What Happens When Misinformation Wins? | Rory Stewart - PT 1

Summary

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Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu: “What Happens When Misinformation Wins?” with Rory Stewart – PT 1

Release Date: October 1, 2024
Guest: Rory Stewart (former diplomat, politician, author)
Main Theme: The episode explores how demographic shifts, economic fragility, and the evolution of media—particularly social media—fuel the rise of populism, societal unrest, and misinformation in Western democracies.

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Episode Overview

Tom Bilyeu sits down with Rory Stewart, a deeply experienced voice in geopolitics and economics, to dissect multiple forces destabilizing the West: falling birth rates, divisive debates over immigration, rising populism, and the polarizing power of social media. With a mix of curiosity and challenge, Tom and Rory navigate complex questions on national identity, cultural assimilation, and how truth itself is at risk in today’s hyperconnected, algorithm-driven public discourse.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Economic Fragility and Demographics ([01:51]–[05:27])

• Main Point: Western economies are struggling due to falling birth rates and rapidly aging populations.
  • Rory Stewart: “When we set up the welfare state… there were 20 working people for every one retired person. Today we've got just under three…” ([02:09])
• Immigration is increasingly essential, especially for care sectors and services. But constant population growth via immigration is not sustainable long-term, especially in already densely populated countries (e.g., UK).
  • Japan is cited as a model for employing AI and robotics in care to maintain productivity and sustainability.

2. Immigration, Birth Rates & Populist Sparks ([05:27]–[10:59])

• Immigrants often come from countries with higher birth rates, potentially stabilizing population pyramids over time, but with transitional cultural friction.
  • Tom Bilyeu: “The architecture of the human mind is very tribal by nature. …anything that disrupts that is going to cause this sort of weird moment that I see us living through.” ([05:27])
• Rory Stewart clarifies: Higher birth rates trend with poverty, not simply culture or religion. Wealthier populations trend toward lower birth rates, regardless of nationality or faith. Poverty, uncertainty about child survival, and economic calculus drive family size.

3. Populism—Drivers and Definition ([08:59]–[21:32])

• Populism’s Current Surge: Closely tied to perceptions of uncontrolled immigration and a failing elite, per Stewart. Even those satisfied with diversity demand border control—perceived lack of this fuels right-wing populism.
  • Example: Germany’s far-right gains are tightly coupled with immigration-related backlash.
  • Rory Stewart: “Immigration is clearly driving the rise of far right populism across Europe and the United States.” ([09:16])
• Populism Defined: A mindset—claiming to speak for “the people” against “the elite,” often exclusionary, presenting opponents as traitors, not fellow citizens.
  • “Populism at its core is a very exclusionary worldview… [that] assumes that they represent 'the real people'...” ([19:20])
• This mindset enables disregard for constitutional checks and pluralistic dialogue, paving the way for authoritarian tactics.

4. Cultural Assimilation, Identity, & Historical Parallels ([10:59]–[17:44])

• Tom explores “great replacement” fears, tying perceptions of demographic change to basic human psychology: “Everything is funny until it happens to you.” ([13:16])
• Assimilation is key—ethnic diversity alone is less divisive than a lack of shared cultural values.
  • Tom Bilyeu: “I would not expect ethnically diverse UK to be where the battle lines are drawn. …immigration is really a bigger question of assimilation…” ([13:16])
  • Rory Stewart: Assimilation is not one-way—immigrant groups alter host cultures as well, producing hybrid futures for national identities.

5. Social Media’s Double-Edged Sword ([24:15]–[34:41])

• Modern populism draws enormous power from social media, which amplifies provocateurs and breaks the gatekeeping of traditional news organizations.
  • Rory Stewart: “Donald Trump… was an immense beneficiary of the world of social media… [he] gets the benefit from his supporters… and also from people who are outraged by him…” ([24:15])
• Social media’s instant dissemination and social validation (“500 replies which seem to validate the posts…”) can spread misinformation with unprecedented speed ([28:22]).
• Early hopes that social media could fuel grassroots democracy (the Arab Spring) have given way to concerns about its role in polarization, post-truth politics, and undermining public consensus.

