It is my pleasure to introduce Konstantin, who is going to be talking about political
polarization, a topic which, you know, may be unfamiliar to those of you in the United States,
but this is obviously very relevant to us here in the voting village. Thanks.
Thank you. Can you guys hear me okay? Awesome. Okay, so let's kick it off with conventional
wisdom, which is always one of my favorite ways of looking at the world. I think you've probably
all heard this idea that social media is tearing our country apart. And I'm going to challenge
that a little bit for this talk. There's all these different things that we hear about,
and it's almost a little bit like, well, nothing like this has happened in my lifetime. And this
other thing, the internet's new, so they must be related, right? And so the first question I want
to ask is, is there a potential deeper explanation for the state of political polarization we have
today? And the answer is, I think there are. There are very good explanations. And I choose
these two to start with. We're going to have a lot more fun than this, because they both are credited
for having predicted the polarization we see today many years before it happened. So generational
theory, which is a qualitative approach, they've been going back through history. We'll get into
more detail what that means and how they do it. But they were able to, in the 90s, predict that
in the 2020s, we would be in a state of very high polarization. And a totally different approach,
we're able to create new levels of big data that describe historical events that never existed
before. And also in 2010, very visibly to the scientific community predicted that this would
be polarization, would be a crisis with high levels of political polarization right in the 2020s.
And so it's interesting that these two very, very different approaches predicted the same thing.
So let's get into just a little bit about how they did what they did. And, you know, why did
they think that polarization was going to peak at around the time we're on now? So generational
theory, it is also, by the way, somewhat controversial theory among historical circles,
historian circles. But what they did is they went through, and I don't think they were trying to
find a pattern initially, they were going through different periods in history, all the way back to
late 1400s. And they were starting to see a pattern of how generations would shift and eventually
discover that there was this four archetype, archetypical four generational pattern that's
been repeating all the way through the late 1400s in the US. And that pattern would create different
moods in history. And so a thing that historians have known about, which is that there seemed to
be this cyclical nature to some historical events, they started to explain that, on their theory,
the movement of these generational archetypes, which had different, like, large personalities,
would change the mood depending on which stage of life they were in. And let's dive into a little
bit of what those seasons might look like, right? So we have a pretty good intuition of what the
50s were like. I mean, I was raised with it on TV, right? And it was a time period that
just after a big crisis, like World War II, and society had learned the lesson they have to
work together. And the way people felt about their government and institutions was very different,
right? And we think about that white picket fence. Maybe it was a little bit stifling as well for
creatives, right? But it was a certain type of time. When we think about this next season,
it's important to know every one of these seasons. I'm talking to the latest one that we've passed
because we have intuitions for it. But they go back all the way again to way back in 100-year
increments all the way back to the 1400s and 1500s. So our last awakening or summer season
had this period where now we're looking inwards. We have a lot of stability and we start questioning
what we think is right and wrong and how we're supposed to live. And this is a period where you
have a great deal of, I would say, institutional power and the general population no longer wants
it anymore, right? So it's a bit of a period of flux, you know? And then we get into the
generations... so the autumn or the unraveling period was the period that I came of age and we
sure hated those hippies and we were punks and we were different, right? And so we kind of...
that period in time things get very atomic. The population does not want a lot of structure
and civic authority and they're not getting it and it's okay. And so the thing that got my
attention when I was looking at this theory and I started looking at this around 2017
was, well, there's a crisis season as well. And all of a sudden you look at this and this is where
all the big wars happen. Not the little wars, but the big ones, right? By their measure, by the way,
World War I didn't quite finish its business and required World War II to kind of resolve
some of those issues. And so the idea that we had this big crisis coming that was being predicted
in the 90s was a very interesting topic, right? Well, let's jump into this totally different
approach, right? So now we have the advent of a field of science called Cliodynamics.
