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Reform or Revolution: A Breakdown of How Complex Systems Change · The Overlap

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  All right, so welcome back to The Overlap. 00:19.940 --> 00:27.360 The history of governments and organizations is punctuated by moments of radical transformation, 00:27.360 --> 00:34.380 whether it's propelled by reform-minded leaders, mass protests, or the influence of foreign powers. 00:34.800 --> 00:42.300 These periods of upheaval really redefine institutions and societies. 00:42.720 --> 00:49.340 The current question of these sorts of events is whether it's more effective to instigate change 00:49.340 --> 00:53.480 from a position of authority and influence within the system from the inside, 00:53.480 --> 01:00.160 or to pressure the system from a position of detachment and opposition from the outside. 01:01.240 --> 01:05.240 Speaking of inside and outside, I am your co-host, Joshua. 01:05.740 --> 01:10.920 And with us again after a short sabbatical is our co-host, Will. 01:11.040 --> 01:12.340 Will, why don't you say hello? 01:13.720 --> 01:15.240 Hello. It's good to be back, everyone. 01:15.760 --> 01:19.740 And despite the forces of technology conspiring against us, I'm here. 01:20.680 --> 01:23.380 We are absolutely here. 01:23.820 --> 01:28.700 So these moments of glorious upheaval, these historical dumpster fires, 01:28.700 --> 01:33.100 are what academics refer to as radical transformations. 01:33.700 --> 01:38.820 Sometimes they're kicked off by a politician who suddenly grows a conscience, which we know is rare. 01:39.080 --> 01:47.420 And other times it's because of some sort of critical mass or black swan event of people getting justifiably angry 01:47.420 --> 01:52.460 and marching in the streets and occasionally cutting people's heads off. 01:52.460 --> 01:59.060 And just because some foreign power decides to stir the pot for its own amusement, right? 01:59.520 --> 02:06.540 The chaos inevitably sparks the ancient eternal debate that fuels a thousand angry social media threads. 02:06.900 --> 02:13.900 What is the actually effective way to fix something that's fundamentally broken? 02:14.440 --> 02:19.700 Do you play the long game, put on a comfortable suit, infiltrate the halls of power, 02:19.960 --> 02:24.260 and try to dismantle the whole corrupt apparatus from your corner office? 02:24.380 --> 02:32.740 Or is it the path of the sensible insider sort of chipping away at the foundation with memos and policy proposals? 02:32.740 --> 02:48.020 Or do you stay on the outside, don a giant megaphone, and apply relentless disruptive pressure so often and so hard that the whole thing just kind of collapses in on itself? 02:48.540 --> 02:57.740 So it's kind of the quintessential question of the revolutionary versus the reformer, the protester versus the politician. 02:58.340 --> 03:06.060 So what we've done is we've done some research about different strategies, different techniques throughout history, 03:06.200 --> 03:11.360 and done sort of a comparative analysis, and that's what we're going to talk with you about today. 03:11.760 --> 03:25.440 Again, I know this is kind of dry, but one of the things that precipitated this was understanding whether or not it had something to do with the efficacy of the movements that we're seeing pop up, 03:25.440 --> 03:35.120 like 5051, who is still doing a fantastic grassroots job, but seems to have sort of, from a national organization perspective, fallen off the map, 03:35.340 --> 03:42.280 which is an outside organization versus an outside character, say like, you know, Donald J. Trump, 03:42.560 --> 03:51.620 who presents himself as an outsider who has taken up office on the inside in order to change the corrupt system 03:51.620 --> 04:01.180 from the outside in. And so that's what we're going to talk with you about today, as well as some historical examples of different methodologies. 