of the virus sociology side of masks all of that and I just sort of tted my thumbs after tweeting out the whole argument hoping like somebody would write it and not me because it shouldn't be like I mean it's
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kind of really terrible to undermine as you say uh nation's leading health authori so I hoped it would come from I don't know the ex director of CDC somebody like that somebody really high stature so it didn't look like a random
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Challenger because like how are you going to distinguish that from an antivaxer or a quack right that is a real problem but it didn't happen so I think the real question you're asking isn't what should the New York Times have done in some sense I think what
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should have our scientific establishment have done why didn't they create like a Consortium why don't the universities create their own advisory body or some sort of like even if our own authorities weren't functioning very well partly
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because of Trump's not great I mean really negative influence we didn't like step up as academics to say here's another you know Consortium of lots of experts not just one person saying oh by the way because that's really corrosive
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at some point to have individuals be ahead of the health authorities isn't the scientific establishment part of the problem so there's a kind of religion of Purity The Cult of the randomized control trial you want to maximiz status everything has to
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be perfectly safe when in fact during a crisis we want them thinking in terms of expected value and expected number of lives saved so what can we do to reform them to get them to think more in terms of expected value because they failed us
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most of all so I would say that there are many things for which you do do randomize TR for good reason what we didn't get was the flexibility necessary to match the question to the method right with something like masking up the
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precautionary principle plus the mechanistic science plus the South Asian experience to me was more than clear where things were with other things like vaccines like I'm on the side that there would have been problems with and we can
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discuss this with things like human challenge trials for a bunch of complicated reasons so what you needed was flexibility in what's the right method given the risk you're taking uh for masks I think it was clear even if you reject human challenge trials so the
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vaccine information is presented and then it's three weeks to schedule a meeting at the FDA and have a final decision right the offices are locked and cold over a 4-day Thanksgiving weekend I asked many people who are experts in the area they all assured me
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it could be done in less time than 3 weeks and yet it took three weeks because what is it just takes that long to schedule the meeting or there's too much status maximization bureaucracy how do we fix that problem which seem to
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recur many different stages I don't know the details of that particular one but uh with something like vaccines the reason I'm cautious is that you know once again there's a saying it's not vaccines but vaccination that saves lives so the slightest screw up in
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vaccines can undermine confidence and just kind of even if they're approved and they're scientifically kind of solid if you overlook something or if there's some unexpected thing that can be dramatic and terrible so I'll give you
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an example that I can't figure out right now which is that why haven't we gotten the full authorization right now they're still functioning as eua and that is both causing people to think it's experimental because it's still
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emergency and it is sort of holding back some of the necessary things like mandates because you know which employer is supposed to say okay it's an emergency thing and it's not fully approved but I'm forcing you to do it that doesn't seem to make sense and I'm
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just looking at and thinking you know we've vaccinated in this country more than 100 million people we've vaccinated you know a billion around the world we have very good idea of the safety profile and it's better than most
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vaccines that are approved so why are we waiting for the full approval and I have no answer to that one like well some I try to do the most charitable reading maybe they with the approval the initial emergency one they you know maybe it
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could have been 10 days instead of three weeks maybe a week difference I I don't really know I don't have like background information but I'm just looking at the full approval and I don't understand I think there is something that Trump's
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presence has obscured which is there's a malaise in the Western Scientific Public Health economic governing our institutions there's something not functioning very well but because we are fairly wealthy nations with an enormous amount of
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inheritance we can get by you know we have a lot of science we have a lot of scientists we have excellent universities you know we have so a lot but I feel like we're almost like the second generation or even the third
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generation that's still spending the inheritance and since we started so rich it's kind of hiding the deeper problems and Trump's year made it look like it was all Trump but I'm looking at Western Europe and I'm like well they didn't do
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that great either they in fact they've done terrible relatively speaking so I feel like we haven't really gotten our heads wrapped around How We Do risk assessment how we move as you say fast when we need to move fast especially for