Clio is the name of God of history. And this is the first real application of big data
to historical modeling. So Peter Turchin was one of the people who started this field
and he basically found ways to get different historians and archaeologists to collaborate
and create this giant database called the Seshat database. And then he was doing like in his career
non-linear dynamic models that fit into ecological problems and it was a safer place to do that
because it wasn't as controversial. And then all of a sudden he flipped in his 40s and started using
those same equations to try and describe human populations. Oh my! And so he described some drivers
that he can predict over the course of thousands of years, every kind of civil war, revolution
out through this database. And there are two main drivers. One is what he calls popular
immiseration. There are ways of measuring, you know, things that we think of as like, you know,
economic inequality but more accurately described as like, how good is your health care? How well
are you living off your dollar? How is your wage doing in keeping you healthy and, you know, free
of stress and fear, right? And then a lot of us have this intuition that, wow, you know, we've
been squeezing our middle class for so long that eventually they're going to get pissed and we're
going to be unstable and that's what's happening. But his model shows something that I at least
never thought of before, which is that in the same conditions that causes this, you know, popular
immiseration, as we concentrate wealth, we also create new elites. We make too many new rich
people. So even that money is concentrated, the population, it's very easy to measure these things,
the population of people with that amount of money and influence is increasing twofold, threefold,
fourfold. So when you get to a state where you have too many elites all aspiring for the same
positions of power, that battle royale that happens up there is actually the thing that
destabilized society for thousands of years looking at every revolution in civic unrest.
And so the way that Peter Turchin himself likes to describe this is, imagine if you had to give
musical chairs, but instead of taking the chairs away, you just added more and more people playing.
And imagine the kind of brawl that would come out there. And that's what's kind of happening now
politically. Now, the, by the way, as those elites are kind of working out that whole battle, what
they do is they use the immiseration of the popular, you know, popular, you know, population
to basically say, I'm going to get you guys all worked up so you can be on my side.
That's a tension that is one of the root causes by this theory of political polarization. What's
interesting is the earlier theory, generational theory, which is totally qualitative, comes to
just about the same exact conclusion. So what's going on here? Let's be skeptical for a second,
because just because something predicted something doesn't mean that it really knows what's going on.
Maybe it's just a broken clock that happened to be right. Or maybe in this case, it's two broken
clocks. So this is a fun book that I read recently. And it was a group of people, I think
it was out of Berkeley and some other schools, where they started trying to make short horizon
predictions. So not like these types of predictions, almost like horse betting on little events in
history. And as they were doing it, they got thousands of volunteers from around the country
to be amateur forecasters. And they slowly started improving these abilities. And eventually,
started actually competing with and sometimes exceeding the intelligence community's ability
to make these forecasts. So then they started looking and saying, well, what is it that makes
you a really good forecaster? We've got thousands of them going at once, and some of them better
than others. And one of the things that kind of stuck out to me, amongst many other things,
is this idea that they would pick a lot of alternative perspectives.
It's kind of like you're betting on a horse race, and you have some angle that you know about that
somebody else doesn't, right? And so this kind of brings me to, I would say, the theoretical
basis of this work, which is... this is back now, 2017, where I came across this book, which is one
of those books that is all the rigorous advice that you would give a social scientist as to how
to use statistics correctly, and statistical models correctly. And it's a hard thing. And
the social scientists, you have to be sometimes more rigorous to get that right. And this book
is fantastic about going through all those methods of what makes sense and what doesn't.
But early in the book, this particular way of thinking of social science has really struck me.
And you think about it, you've got this data layer. And that's like 20, 60, 140, 180, right? Just
data. And if you can tag that data, you can turn it information. Oh my, that's how fast a ball is
falling right now. And right now. But if you want more than just how fast the ball is falling right
now, you need to develop a model. You need something like gravity. And gravity is not
perfect, but it's really useful. And then this idea that you can get to this wisdom layer, the
wisdom of expertise, the wisdom of models, right? Not like the wisdom of crowds. And that what you
do is you compare these different models. This one's good at this. This one says this in relation
to that. And that you could create this view that'd be the best you could get based on the
existence of the current models that you chose. So we tried to do that, albeit qualitatively.
So how do you hunt for models? You start reading all these respective thinkers.
And this is just a small subset of the books that we went through. And you'd be like,
that book's saying something special. There's a thinking process there. In the first couple
of chapters, they'll say what they're really about. Then they'll show you why it's right,
or they'll give you some coffee shop rants. But you can often extract the model, like the ones
I just showed you, from these various deep thinkers. So now we're gonna get wild.
I got 17 up here. You learned about the first two, so it's not so bad.