6. Curation, Algorithms, and the Erosion of Truth ([33:21]–[36:03])

• Pros of Unfiltered Social Media: Directness, mobilization of grassroots movements, circumvention of old hierarchies.
  • Obama’s campaign and Rory’s own political moments are cited.
• Cons: Loss of fact-checking, professional standards, and agreed norms of public discourse.
  • “If we are really losing any sense of truth… we find ourselves in a very odd world.” ([33:21])
• The fundamental debate: Is a curated reality necessary for a functioning democracy, or does it risk authoritarianism? Algorithms themselves become invisible censors/manipulators.

7. Democracy, Free Speech & Constitutional Balancing Acts ([36:03]–[43:34])

• Tom expresses admiration for American constitutional checks and balances, especially the First and Second Amendments as bulwarks against tyranny—both government and mob rule ([37:49]).
• Stewart points to deep cultural and historical differences in how nations handle rights like free speech and gun ownership. Adaptability and context matter.
  • On free speech: It’s “a smart and good one… [but] with limits short of incitement to violence.” ([39:23])
  • On gun rights: The U.S. death toll from guns is astronomical compared to the UK, suggesting a need to modernize interpretation in the face of technology and changing risks.
• Societies must adapt over time; what worked for the Founders may not suit every context or era.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“As we get older we become more expensive to look after, particularly in medical terms. … You can see the balance has changed very dramatically in terms of who's paying for who.”
— Rory Stewart ([02:09])

“Immigration is clearly driving the rise of far right populism across Europe and the United States. …The perception is that the ruling elite has failed to control borders.”
— Rory Stewart ([09:16])

“When you are the person being conquered, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. …I think we see the exact same parallels between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All of this feels like, yeah, this is pretty predictable.”
— Tom Bilyeu ([13:16])

“Populism at its core is a very exclusionary worldview… they present themselves as having a monopoly on truth and identity.”
— Rory Stewart ([19:20])

“Social media and the internet more broadly was a wonderful liberating phenomenon… it took me some time to understand the risks associated with that.”
— Rory Stewart ([30:00])

“If we are really losing any sense of truth, if anything goes… we find ourselves in a very odd world.”
— Rory Stewart ([33:21])

“I am completely enamored by what the [U.S.] Founding Fathers put into place. …You have the right to say anything… That has to be protected.”
— Tom Bilyeu ([37:49])

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Timestamps for Critical Segments

• Demographic Challenge & Economics: [01:51]–[05:27]
• Immigration, Poverty, and Birth Rates: [06:34]–[10:59]
• Populism—Why Now & How It Works: [09:16]–[21:32]
• Assimilation/Cultural Shifts: [13:16]–[17:44]
• Role of Social Media: [24:15]–[34:41]
• Curated Reality vs. Free Expression: [33:21]–[36:03]
• Democracy, Free Speech & The Constitution: [36:03]–[43:34]

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Tone & Style

• The episode is intellectually rigorous yet conversational, with Tom frequently testing his hypotheses about human nature, society, and technology against Rory’s policy expertise. Both express humility about the limits of their own knowledge, and challenge one another respectfully.

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Summary Takeaways

This episode offers a nuanced, honest look at why Western societies feel so unstable: it’s a mix of economics, demography, tribal instincts, and the information environment. Rory’s diagnosis is clear—demographics and lost faith in institutions (plus new tools for polarization) feed populism, but societies cannot “fix” these issues with simple answers. The media revolution, in particular, means old checks and balances need urgent rethinking, lest truth itself becomes a casualty.

For those seeking to make sense of an increasingly chaotic world, this conversation is a blueprint for critical thinking, skepticism, and adaptation.

Transcript

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[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm Tom Bilyeu and this is Impact Theory. Today I'm joined by Rory Stewart, a former diplomat, politician and author who has spent his career navigating the high stakes complexities of geopolitics and economics. We dig into some of the most pressing issues influencing our lives today, from the rise and causes of populism and social media's ability to mess with people's heads to the profound effects of economic inequality and rising unrest across the globe. Rory is extremely thoughtful and while we disagree on many things, he has a voice that I think adds an important dimension to public discourse and I'm glad that I had a chance to sit down with him. I'm eager to hear what you guys think about his ideas, so be sure to leave a comment on Spotify with your take. With that, I bring you my conversation with Rory Stewart. Rory Stewart, welcome to the show.