04:01.500 --> 04:06.540 And anything else, anything else that I left out or you might want to say before we get started here, Will? 04:07.740 --> 04:16.260 Let's roll. Let's get to it. Awesome. Yes. So if we want to move past sort of the superficial understanding, 04:16.260 --> 04:27.580 we need to get to some sort of framework that sort of expands on the dichotomy between top down versus bottom up, which, 04:28.120 --> 04:38.900 look, we're going to use a lot of these different, these different terminologies, because that's how they're being presented in society, on social media, in media sources, is sometimes we hear, 04:39.000 --> 04:46.660 oh, it's a top down, which really just means it's somebody working from the inside, as opposed to bottom up, which is somebody working from the outside, right? 04:47.040 --> 04:59.000 So you might hear us interchange some of this terminology, but, you know, we're not perfect. And we also want to be as inclusive of the thoughts and ideas and words that are being used out there as possible. 05:00.460 --> 05:08.760 Inside agent versus outside agent, right? The inside agent of change is kind of like a person or group already embedded in the system. 05:08.760 --> 05:15.920 I think a reasonable comparison would likely be sort of the corporate Democrats. Would you, would you concur on that one, Will? 05:16.840 --> 05:24.140 Yeah. So it's somebody who essentially says, look, yes, it's broken, but we can still help people. 05:24.240 --> 05:33.000 We can still figure out a way through this broken system to affect change in a positive way that might not be as necessarily as fast as you want it to be, 05:33.180 --> 05:50.660 but it will be, be breaking as few things as possible. But also that a trade-off of that is slow change, slow progress, if you will, versus an outsider, like say, I mean, Bernie Sanders, is Bernie Sanders really an example of an outsider? 05:50.820 --> 06:00.240 I mean, he's been in Congress for a long time. He was a governor. I don't know. Maybe AOC getting elected as an, as a bartender in New York is a better example. 06:00.240 --> 06:06.540 What would you, who would you give us as far at a national level of an outside agent? 06:07.460 --> 06:17.460 I would say AOC is closer to an outsider. Although Bernie Sanders, his rhetoric, you know, which I think is, points out a lot of good things. 06:17.460 --> 06:31.560 His rhetoric is more of an outsider's rhetoric, but his activities, his actual actions are voting on things and trying to rally other people in the Senate to join him in opposing whatever ideas he thinks are harmful. 06:32.600 --> 06:32.680 Yeah. 06:32.680 --> 06:37.400 So I think AOC is closer to an outsider, but I'm not sure that either one really qualifies. And that's part of the question, right? 06:37.440 --> 06:43.640 I mean, how much, how much are you in the swamp if you're draining the swamp, you know, as a senator trying to drain the swamp? 06:44.400 --> 06:49.960 Exactly. It's like, it's like trying to, trying to drain the swamp inside of a boat in the swamp, you know? 06:50.160 --> 06:50.520 Exactly. 06:50.520 --> 07:04.840 I think, I think more often times, some of these outside actors tend to be more like movements, right? Like grassroots movements where you can't really necessarily pinpoint a single driver, a single person that sort of leads the charge. 07:04.840 --> 07:07.580 You know, like what's his name? The guy from Braveheart. 07:07.860 --> 07:08.520 William Wallace. 07:08.980 --> 07:26.700 William Wallace, right? Like there isn't like some, they'll take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom. You know, it's nothing, nothing like that. It's same, same energy for sure. But I think, uh, Robert the Bruce, uh, you know, back him up at some point, finally got Robert the Bruce on board. 07:27.620 --> 07:51.440 Exactly. So I think what I'm trying to say is this can kind of be, it can be a social movement. It can be an opposition party. You know, like we saw the Tea Party in the thousands, that was sort of the opposition to the mainstream conservative viewpoints. It was a more far right. But even now, you know, we have parties like the, the new democratic socialist party, right? 07:51.440 --> 08:16.920 So we're, we're, we're, those would be the, an example of an opposition party that seems to try to disrupt or have a desire to disrupt that dichotomy between Republicans and Democrats, even though within them, they've both been changing and have changed several times over the, over the years. So I guess what we're trying to do is kind of divide it into two ideas, an internal and an external. 