But we're gonna do 15 different models that we found. We tracked, by the way, close to 30 right
now, but I'm just showing you something that's representative. I promise I didn't cherry pick
these. And we're gonna just flashcard. Instead of reading the book, just listening for 30 seconds,
we're gonna keep going. And then you get some kind of intuition about what this model says,
and then we'll talk about what they say at that wisdom layer in relation to each other about
things like polarization, right? We just talked about this one, right? I like to think about it
as like, the gears of the generations are moving, and oh my god, we're on fire now, it's a crisis.
But it's this idea that there's a symbiotic relationship between these repeating personalities
and the mood that they generate, and how we decide to react to events and make history.
This is the exact opposite, right? Any Asimov fans in the audience?
So this is the closest thing on earth to psychohistory. And in Peter Turchin's latest
book, which I recommend deeply, it's called End Times, he will describe how his stuff is
different from psychohistory and some assumptions Asimov made in his science fiction were wrong.
But it's absolutely brilliant. One of the other things I like about this model, which we talked
about, but is this idea that a lot of people who absolutely hate Marx still use his framing of the
world. I totally am anti-communism, but I'm really afraid if all the poor people get too poor, they
might revolt. And maybe I've got a villa in New Zealand just in case, right? But what Peter
Turchin shows mathematically is that it's actually the other rich people you got to watch out for.
So this is a fantastic researcher named Lawrence Lessig. You guys may have heard of him.
And this model really focuses on this idea that the moneyed interest has its way with the
politicians before we even get to vote for them. And that this creates a paralysis where we can't
get things passed and done. But it's interesting to consider, well, where's all that money coming
from? All those elites who have too much of it are trying to influence each other, right? So there's
like the fact that we're peaking in terms of our power paralysis with the way funding is affecting
politics is related to these other models. I'm gonna keep going at a clip. All right.
This is a fun one, because I'm in tech and I'm not rich. So it's this idea that these
scientists are trying to recreate wealth distributions. And so they say, well, what are
the different factors that create wealth distributions that are similar to ours? And it
turns out after you get to a certain amount of access and ability, that the best indicator is
luck. Not very popular to say, but... And then they use the same exact analysis to look at scientific
breakthroughs. So like, oh, you won the Nobel Prize? Let's give you all the money. Well, maybe that's
not the best thing to do. Just because you did it once doesn't mean you'll do it again.
This one, I chose this particular researcher in this name. But this comes in a lot of shapes and
forms. If you look at the work of Peter Zion or the people out of Pratfers and Geographic Futures,
they talk a lot about this one flavor of this or another. And it's this idea that we have this
kind of first past the post system, and we get these large tent political factions, and it's
almost like an earthquake every now and then. Sometimes people think it's 30-year, 60-year,
at some sort of cyclical point. The thing falls apart, and it realigns itself, and the factions
find new things. And by most people who follow these types of thinking and theories, we're right
at the point where we're realigning right now. So the factions are all changing. And you can see
some of this, by the way, where it's like, wait, I thought the unions were a democratic thing. Oh,
wait, they're shifting. They like this now. There's a lot of factional movement happening
if you keep your eye on politics today that relates to this theory. So now I'm going to
change from the internal world a little bit to the external world, because we're going to find
that the external world might be affecting us too. So this is a very famous researcher from Harvard
named Graham Ellison. Some people have heard of Thucydides' trap. Fun story is he's actually,
I think, one of Kissinger's prized protégés, and they give talks together sometimes.
So he observes in ancient Greece, as he's watching Thucydides describe history, that
this rising power is starting to affect this existing power and that tension between them
can cause a war, sometimes that neither of them wanted to start.
And so he gets a case files and goes through 500 years of history with his students and
uncovers 16 occasions where this dynamic has occurred. And lo and behold, 12 of them were
major wars. And some of them, I swear, he has cherry picked to make this look more optimistic.
But that's Thucydides' trap. This is my favorite geopolitical analyst. His book,
Danger Zone, is absolutely spectacular. And so he takes Thucydides' trap, I would say,
a step further, where he starts looking at what happens historically when a power is not just
changing transition, but when a power begins to peak. What happens when a power is growing like
this, really fast, economically, everything's going great, and things start hitting some
shady, rocky waters. At that peaking point, he finds that all of these powers get very aggressive.