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things like ask for which downsides are very little you know if you found out they were useless you can change it next month and you didn't lose anything we don't do it like there's something we haven't really completely come to grips
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with and the pandemic's urgency is perhaps acted like a stress test it's shown us the problems but it's still ongoing so we haven't sat down and said let's think about it because this is not good and I think that's job number one
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like after the pandemic gets kind of calmer which will happen pretty soon it's it's going so fast that it's going to end relatively soon we should sit down and say this wasn't just Trump we screwed up a lot of things and we also have revealed a lot of cracks in our
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institutions and it's time to try to fix that if I look at some of the other people who got many key questions right early Nate silver Alex tabarok they tend to have a background in expected value thinking and in statistical thinking
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you're a sociologist how does is your background in sociology in form you're having been right about most or all things Co I mean for one thing the sociology of the situation is always very important for example one of the reasons that they were saying you don't
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need to wear mask early on where they were saying something like well you should only wear a mask if you're sick and like you don't need a sociology degree to understand stigma right if you have a deadly pandemic with an unknown
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disease there's no way you're going to go out wearing a mask if only sick people are wearing masks I mean you don't really if they had anybody with any social science background or any common sense in that room they'd say wait a minute how are sick people
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supposed to wear masks like that is just not humanly feasible for them to paint a Target on themselves like that so that's the kind that's one of the ways that it helps the other way it helps is that so I used to teach things like group think
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and institutional inertia and all those things that we've seen and I you know in some ways one of my friends who's a immunologist and a medical doctor at Harvard Michael Mina who's done a lot of work on rapid tests one of the things he
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keeps joking about is how basic our viruses like the virus that has caused our pandemic is a Corona virus and if you had a it SARS too essentially with a minor twist like there's not much we need to figure out about it yes of
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course you know think figuring out things like vaccine is important but in terms of its Basics it's a it's not a retrovirus like HIV which forced us to write the textbook right so the Urology part of it wasn't very complicated in some ways to you
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know a competent urologist or something you know Michael jokes like you know it's just first year student can handle most of it it's a very simple straightforward virus but the things like the group think in parts of the scientific establishment which or or the
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silencing right after I wrote about masks in March 2020 I honestly I thought that's it I'm going to get cancel that's the end of my public writing career I just contradicted the CTC and the wh at the beginning of a pandemic I don't have
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a medical degree whatsoever I just thought I have to do it I'm a 10e academic if I'm not going to do this now like what is the point of tenure if I'm not going to take this risk so I thought here I did my job now I'm going to get
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cancelled instead what I got was a lot of emails from people in the medical professions thanking me saying thank you for writing it and I like I thought you know you're welcome but you know part of me was thinking why didn't you guys
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write this like don't thank me like I would like to have somebody with more credibility to have written this and what I realized was they were just s either silent or parts of them had convinced themselves of really illogical
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things like a mask might be harmful I just can't like there's no logic to it there's nothing it's just group thing so the sociology of the moment made me realize after that incident I thought you know what sometimes being an outsider and not having my grants or my
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feelings or my professional career or my friendships be affected by this gives me freedom to front things like I know what the scientific sort of underground is speaking about and I have like I don't have a medical degree but I can read a
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good deal of the papers just at a basic level and and I know statistics and I can read some of the basics and I have a lot of friends in the you know especially sort of Junior people who are some of them are a gas but cannot speak
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up and because I don't have as much to lose I can write things in a way that sometimes they can and that's really made me think like we need a mechanism for for that to be possible for the scientists in the field medical fields
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are very hierarchical and there's some positives to that you don't want quackery there but when they need to be challenged there's no mechanism to challenge them so we can have a better sense of how you think talk us through a
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mistake you once made in reasoning and how that happened what were bad trades so to speak yeah I know like this is the this is the job interview question where you say um I work too hard and I'm a perfection [Laughter] you know it's just very very hard um in
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the pandemic or are you asking General no any anything anything in all of life a mistake you made in Practical reasoning and how it happened oh my goodness I made so many mistakes now I'm wondering like what what I should reveal
