YouSaid · the spoken record

Elliot Ackerman

lines on the record: 29
first: 2024-04-05
most recent: 2024-04-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Secure, safe, happy lives. And so I think we are often the ones who bring ourselves back from our worst impulses. Although we have in the past let it get pretty bad before we are able to kind of snatch the reins. So that is ultimately it's just sort of the individual who leaves me feeling optimistic that when you take each of the characters in the book, they are ultimately the ones who rescue the narrative. And these narratives are drawn not by huge, completely insurmountable forces. They're drawn up by individuals. And you'll see each of the books the way they're told is sort of through a soda straw perspective because as we often say Gemini, big doors swing on small hinges and it's sort of the small hinges that give me hope.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing that I feel the most optimistic about is that our institutions typically are very resilient, even though they can be put under extremely uncomfortable situations where there's a lot of stress. And I think ultimately, you know, people want to pause. They don't want to go down these paths. They want to, you know,”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our best days are ahead of us, that these are crises that we will be able to avoid, that we do not have to fight a war with China, that the United States doesn't have to tear itself apart, and that these new technologies don't have to spell the downfall of all humanity. But we are imagining situations in which some of that comes to pass so that other people can imagine a way past those hazards as well.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These books are not works of prediction. They're works of speculation. I mean, this is speculative fiction. And the spirit behind it is, you know, if we can imagine some of these outcomes, which are not positive, right? A war with China, devastating civil conflict in the US, that by imagining them, that is really one of the first steps we can take to avoiding them. And so that's been the spirit with which we've been writing these books, is trying to see some of the wrong turns that we could take. And by marking them off very, very clearly, perhaps we'll be able to just sort of drive right past them and never go down those paths. So I think both of us, as much as we're, you know, writing books that, you know, we think are fun in our page termers, but are about fairly grim topics, are ultimately optimistic.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we sort of realized we were going to be referencing Kurzweil in the novel. And I think at a certain point, we just realized, you know, I think we should just become a character in the novel. And so he is sort of, he's mostly off stage, but there's this sort of search for Kurzweil that becomes one of the narrative strands of the book. You know, who is he? What did he mean? And what is the role that he has had in achieving this singularity? And one of the things we played with as well, which we hope he likes, is that given advances in technology, we also imagine that he is alive and healthy in the year 2054, which I think puts him at about age 120.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we were, you know, as I mentioned, this is the second book in a trilogy, and this project really is dealing with what we view as sort of the three great challenges that we'll probably face humanity in the 21st century. One is a peer-on-peer conflict, and we do it with China. This book is about civil conflict and the rise of artificial intelligence. And the last book is going to be 2084 will be about the environment. But that being said, as we were talking about this book and the ideas in this book very early on, we had both read and were rereading at this point a book that came out 20 years ago by Ray Kurzweil called The Singularity is Near, in which many of the ideas that we're talking about right now and in many ways our reality was sort of prophesied in this book that he wrote 20 years ago.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As to who she thinks is in the right on both sides. She's sort of comes to a conclusion of a pox on both your houses, but winds up making a decision that is the one that will allow the majority of her Marines to basically, and she says it's just to go home to get back to their homes so they can kind of have a life once this crisis breezes over. And I think the tacit statement there is that in any conflict, and I've seen this having fought in wars and then covered wars as a journalist, is that the immediate exigencies of just keeping yourself safe, keeping your family safe often almost all cases, take much greater priority than any type of abstract ideology.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So, I mean, Julia Hunt is another character. She's the adopted daughter of one of the characters who is very central in the first book, Sarah Hunt, who was the admiral in 2034, who is responsible for launching a couple of the U.S.'s nuclear strikes. And so her adopted daughter finds herself also serving in uniform as a Marine first at the White House and then eventually at the Marine Barracks in Washington, D.C. And so when the political crisis starts to sweep into Washington, she finds herself in command of a garrison about a thousand Marines. And the question foisted on her is, you know, who are you going to support? The truth is the dreamers, because both of them are asking for the Marines to come out and lend them a hand. And I think for without spoiling too much of the novel, but for Julia, her decision becomes much less idiotic.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the national security state has got its hands on some very, very important levers of power. Eventually, it doesn't take much to imagine those crises playing out and realizing that the national security state is going to get drugged into this thing one way or another. And that becomes very, very concerning and very, very dangerous.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think when we talk about U.S. politics today, and even in the past, and then we extrapolate out what becomes sort of clear is that when we find ourselves in these hyperpartisan moments, you're really in a situation when there's a tyranny of the minority over the majority. Meaning, most Americans are not these insane partisans that we see out on the fringe of the right of the left. Most Americans sort of want to just go about their lives and have sort of common sense solutions to the problems facing us. However, we have political systems, media systems that are all sort of incited to trying to generate rage because rage activates voters, it activates viewers, and many of us are just sort of stuck in the middle. I think the thing that's different in the national security state is even though that same dynamic exists.