Even democracies do it. Even we did it at certain points in our peaking point.
So what does this mean? Well, China is a peaking power by his count, and he's a very convincing
description of this. And as these windows of opportunity close, as they get all these
economic variables, demographic, all these things, all these pressures, strategic encirclements
coming around, they're seeing their strategic opportunities closing and getting further away.
So there's an incentive to do it while you can. And this is an important model because it puts a
time frame on this all. It puts a timer on it. There is this conventional wisdom out there
that we're in the new Cold War. Hey, we just had one. Why wouldn't we be?
But a lot of this stuff suggests that that is not at all what's going on.
We're not gearing up for a 30-, 20-, 40-year marathon. We should be potentially gearing up
for a 5-, 10-year sprint instead. So this is a fun one where it appears...
Klinkenberg does a lot of other work as well, but there seems to be this emotional cycle.
The 20-year is not a coincidence. It maybe has to do with generational shifts as well,
where we get really interested in some foreign war, and then we just decide we want to go home
and don't want to do foreign wars for a while. And so we have this weird moodiness around the
20-year cycle when it comes to how much we want to be the world's policemen and how much we don't.
Bruce DeMosquita is a professor at NYU who is a game theory expert, and his research is how
game theory applies to politics. And he's the kind of cat they'll bring in if they're doing
a negotiation with North Korea and they want the game theory advice as how to best do it.
He does a series of absolutely amazing books where he studies these effects historically,
and also predictions of game theory. And one of the things I pull out of it is the idea of a
selectorate. A selectorate is the group that chooses your leader. Well, that group might be
really small. That's starting to feel a little bit like an authoritarian situation, right?
Or that group might be really big, like a democracy should be, right?
And then there's the winning coalition. Well, that's the group that lets you stay in power.
So if you think about something like Hitler, he got elected, but then things changed,
and the country turned into a fascist thing, and the winning coalition was still very tight
and small. The point is that under conditions where your winning coalition especially,
but also your selectorate, are small relative to your population, the incentive structure
that tells... if you just want to keep your job and stay out of jail, the people you have to keep
happy are a smaller circle of people, and that incentivizes a totally different type of behavior.
You can put your general population through a lot more pain. You can start wars that you
probably shouldn't. So there's all this, and there's a lot of things we see, we're like,
oh, we always pick the dictator when they're always crazy. Oh, Putin's the crazy one now.
And before that, it was, you know, Gaddafi or whatever. There's always a crazy one.
But it's a lot of times because you're not looking at the world through the lens of what
their true motivations are. So this is a really interesting book that describes,
kind of merges West Point theory about how war works with this new domain,
the fifth domain is the cyber domain. And one of the things they point out is,
it's less costly and easier to attack than it is to defend in the cyberspace. And traditionally,
back when you had walls and cannons, the same thing applied.
When it's cheaper to attack, it begets conflict. So we can expect conflict to occur. And by the
way, I'm one of those people who doesn't think conflict has started there yet.
We have the inklings of it, but we have not really felt it.
So this is a new world for me. These are like military theorists who are looking at like,
you know, power projections. And I was reading this book and they were looking at like,
how many smart net underwater drone mines can take out a submarine? And I was like,
I guess we're working on that now. It was really cool stuff. But the interesting about them is
they point out this fundamental vulnerability in voluntary alliances, the kind that we like
to have with our NATO countries and with like the Pacific, you know, Japan and that voluntary
alliance. Well, if I can do something that really pisses off the Philippines, but doesn't seem like
a reason for us to start World War III, like all those little islands, nobody lives on them.
Are we really going to come back with all we got because they took those little islands?
But that's not why they took those little islands. Because when we don't come back and respond,
then Philippines doesn't know if we have their back or not. And if you lose methodically,
you now have a vulnerability that you can use to weaken alliances. And the problem here is that
the process of doing this, which regularly happens with China and Russia all the time,
can also create a kind of reaction you didn't expect. So it's a great trigger.
This is a book, I believe he was on the National Security Council for Obama.
He was a little bit early to the stuff that I think we're all seeing now is some of this
aggressive, somewhat sly behavior that's coming out of the CCP and MSS. He goes through tons of
case studies of what's happening in universities, case studies of cyber attacks that are so intricate.