08:17.800 --> 08:47.560 And I guess the efficiency part would be the next, the next sort of definition to define. So from an internal perspective, I think that the efficacy comes around kind of the personal convictions that the actor has that sort of possesses the, the understanding and the, and the knowledge and the, and the skillset to participate in politics, right? Understanding how the bills work, understanding how, how sausage is made in that sort of thing. 08:47.560 --> 08:55.560 and tries to change that by making small adjustments to those processes within the greater framework, 08:55.940 --> 08:58.120 believing that ultimately the framework is valid. 08:58.720 --> 09:02.240 It's just the parts and pieces that need to be better. 09:02.380 --> 09:08.460 I think the big question that it comes down to is how broken is the system or how broken do you believe the system is? 09:09.300 --> 09:13.520 Yeah, and I do think it has a lot to do with perception of the system. 09:13.520 --> 09:19.620 A lot of times, sometimes more so than the actual ability of the system to function, right? 09:20.860 --> 09:24.660 I think we saw that pretty heavily or we're seeing it now too, 09:24.780 --> 09:30.260 but convinced more than half of the country that the government was actually operating really inefficiently 09:30.260 --> 09:41.120 and that we had to gut entire portions of our government in order to make it more efficient in whatever one describes efficiency. 09:41.120 --> 09:48.400 And it's hard to take sort of a neutral tone with any of these things because obviously I'm not on the side of what Donald Trump said, 09:48.440 --> 09:54.380 and I don't believe it's true, but I'm trying to paint this as a general idea 09:54.380 --> 10:03.280 because I do think that there is some on the right, some on the right, that see it as, you know, I don't like what he's doing. 10:03.280 --> 10:13.640 I don't really like him, but I do believe that there is corruption and that the government needs to be more efficient at specific things. 10:13.640 --> 10:17.420 And now it doesn't like what he's the way he's doing it, but agrees. 10:17.600 --> 10:27.140 And I think we all can agree that to whatever degree we view the government, we think that it could be more efficient at various things throughout time. 10:27.200 --> 10:32.280 I mean, whether that's, you know, actively working on like snap benefits, you know, 10:32.280 --> 10:41.620 they're taking away soda and chips and candy and cookies in different states now from snap benefits because they argue that the N is for nutrition and those things are not nutritious. 10:41.620 --> 10:52.080 And it's like, well, you know, I mean, they can be in certain scenarios more nutritious than the alternatives and typically allow dollar for calorie to go a lot further. 10:52.080 --> 11:00.860 But whether or not that is efficient depends on the side of the aisle that you stand on or the side of your perspective. 11:00.860 --> 11:01.100 Right. 11:01.480 --> 11:07.400 I was going to say that I think that, you know, it comes back to the what we can accomplish today. 11:07.400 --> 11:13.060 I think from our part here is not so much painting one side or the other or talking about the current debate as a specific example of this. 11:13.060 --> 11:19.400 But just to point out that there are tradeoffs when you go with an outside approach versus an inside approach or vice versa. 11:19.600 --> 11:22.760 You know, there's there's going to be things that happen that you want to be aware of. 11:22.820 --> 11:23.740 What are the costs? Right. 11:24.220 --> 11:31.740 If you break the entire system, like if you sort of you go with the whole like most radical approach of a constitutional convention or something like that, 11:31.900 --> 11:34.600 there's a lot of things that are going to get broken along the way. 11:34.860 --> 11:37.300 And we need to be aware of that if we're going to choose that method. 11:37.420 --> 11:42.120 It may seem like the fastest path to what you want, but it may also be a costly path. 11:42.120 --> 11:44.340 And you have to decide if you are willing to pay those costs. 11:45.580 --> 11:45.900 Exactly. 11:46.540 --> 11:48.720 Like saying, yes, we need to change the Constitution. 11:49.060 --> 11:53.040 But in a constitutional convention, they might decide to remove the First Amendment. 