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given this is going to be a podcast because the list is quite long so let me try to find a useful example that I can share I don't know what I would call like a mistake but I have learned a lot more over the years about that line
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where you kind of know enough about something to try to reason what you should be thinking about that I mean it's gotten better I'm not saying at all done there but I have the same academic disease that you any academic will understand that I sort of try to get you
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know I get focused on the interesting because that's appealing to me and most of the time most answers are boring you know it's a respiratory disease wear a mask right that's kind of a boring example you know trying to be too clever
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too smart almost too contrarian sometimes so I would say that is something that I fight in myself because like a lot of academics and a lot of intellectual people I like the answers that surprise me and I like sort of examples that appear
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counterintuitive but in reality it they're almost never true like there are very few things in the world that I think that are big and important where the counterintuitive and the surprising things is actually really revealing so
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that's my like reasoning sort of not error as much as much as attraction that I believe I have gotten a better handle on in fact like what I've done throughout the pandemic and what sort of some of the people you've named is just
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say a lot of basic stuff just you know respiratory disease you need masks vaccination you need wider coverage as soon as possible Outdoors is safer you know those kind of very simple things if you're having super spreading events at
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a distance it's probably Airborne so every time I do that I do better let me try an example where I disagree with you and see if we can work that out so you've been very critical of stock BuyBacks from my point of view they're just like stock dividends they don't
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matter they don't harm the economy any more than paying interest on bonds harms the economy it just recycles funds there's not a real resource cost they hardly increase the value of stocks right the academic literature essentially would agree they're not a
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big deal so why be upset about stock BuyBacks have I like said something about stock BuyBacks your Atlantic piece on the GameStop mess quote for example major I might have said that okay all right what did I exactly say probably was something
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specific let me find out what I got wrong I'm I'm waiting to hear quote major US Airlines have spent nearly all its extra cash on stock BuyBacks for the past decade thereby inflating its stock price and thus executive pay which is
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often tied to the stock price and the stock market and again stock BuyBacks there may be a modest signaling value for how much the firm is worth big leani Miller it won't change the value of the firm very much so I have said that I
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honestly I'm going to consider right away that I don't have a huge opinion on stock Buybacks in general that sentence was in the context of they get dued the stock BuyBacks with their extra cash and then they get bailed out with taxpayer
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money and that's my criticism is that I don't think these companies should be whenever they get in trouble they get bailed out and I'm not against you know occasional bailouts but I think it's extra problematic when you have the
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executive pay be that high and then you know at this first sign of stress they're like taxpayers bail I don't think it's healthy for the economy or the competition either and that's the extent of my opinion on stock BuyBacks before I get in more trouble on this
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what's your current view on how much YouTube radicalizes people so it seemed that way for like a year under Trump now they've changed the algorithm the government we have you like it or not it seems pretty boring right mayor of New
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York mainstream candidate radical left didn't do that well isn't that over I don't actually think I know I don't think so and I don't think the what I call the radicalization there might be a bit of a misunderstanding in that it's
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not like about Trump in fact even my first article about it it is what's the right word for it is been a bit difficult because we sometimes say extremism but that's not the right word either it's pulling you to the edges because it goes back to my own reasoning
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Temptation the edges are more exciting so it's not necessarily pulling you to Trump it's not necessarily pulling you to this or that it's pulling you away from boring and what is not boring is exciting to watch right who the heck
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wants to watch a movie of you know functioning bureaucracies and institutions but I mean it would be great in a pandemic but it wouldn't make a good movie so if you want to watch something what you watch is the thing that's kind of exciting it's the 10
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biggest sink holes in Florida and watch the alligator almost eat the baby so what you're getting is pulled to the edge and that's true for politics that's true for anything you want but it keeps on showings videos maybe the Sicilian
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Defense pops up but there is an alternate literature monger and Phillips ledwich and Zev both have written papers in the last three years saying no evidence that YouTube radicalizes maybe that's agnostic but when I read you on
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labak it's all about agnosticism expected value wisdom multiple perspectives but when I read you on social media YouTube it seems very hardcore here's the right answer it's bad for people it radicalizes them it's all about the ads it's like there's two