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because if when you push and you push and you push and the crises become ever more extreme, you eventually forced onto military members a choice as to which side they're going to throw themselves behind. And in the book, it builds towards that. And it's not a choice whether the U.S. military goes all with one side or all with the other. The military itself cleaves because as much as the American military is an apolitical force doesn't mean the military members don't have political beliefs. There's just a culture of omerta. But that culture can break. And so Bunt becomes kind of a moral center in the book trying to figure, trying to keep that break from happening. But also, I think giving the reader a sense of what that break means potentially.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of the things that I've read at a number of novels and people, when they ask about the characters in the past, the ones that I write on my own, I always have to admit, you know, well, these characters, they're all sort of me. They're versions of me. I'm trying on the thing that's been fun writing this book is actually the characters are all both of us. And so they're sort of versions of both of us. And so Admiral John Bunt Herrickson is a character who was also in the first book. And when you meet him now, he is a retired admiral working as the White House chief of staff at the beginning of the book. And he becomes sort of the, yes, he's sort of the one adult in the room trying to hold everything together. But also very cognizant of the horrible role that the military is placed into when the partisans on either side of American political life insist on pushing society to the brink.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of humanity comes pouring out of this box in very, very destructive ways. But if you remember, the end of that myth is the very last thing that's left in the box after all of this destruction pours out is this little kernel. And this last little kernel is actually a hope. So hope is the one thing left in the box. So I think creation destruction always exists in tandem. In 2054 is a book that is about both.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's this dance, you know, like one of the characters in the book, a guy named Sandy Chowdhury, who's in the first book as well. When we meet him in the first book, he's a young White House staffer. He's an American bit of Indian descent. When we meet him in the second book, he is sort of toward the end of his life and has become sort of a great titan of private equity and finance. And he is funding some of these efforts. And his group that his investment vehicle is called the Tandava group, which is Hinduism is sort of the dance and the interplay between the creation and destruction, and that the two always exist hand in hand. And that's something that really cuts across cultures. Like, for instance, if we look at the Greek myths and the legend of Pandora and her box, Pandora opens her box, all the suffering and destruction.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Age of human innovation. Just what's more challenging is there isn't that visual representation like we had in 1945, even though the pace of change is every bit as quick and everybody's as profound.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both China, Nigeria, all these powers are racing towards this singularity, which is the moment in which we are able to harness the power of quantum computing to vastly accelerate human intelligence. And that becomes a contest between nations that's every bit as profound as the contest we saw, for instance, between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 20th century to become the nuclear dominant nation. So I think what's a little bit different, though, is the beginning of that arms race, we all had a very clear visual representation of what nuclear power meant. And that was the dropping of the A-bomb at Hiroshima in Nagasaki. You know, we're standing right now, I think today, on a similar, at the dawn of a similarly professional...”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, this idea, and we're already seeing the antecedents of it today that potentially in 30 years we would have the ability with the power of quantum computing and it advances in biology to basically upload our consciousness to a computer chip so that your personality, your memories would be able to exist beyond the realm of your lifetime and that we will also start to see really this line that is, you know, at least right now in our country is a pretty hard line between technology and biology become increasingly porous. And again, these are things that we've already seen the antecedents. So for instance, when we went through the pandemic, millions of us injected a technology into our body that was not a strictly biological technology that were these vaccines. And so we will start to get to the point in our evolution as human beings.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly elected president with a last name Castro. And he emerges initially as an independent political figure, runs for president and wins, but then inevitably a party coalesces around him and they become the American Dream Party. But he is certainly their figurehead. And so by the year 2054, the great tension that exists in American life is one between the Democratic Republicans and Castro, or put differently between the truthers on one side and the dreamers on the other.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These types of alliances in American politics are really not without precedent because unlike the parliamentary system where you can have sort of small parties, the American system just lends itself to two major parties and that often will create really strange alliances. Like for instance in the mid-20th century when you had in the Democratic Party Northeastern liberals coexisting with segregationists I mean that was the Democratic Party in the 1940s and 50s so the democratic republicans formed into their own party and they are colloquially known as the truthers. Because they believe that their rigid version of truth is the one truth. And then this very charismatic figure after the war in 2034 emerges and this is an immigrant, his name is Angel Castro. He likes to quip that if this country could elect a president with the middle name.