YouSaid · the spoken record

Max Brooks

lines on the record: 31
first: 2021-06-22
most recent: 2021-06-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I hope that voters will mercilessly grill their politicians about the systems that keep them alive, especially now, especially now with Brexit. You know, now that you've gone back to being an island, I hope that everyone will question their politicians and say, hey, how are you going to keep my lights on in the water running? How do you keep the lights on? How do you keep the water running? I used to get all this great fresh fruits and vegetables from Spain. Where's it going to come from? You know, what are the systems, the ships, the planes, the infrastructure, the communications? I know that Britain wants 5G and they're going for Chinese 5G because it's cheaper than American 5G. Fair enough. Is that 5G hackable by the Chinese government? Are their systems built in where you can spy on me? I demand as a British citizen to know how all”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think that's what I'm trying to do. Lord knows if I'm going to be, if I've been successful if I'll ever be successful, but I got to try. You know, I was just on another British podcast a little while ago talking about vaccinations. And they had a philosophy professor on who'd written a book on how to inoculate yourself from propaganda. And I thought, who is gonna read this book other than people who are already on board? What you're going to go to a biker bar in Lexington, Kentucky and pass out the book? No, you gotta go to people where they live. You gotta go to them. And so that's why I'm trying to reach people on that level. And as we round down, I'll say that I am not a great intellectual. I grew up with this crippling learning disability called dyslexia. So I had to fight in school every single day and try to make what I was learning.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's exactly right. And that's one of the reasons I write the books that I write, because I found, this goes back to what I said about the gap in the communication class, the talkers, the people who can inform the public. That's where fiction, science fiction, or horror can come in, because once you've got the audience's attention, once you're taking them on a fun, exciting ride of a story, educate them. That's what happened to me when I was a kid every episode of Star Trek, the Tom Clancy books I used to read, they educated me about the world I lived in. So you can entertain and educate at the same time. And so what I try to do, whether it's Sasquatch or Zombies or Minecraft, I'm trying to mix a little bit of intellectual nutrition in with the sugar of the fun ride.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a citizen, as a voter, as a customer, I then have to stay informed and I have to do my job and I have to make sure, oh, is the iPhone that I'm buying made in a slave labor camp in China? And is the money I'm giving to Apple making sure that Xi Jinping can threaten doctors? Oh, well, then maybe I should look around for another phone. And if there isn't another phone, if they're all made in China, then I've got to do my part to make sure that other companies build other phones in other places. So yes, it is difficult. It is frustrating, but it is the best way for us to ensure our own safety.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capitalism is, I think, one of the greatest tools of freedom ever created because not only am I a voter, I am a customer, I have power, and with capitalism comes competition. Now don't confuse capitalism with crony capitalism and monopolies, where one company owns everything and then you don't have a choice. But with that wonderful two pillars of the vote and the wallet, I am able to choose which company that I want to support and through the vote I am able to make sure that I have a choice of companies, that one company doesn't swallow everything up. Now, this is why there's been resistance to these two pillar system. It takes homework.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People up, you know, go with our model. Give up your human rights, and we'll keep you alive, which is ridiculous. Taiwan has completely destroyed that model, and if we all model our democracies on just being good citizens like Taiwan, we will be okay.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is as democratic as the UK or the US, free press, open government, and look how well they've done. They've had a little spike recently, but their spike is nothing compared to what's happened around the rest of the world. And why did they do it? Because their citizens understood their responsibility as citizens. They all understood that, hey, we live in a democracy, which means we all got to do our part. So we all got to wear masks. We all got to stay away from each other. We all got a job to do. And they did it. And look how well they've done. So that completely kicks the Chinese, the People's Republic of China, their model in the bollocks because their message coming out of COVID is, look how well autocracies work. You know, we get to build hospitals in 10 days. We get to weld people in their apartments. We get to lock.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if another plague breaks out in China, oh well, there's nothing they can do about it. We, through that ass clown out because he was doing such a bad job. And if anybody questions the idea of how liberal democratic societies can weather a crisis in the early stages, forget adapting, look no further than the country that China wants to disappear, which is Taiwan.