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zap and why not apply the lab leak approach to social media well okay so here's the thing though I'm gonna push back a little bit because my book is all about how great social media is in some sense for dissidents as well but it's
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not an unalloyed good it's complicated I I'm I'm from Turkey like it would be kind of hard for me to deny that you know Facebook is now kind of the public sphere there in Twitter like that's where you break a lot of the censorship
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thing so I'm acutely aware of a lot of those things but in terms of the algorithm pulling you to the edges I do think it's still true it doesn't really mean like it's pulling you to sort of only one side that's the misunderstanding it's like one of the
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few pages that does really great on Facebook on the left is something called occupy Democrats and I mean it's just non-stop outrage and barely tied to truth so it's not just a right-wing thing that I mean the fact that it is it
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is very friendly to authoritarians for some reason but it the fact that it was more right in the United States is more about the United States political structure and my criticism isn't that it's great for us to have these large Platforms in some sense and a greatly
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expanded speech but the the way they keep people on the site by keeping them interested is a bit like keeping people in a cafeteria by giving them constant chips and ice cream I I like chips I like ice cream but I wouldn't want a
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cafeteria whose business model is to keep me sitting in that table as long as possible uh because we know this like we know in cities where people there's the infrastructure for walking people people walk when you sort of change the menu in
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cafeterias people eat different things when you put stuff in different places people watch different things and I think the papers that you site one of the problems here is it's a little bit like China in that we have no data like
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the YouTube stuff that we have tried to do I mean we're literally looking at very very very broad data because what we need is YouTube's internal data perhaps linked to a panel you know something like think like not the GSS but something like a you know couple
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thousand people panel that is linked to sort of data and I mean it's like 20 years into sort of Internet explosion and we don't have a single good study most of the data is locked up in the companies and there's not a good
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research thing so I'm agnostic in the sense that I don't really know exactly the extent to which the algorithm works but that's similar to lab leak where I don't know what to say because whatever data there is it's in China and we don't
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have access to it now in all of these dialogues there's a middle segment called underrated versus overrated I toss out some names ideas you tell me if you think they're underrated or overrated the Turkish singer I'm gonna go orthogonal ton the Turkish singer
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overrated or underrated in which country uh it's difficult uh I mean I know him I would say he's just about right because he's kind of pasted his Peak uh so he's good sorry Marx vber overrated or underrated as a sociologist underrated
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why underrated I mean the the reason part of the reason he's underrated is is that because he writes in that very hard to read in know early 19th century writing but if you read Max wer 90% of what you want to understand about the
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current Public Health crisis is there in his sociology I mean not just him but sociology of organizations sort of how that works good at that yeah so I would say underrated partly because it's very hard to read and what we don't do is like
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it's like Shakespeare you need the Modern English version conceptually for more people to read it I would say almost all of sociology is underrated and how useful how dramatically useful it is just ask me any time like early on like I knew we were going to have a
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pandemic completely based on sociology of the moment in early January like before I knew anything about the virus because nobody knew they weren't telling us but you could just use sociological concepts to put things together and Max
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waer is great at most of them and underrated Kamal Mustafa overrated or underrated underrated why why because um so my grandmother she was 12 or 13 when she was in sort of Mediterranean region Central Asia but Mediterranean region
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very close to the uh Mediterranean she was born the year the Turkish Republic had been founded and so 1923 and she was like 13 or so she would just about to get you know be married off but the Republic was just a little over a decade
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like same age as her and they created National exam to pick talented girls like her and the ones that won the exam got taken to Istanbul to the sort of elite one of the very few boarding schools high schools for girls now the underrated part isn't just that such a
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mechanism existed the underrated part is that the country changed so much in 13 years that her teacher was able to Prevail upon the family to Let Her Go I mean to have a 13-year-old be sent off to Istanbul you know complete opposite
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side of the country to a boarding school for Education that kind of sort of flourishing of Liberation I I'm not going to sort of deny it was an authoritarian period and minorities like Kurds during that period were brutally
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suppressed so I can't like make it sound like there was nothing else going on but in terms of creating a republic out of the ashes of a crumbling Empire I think it's one of of the very striking stories of national transformation globally and in you know
