Transcript
A (0:05)
They say if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. The idea being that we only get better when we surround ourselves with people who are brighter, more experienced, or more talented than we are. My name is John Dick, and I'm never, ever in the wrong room. At my company, Civic Science, the brightest minds in the world are studying people, culture, and markets in revolutionary new ways, providing glimpses into a future you've never seen before. Me, I drank my way through a party school in college and only became an entrepreneur because I couldn't get a real job doing anything else. I owe everything to a long list of colleagues, mentors, and friends who made me better, or at least made me look better. So I started a podcast to introduce you to some of the brilliant people I've encountered along the way. You'll meet visionaries in business, technology, media, entertainment, even politics. They'll tell us how they see the future and how they're making it happen. But we'll also keep it real. You don't go through life with the last name Dick without learning how to laugh at yourself. So we'll ask these incredibly successful people to share some of their most embarrassing stories, their dumbest mistakes, and how they made them into the people they are today. And we'll do all of that with data at the center of everything, because the world has never been in greater need of truth, and you can only get there with honest, objective, and reliable data, which is what civic science is all about. So please subscribe to this show on your favorite podcast player. Come listen to some of the smartest people I've ever met and me, the dumbest guy in the room.
B (1:48)
Hello, and welcome to the David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at the Atlantic. My guest this week will be Will Thomas, professor at the Michigan School of Business. And we'll be discussing the intersection of cryptocurrency and American kleptocracy and how we can have a more honest approach to the management of both. My book of this week will be Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. A Study of Courage. What it means, what it means to have it, what it means to lack it. But before the dialogue and before the book discussion, some opening thoughts on the terrible news this week from Australia. A massacre on Bondi Beach. Apparently, two gunmen armed with hunting rifles who killed, as I speak, a tally of 15 people injured. Many more who had gathered on the beach to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. The first night of Hanukkah Much has been written about this terrible crime. I've written something myself on the Atlantic and you can see my immediate thoughts there. I want in this dialogue to discuss something, in this opening to discuss something a little more practical, which is what can be done about outrages like this. Are governments truly helpless in the face of this kind of anti Semitic? And it didn't have to be anti Semitic. It could be some other kind of extremist hate. Or is there more that could have been done that wasn't done? I draw attention to this fact. The two alleged apparent gunmen are reportedly a father and son team. And the son in particular was known to the police. In fact, Australian police, the Australian security organization, which goes by the acronym ASIO, ASIO had put under close scrutiny in 2019 because of his suspected ties to ISIS. They kept him under watch for about six months and then decided that he wasn't an active threat to anybody and ceased to pay attention to him. I'm not second guessing that decision because maybe they had good reasons. People deactivate and activate. The resources of a democratic country are large, but they're not infinite. You cannot watch anybody, everybody, anywhere. So I'm not second guessing that decision. Maybe it was right, maybe it was wrong. But the point is he was a known quantity. And when you get these kinds of radical actions, it very often happens that the people involved are known quantities. We are no longer in the Al Qaeda days where a foreign intelligence or a foreign terrorist group infiltrates sleeper agents into a country, tells them to avoid all contact with the police, to drive the speed limit, keep out of the public eye, don't get into trouble, don't get arrested until the day to strike. The extremist actions that are happening in the 2000s are much more local. They are people, they import the technology, the know how, the ideology, but the persons themselves are from the place where the crime is committed usually, or they've been there for a while at least, and they've had a chance to break other kinds of laws, as they often have done. So they're, they're known to the authorities. Now again, the authorities do not have infinite resources. They can't watch everybody. And in a free society anyway, there are limits on what watching means. You can't just send an agent to tails, follow somebody around because you think he might at some point in the future do some heinous act. But what they can do is put pressure, put various kinds of legal pressure on the world from which these outrages come. In Australia, in my native Canada, in the United States too. The movement that has expressed itself in anti Semitic murders like this one in Sydney, like the murder of two people, the murder of two and the wounding of three in Manchester, England on Yom Kippur of this year, like the assassination of two people here in Washington earlier in the year 2025. Those people usually have associations with some kind of radicalized group. And that group is something the government can monitor. And what it can do is be aware that in these kinds of groups, they're kind of circles. There's a hardest core of people who might be, might be on their way to committing an act of violence. There's a slightly outer core of people who without committing the act of violence themselves, will support and enable the act of violence and have a pretty good