[Rory Stewart]

Thank you for having me.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It is an honor, man. You're going to help all of us think through what I think are some very difficult problems. And I want to start with the economy and some of the knock on effects. So let me ask, why are so many Western economies right now very fragile?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, I think one answer is that nobody really knows. I mean, it's amazing how often very distinguished Nobel Prize winning economists get this stuff wrong. But clearly we have certain problems and the most obvious one is demographic. So most of our countries, our birth rates are falling and we're getting older and as we get older we become more expensive to look after, particularly in medical terms. In Britain, the statistics are very stark. When we set up the welfare state before the First World War, there were 20 working people for every one retired person. Today we've got just under three working people for every one retired person. So you can see the balance has changed very dramatically in terms of who's paying for who. Second bit that comes out of that, of course, is that our economies are increasingly dependent on immigration, and that's particularly for running care systems, running service industries. But it's also increasingly true for skills. And the problem there is that immigration is very unpopular with large swathes of the population in the US and in Europe, and it's driving a lot of votes for the populist. Right. And I guess the center hasn't really worked out how to deal with that. So maybe those are two things to be getting on with.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, those are two very good things. So let's first address the demographic bombshell. As we have this happen, the pyramid gets inverted. We have a ton of people at the top that are going to require a lot of care, they're no longer in the workforce. Is immigration going to be the only response to that or do you look at something like AI and you say AI and robotics is going to solve the problem, or do you take a totally different approach to this?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, I think ultimately immigration can't continue always to be the answer because if you did that, your population would keep growing indefinitely. And the United States, I guess, is a very, very large country, but in somewhere like the United Kingdom, we're already more densely populated than India. So if the pyramid inverted and then you tried to build a bigger base to the pyramid by bringing in more and more people indefinitely over the next 300 years, you'd end up in an impossible situation. Ideally, you want not to have a pyramid at all. You want to have something that's pretty static and sustainable. And to get to that, you've really got to work out how to become more productive, and that includes more productive in the care industry. So that does involve learning from Japan on what can be done with machine learning, what can be done with robotics. It involves thinking seriously about jobs that we currently do that may be replaced by AI. And that of course, we're often reluctant to do because we're very risk averse. We can be very impacted by regulations, by unions and by others. But no, I don't think the answer can be indefinitely bringing in more and more younger people because those people get old and they in turn will have to be looked after by more and more younger people and you'll end up with a never ending growth.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, well, here is an interesting hypothesis. So one thing that does seem to. To be playing out is that the immigrants that are coming into the country are coming from countries that have higher birth rates. Now, that could give you that static column that you're looking for over time. Obviously, you're going to have this sort of weird transitionary period. But what becomes fascinating is you get this very populous spark against that, because what drives the higher birth rates is a wildly different culture that's. That seems unarguable. And without putting any value judgment on whether one culture is better than another, I will say it is. The architecture of the human mind is very tribal by nature. We grow up in the culture that we grow up in. We tend to hold on to that. And so anything that disrupts that is going to cause this sort of weird moment that I see us living through. Do you think that is an accurate read on why we're seeing populism now, or is there something else afoot?

[Rory Stewart]

So I think that's partly it. Although, remember that immigrant communities have often had much higher birth rates. So if you look at the Irish American community, when it began to come into large numbers in the United States, late 19th, early 20th century, they had significantly larger families than the kind of.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And do you think that's a function of being an immigrant?

[Rory Stewart]

It's usually a function of poverty. It's not really a question of which part of the world you come from. Poorer people tend to have larger families. And that's partly because if you're coming from a subsistence economy, you feel you need, firstly, the labor of your children, but secondly, most importantly, you're worried some of the kids are going to die and you need a lot of replacement. Birth rates come down for a number of reasons. One of them is that you think that the children you have, you hope are likely to survive into adulthood. Secondly, kids become more expensive. They no longer seem as they might do if you're a small farmer in Ecuador or in Ireland, as though they're a net positive income contributor to the family. Instead, you get into a worldview where you think, oh, my goodness, I'm going to have to pay for their college education and this, that and the other, and they're not really going to bring me much in in return. So we can see that as countries get wealthier, their birth rates fall very dramatically, and that the biggest birth rates in the world, place like Niger, which at the moment it's in the Sahara in Africa, has a birth rate of about 7.6 on average per couple.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Whoa.