They will come and hack a company because they care about it from some sort of technological
standpoint. And they will just figure out what the sales data they promised their investors are.
And then they'll tweak that data just so they missed the next round.
Company gets in trouble, and then they show up and they're like, we'll buy you.
And lots of these really interesting case studies that he has. Fun point,
and this relates to some of the other things. He tried over and over again to think tanks to help
him. I'm on the National Security Council, please think tech, will you help me? We take a lot of
Chinese money. We're not feeling comfortable. Switching to economic models. I'm hoping to
get through these fast enough. So you've probably all heard of the middle income trap. It's a
pretty common economic thesis. What's important in this context is that China is in the middle
income trap. We are not. There are very different things going on there when you compare us into
stages. And there's this idea that this model of how you can get from very poor to middle,
and a lot of countries did it. There's earlier names for it, but now they call it the Asian
tiger model because Japan just did it and South Korea just did it. And then you get to that point
where you're middle income and you lose your 10, 20 years, you restructure your society,
and somehow you pop out the other end as a liberal democratic country with the rule of law.
And for some reason, the ones that keep popping out keep looking like us and we don't know why.
Well, China's right at that point right now where they're here and they have missed a lot of those
exit ramps to become a liberalized democracy with a free market economy and a rule of law, right?
So how are they going to get here? What happens if they don't? And by the way, an authoritarian
regime can go from here to here quite easily. I'm just telling my poor factory people which factory
to show up at. That's not a complex, sophisticated society. So there's a lot of change that would have
to happen that's very, very difficult in an authoritarian environment with a small winning
coalition to pull off right now. So they're really stuck. Oh, by the way, there's also the idea that
they could somehow use AI to get out of the middle income trap. This is my favorite economist.
I think he lives and teaches in Beijing. I think he started the first punk club there,
maybe the only one for all I know. So he does a lot of sophisticated work,
but I'm going to simplify from this perspective. And I think one of the things he does,
this is my own take on it now. So he says, well, okay, I get this whole income inequality thing.
And is it fair who's rich and who isn't? Let's just put that aside for a second.
In a consumer economy, your population, your general population is your consumers,
the middle class of the people buying for stuff. And when you're rich, you can't buy enough stuff.
You have to reinvest your money in supply. So there is a relationship between supply and demand
that has a relationship to income concentration as well. In other words, if you start losing your
ability in the middle class to buy things, you're putting a tax on your consumer economy. And what
he shows is that doesn't happen evenly around the world. Is that I can then run out of my demand and
I can still push it on some other country and take care of their demand. And eventually you're
robbing Peter to pay Paul over and over and over again until eventually nobody's got any demand
left and it's fighting time. So he does describe, doesn't get into it too much, but he does describe
that it gets politically very uncomfortable to rebalance this once all demand has run out.
This is Redaglio. This is not Redaglio's synthesis of his thoughts of the world.
I steer very far away from that because I think it's got some fundamental flaws.
He does have an earlier model where he talks about short-term and long-term debt.
And so the way that short-term, you have a recession and you're back and you're okay,
it's kind of shorter, you know, cycles. And that every one of those cycles piles up a little bit
of debt until you have this bigger deleveraging. Think Great Depression, think 2008. Except that
one of the things you have to do to get past it is somehow find ways to redistribute that wealth.
Doesn't that sound interesting or familiar, right? Until you redistribute your wealth,
you're not out of the trouble yet. And you get into very difficult political environments when
trying to figure out who's going to feel the pain that it takes to redistribute that wealth.
This is Thomas Piketty. He's loved these days and he has a whole book on policy and what to do.
But I'm just extracting from this the simple model that he had that I think was brilliant,
which is to say, hey, there's a reason why the wealth concentration is occurring.
And it happens over and over again because of the way that money is made from having money
versus wages. And you're going to see this effect every time. Wealth will keep concentrating,
which is great because we get right into Scheidel's work.
And he goes back and now looks across thousands of years, across millennia,
and tries to do all this analysis to figure out what points wealth concentrated. And the bad news
is every single time, once you get at that peak, there's this what he calls a four horsemen event.