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within one generation so underrated TV show Game of Thrones why does it interest you as a sociologist so it interested me till the last season and a half because before that it was a very very sociological thing so here's the thing here's the difference between
38:21
a sociological story and a psychological story in a sociological story you can imagine yourself being almost anyone right instead of like terrible evil characters and good people where you just identify with the good ones which
38:35
is the Classic Hollywood sort of narrative which is also most of human narrative right you have the good one the bad one it's more like a complicated mythology where you can imagine yourself being any one of those characters even
38:47
the ones that do the terrible things you can kind of see yourself doing it and the second sign of a sociological story for me is when nobody has plot armor because it's the setting that's carrying the story with lots of people but it
39:00
doesn't rely on one person dying or not dying so for for six seasons you have a very sort of institution sociology very interesting it's like the wire you know people can die but the story is still gripping because it's sociological and
39:14
here comes season whichever the last season is and all of a sudden you know Arya can walk through FY dragons and nothing happens it just misses her by an inch and I'm like all right you lost the plot here because that's like plot armor
39:29
essentially means you no longer have a solid sociological story so I watched it with great interest until the end and in the end I'm like what just happened and I wasn't really very clear with the novel world and I learned that the
39:44
novelist had run out of material and the Hollywood showrunners were now writing the script I'm like Ah that's what happened they they they switched to the good versus evil story so they took a great story that was was going to be how power corrupts which
40:00
clearly was the story and in the end they made the Dragon Lady snap just because she heard the church bells or something like you that's not a good sociological story as a sociologist coming from Turkey do the Star Wars prequels make sense to you no why
40:19
not it's about power corruption Jar Jar Binks I I mean nothing no no movie with Jar Jar Binks makes sense to me I I refuse to have it make sense so but yes it's kind of like the Star Wars sequels have the same sort of it the power
40:37
corrupting is a very important sociological story but you can tell it badly right it happening overnight or you just have something evil in you just kind of take over that's the ridiculous version of it what happens is every
40:52
moment you're thinking I'm doing the right thing like you don't don't you almost never think you know let me go do evil things you convince yourself you're doing the right thing till you know you lose your mind in it and you have people
41:06
around you who are just saying yes yes you're doing the right thing that's that's the classic story of power and I I I love movies like that but the you know jar jar Bings just nope if you were speaking to an educated American who was
41:21
somewhat informed about turkey but not well informed what is it they're least likely to understand about the current leadership of arahan and the current regime that you could illuminate for them what are we so I would like to First say now that I have this
41:34
opportunity we do not have camels I everybody asked me about this I know this has nothing to do with aroan the camels only exist in tourist areas because everybody's convinced turkey has camels so I I need to First correct that misunderstanding I've never seen a camel
41:49
in Turkey I can verify this yeah yeah it is insane everybody always asks me about them and I'm like what uh so now that has been corrected so Adon is a complicated figure for sure and one of the things I think is less understood is
42:06
that for a long time he had and he still has a genuine support base and that's a very complicated long story why that is and right now after 20 years in power it's gotten more of a sort of a a centralization of power story so that's
42:24
the first thing and the second thing is when people want to understand erdogan sometimes they compare him to say I don't know leaders of Iran and I'm kind of like you want to look at Putin you want to look at Hungary uh you want to
42:38
look at Brazil I mean so the on sort of the similarity there isn't necessarily I think which religion or the strength of the religious beliefs as much as once again a strong popular populist authoritarian leaning person getting elected and then sort of of staying in
42:57
power and making sure he stays in power for a very very long time so it is actually if anything I would say it's a very Western story we have many examples of it around the world it is not particularly a middle eastern version of
43:14
the story which there are many but that's I think a different version so I think that's largely misunderstood why did the gazy protests fizzle out it seemed promising right you were optimistic at one point but something
43:27
happened you know I was both optimistic and realistic at that point uh and this is something I write about on my book Because by the time the gizi protest had happened in 2013 I'd already been through the like as a researcher the Arab Spring right so
43:42
I kind of knew the up and down wave and one of the things that I think and this is not necessarily A criticism or not criticism of social media this just kind of explain the reality of what happened is is that so in the past if you wanted
43:58
to have a movement you necessarily had to build a lot of tools because you were out of power right you had to build a lot of tools if you wanted to organize to say the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the 1950s and 60s during that time or the
44:12
sort of March on Washington you had to spend a lot of time just the March on Washington took I think like six months just to do the logistics right you don't have Excel spreadsheets and things like that and from an idea to March it was
44:25
about 10 years so that kind of preparation work arduous and it kept dissent movements weak because you had to build that before you could do anything but if you did build it right you had something to stand on whereas right now with social media you
44:44
can kind of overcome censorship like this if especially if you know the government's not really very up on it which at the time they weren't but you're not ready for what's coming so I feel like it's kind of like coming into
44:56