[Rory Stewart]

But that's one of the very poorest

[Tom Bilyeu]

countries on Earth, and I assume they still have a pretty traumatic infant death

[Rory Stewart]

rate, huge infant mortality rates, Whereas countries like Italy, which had very high birth rates in the 1950s, are now in a position like the United States where the indigenous population is shrinking. So it's not a simple question of culture and religion and the way that we used to think. We used to think. Now the point is that, I don't know, people from Italy or people from Ireland had big families because they were predominantly Catholics and there were prohibitions on the use of birth control. It now seems more plausible that the reason they had bigger families, generally speaking, was that they were poorer.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is the rise of populism predictable or is this a totally unrelated thing to immigration? Totally unrelated to the economies, and it just happens to be happening at the same time, because in my current mental model, they are effectively one in the same phenomena.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah. So I think the first thing is that you're right. There's a very, very strong factor there. Immigration is clearly driving the rise of far right populism across Europe and the United States. And if you were trying to explain why the far right in Germany just got nearly a third of the vote in the latest state election, that's very closely related to immigration. You just have to see there literature, you have to interview their supporters. It's immigration. And the perception is that the ruling elite has failed to control borders. Now, it's a little bit more nuanced than you might think because often the people interviewed will say, look, we're reasonably happy with having a more diverse society. We just want to know that we've got control of our borders. In fact, we don't even mind more people coming in, provided we think the government's making the choice to do that rather than being forced to do it by. In Britain, for example, a debate between people who are very, very focused on the absolute numbers, which is a minority, and the people who are focused on people who are legally crossing on boats, which seems to be the thing that's upsetting people most. On your second question, which is, are immigrant populations generally having more children? Yeah, there is some evidence for that. I mean, this stuff is all very controversial and I'm wading into tricky territory. But in London, for example, it seems as though over 60% of the children born in London are born to people whose parents were not born in the United Kingdom.

[Tom Bilyeu]

When looking at this problem, there are obviously conspiracies that abound. The great replacement theory. People get very paranoid that there's something that is Happening intentionally. Now, you've said that one of the ways to offset the inverted pyramid is to bring in immigrants. Not going to solve the problem the whole way. But when you have an economy that is based on growth, which I would say in the west is the primary base assumption of our economies, so you have this economy that requires growth, you are the elites making policies, you probably are going to be pretty pro people coming into the country then. If you have stats like this In London, over 60% of the people are born to mothers that are foreign all of a sudden. I hate even using the phrase replacement theory, but it's like that is a fact that is happening, that the people that are locally that are already there are birth rates far lower. And so they're just, you know, again, trying to use very neutral language. It just begins to shift.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah, I mean, and again, there's a interesting thing that I need to learn from you about, which is the difference between the United Kingdom and Europe and the United States, on the other hand. So the UK and Europe predominantly. If you looked at the genetic profile of people living in the United kingdom in the 1950s, 1960s, a very high proportion were descended from people who had been there 6,000 years ago. It's now clear that these Viking invasions, the Norman Conquest, didn't really change the gene pool of Britain very much. The United States is different. And that's what I never quite understand in the Great replacement theory. And the great replacement in the United States was of course, the great replacement of the Native American population. And therefore, as a European looking at the us, I get a bit confused. I mean, what exactly is it that people are anxious about? Their own parents, grandparents, great grandparents, were immigrants not that long ago. So presumably that's a little bit different to what's going on in Europe.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't think it is. So this feels to me like a phrase. I will say a lot. This is just the architecture of the human mind. So Dave Chappelle has a quote that I think can be broadly applied, which is everything is funny until it happens to you. When you're the person coming in and conquering and getting the land, hey, it's all good when you are the person being conquered, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And now all of a sudden, it's all breaks all the time. What the hell is happening? And so that, to me, I understand, I think it is just going to be the natural human response. I would have expected Native Americans to be wildly pissed off as people roll in and start taking their land and I would expect them to, as they did, fight to. To feel betrayed every time a treaty was made and then broken, to have longstanding generational bitterness over what happened. I think we see the exact same parallels between the Israeli Palestinian conflict. All of this feels like, yeah, this is pretty predictable. The things I want to tease out are how much of the future can we see by saying, okay, I understand the human mind, I understand how it reacts to this stuff, and I would like to predict as many of the second and third order consequences as possible. So I think now would be a good time to plant a flag in populism. What is it exactly, and if I am correct, that populism happens when you feel. And in fact, there's one more thing I have to put out there. I have a feeling that people only conflict ethnically once you have cultural assimilation. If you don't have cultural assimilation, then people will fight at the level of culture. So I would not expect ethnically diverse UK to be where the battle lines are drawn. I think people that sound and act, quote, unquote, British will all get along no matter what they look like. And then people who don't and are espousing foreign values, that's going to be where the line of conflict is. And so to me, immigration is really a bigger question of assimilation, which is why it probably feels slightly different in the US Because I think the US ethos largely is one of, yeah, give me immigrants, I'm here for it, but when they roll up, they better feel American, so they better want American values. If you roll up and you feel like you're trying to shut down the things that are classically American, then you're going to have a problem. That would be my gut instinct.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah. And the question of what's American, of course, changes over time, making it even more complicated, because I guess if you were part of the kind of Brahmin elite in Boston in the mid-1800s, you would have seen a lot of the immigrant communities turning up in the 1800s as not being classically American in the way you defined it then in the 1850s, 1860s. And every time you see that what's classically American now, I guess, is the kind of post war American vision.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No doubt. And you will, when you look back in history, you see the pockets of discrimination, violence, et cetera, when they are perceived to be the other. Right. That they haven't assimilated. And look, that's complicated. I know I'm sort of rounding things just to.