11:53.700 --> 11:55.520 You know, it's like it's like, wait a minute. 11:55.700 --> 11:56.240 I don't want it. 11:56.240 --> 11:56.940 I don't want it to go. 11:57.080 --> 12:01.340 I want us to add things that supersede others, you know, amendments versus anyway. 12:01.840 --> 12:09.220 So an internal agent for change, right, whether inside or outside, they have to kind of possess a high degree of internal efficiency, 12:09.220 --> 12:16.020 whether that be within the grass movements that I was talking about, like 5051, which is doing protests around the country at all 50 states. 12:16.280 --> 12:25.680 So their degree of internal efficacy to believe their actions can be meaningful is kind of what determines their efficacy on either side. 12:26.400 --> 12:37.560 External efficacy, on the other hand, is kind of the belief that the government or the institution will actually respond to the demands of an external force. 12:37.660 --> 12:50.160 Right. So a widespread sense of low external efficacy, the feeling that the system really isn't responding to what we want, is kind of a powerful catalyst for radical change. 12:50.860 --> 12:59.880 Basically asking the government to change and then perceiving that it's not changing drives in and of itself additional external upheaval. 13:00.160 --> 13:10.440 So that's kind of what we're trying to do is we're trying to make a distinction between the internal and external at a fundamental level is understanding the sort of the tension at the heart of the change. 13:11.440 --> 13:26.940 So a leader who wants to reform the system from the outside or from the inside, rather, may be motivated by a desire to restore a sense of external efficacy, meaning to a frustrated people. 13:26.940 --> 13:43.120 Like so top down changes, which is is what we're currently seeing that he's making changes in executive orders, sort of top down style that aim to show that the system as perceived from the outside can be responsive to the problem. 13:43.120 --> 13:51.640 On the other hand, an outside movement often starts from a collective sense of low external efficacy. 13:52.040 --> 14:00.900 So they see the system is either doing something actively that they don't agree with or not doing something that they do agree with. 14:01.680 --> 14:13.380 So when those people feel like their demands are being ignored, it kind of leads to a desire for fundamental reform or in the French term, la revolution. 14:13.380 --> 14:19.480 Right. So and the success of each of a movement kind of hinges on its members. 14:20.920 --> 14:34.840 Developing a profound sense of internal efficacy, the belief that their protests and actions can actually make an seemingly immovable power, government or structure to change. 14:34.840 --> 14:51.860 Now, I would be remiss if I didn't mention there is a layer of complexity, right, in each of these roles, because an individual's or group status as an insider or outsider is not necessarily static, right? 14:52.260 --> 14:55.440 It's kind of situational. It's kind of dynamic. 14:55.680 --> 15:08.560 So a leader working within an organization may need to kind of adopt a mindset and sort of a detachment of an outsider to challenge long entrenched norms. 15:08.740 --> 15:24.880 And I think that kind of paints what we were talking about with Bernie Sanders will like he is technically an insider who has taken up the cause of external forces and taken on a role of an external force acting on an internal system. 15:25.520 --> 15:30.500 Right. And trying to to effectuate change from within that system using. 15:30.500 --> 15:42.640 Right. So that kind of requires them to distance themselves. Right. 15:42.640 --> 15:51.280 From from from the institutional awareness as a whole and convince other people to adopt the same sort of practices, which is good. 15:51.640 --> 15:55.500 It's it's sort of an external internal. It's an internal grassroots movement. 15:55.500 --> 16:01.540 So also like a social movement that overthrows a regime like like Arab Spring. Right. 16:01.620 --> 16:05.920 That we saw in the was it the 70s? Arab Spring was in the 70s. 16:06.460 --> 16:08.840 Before I was born. Yeah. 16:09.680 --> 16:12.540 As I was getting confused with the more recent there was a more recent. 