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at all. Absolutely not. I would argue the total opposite that liberal capitalist democratic societies are the most resilient because they have the ability to self-correct. They have the ability to crash into a problem, demand that their leaders take action. And if their leaders don't take the right action, you throw the bums out. We did this in our country. If you look at the COVID response in the People's Republic of China and the United States, The Chinese people are still stuck with Xi Jinping.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cheap stuff that we are all addicted to, we wouldn't have stood for that. If this was happening in a country that we weren't economically beholden to, we would have said absolutely not. We are getting in there and we are finding out what is going on before you kill millions of people around the world. But we didn't. We said, well, hey, don't want to mess with Disneyland and iPhones. So it is our own greed that has allowed so many of our citizens to die.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem is the private sector can't afford to warehouse equipment. You need to turn your stock over. So they're operating on razor thin margins. I literally years before COVID was sitting in a meeting in Washington, DC listening to an expert saying that masks and rubber gloves are not available in this country because they are being made in cheap sweatshops overseas. And God forbid the pandemic starts overseas. We're going to have a shortage. And that came to pass. So that's one thing. But also let's specifically look at China, which is a dictatorship, which is an autocracy, which suppressed the truth, right? This got out because of Xi Jinping and his cronies sat on it and said, we got this, we got this, we got this, we don't got this. Now, if we weren't so heavily invested in their slave labor sweatshops making”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it comes down to one word greed. It simply comes down to our greed. I saw in the nineties, certainly in the United States, how we started to dismantle our safety network because it cost money. We didn't have enough medical equipment stockpiled, and there's a very simple reason for that. Was in the 1990s, we got rid of all our Cold War stockpiles, our warehouses that were prepositioned all over the country because it was expensive to warehouse equipment. And we farmed that out to the private sector.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is the hope, that is the hope. I think in life it's not what happens to us. It's what we learn from what happens to us. I mean, I'm sure in your life you've seen people go through crazy experiences that should have changed their life and should have taught them experiences. And they didn't learn a damn thing. You know, they kept going along. And it can be the same thing in governments. You know, the United States, we're masters at that. We should have come out of the Vietnam War with the greatest counterinsurgency school the world has ever seen. But we didn't. We literally called Vietnam our great national nightmare, which was something you could wake up from and then move on with your life. And then when Iraq and Afghanistan happened, we had to learn those same lessons over and a lot of kids died. So what my hope is, is that we come out of this understanding that not only do we need to reinvest in resilience, but we also need to reinvest in”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and explained to the British people, here's why you've got to grow carrots in your backyard. And we did the same thing in the United States. We took all of Hollywood. You know, even Walt Disney, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming because he loved Hitler and say, oh, all right, I guess if we're at war with Hitler, I'm going to have to switch. And explain to us. Literally why we fight. And we've lost that. We've lost that middle link. And unfortunately, we've left the communication to the internet and to anybody with a podcast who are able to say whatever they want and spread misinformation. And so that middle link needs to be reclaimed because the Thinkocrats are still there and I know them and I've worked with them, but they're constantly frustrated by the fact that they'll spend all day tearing their hair out trying to keep us safe. And then they'll go back home, turn on the...”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is the thing it starts with them. But what used to happen was you had another link in the chain that would connect the thinkocrats to the average schmucks like me. And that was the communication class. That was government depending on good talkers who were able to take this sort of very wonky policy and put it in language that people like me could understand. And we did that. Churchill himself was such a great orator. So he was able to speak in simple ideas. And the British government was brilliant in World War II hiring these people. I've seen a wonderful footage of Sir Lawrence Olivier, who was Royal Naval Reserve volunteer, possibly the worst pilot in the history of aviation, but the British government was smart enough to take him out of the cockpit and put him on the stage still in uniform.