[Rory Stewart]

And they, of course they didn't just to make it even more complicated. It's not just that people assimilate in assimilating, they change the culture. So it's partly because of immigration that the culture of the United States in 2024 is quite unlike the culture of the United States in 1954 or the culture in 1924. And the same will be true in Britain. It's not that there's a given thing called British culture into which people assimilate. In the process of assimilation, British culture itself shifts and alters. So, for example, you would expect in 20, 30 years time, very different views of the monarchy, the royal family in Britain. And that will be largely driven by people coming from other countries who didn't grow up with this royal family, who think a lot of British traditions are a bit peculiar. And a lot of those traditions will be stripped out. And the same will happen in the United States. If you end up with a much larger population, many of whose parents, grandparents, grew up in Latin America, you will expect a more hybrid culture to emerge which will have features which were more associated with Latin America and not associated with the America of the 1950s.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, and the final button I'll put on that is no one likes change or the vast majority of humanity don't. So in any transition, everyone goes through a transition, which is one of the big questions of my life right now. I've started paying attention to world affairs. Is that just because I'm about to turn 50, or is something actually happening right now that's worth paying attention to? I have a hard time parsing those, but it does feel like there's a larger wave of immigration, which I think is explained by economics. We've already been through that, so I do feel like this moment is going to be more contentious. But I think your point is well taken, that these moments are occurring basically at all times. And even if it's just generational, where they're assimilating new values, you're Always going to see this movement. Okay, plant a flag in populism for me. What is it exactly?

[Rory Stewart]

Populism at its core is a very exclusionary worldview, by which I mean the populist claims to speak for the people against the elite, and usually claims that the elite is somehow foreign or alien to the country. So when a populist says, I'm speaking on behalf of the American people or the German people, in actual fact, often their supporters are barely 50% of the population. But that's not how they present themselves. They don't present themselves in a pluralist way. They present themselves as having a monopoly on truth and identity. And people who are against them are not perceived as fellow citizens who have a equally valid but different perspective on things. They're perceived as people who are somehow traitors to the cause. So it's got a sort of monopolistic structure built into it, and that's what makes it so dangerous. That's why often you'll see populists challenge the Constitution, challenge the rule of law, challenge checks and balances, because it's a mindset that assumes that they represent in adverted commas the real people, that they're right and everybody else is wrong. And therefore anything that stands in the way of doing things in the way that they want, Constitutions, amendments, courts, legislatures, are to be swept aside because they are defying the will of the people. And of course, this is not just phenomenon of the right. I mean, this was a very, very apparent. In the Bolshevik Revolution that created the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks were a tiny proportion of the Russian population, but they claimed to be the people and proceeded to rip up everything that stood in their way in order to fulfill the will of the people. And anyone who opposed them was a traitor to the people