16:12.660 --> 16:15.220 I did too. Because there was a because they retook it. 16:15.340 --> 16:21.400 The Arab Spring was kind of upset at the Islamic State and they they overtook the Islamic State. 16:21.520 --> 16:24.500 But then the Islamic State has now come back. So it's it's sort of a yo-yo. 16:24.920 --> 16:41.760 But that's an example of how they now have to navigate that transition from being an external force that has disrupted the existing system and now has to be a new stable internal power structure. 16:41.760 --> 16:49.840 And and this continuous transformation and redefinition of those roles is kind of a crucial aspect of that radical change. 16:49.840 --> 16:58.180 So I say that not to confuse you, even though I know it is confusing, but but rather to highlight that this is not black and white. 16:58.180 --> 17:12.420 Right. Like these are very, very gray areas that can happen and need to in order to transition in sort of a transitional architecture between rapid external change to new internal regime. 17:12.960 --> 17:26.380 And how to how to how to navigate those sources. Right. And I think we're seeing sort of that that concept from the perspective of creating the United States from what was what was England really new England as well. 17:26.600 --> 17:32.960 They were a radical expeditionary force that sought revolution to overcome England and did. 17:33.340 --> 17:39.520 And then they had to turn themselves into a government. And it's and I think that that it was probably a pretty radical time then as well. 17:40.440 --> 17:46.120 So we'll include a photo on our blue sky. Make sure you're following us on blue sky and Macedon. 17:46.240 --> 17:57.560 But we'll include a photo of kind of a graph, a chart we made for explaining the different types of of radical change from top down all the way down to negotiated transition. 17:57.560 --> 18:03.840 But I think we're going to talk about some sort of case studies within that transition. 18:04.680 --> 18:11.480 Well, did you have any other thoughts before we sort of dive into specific use cases and specific types of changes? 18:12.360 --> 18:28.940 I think I would just have to say, if you're confused at this point, just to kind of sum up what we're talking about here is that you have the paradigmatic examples of the outside revolutionary leader who comes in and demolishes the existing system versus the insider who reforms. 18:29.460 --> 18:32.780 But in reality, there's also a sort of counterpoint to each of those. 18:32.900 --> 18:40.040 That's the insider who tears down the entire system by sort of inviting outsiders into the conversation without actually destroying it. 18:40.540 --> 18:48.500 Remodels, so to speak, the inside of the system versus the outsider who may transition over to being an inside leader. 18:48.640 --> 18:54.400 Right. Hopefully they're pretty rare. But the revolutionaries who make also good reformers are good leaders after the fact. 18:54.680 --> 18:58.540 There have been some throughout history. I think we'll talk about a couple of examples like that as well. 18:59.040 --> 19:07.440 Let's say let's say that make efficient leaders because a lot of these people were really good at mastering this very thing and were terrible leaders. 19:08.080 --> 19:14.460 So I will say if you're hoping that that somehow we're going to get to the overthrow of the Weimar Republic with Hitler, we're not. 19:14.700 --> 19:22.580 I purposefully left that out because of the trope about liberals always making everyone that it doesn't believe what they believe Hitler. 19:22.820 --> 19:24.980 So I'm like, you know what? I'm leaving Hitler alone. 19:24.980 --> 19:29.580 I've got some other more modern, more recent examples for these things. 19:29.740 --> 19:31.920 So let's get started on one of them. 19:32.300 --> 19:33.720 Mikhail Gorbachev. 19:35.520 --> 19:38.300 I barely I barely I barely remember him. 19:38.420 --> 19:42.900 I remember they used to make fun of him by putting a world map on his forehead on Saturday Night Live. 19:43.040 --> 19:47.840 Do you do you have any any really remembrance of Mikhail Gorbachev at all? 19:48.340 --> 19:50.040 I just remember the classic line. 19:50.120 --> 19:52.320 You know, Mr. Gorbachev tear down that wall. 19:52.840 --> 19:53.320 Right. 19:53.460 --> 19:53.960 Exactly. 