a curve like from going from Zer to 100 miles an hour and you're coming into a curve but you haven't built the car you don't have a steering wheel like you just know how to speed up right and you see this in very many other aspects of
45:10
society as well where digital technology lets people scale up very quickly and if you're Instagram and you go from you know I don't know Zer to a million users or 10 million users well Facebook can come by you and you're great so that
45:26
kind of Speedy exponential growth is not a problem in many other areas but whereas if you're a movement that kind of Speedy exponential growth without having built other parts of the infrastructure means that when the government does come for you you don't
45:42
have even a decision making system you don't even know like how do I respond to it so when the gizy park movement start and I went there I went there to as a participant Observer I did like hundreds of formal interviews I stayed in the
45:56
park I spent like you know the whole time essentially living there with everybody else and just observing even then when people ask me you know how is this going to end because they realized I was a researcher because I'm doing
46:09
interviews and they would ask and I already knew like in Egypt my friends were in jail and I was already demurring saying I I don't you know you're a researcher you're not going to make predictions there so I think the fizzling out of social media field
46:24
movements it's not that they aren't impactful they're just on a different trajectory they start big and if they're in an oppressive repressive environment they can get crushed whereas if they're in an A different kind of country they
46:38
could have time to build something and I think we're seeing some of that in Western Nations like black lives matter whatever else you want to say it is a sustained movement that is changed a lot of things in the country but unlike say
46:53
turkey or Egypt they're not going to f face a government that's coming for them in the same degree say you know what happens in Egypt why does Islamic fundamentalism at least seemed to be on the rise in Turkey well if you go to cona right it feels quite devout in a
47:10
way it might not have 30 years yes well it's actually also on the downside I I don't know when you've last been there but if I I was looking at the polls and like the current under 30s are saying they're much less religious so I
47:25
wouldn't really be completely sure like if and when this government changes I think we'll have a better sense of it when you have like a religious government in power for 20 years and if you're 30 like that's all you've ever known it can actually create the
47:39
opposite effect I think it's a little early to say the fundamentalism part is on the rise or not I mean we have a more religious government so there's more religious official stuff and more encouraged and more sort of rules about it and
47:55
allowances and alcohol is more expensive for example and more restricted are people drinking less alcohol I'm not so sure you know it's kind of like I think it's a little too early to figure out what the long-term trajectory will be
48:11
two final questions first let's say you're designing a trip to Turkey for us put aside coid obviously we're visiting Istanbul but two weeks where do you send us other than Istanbul well I have never been to Martin it's it's in the
48:26
Southeast region and it's both Assyrian Kurdish and Armenian and Turkish in history so amazing and beautiful architecture and I've never been there so I would like to take a soul on a trip that I'm coming along for Marin which is a place I heard a lot about and the
48:45
other place that I mean everybody knows the aan and I don't really need to explain it it's you know the same it's the other side of the Greek island it's just most beautiful place but you know about it already another place that's I
48:58
think less known is the Black Sea region where you have dramatic Green Hills meet the sea not like San Francisco because the hills are very Steep and then you have a fairly little strip so very different climate and visuals and
49:13
there's a lot of historic stuff there too because it was you know for obviously it was the Ottoman Empire for a long time but before that it was it was the last bit of the you know the Greek East Roman Empire sort of Empires and countries too so there's a lot of
49:26
history there as well so two interesting places outside the usual tourist places before we turn to the audience last question from me what will you be doing next for like w person no your your your public presence anything go going to
49:41
Turkey that's fine any answer unpacking your boxes besides the unpacking boxes I have moved to New York which is wonderful I'm GNA live I I really miss living in a city I'm from Istanbul and I haven't lived in a city for a while like
49:55
fulltime time so that and especially sort of as the pandemic kind of last face that's interesting I am pondering to finally write a book when the Arab Spring ended not ended but when the first like during the first phase of the Arab Spring in
50:10
2011 I was there the whole time like I kept going I was in Tyra Square I went to Tunisia I went all over the region and there are a lot of books that came out quickly at the time and I just kind of resisted writing a book just then I I
50:24
felt like I'm from the Middle East too I felt like this is not over yet a lot of books were quite triumphant and it was only after the gizy protests and how they played out I felt like I'm going to write a book and I feel like it's a more
50:38
durable and balanced book it's not for or against social media it's also not saying the movements were triumphant or not but I had to sort of to gift and G I gave myself sort of time to let it play out so I feel the same way about the
50:52
pandemic now I feel like it was a stress test and and I think there's going to be a first crop of books that put most of the blame on Trump's lab which is not unjustified like that Administration has a lot I think to answer for but I think
51:09
the things that it has shown us is much bigger than one administration's admittedly very real failings so I'm thinking like maybe just maybe there is space for a book that looks at some of the things you were talking about like which is there's something like we have
51:28
to revitalize how our society works and we haven't come to grips with it so I'm thinking I might be writing a book it will come out after the first crop of the post-pandemic initial like there's they'll probably be dozens of books in
51:43
the next year but mine will come after all those are over zip thank you very much thank you I will take questions from the audience and from the iPad so start with the audience questions so for those few people in the room who've never read