[Tom Bilyeu]

if they actually don't have a majority behind them. Why does that rhetoric work so well?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, I think it works partly because it gives a great deal of confidence and energy to their supporters, gives their supporters a degree of moral legitimacy that they might feel they lacked if their leaders were just saying to them, well, you know, we've got X million votes and they've got a few more votes than us, and we're going to take it in turns. That removes some of the. Yeah, some of the authority which is necessary for the extremism. It's also that they're able to draw on very deep roots of nationalism, blood and soil. If you say you speak for the nation, you know, you are making America great again, for example. Right. You have a whole language which is not available to your opponents. Your opponents may be talking about, I don't know, tariffs or economic growth or how to fund a Medicare system. But you are saying, I am making my country great again. And the whole structure of that creates a very different type of politics.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so I have a thesis on why this works. Let me know what you think about this. I suppose I should call it a hypothesis. The reason that the strongman works, the reason that populism works, even when they don't necessarily, in the beginning, represent the majority of the population, is that leadership works because the average person feels lost and confused. They are looking for shorthands always. This is just, again, architecture of the human mind. And a strong man will intoxicate people with certainty. They will say, this is the problem, this is what we're going to do about it, and your life is going to be better. I think it only works if there is underlying frustration in the populace. Even people that would not have at the beginning of this identified. It could be as subtle as a malaise. Things aren't growing. I don't know why. It feels like it's going to be worse for me than it was for my parents. Things just seem harder. But if you have that open door of frustration or malaise and you come in and say, this is why you feel terrible and this is what you need to do about it, People feel seen, they feel heard, and now they have an answer. They don't have to think for themselves, they just have to identify with that person. And it's like, all right, well, things suck now, so I'm going to get on board with this.

[Rory Stewart]

Yeah. What do you think about that? I think it's right. I think any successful insurgent movement and populism by its nature is quite revolutionary, always has to draw on a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo. I mean, the only way you can run a campaign against the elites or the establishment is if the elites and establishment are associated with something that seems to be failing people. Now, some of that is objective and some of that can be made up so objectively. The 2008 financial crisis was a humiliation for the credibility of markets and exposed profound inequalities. Inequalities between people's incomes, inequalities between people's wealth, inequalities between regions. Right. Difference between what it's like living in Flint, Michigan, and what it's like living in Massachusetts. The Iraq and Afghan wars were complete, humiliating catastrophes. Three and a half trillion dollars. So three and a half thousand billion dollars was spent by the United States and its allies, and they achieved nothing. Invaded to get rid of the Taliban, spent 20 years in Afghanistan, handed the country back to the Taliban again. So these are objective facts, but it's also true that such facts exist at many other periods. And the question is, are the political entrepreneurs able to exploit people's frustrations successfully or not? So the Vietnam war was an equal catastrophe, but it didn't lead in the way that the Iraq and Afghan disasters did directly contribute towards the rise of populism. Now, why is that? Partly because of social media. I mean, I think one of the most dramatic changes in our lives has been the introduction of Facebook and Twitter and indeed the algorithms that underlie Google, and the way that those have contributed to very, very particular ways of perceiving the world, contributed to polarization, continued, contributed to the erosion of borders, contributed to the dissolution of traditional news networks. And that's necessary because people in Flint, Michigan, were always in a worse situation than people living in fancy parts of Boston. But the modern world makes that much more visible to people and also gives the populists an opportunity they didn't have before. Donald Trump, for example, whatever you think of him, was an immense beneficiary of the world of social media because he's able to benefit from the fact that if he says something provocative in the 1950s, he wouldn't really be reported. The New York Times could ignore him. The television news anchors could decide not to cover him. He wouldn't really go anywhere. As soon as the world of social media exists, if he says something provocative, he gets a double benefit. He gets the benefit from his supporters who say, whoa, this guy speaks the truth. He's given us permission to say things we haven't been able to say. But he also gets the benefit from the people who are outraged by him, because the people outraged by him are also viewing his things, retweeting his things, sharing his things, and a whole revenue stream comes in and an attention stream from support and outrage, which wasn't possible really before. This stuff really gets going, I guess, in about 2014, when smartphones become very, very available and when a critical mass of people are using these platforms. So this contemporary populism, yes, it has some relationship to fundamentals, but it's much better understood as a product of a changing media culture.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you think that social media is a net benefit or a net detraction from society?