19:54.120 --> 19:54.740 President Reagan. 19:55.240 --> 19:57.640 And I mean, it's likely generational. 19:57.640 --> 19:58.040 Right. 19:58.140 --> 20:04.400 But but ultimately, Mikhail Gorbachev was the was the prime of of Russia. 20:04.400 --> 20:08.680 And he whipped the help of Bush, the original H.W. 20:08.760 --> 20:08.980 Right. 20:10.180 --> 20:10.780 Am I am I? 20:10.880 --> 20:11.780 I'm getting my history right. 20:11.840 --> 20:12.380 It was Bush. 20:12.600 --> 20:13.320 No, it was Reagan. 20:13.960 --> 20:17.240 Reagan was the one who initiated the conversation and sort of had. 20:17.320 --> 20:17.720 That's right. 20:18.400 --> 20:18.940 The moment. 20:18.940 --> 20:23.800 So this was the the sort of the end of the of the Cold War. 20:24.100 --> 20:31.300 But essentially, we're going to we're going to actually kind of talk about his position with the Soviet Union. 20:31.680 --> 20:34.700 It's it's still so weird to even say that out loud. 20:34.780 --> 20:36.360 Like the so we're talking about the Soviet Union. 20:36.420 --> 20:36.660 Sorry. 20:36.660 --> 20:41.060 Mikhail Gorbachev was the prime of the Soviet Union. 20:41.240 --> 20:48.620 And he's kind of a prototypical example of a well-intentioned inside initiated reform. 20:48.620 --> 20:52.580 that spiraled into an unintended revolution. 20:52.580 --> 20:54.820 He assumed power in 1985. 20:55.300 --> 20:57.880 I was literally one when he assumed power. 20:57.980 --> 21:00.620 That's why I have very little memories of this. 21:00.760 --> 21:04.120 But I do remember of him and seeing him and hearing him talk and things. 21:04.280 --> 21:11.500 But the Soviet Union was was suffering from a really terrible economic stagnation, 21:11.580 --> 21:17.320 mainly because their position was to be this sort of in the Iron Curtain. 21:17.480 --> 21:17.660 Right. 21:17.660 --> 21:20.780 I mean, when you think of the Iron Curtain, what do you think of inflexible? 21:20.780 --> 21:28.880 But it was a centralized command economy, very top down, that were operating on the legacy of Stalin's policies. 21:29.420 --> 21:33.720 And they really were not able to compete in a in a globalized world. 21:33.720 --> 21:51.020 The system that maintained power, not through really their responsiveness to their people in sort of a democratic sense, but through a really, really harsh security posture, including widespread censorship and a culture of secrecy. 21:51.400 --> 21:52.400 sound familiar. 21:52.400 --> 21:54.520 Given the conversation this week. 21:54.520 --> 21:56.780 Yeah, exactly. 21:57.020 --> 22:12.060 Gorbachev, who was a dedicated communist, had experienced the famines and the purges of the Soviet era and the transition to that area and sort of recognized that a significant change was necessary for the state's survival. 22:12.440 --> 22:21.720 So the position that he took as a high ranking insider kind of gave him the authority to challenge this status quo. 22:21.820 --> 22:25.760 So Gorbachev's approach was kind of centered on two key policies. 22:25.940 --> 22:29.380 One was glasnost and the other was perestroika. 22:29.980 --> 22:49.120 So perestroika, which in Russian means restructure, it was an attempt to sort of decentralize the Soviet economy, making the government relax a little of the control over individual businesses, small businesses, and introduced as well, semi-private business ventures. 22:49.280 --> 22:53.540 Obviously, as a communist, the government owns all means of production. 22:53.540 --> 22:55.000 They own all businesses. 22:55.240 --> 23:05.200 So what he suggested was sort of breaking it down, allowing for semi-private businesses and individual enterprises to be more prominent within the Soviet Union. 23:05.800 --> 23:20.260 So the goal was kind of to inject efficiency and innovation into this rigid system to hopefully improve the lives of the workers, which if you're familiar with the communist manifesto, that's kind of the whole point. 23:20.760 --> 23:32.000 And so this was, I mean, obviously a very dramatic shift, but the glasnost, you can probably tell from the glass part, is openness and transparency is kind of what it stood for, right? 23:32.000 --> 23:40.920 So it proved to be the more, I guess, destructive force in his plan. 23:40.920 --> 23:46.600 But Gorbachev's policy of openness allowed for freedom of speech. 