52:00
vber what's the right way to get started I think the best way is to not read waer because you do not want to start there if seriously the language is so complicated but I have a colleague I've never been in his department but George
52:17
ritzer was a sociologist and he wrote a lot of sort of theory books and they're really good like uh and I believe he he has one called mcdonaldization of everything but that's kind of like that's a very much aarian rationalization but he has it on
52:33
many other things as well so I would read someone like George ritzer to read about wer because his books are a lot more accessible it it provides like reading ritzer so I learned probability Theory from a book in Turkish it only
52:48
exists in Turkish it's written by uh someone from turkey and the premise of the book is there's there's a little girl who wants to win at a game of dice and she loses because she's betting the wrong way and then she meets someone
53:04
says I can teach you how to you know win this game and then the book it's just a novel I still have the book it's amazing walks you through probability Theory including you know walks you up to I think the binomial theorem and it's like
53:16
something you can read when you're in the third grade and understand and at the end of the book The little girl discovers that you know there's textbook and she says that's probability I hate it like my older sister reads it and hates it and the sort of the person in
53:33
the neighborhood who's been teaching her says that's because you have like this preconception that theory is something boring and dry like probability is something boring and dry and complicated instead of as we were talking something
53:46
really exciting understanding a bit better about you know probability and probabilistic thinking is really empowering and fascinating so that's the way I feel about sociology is that it's actually conceptually really powerful
53:58
but the theory part can be really dry because if you read it from like early 19th century person that person is talking about early 19th century that's boring and dry and crazy to you whereas what you need is somebody to do it now
54:11
and ritzer does it for like 20th century and it's really good all his books are good and I'm not sure if somebody's updated because with sort of the internet and stuff we have 21st century stuff to bring in but they're still equally valid like institutions and the
54:28
way they work humans are remarkably human question from the iPad how would you convince a coid vaccine skeptic so it depends who they are obviously someone St an island and they walk into the room and they say I don't trust the
54:44
vaccine I don't trust those authorities I'm thing is I'm GNA go back to the sociology fallback which is that people don't exist as sort of indep dependent Adams the person to convince that person is a friend an acquaintance or somebody
55:02
else from State and Island right so the way you want to deploy these convincing is that and we have this from so much sociology if I come to you and say your field this terrible and you're wrong about everything you're GNA all of us
55:17
sudden like me right so if we want to convince people we need to deploy the people on the ground that we have whoever it is who's closest to those people so if you want to con people in state and Island you got to sort of send
55:30
people who live in state and Island who you can sort of work for this or whatever Community it is and instead we're like lecturing Adam and I'm kind of like nobody likes being lectured and even if the lecturing is all correct it just doesn't work I would say I would
55:45
try to say hold on my state and Island friend I'm going to find you somebody who is somebody that you relate to who's going going to tell you why you should get vaccinated but there are still inroads we make right on people getting
56:01
vaccinated if it all relied on peers it' be a kind of circularity so there must be some peers Who start before the other peers do and what convinces them that's what you should say course because the peer networks you could say you could be
56:14
first but I I will necessar not necessarily have a lot of authority so the peer networks I mean they don't have to be like your sibling right they're heterogeneous they just have to be somebody socially similar to you so that's clearly one thing and the one
56:28
argument that I make to people a lot that the my most strong abstract argument that I think I can make is that you're going to encounter this virus either through infection or vaccination right there's no not encountering this
56:42
virus you're G to I've written this many times you're going to eventually encounter it so you either encounter it in its full form where anything can happen or you encounter what we have which is just the spike which will make
56:56
you fine when if you do encounter the full form so there's no avoiding the virus it's just a question of you know do you want to fight it with you know your hands tied or do you want the defenses so that's all I can say to people who with to whom I have no other
57:12
relationship to from the iPad are there situations where public health and transparency are intention and in those cases should the public health authorities either lie to people or simply deliberately not tell them the full truth
57:25
I I just cannot imagine where we should not tell people the truth I mean sometimes it gets complicated for example I do agree that for the most part that the vaccinated are back at Baseline risk but that's not the same as
57:41
saying like we should not have any indoor mask mandates for now now there's been a sort of a crisis over that because people are taking it to mean the vaccinated is not safe but that's not true what you're saying is that you you can't expect a business to
57:57
differentially police are you vaccinated are you not vaccinated and we're still both vaccinating people and we have IMA compromised people and we have children under 12 who are not even eligible so while we work through this for a couple
58:10
more months perhaps it makes sense for especially if it's a less ventilated space just to keep it up so at that point I wouldn't say you should wear a mask if you're vaccinated because you're at risk I would just say I think you're
58:26
fine but the business can't just sort of you know check your vaccination card we don't have something like that and this is how it's got to be so even this is not very complicated so I don't think there's any point at which like even if
58:39