idea that the act of violence is coming. And then beyond them, a group of activists who maybe don't know that an act of violence is coming, but press the law and create permissions that enable the people who are more active, more militant to go forward. And then outside them is a larger group of well wishers and fellow travelers who may share ideas and principles, but probably aren't in the movement for the long haul. One of the things that's very important to do is to, to, is to separate the soft groups from the hard groups and to keep the, and, and to make sure that the hard groups understand they're not going to have as much permission and protection as they think they do. And this begins by enforcing laws pretty strictly and pretty unanimously, pretty, pretty impartially. Let me give you an example of what I mean. In September of 2025, a supporter of the anti Israel cause rode along Bondi beach, didn't disrupt, galloped on horseback on Bondi beach holding a Palestinian flag. Now he didn't commit, no one was hurt. But the act, this was a reckless action. People could have been hurt. The beach is crowded. We have no idea how good a rider he is. And anyways it's illegal to ride a horse on the beach. He was let go with a warning. Now if you walk your cocker spaniel on Bondi beach, you'll have, you will face a fine of up to 330Australian dollars. If a restaurant, that a sidewalk cafe doesn't place its chairs properly, there's a fine for them. But someone, because he came from a favored political group, was able to break the law and do it with impunity and, or with a warning. And that sends a message about the attitude of the public authorities. Now that doesn't affect the people the hardcore person who's determined to commit violence. But it does affect those who are making a decision. How far along the way do I go with this hardcore person who's willing to commit violence? A lot of anti Israel violence since October 7th takes the form of a kind of play acting. Dressing up in terrorist outfits, occupying public spaces in illegal ways, like university campus, like putting up tents that are normally prohibited, but putting them up on university campuses and defying the authorities to do anything about it, the riding the horse on Bondi beach, that kind of thing. There's a kind of play acting. But the play acting is not just a form of expression. It's also a form of testing the attitude of the authorities. And if the authorities are more resilient and robust, the people who don't want to get in trouble, which is most of us, will back away from the play acting and will retreat to more lawful forms of protest. No one is saying you don't have a right to express your views on any contentious issue and you want to picket, picket. But for every picketer there are rules that govern what is legal, time, place and manner methods of picketing. And the anti Israel movement systematically breaks those rules. At first in quite modest ways, but. But then in more and more threatening ways. Maybe it's not the biggest deal in the world that somebody puts up a tent and breaks the campus rules on camping on the quad overnight. It's a bigger deal when they are forming mobs in front of daycare centers or synagogues or old age homes or hospitals, all of which have happened in many cities. And blowing whistles in the middle of the night. And again, testing. Is anyone watching? Will anyone do anything about us? And again, if you enforce the rules, you're not going to necessarily deter the most violent person, but you can successfully separate the most violent people from the support structures that they need. And it becomes especially dangerous when the reason that that separation does not happen is if there is a government, as was the case with the Australian federal government at present, as has been the case with some Canadian governments, both federal and provincial, where the government in some ways look to the soft part of the movement for some kind of political support. So it's worried. The reason we're not going to enforce the law on riding horses on Bondi beach, the reason we're not going to enforce the rules about blowing whistles under the windows of hospitals emergency units, the reason we're not going to stop you from mobbing in front of synagogues or daycare centers in ways that are clearly meant to be intimidating is because some of the people in this mob may vote for us or anyway are connected in ways to people who vote for us, because that tells the mobile that the government is afraid of them. And that is a very different dangerous feeling for a government to communicate. Managing the problem of how do we protect lawful protests, lawful dissent, whatever one thinks of the particular dissent and separating it from the past, taking the steps on the pathway to violence begins by understanding that people who are really good liberals in their heart think that free speech becomes most important and precious when it's at the very outermost edge. That when the speech is at its most extreme and when it is tempting us most to do something to suppress it, that's when it most needs to be protected. And so when somebody is chanting some hideous slogan or protesting under the windows of an old age home, those are people. That's exactly where the free speech instincts need to be most robust. That's the way many strongly principled liberals think. But not everyone in that crowd is a strongly principled liberal. They're thinking in a different way. They're thinking I am testing and probing as to what is possible. And if this is possible, then the next thing will be possible. And I'm not. I'm not walking up to a bright boundary. I am changing the nature of the boundary. And I'm pushing and pushing and pushing to test and expose the weakness of the authorities and building a network of community that includes people who will take up a gun and mow people down on a beach in Australia. And now my dialogue with Will Thomas. But first, a quick break.