Something really unsavory happens for that wealth concentration peak to get past and reset in some
way. So, well, how do we do all that? So, let's start asking. I actually organized this almost
like a magic eight ball. Let's see what all the different models say, right? So, let's ask it a
question. In this case, let's ask it the original question, right? Are we really in this turbulent
crisis time with high polarization and do you predict it? And you notice, by the way, I didn't
mention social media once, right? So, you're predicting this. Well, the way this goes, this is a
way of kind of externalizing a thought, right? Is the dark green color is saying, yes, I totally
agree with the answer, right? The lighter green color is saying, I kind of agree. I don't think
there's any... oh, there's one lighter green. The yellow is a contextualized thing where it's like, I don't
directly answer this thing, but I give context that supports and increases the validity of one of
these other answers. The gray, it means I don't apply to this thing. What we did is all those
external models, we filtered out of this question on purpose. So, we like filtered out
all the external stuff we talked about. So, now we started with that one model or that two model,
the second model that predicted the future in that weird way, but all these other models have
really strong relationships and a really strong agreement and they all come from different places.
So, that tells me a different thing about how what I... this is why I believe what I believe about
as opposed to the internet did it. So, well, what about these external things? Well, is there any
chance that this crisis we're looking at right now has a both internal and external characteristic?
You bet your ass it does. That is an extraordinary level of agreement. I have not yet discussed that
we have a pink color for I kind of disagree and a red color for I totally disagree. I have not
cherry-picked these models. It's like trying to like, I don't know, learn to read the weather
during a hurricane. It's unbelievable how much agreement there is. Well, let's ask about
polarization and the way I like to look at it, right? Is this polarization a key vulnerability
in this world for us? Can this polarization be used against us the way a vulnerability would
even in cyberspace? Well, what are all the models we just talked about say about that idea?
You're damn right it can. This is a very fundamental vulnerability in our country right now.
So, what's the neat thing about, let's tell you some more things we've learned by looking at
these models, right? One of them is these crisis situations that we've gotten ourselves into,
they tend to have a high-walled interest. Like once you're going down the path,
you know, and as Peter Turchin would say, as your wealth pump starts to move money away
from the middle class and you start creating new elites, it's hard to avoid the crisis. You're
kind of like barreling into it. But once you get in the crisis, generational theory says the same
thing. A lot of people have seen and observed this. When you're in the crisis, the cement
gets really soft and you can have a lot of different outcomes. The difference between
civil war in the US and the New Deal in World War II had a lot to do with some decisions that
the elites made. And by the way, there was a small faction of elites that didn't like those
decisions and tried to do a fascist coup in the United States called the Wall Street Putsch
or the Business Plot, look it up. The movie, 2022 movie called Amsterdam is secretly about that if
you're interested. How do we push back on it, right? Let's talk about what a counter-elite is
and what a counter-elite isn't. Tom, by the way, thank you for pointing out that this word can be
interpreted more than one way. So when I say counter-elite, I don't mean somebody who is
against elites. I mean an elite, a powerful person that is exhibiting counter-elite behavior.
So this is an elite aspirant. I want that position. I want that job in the White House,
that Senate job. I want this thing and I'm not getting it. And by the way, this is like
historically speaking, this is the behavior of Mao or Lenin. All these revolutions were all
started by counter-elites. Most of them were actually upset lawyers who didn't get the job
they wanted. And so I'm a dominant and influential group. I've got power, but I'm not getting the job
I want in society. It is not a political ideal. It is not left or right. Everybody on the left
likes to think that people on the right are going to destroy the country. Everybody on the right
thinks people on the left are going to destroy the country. That's just a trick. Counter-elite
behavior is not about your position on the political spectrum. It is about your willingness
to break the system to get power. And then you can radicalize the vulnerable general population.
This is where horseshoe politics comes in, right? This concept that I'm on the left,
on the right, I'm kind of normal. But the more extreme I get, the more radicalized I am in almost
the same way. So let's go back to the very beginning when we talked about social media
and whether it was doing this to us. So I have a background in usability, so human-computer
interaction. And one of the things we learn is one of the big mistakes that product teams make,
which is when they look, so this is like our mythical social media is one big thing, right?
And we say, what's a UTTL? Well, we describe users, the people who are using a piece of
technology, their tasks, what are they doing with it, right? Their technology that they use,
I use my mobile device to use Facebook or Reddit, and the LOS stands for level of support.