you did lie and get away with it it would eventually come out it's it's 2021 there's internet there's social media like the stuff would come out and all you end up doing is but say about vaccinating your 11year old that to me
58:53
is clearly a public good and we don't lie to people but we don't quite hit them over the head with just how safe your 11year old really is unvaccinated right so we slant the distribution of information to get more people to vaccinate their 11 year olds is that
59:08
right or wrong I I don't think we even have to do that because people are very risk averse with their kids generally speaking like we so I think it's fair to say that your 11-year-old is almost certainly fine but I still want them not
59:24
to risk the secula right because when you have an unknown virus there's always like the post viral syndrome that people talk about long Co is not like it's probably not as bad as some of the reporting but it's real and it's real
59:38
for other viruses I mean it's something we've long ignored it's not just that so at 11 you're still kind of close to a risky age it might be a small risk but I I feel like we can tell people the truth it's not likely that your kid is going
59:53
to die from this it's really Baseline risk for your kid but if you could spare your kid even the anxiety because it occasionally you you could just be the Unlucky person I I think we could just tell people that low really low odds but
1:00:05
here's a free vaccine you know why wouldn't you take advantage of it the argument against vaccinating 11 year olds now for me is that you know healthcare workers around the world aren't vaccinated so that seems the wrong order of things but once you know
1:00:21
you take the supply part out of the question per 11 I'd be like yeah why why risk the low but real side effects of the infection because they're going to get infected like there's no getting around encountering this virus I think
1:00:36
that still leans towards vaccinating young ones from the iPad what is your most controversial opinion controversial to whom to those people who you respect not to anti boxers not the crazy people but the 20 people in the world you most
1:00:52
respect I'm just G to say something different now but I think it's an interesting thing to kind of expand on is that I think most of what I said in the past year that appeared to be controversial or contrarian is actually very straightforward and boring lab accidents
1:01:13
and screw-ups happen biomedical research has potential risks especially if we can manipulate the the viruses you know we should wear masks for Respiratory pathogen widespread coverage first I mean these are sure but what's the area where
1:01:29
you're a denter like you think the best owner Bob is in Paris or some crazy VI like that right which is clearly FAL um okay so I think for example I think us is a less racist Society than most of Europe because I lived in Europe and I
1:01:46
have a feeling like this is where I kind of sometimes differ from my own intellectual circles is that they think of Europe as because they tend to see the Social Democrat side of it right compared to the US Europe is a lot more
1:02:00
government oriented in some ways for good or bad but it can be suffocated sometimes but it's actually a much more in some ways racist Society in my experience than the United States and for that's sometimes I differ another thing I differ is that I think gdpr the
1:02:18
sort of the digital regulation I I think it was just at the wrong level and if anything it backfired I think you can't just regulate something by I don't know wagging your finger across the pond sometimes that just doesn't going to
1:02:32
work so I I I differ in some of those ways like the way I look at Europe and I think that's partly because of that I have an immigrants view of the United States which I think is in some ways more realistic but I've lived in Europe
1:02:47
too so I think a lot more positive feelings about certain things that might not be as apparent to somebody who's looking at Europe from this side of the Atlantic because some things look good if you're an American but are not necessarily great if you're
1:03:05
not if you're living in Europe question from the iPad how does your background in programming affect your work as a sociologist and public intellectual oh it's great question so the thing is like it's not just the technological side
1:03:21
like for example I did a lot of like on trying to understand and I I was going to write a book about that for the pandemic I'm super fascinated by Machine learning and I think there's a lot of misunderstandings around it and one of
1:03:33
the reasons that I think I can do some of what I do is that I can read the papers I'm not I'm not a machine you know learning researcher I'm not going to develop Advanced science or anything like that but I understand what's going
1:03:48
on in a way that someone who's just looking at the sociology of its impacts might not because of my background and I had the same thing happen with the pandemic this is not like I actually used to teach sociology of pandemics
1:04:00
because I thought it was really fascinating sociologically but I was always interested in the science side too so I didn't like start knowing nothing I started knowing yes a lay person but a professor an educated lay person and somebody who
1:04:14
taught some of this stuff so I I I had some level of reading and whenever possible I kind of just deepen I read textbooks I read like primary papers and a lot of fields that I'm trying to do sociological analysis and and I think that's something we don't do enough of
1:04:29
in the academy in that because we're so siloed and we treat it like dabbling it's not dabbling if you do it right yes you can do it in a bad way but it's not dabbling to sort of get some level of understanding of a field and you need to
1:04:44
be careful you need to be humble about like what you're doing and then apply your own field sociology to that base so if you don't have any of the other you can kind of get things wrong quite easily if you're overconfident yes it can get into that
1:05:02
you know heavily criticized dabbling where you're just completely out of your depths but I think there's Great Value to be added from being it's not really interdisciplinary you're rooted in one discipline but you're really not like
1:05:15
you're going and learning stuff and you're interacting with the field directly as much as you can so I think that's kind of how it's been broadly beneficial zup a real pleasure chatting with you thank you very much thank you thanks for listening to
1:05:34
conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show