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a plea to us because in the democratic system we are the government. We have no one to blame but ourselves. You know, I think that in autocratic systems, the people are just passengers. They are completely innocent. But in our systems, we vote. And it is our job to be informed voters. And it is our job to seek out new sources that we trust so we can be informed voters. And if that doesn't happen, ultimately our President Harry Truman used to have a slogan on his desk that said the buck stops here. Well, I disagree with Harry Truman. The buck stops with me. I am a taxpayer, I am a citizen. And if my government is, to use your terminology cocking things up, well, I should take a good, hard look in the mirror because it's ultimately my fault.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And that's why in my book World War Z, we can say Z, the hero is everybody. The hero is everyone coming together and doing their part, as they have done in crisis. You know, World War II was not won by individual heroes. It was won by all of us doing what we had to do. The same thing in plagues, the same thing in natural disasters. There's never one guy with really great hair and washboard abs running around saving the world. It's all of us. And it's boring and gritty and it's the daily grind of it. As American GIs used to say, we got a job to do.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You simply cannot survive as an individual. What we need, what's gotten us to this point, is what's called specialization. Different individuals working very hard at one specific task all the time, and then those individuals coming together to share their skills to form society. And keeping that network going is how we've risen from the caves to be able to talk across the Atlantic on Zoom.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“he had run for public office and won a seat on the city council and had used all that time and energy to beef up his town's emergency support systems. So the lights do stay on and the water does keep running. Because as individuals we do not survive, we simply cannot and that's another failure of popular culture, this sort of heroic notion of the individual survivalist. Because the bottom line is you simply can't. Anybody who thinks that they're going to rise from the ashes like Mad Max and become the alpha male they always wish they wanted should look at the average life of a Somali warlord.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and that is absolutely wrong. And I have a lot of fans in the prepper community of which I'm always battling with them and telling them you're absolutely wrong. The solution to keeping you and your family alive is not to sort of move into the wilderness and dig yourself a bunker and surround yourself with beans and bandages and bullets. The solution to keeping yourself alive is to, yes, have an emergency disaster kit for 36 to 72 hours to keep yourself going until the system kicks back in, but the long-term survival strategy is to invest in those systems. I was literally on one of our cable news programs where the presenter tried to interview me to try to coax me to say we should all bunker down. And he had just interviewed preppers. One guy had literally talked about how we had spent years digging himself in an emergency tunnel, and I said Basically that idiot's time would be a lot better spent if instead of digging a tunnel.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was rather shocked what happened in your country, and certainly now that these new allegations were one of your highest government officials said, I think we know we are truly, you know what?”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's sort of how I've always lived my life. And I've taken that template to nations. You know, what do we do when things don't go well? And in my 20s, in the 1990s, I saw a very dangerous trend. As the Cold War ended, we believed it was what Francis Fukiama, the historian called the end of history, that suddenly the great challenges were over, and we would all come together in sort of a star fleet united federation of planets. And so there was no need for redundancy anymore. There was no need for emergency systems and taxes to fund those emergency systems. Don't worry about it. And we've been going on that path for the longest time, and now we see what's happened certainly with COVID. In my country, I expected that. Americans are supposed to be at least in the beginning of every crisis selfish and stupid and scrambling to adapt.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had an earthquake kit. We had an earthquake plan. We didn't obsess on it. We didn't talk about it every day. But you know, once a year there was time to go through the earthquake kit and see what was expired and go through the plan, what happens if we're cut off? What do we do?”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm always fascinated by what can go wrong because even as a child, I saw things go wrong. I saw the grown-ups that I depended on for my very life show themselves to be human and to make mistakes, and I sort of never had that golden age that I guess other people talk about when you're young and feeling invincible. I never did. I always knew that death and disaster was always lurking. Part of that comes from growing up in Los Angeles in the nineteen eighties. You know, we've always had earthquakes. We've always had horrible fires. We've always had, especially in the 80s, we had crime, we had drugs, crack, gangs, random shootings. An entire neighborhood I used to hang out at every day or every weekend. There was one gang shooting and it suddenly closed and died overnight and it's never recovered. Things could go wrong. So, okay, what do we do? And my mother was very good at that.