Are they trained? Is this the ATM that I walked up at? Is this Photoshop where I spent a year
or two learning how to use it? And so I just did one for the way I think the general world looks
at social media. And guess what? They make the same mistake that all of us product owners make
at some point or another, which is we forget to consider all the users. So here we are.
There's some other users out there using social media and they're threat actors. They could be
in our country and they're counter-elites and they're using the internet to break us right now,
or they could be external, they could be working together that we don't know.
But when you look at social media and the internet this way,
you realize that this is not a thing doing something to us.
This is a new domain of warfare that we are being attacked through.
So now I want to invite my dear friend Tom, who works with me carefully on all these things,
who is one of my closest collaborators. Come up, Tom. And Tom has done a lot of work
along with Greg Conti in this space of saying, well, how do I go break a democracy?
Thanks, Konstantin. So center of gravity analysis is a vulnerability analysis technique that comes
from US warfighting doctrine. If you're interested in understanding it, myself along with Greg Conti
who wrote this slide and Dave Raymond gave a talk at 2015 at Black Hat called Pen Testing a City.
The video is online and there's a number of slides that are devoted to this topic. But
basically, the idea here is that attacks against something may not come directly.
So if you think about a system, the first thing you do is ask yourself, what is the center of
power of this system? What is the fundamental thing that its power depends upon? And then you
ask yourself, what are the capabilities that are needed for that center of gravity, that center
of power to function? And then you ask yourself what conditions or resources lead to those
capabilities operating properly, right? And then for all those conditions, you start talking about
vulnerabilities. And you could do this in a lot of different contexts. So Greg made this slide
and it's about democracies. And so it starts out with, we're starting out with democracy being a
center of gravity for democratic societies, right? So what are the things that we need for democracy
to function? We need an independent judiciary. We need elections. We need a good legislature.
What's needed for all those things to work correctly? We need secure voting machines. We
need voters that are willing to vote. The military needs to be able to recruit people. The
executive branch needs legitimacy. And then what are all the vulnerabilities that exist that could
undermine some of those conditions, right? And so with respect to voting, just like apathy with
respect to voting is something that undermines our ability to operate effective elections,
which contributes to undermining a critical component of our democracy, right? And there's
all these other components as well. So the moral of the story here is that people who are attacking
elections infrastructure, they may not have like a direct motive where they're just sort of like
trying to get a particular person elected instead of that other person. They may not be attempting
to get a certain outcome to occur. They may be attempting to undermine people's confidence in
the system in general, or they may have like a secondary effect that they're trying to achieve.
So I think that's the presentation. I don't know if we have much time for questions, but
we have maybe two minutes. So we could hand you this microphone if you have a question you'd like
to ask. Well, you talked about this in terms of like America. Has some of these models
been run of other countries that like have similar profiles? That's an important question.
Internationalization. These are US-centric models. Oh, that's a very good question. So a lot of the
people working on these models have hypotheses as to how they can work in other countries as well.
Some of it immediately transports. So like you think about something like the authoritarian
stuff, that's an international model, right? Generational theory, in their latest book,
they talk a lot. It's called The Fourth Turning is Here, by the way. They talk a lot about other
potential times in history and things like that. And they even talk about why they think the
American cycle is particularly pronounced. But yes, a lot of these models apply to a lot of
different countries. There's also the theory that World War II was so global in nature
that it kind of synced us up in a weird way. So you had a lot of great titles in your talk.
Are you going to be sharing the slides online? Or can you put up the summary slide again so that
you can maybe snap a photo of... Yeah, yeah. Or the one with all the book covers, the book
specifically. Okay. I think we're at time. If you guys email me, my email is the word
Constantine, my name, at company.co. It's really easy to remember. I will send you... I have reading
lists that are literally like every book that I've ever used that I can email you back. Yeah.
There are two new books that just came out. One is Michael Beckley's book, Danger Zone.
That's kind of new. The other one is End Time, Peter Turchin. And the third is Fourth Turning
is here. Those three books are really deeply supported by all the other models. So it's a
really good place to start. All right. I think we're probably at time.
We'll definitely hang out for a little while if you guys want to ask more questions.