[Rory Stewart]

I think politically, it probably has been a net detraction. I think there's huge things that we all enjoy about it enormously. I Think it gives us wonderful access to things with incredible ease. I spend a lot of time on Twitter X and like many people, there are kind of wonderful rabbit holes that I go down, which I wouldn't have been able to go down, you know, 15 years ago, right. I can look at cute cats, I can work out, I can follow people with strange theories on medieval Britain, I can look at lovely architecture, I can learn how to follow a new diet regime, right? All that stuff I'm able to do. But when Elon Musk decides to take control of a platform like that and then say to people in Britain on X that there is a civil war in Britain and is able to get it to a very, very large number of people instantaneously this claim, and is then able to do something that wasn't possible in traditional media, which is to have 500 replies which seem to validate the posts from people saying, oh yeah, there is a civil war in Britain. I looked out the window, look at this. The whole thing's out of control. It has a power which simply didn't exist before. There was no equivalent to this. There was no way of doing that before. And that's what the Arab Spring was kind of the first hint of.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, when it happened in the Arab Spring, did that feel positive or negative to you at the time?

[Rory Stewart]

At the time it felt positive. At the time, I felt right the way through that social media and the Internet more broadly was a wonderful liberating phenomenon that would allow us to speak directly, people to people, that would push out the control of the old hierarchies and elites, that would allow people to topple dictators, to self organize. And it took me some time to understand the risks associated with that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What are the risks?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, the risks are exactly these examples I've tried to give from Donald Trump or Elon Musk of being able to mobilize very, very rapid, very aggressive, very exclusionary movements, often on the basis of very scant facts and getting visibility and support and enthusiasm for projects which previously were curated. I mean, previously when news anchors dominated, when the newspapers dominated, there was a normative structure, there was an ethical structure embedded in the editors that chose what to display to the public and whatnot. And often that put an emphasis, for example, on the truth. I mean, newspaper editors, you know, of course, were always vulnerable to advertisers. They were always, you know, flawed human beings. But they had some notion of public service and particularly publicly funded broadcasters, you know, the NPR's, the BBCs of this world believed they had an obligation to the public to try to check whether what was being said was true. But as those business models have been destroyed, and they have been destroyed, they've been destroyed so that these platforms now are struggling to compete with a YouTube influencer who can make more money than the New York Times, then it becomes much more vulnerable to all these things. We're talking about polarization, post truth populism.

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[Juan Naula]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you think the general public is better off with a curated reality?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, it's a really good question. I don't know how I work my way through that because you can see so strongly the arguments on both sides. I mean, on the one hand, I was the beneficiary of social media. When I ran to be Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, I was able to come from nowhere and use social media to develop a momentum I would never have been able to find before. I was able to get huge support for my particular program in a very unusual way. I was able to circumvent traditional party structures. I was able to crowdfund and do all that kind of stuff. And of course, people like me who tend to be more on that side of politics, we got very excited by President Obama's ability to do that, you know, again, difficult to imagine his campaign in the old world, the Democratic Party machine. On the other hand, if we are really losing any sense of truth, if anything goes, if we can no longer really rely on serious journalists with serious editors, fact checking, we find ourselves in a very odd world.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, this I think, is going to be one of the defining arguments of our time. Because to your point, you can see the arguments on both sides in terms of man. The very sense of what is real begins to break down when you just have a wall of information coming at you. You need algorithms to parse the information in some way. Even time based display of the information is a decision, right? And not necessarily the best decision. And it will be gamed and all of that people will start posting right when they think the right people are waking up. I mean, it's really interesting, but I think it forces everybody to lay bare what their base assumption is about the, what I'll call the, the people. And I have a base assumption that authoritarian rule is the only way to enforce a controlled narrative. Even if you're doing it for the what the quote unquote right reasons that you, you will eventually have to do it through violence. And given that, my fear is always that the authoritarian government is far more terrifying than the mob, meaning a bunch of people let loose, going crazy, saying whatever they want to say.