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and this is something I always have to be absolutely clear in every talk I've ever got done. I'm not a Luddite. I do not believe that we should go back to some sort of idyllic quasi-medieval existence. I believe in technology. We need it. It's critical, and I believe we must go forward, but we must go forward with our eyes open, with an eye to what happens when we stumble. And I think that that's critical. And I think that the British for hundreds of years were very clear on this because you had a cultural worship of your navy, not just because your tall sailing ships looked good. It was literally because without them you would starve. So there was this idea that we can have our tea and our cream on our strawberries. However, there will come times when this island will suddenly feel like an island, and we are going to need those boats to keep us fed.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it all comes down to adaptation, which is pretty much the theme of every single book I write. And I think if you were to look at my body of work just on the surface, you would think, well, that's a rather eclectic writer. I mean, I've written about Sasquatch and Zombies, also World War I, and even Minecraft. But underneath them all is a very continuous premise, which is my characters are living their lives in life as they know it, and suddenly life changes, and they must change with it or they will not survive. And so in devolution, it is a race to see who can adapt or die. Some adapt, some die.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I was not, obviously, I wasn't planning on COVID because I wrote it before COVID, but I was planning on sort of a general disaster because in disaster violence is inevitable. and the idea of being unprepared not just for starvation, for accidents, for infection, for all just the regular threads that hold society together, but also being prepared to physically defend yourself. I think it's sort of always on the mind, certainly on anyone who lives in Los Angeles, because we are probably the least prepared city on planet Earth.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I focused on solutions through technology for two reasons. Number one, particularly in the United States, we worship technology because it's the backbone of our economy. But we're always looking for a techno fix in the US. But because of my work with two different think tanks, I've been able to go deep into the technology world and understand their culture. There is no backup plan, there is no redundancy, there is no thought put into what if all this technology fails, what do we do then? That's always been a fascination and a fear for me. So I wanted to illustrate what would happen when this technological utopia fails. And these people are utterly unprepared.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These very well paid, very well educated intellectuals don't know how to change a light bulb. So they need to dig in and try to figure out how to work with their hands and survive the winter. And if that's not the worst of their problems, The eruption has driven a pack of very large, very hungry Sasquatch creatures out of their traditional foraging grounds, and they need to stack up on calories as well, and they come up against Green Loop, which to them is essentially a pen of sheep. And that is where our story begins.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They get up in the morning, they telemute to work, they tap on their phones about what kind of fresh lunch that they want, then they go for a beautiful walk in the woods, the pristine wilderness, and when they come home, a drone has delivered it from Seattle. So this is solar panels. This is biogas to cook their tea converted from their own feces. It's a wonderful idea, and it works until one day it doesn't, when the volcano Mount Rainier erupts and cuts them off from civilization. Because the volcano blows out in the direction of Seattle causing the greatest natural disaster in American history, these people are not only cut off, they're completely forgotten. And winter's coming.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Well, first, let me just, to the UK audience, do a massive pre-apology to the Scottish community for the title. It was a title I came up with many, many years ago when it was being sold as a movie screenplay. My British publisher begged me to try to find another title. We couldn't. So that is my failure, and I do not mean to confuse anyone with Scottish political independence. The story centers on the high tech high end community of Green Loop. It is a teller telecommuter community set in the Cascade Mountains in the United States Pacific Northwest, and it is supposed to be the ultimate embodiment of the Green Revolution, saving the planet through technology. So the idea is that this is a small bedroom community where people can live as if they're living in New York City.”
2021-06-22 · Intelligence Squared · Surviving Disaster, with Max Brooks and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source