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of the trends that is often not reported on in the United States, but I think it's really significant, is that the U.S. is a country in which the majority of Americans don't identify with either the Democratic or the Republican Party. So our two majority parties are actually two minority parties. And that's today. And so taking those trends and extrapolating them out, we imagine that in 2054, you will have seen the Democratic and Republican parties continue to shed membership to the point where they're really two rump parties, both increasingly extreme, both increasingly fringe. And in order to survive, they have to band together and they become the Democratic Republican Party, which was actually in the early 19th century a political party in the United States.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly, I mean, it's definitely something that is a presence in American life, which are. You know, he could call them militias or protest movements. We saw it with right-wing groups like the Proud Boys or far left groups like Antifa. And these groups frequently represent the militarized fringe wings of the two political movements in the United States. And often not only the United States, but if you look back in history and other countries, there is sort of a tacit agreement between the respectable political entities and the more fringing wings of their party to work in concert. And so you very much see that. You know, America in 2054 still is a bipolar political entity. There's sort of two major groups, but their extreme wings are warring with one another and taking their”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're already seeing the antecedents of that right now. Whereas if, for instance, the great competition and power competition of the 20th century was centered around nuclear arms and a nuclear arms race and then a technological space race, I think what we're seeing right now, particularly vis- ⁇-vis the United States and China, is a race around artificial intelligence and who can outpace the other in machine learning and capacity to innovate in that sphere because whoever dominates in the AI space is going to have significant economic dominance and probably military dominance. And so that also becomes one of the themes in the book as we see these types of technological arms races between nations. And those races also have a significant part of them that rely on the private sector as well.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that is an extrapolation of current trends and that the world is today becoming much more multipolar than it was in the second half of the 20th century. You know, it's often been said that demographics are destiny and American demographics and European demographics are declining in ways that demographics in countries like India, Nigeria, Brazil, you have much stronger and younger populations. And so by the year 2054, Strepolin, we see that those are really the countries that are coming onto the fore on the world stage.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“However, the caveat is he then believes he's the only one who can keep the United States from the brink and as such is reluctant to give up power.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's a theme that we just don't only see in America. I think it's a theme that we see through the course of human history, which is that if there's one thing that you can sort of count on in our human story is that people who have vast amounts of power are extremely reluctant to ever give up that power voluntarily. And they will cling to it to their very last breath. And really, the instances in history where people do voluntarily relinquish power are by far the exception as opposed to a rule. So that becomes a theme in the book. And as President Castro has been a very effective president, and after the calamitous events of 2034, he's really the single individual who is responsible for pulling the United States back from the brink and seeing the United States, maybe not to restore to its epoch, but restore to a functioning country.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that in many ways, you know, mirrors our society right now. In which the pace of technological advancement and change is as high as has probably been in the course of human history, where remarkable new technologies are coming onto the scene, it seems almost weekly that promise to fundamentally alter the way we work, the way we create, the way we live, human life also at a time when it seems as though humanity and civilization is also sort of in this race to the bottom as we see rises in bigotry and authoritarianism. And so we're sort of tearing our self apart at the same time as we're building ourselves up. And so the duality, that duality of creation and destruction is definitely a theme in 2054 and very much in the air at the outset of that novel, when the president basically dies. And there's a lot of questions of whether or not he's died of natural causes, whether or not he's”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The president refusing to let go of power. At the same time that new really conscious altering technologies are coming onto the scene. And one of those technologies seems to be implicated in the death of this president, which occurs in the first chapter. And that sends American society tumbling into a crisis that brings it really up to the brink of civil war.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this novel is the second part of a planned trilogy and the first part of that trilogy is in 2034. And in that book, we see the United States and China enter an escalatory crisis that culminates in an exchange of nuclear weapons. And on the back side of 2034, both China and the United States are really in tatters and we're left with India as a real rising power. So we then go 20 years into the future. And in 2054, when the novel opens, what we see is increasing trends of polarization and partisanship at the United States that has led to the emergence of two new political parties. One, a majority party and one a minority party. And the leader of the majority”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To Intelligence Squared Meet, I'm Programming Connor Boyle. Coming up This episode The best selling author, Military Discusses his latest book, 2054. Depicts a dystopian Politics Eerily with Site. Elliot is a former U.S. Marine. Co Of More than 30 years in the U.S. Navy. Joining Elliott to discuss the book is Carl Miller, co founder of the Center for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank demos. He's author of The Death of the Gods, The New Global Power Grab. Let's join Carl Now with more.”
2024-04-05 · Intelligence Squared · A Journey Into Our Geopolitical Future, with Elliot Ackerman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT