Keep in mind: Taleb wrote this before the 2016 election—but this is exactly what has happened in America. The vast difference between those four pillars of our society—government, politics, media, and academia—and the American people was perfectly expressed in President Trump’s election.
WHERE THE IYI LIVE
Another author, Charles Murray, who is a brilliant scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, touched on a related issue in his book Coming Apart: The State of White America. In the book, Murray talks about the forming of what he calls “super zip codes.” This is another observation about how the elite are stratifying themselves away from the rest of society. The basic premise of Murray’s idea is that people who go to Princeton, Harvard, or Yale marry people from those schools. Then they move to neighborhoods with other people who went to Princeton, Harvard, or Yale. They send their children to prep schools, so they, too, can grow up to go to Princeton, Harvard, or Yale, and the cycle continues. The result is that you end up with relatively large neighborhoods made up of people who are in the top 5 percent economically, and the top 5 percent in educational attainment.
These people end up doing the same things, consuming the same media, and ultimately thinking the same way—which is to say completely differently from the other 95 percent of Americans. When the rise of Trump began, people in the super zip codes—many of whom consequently are major political donors—wrote him off. They didn’t understand how anyone in America could support him or recognize that he connected with and related to normal working people. They didn’t understand the great reach of Trump’s TV show The Apprentice. They didn’t watch it, so in their closed minds no one did. If only Trump had been on PBS, immediately following Downton Abbey, the elites would have understood how good he was on television.
The Washington Post took Murray’s work and created an interactive map of the super zip codes. The paper reported in November 2013 that on average, median income for households in these zip codes is $120,000 a year, and 70 percent of adults in these areas graduated from college.1 US census data shows that the median income for all US households was $51,939 in 2013. Not surprisingly, the highest concentrations of these zip codes are in the coastal Northeast—especially around Washington, DC—and around Silicon Valley and Los Angeles.
But the Washington Post said Washington, DC, was a special case. More than one-third of the zip codes in the district’s metropolitan area are in the top 5 percent of income and higher education. These zip codes are also contiguous, according to the report—meaning there is a 717-square-mile wall of out-of-touch affluence almost surrounding our nation’s capital. In the paper’s reporting, William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, described it as “a megalopolis of eggheads.” And he’s right. This population makes up a significant portion of the intellectual yet idiots Taleb is talking about. And they govern us on a day-to-day basis.
Now, this relates to President Trump, because he understood in the campaign that he needed to make sure he was communicating with all Americans—not just the ones who live in super zip codes. Trump’s campaign speeches were written in the language of normal Americans. Because he connected with all these regular people, the media and liberal elites dubbed him a populist—their way of discrediting the views of the Americans who elected Trump. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, spoke to Americans in the language of the elite. This guaranteed that whatever she was saying did not resonate with most of the American people, although people in the “megalopolis of eggheads” ate it up.
Despite now living in the White House, Trump is not an IYI citizen of this megalopolis. Trump is a builder. He couldn’t get away with writing a nice essay about Trump Tower to get tenants to move in—he had to actually build Trump Tower and build it well.
And Trump doesn’t hire IYIs. He doesn’t have any use for them. Anyone who has run for office knows that conventional wisdom says the higher up you go, the more consultants there are, and the more they tell you that your main goal is to raise money to pay more consultants. Trump immediately recognized this for the scam that it is. At one point in the spring of 2016, when the Trump movement was growing, someone suggested that because the campaign was getting bigger, it should hire someone to lead communications across the country. Trump was incredulous. He reminded that person that he was the campaign’s lead communicator.
And Trump’s skepticism about consultants was proved correct. Jeb Bush raised $110 million, had a legion of political consultants, and commanded a huge political network—and earned only one delegate. Trump had a small team of people who could get results, and he defeated all his rivals. This was so hard for the intellectual yet idiots to understand. During the general campaign, a reporter asked me if I was concerned that Hillary Clinton had spent $22 million at the time, and Trump had only spent $300,000. I directed the reporter to ask Jeb’s $110 million delegate.
Jeb Bush is a dear friend and was an excellent governor. And I mention this anecdote only to show that Trump values people who have gained practical knowledge—knowledge that must be learned by doing rather than by hearing a lecture or reading a book. Trump himself learned the bulk of the real estate trade by working with his father—not while he was attending the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
He talks about his experience at Wharton, and his realization that knowledge gained working in the real world was more useful than abstract education, in The Art of the Deal:
Perhaps the most important thing I learned at Wharton was not to be overly impressed by academic credentials. It didn’t take me long to realize that there was nothing particularly awesome or exceptional about my classmates, and that I could compete with them just fine. The other important thing I got from Wharton was a Wharton degree. In my opinion that degree doesn’t prove very much, but a lot of people I do business with take it very seriously, and it’s considered very prestigious. So all things considered, I’m glad I went to Wharton.
And I’ve seen how President Trump gains this knowledge. During the first two months of his presidency, I watched the same pattern. He would start with something he had never done, and he would learn by doing it.
For example, he entered the postelection transition period with limited knowledge of world leaders. But he did not sit through long briefings. He simply scheduled call after call to chat with different leaders. People were astonished how long some of the calls were and how many questions the president asked.
Similarly, President Trump entered office with limited knowledge of the Congress, but he began talking to and seeing members—and not just the leadership. It was typical for Trump to invite dozens of senators with their spouses for a reception. It was also typical for him to shrewdly observe that a number of Democrats and Republicans would end up chatting with each other in that social setting. I suspect you will see a lot more social gatherings at the White House. With President Trump’s enormous energy, his remarkable memory, and his lifetime of being a good host, Trump will learn every obscure detail about Congress very rapidly.
Having a president who favors practical knowledge over formal knowledge creates a huge opportunity for us to shrink government by replacing many of the intellectual yet idiots that Taleb discusses with a smaller number of people who can solve our country’s problems rather than write about them.
One good example of an institution in need of right-sizing is the Pentagon. When the Pentagon was built, it was designed to house 31,000 employees, so that what was then the US Department of War could defeat the Axis powers from half the world away. At that time, those 31,000 staff members wrote reports on carbon paper, with manual typewriters and filed the reports in triplicate in large filing cabinets. Beetle Smith, who was secretary to Chief of Staff George Marshall, would run drills to train the staff so they could find and retrieve files for Marshall at a moment’s notice.
I’m certain they were incredibly fast, but can you imagine how much faster it is to send an email over the Pentagon’s secure network?
Can you imagine how much less time and fewer people it takes now to send that email than it did to type, file, and later retrieve a report at the Pentagon in 1943? At least 40 percent of the Department of Defense’s bureaucracy must be superfluous or duplicative. Trump has a great opportunity to get the IYI out of the Pentagon and cut it down to a triangle. This could transform our national security apparatus from a typical slow-moving bureaucracy into an efficient engine for keeping our country safe and protecting our interests abroad.
There is a terrific small book by Col. David Johnson called Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers: Innovation in the US Army, 1917–1945 that relates a story about how Marshall worked to rid the military of intellectual yet idiots. Johnson describes a scene that played out in the summer of 1940. The Germans had swept through Poland and France, and Marshall called in the American army chief of the cavalry to find out how he planned to respond to the German blitz.
The cavalry chief told Marshall he had analyzed the German attack, understood why the Polish cavalry had failed against the German tanks, and knew what they needed to do better. He suggested to Marshall that the allies should develop trucks that could carry the cavalry up to the battlefield, so the horses would be fresh. Marshall thanked him, concluded the meeting, and immediately called in Beetle Smith to have the commandant retired as of noon and have the post of cavalry chief abolished. In large part, we won the war because Marshall was decisive and willing to make the military leaner and better performing, by getting rid of high-ranking intellectual yet idiots who planned to fight tanks on horseback. I’m certain Trump and Secretary of Defense James Mattis will be able to find some similar “chiefs of cavalry” in the Pentagon.
THE IMPORTANCE OF REAL INTELLIGENCE
I usually relate the chief of cavalry story with a half grin, but it highlights why having a rising class of people in important positions in America who are educated beyond their experience can be dangerous.
Dennis M. Gormley, an international security scholar who teaches intelligence, military strategy, arms control, and nonproliferation policy at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote an article titled “Missile Contagion, Survival” in 2008. He later developed a book by a similar name. But in the article, Gormley discusses the same concept that’s raised in “Intellectual Yet Idiot” in different terms.
In his article, which is about the threat of proliferation and development of land-attack cruise missiles abroad, Gormley talks about the difference between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge, he says, is “information or engineering formulations that can be recorded and easily passed from one place to another.” Tacit knowledge, he explains, “is the product of a uniquely fertile social and intellectual environment composed of mentors and protégés.”
In other words, explicit knowledge is what you would learn from a traditional education and tacit knowledge is what you learn by actually doing something.
In the context of Gormley, he said as early as 2002 that Iraq had significant explicit knowledge about how to extend the effective range of first-generation Chinese cruise missiles from 150 kilometers to 1,000 kilometers. These are missiles capable of carrying nuclear, biological, or chemical payloads. Thankfully, Iraq lacked engineers who had tacit knowledge of actually converting these missiles, so they “achieved only modest progress in most cases, over as much as seven years of development work.”
Gormley suggests that tacit knowledge is so much more important than explicit knowledge to this process that controlling the spread of tacit knowledge is a good way to control the spread of cruise-missile proliferation itself.
“Thus, while a flow of technology is necessary, it is not sufficient to enable cruise-missile proliferation without the critical support of a small and exceptionally skilled group of engineers in an equally small number of industrial countries. This is the good news. If states can more effectively control the spread of these ‘black arts,’ there is hope that the worst features of the contagion can be checked,” Gormley wrote.
Gormley is concerned about a very specific issue related to arms control, but I think his theory works across disciplines, and it relates closely to the concerns Taleb raises.
In the United States, we have a surplus of explicit knowledge in our bureaucracy, political establishment, media, and institutions of higher learning. President Trump is leading a movement to bring tacit knowledge to the forefront of our federal system, so that it can return to being a practical government that effectively works for its people.
During the 2016 campaign, and now in the presidency, one of the continuing surprises to President Trump has been the willingness of the elite media to lie. Initially, he would be shocked and uncertain how to respond. Despite all his experience in fighting with the New York City media (arguably the most aggressive and confrontational in the country), he was simply unprepared for the brutality and depth of dishonesty of our national media. To this day, he is surprised when reporters repeat various stories—even when it is clear how false they are.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PROPAGANDA MEDIA
Trump is the first candidate in modern history who has been able to sustain and succeed against a full assault by the news media. This is one reason the media elite are so hostile to him. They don’t like losing.
In part, Trump simply outfoxed the media on the campaign trail. He knew they were constantly criticizing what he said and how he said it—while at the same time digging through his past to find anything else to criticize. But he also recognized that media outlets were trapped in their mania, and he could always gain and use their attention.
With a strongly worded tweet, he could raise the hackles of the news organizations. Then he could call a press conference and be sure that every camera available would be present and rolling. That provided him a free, effective opportunity to make his case to the American people despite the media din.
What Trump intuitively understood, and which completely eluded reporters, was that the constant hostility was hurting their cause. Each time Trump was attacked for saying American interests were more important than global concerns, or that American jobs were more valuable than cheap products from other countries, or that rights of Americans should be protected over those of immigrants, normal Americans felt attacked themselves.
And to those same Americans, the assault on Trump for expressing rational self-interest on behalf of our country was a breaking point. The growing liberal bias and animosity toward dissenting opinion that had developed over the Obama era had become too great to endure.
When Trump sensed the pressure valve about to release just days after he announced his candidacy, he launched his own offensive through his Twitter account and TV appearances. This open defiance of the established media elite cemented him as the standard-bearer for middle Americans, who had been left behind by the country’s cultural elite.
I tapped into this during my 2012 presidential campaign, but it apparently took another four years of propaganda on behalf of the Obama administration before the public reached its boiling point.
THE AUDACITY OF BIAS
And make no mistake, the media was totally smitten with President Obama.
Set aside the blatant examples—like when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said in December 2008 that hearing Obama speak sent a thrill up his leg. One needs only look to a 2008 Pew Research Center report that found that nearly 37 percent of people asked said coverage of the Democratic primary race that year favored Obama, while only 4 percent reported seeing a bias toward Hillary Clinton.1
What’s remarkable about this perceived bias is that many of the same people polled also were aware of several scandals that might have sunk less favored, unanointed candidates. According to Pew, 62 percent of the people surveyed had heard a great deal about Obama’s connection to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the militant pastor who made headlines for asking God to damn America and saying the United States was at fault for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
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��s no surprise the people heard about it. The remarks made headlines for weeks. But as I told Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation in 2015 when the media was trying to destroy Representative Steve Scalise over controversy surrounding a speech he had given twelve years earlier, Obama got a pass on the Reverend Wright controversy.
Obama gave an eloquent speech distancing himself from Wright’s church and claiming he hadn’t heard Wright’s hateful remarks. The media collectively shrugged and said “Oh, OK.” Coverage completely ignored that Obama had attended Wright’s church on the south side of Chicago for twenty years. Critical media coverage of this issue had virtually ended by April 30, 2008.
Citing a Project for Excellence in Journalism campaign coverage index, Pew also reported that Obama had “received more press coverage than either [Mrs.] Clinton or John McCain in 11 of the past 17 weeks [January through May 2008]. Clinton has dominated the campaign coverage in 4 of the last 17 weeks. McCain has not led the two Democratic candidates in terms of news coverage since the week of Feb. 4–10, when he became the presumptive Republican nominee following his victories in the GOP Super Tuesday primaries.”
And this was just the beginning. For the entirety of his first term, Obama was treated with kid gloves by the media. Major news organizations largely avoided asking tough questions about the death of US ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in the September 11, 2012, attack on two US installations in Benghazi, Libya. They abdicated their duty to hold the president accountable to the Congress, and later devoted more energy toward attacking the legitimacy of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. After the media was forced to question the erroneous claim that the attack was a result of reaction to a film and not radical Islamic terrorism, they quickly accepted Obama’s next excuse—that the botched protection of the ambassador and other Americans was due to mistakes by lower-level State Department employees.
Understanding Trump Page 8