[Rory Stewart]

But I guess where the founding Fathers would challenge you is they would say that that isn't really or shouldn't be the choice that the idea of representative democracy was supposed to be. Finding a middle path between authoritarian despotism on the one hand and what you call the mob on the other side. That these structures, the electoral college, the Senate, and coming out of that, things like the presidency were supposed to be ways of giving some voice to the people, but balancing that voice with other things, balancing it with the Supreme Court that was supposed to be composed of highly educated jurists, balanced with a carefully written Constitution, an executive balance with the legislature and elected senators and representatives who were supposed to be using their judgment and conscience, not simply acting as a transmission mechanism for whatever their voters said. Because if you are Thomas Jefferson thinking about government, yes, you want to get rid of the King, you want a revolution, but you do not want have much confidence in the idea that a kind of free for all is the way to go, that things need to be curated and organized. Just as I suppose this conversation we're having follows certain kinds of rules, certain kinds of expectations. You very courteously let me speak. I occasionally listen to you and ask a question back. But the risk in the public sphere is that those rules disintegrate and you end up with nonsense.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I aggressively agree with the Founding Fathers. I am completely enamored by what they put into place. I don't think that they could have ever conceived of social media. And it is very possible that they would have put different things in place had they been able to predict that. But I look at the first and Second Amendment and I say, yeah, word like, that's exactly how you have to be thinking. So the First Amendment says you, barring an incitement to violence, you have the right to say anything. And that has to be as a matter of priority as the First Amendment. That has to be protected. And I can go into reasons why, but I'm actually more interested to hear if you agree with that or not. But the First Amendment and then followed up with the second one, which is the right to bear arms. And once you understand that the Founding Fathers were far more worried about the government becoming tyrannical and you needing weapons not to protect against your neighbor going crazy and coming and stealing your chickens though. Yes, that too, but that it's really about the government becoming problem. So to your point, they're trying to get away from the King authoritarian rule. They're like, we don't want that anymore. But the people like, hey, you don't just want anarchy. Love the third way idea, but I think people need to, at a minimum have a hypothesis of mind reading into the Founding Fathers and why they would put those as one and two. That was mine. How do you take that? How do you feel about free speech?

[Rory Stewart]

Well, so I think the idea of free speech is a smart and good one and I think it's good that you added short of incitement to violence. I mean, we've just had this in the United Kingdom, the people who've been prosecuted have not been prosecuted for sharing ideas. They've been prosecuted for defining how to attack immigrants in hostels, telling people to wear gloves, telling them what fuels to use, telling them which hostels to attack. Right. These are not martyrs to expressing their views. The people who have been put in prison have been put in prison for stuff that you would be put in prison for before social media that breaks your first amendment on the Second Amendment. Look, this is a difficult conversation, but I come from the United Kingdom. In 1960s, we had about 100 people a year being killed by gun violence in the United Kingdom. And you had about 15,000 people a year being killed by gun violence in the United States. Fast forward since when about two and a half million people have been killed by gun violence in the United States. We are now in a situation where in the United Kingdom we have about 65 people killed a year through gun violence. And you have approaching 45,000 people killed a year. In other words, the number of people killed A year in the United States by gun violence has tripled when it's almost halved in the United Kingdom. From a very low level to begin with. In fact, at such a low level, it's pretty difficult writing a crime drama in the United Kingdom. There's just not enough people murdered to be able to generate the plot. Right. I mean, it's our average crime drama. So basically body counts as most of the people that would be killed in an entire year. So I think that the founding Fathers anxiety around despotic government is a good thing to be worried about. I think they were right to be concerned about it. But I also think that governing involves balancing very different considerations. It involves balancing the ways that societies change over time. Technology changes over time. You know, would they have taken the same view of an assault weapon as they would have a musket, which is what they were talking about? Would their views of government change once government has the ability to surveil in the way that it does now? Would their view of government change if they saw that two and a half million people had been killed by gun violence since the 1960s? I don't know. But I certainly think that one of the things that we have to do is remain alert to the possibility that the world changes. Things change, and the things that we once believed we may change our beliefs on. I mean, I think a classic example in Ireland would be the debate around abortion, which has changed very dramatically in the last 40 years from a very strong Catholic opposition to a compromise. And the United States is now this very strange outlier. I mean, I had a. You know, I was a member of the Conservative Party in Britain. I had a friend come to one of our Conservative conferences who's an American, couldn't believe the fact we didn't mention abortion at all in the entire conference. It's just not a subject. Nobody talks about it, nobody's interested in it. We have a pragmatic compromise on how many days and the number of days beyond which you can't have an abortion and the number of days within which you can. And it's settled the issue basically permanently in Britain, Europe and in the US it hasn't. But that I don't think is telling you much more than that. Cultures change and they change at different paces.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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