23:46.860 --> 24:01.940 It allowed citizens to sort of express their viewpoints and reexamine their history and whether or not they wanted to carry that forward without fear of the gulag, like dying because of what you have to say. 24:02.940 --> 24:12.020 His initial assumption was that this would, like, bolster the restructuring efforts by exposing corruption and incompetence. 24:12.820 --> 24:17.360 Now, to be fair, the results were pretty catastrophic for the Soviet state. 24:17.360 --> 24:40.600 Instead of invigorating the system, that newfound sense of openness kind of unleashed an avalanche of reporting on criminality as well as state crimes of the past and basically, unfortunately, kind of confirmed the public's deep-held belief that there was a lot of low external efficacy, right? 24:40.600 --> 24:51.440 So there was a really structured inability to make change or to see change come from their government and progress to be made by their government. 24:51.640 --> 24:54.860 It also exposed the fact that the government had been lying to them for decades. 24:55.040 --> 25:01.920 Unfortunately, going immediately open in that situation led to a lot of discontent. 25:04.060 --> 25:16.240 Gorbachev kind of intended to sort of control release the pressure that Russia and the Soviet Union found itself under, but it became sort of unmanageable. 25:16.240 --> 25:22.560 It became a really crappy cesspool of filth. 25:23.180 --> 25:27.340 And to quote our dear leader, it became a swamp. 25:27.560 --> 25:36.520 And unfortunately, it was a swamp before, but then everyone knew it was a swamp, knew it for what it was, and wanted radical change. 25:36.520 --> 25:40.760 So it was enough to drive radical desire to change. 25:41.100 --> 25:50.880 And it empowered the nationalist movements and the separatist sentiments with the various of the Soviet republics, which grew into really dominant political forces, right? 25:50.960 --> 25:52.360 That all wanted one thing. 25:53.540 --> 25:55.700 Independence from the Soviet Union. 25:56.300 --> 25:58.900 In a lot of ways, they were like individual states. 25:59.780 --> 26:09.860 And I mean, in some cases, they were called states, like the Baltic states and the Slavs, and there are different groups in there. 26:09.940 --> 26:12.560 But they were all wanting independence. 26:13.960 --> 26:26.160 So the failure was not because of a bottom-up revolution, but the internal mechanisms that the reforms exposed within the oligarchy. 26:26.160 --> 26:26.760 Right? 26:26.760 --> 26:39.960 So as Gorbachev started losing power, he started seeing conflicting pressure from hardline communists who just kind of want to say, hey, look, you can't do this. 26:40.100 --> 26:41.280 Everything's going to fall. 26:41.640 --> 26:49.800 Or I don't want to say democratic, but a pluralist movement led by Boris Yeltsin, who wanted a more radical reform. 26:49.920 --> 26:51.420 He wanted to destroy the whole thing. 26:51.420 --> 26:53.440 He wanted to destroy the whole thing and start it from scratch. 26:53.660 --> 27:03.320 So that was – there was an unsuccessful coup in 1991, August of 1991, initiated by the hardline communists. 27:03.720 --> 27:18.220 It kind of exposed the fragility of the regime overall and demonstrated a lack of cohesion among the oligarchs, which at the time was kind of the sole pillar of their authoritarian stability. 27:18.460 --> 27:32.840 Is there – they were a unified force that really couldn't be shaken, which depending on how you look at it made the people of the Soviet Union feel at least like they knew where it was going. 27:33.080 --> 27:35.840 They didn't necessarily agree with it, but it was predictable, right? 27:35.840 --> 27:53.900 And so the second that they saw any chinks in the armor, any crumbling of that pillar, that cohesiveness, the whole thing kind of fell apart rather quickly because everybody wanted something very different. 27:53.900 --> 27:57.760 And they all started pulling in different directions and even tried taking over the country. 27:57.760 --> 28:01.040 And it ultimately failed in August. 28:01.540 --> 28:24.000 So the outcome of that was not a renegotiation of the Soviet Union and a much stronger Soviet Union as a whole, but actually the dissolving of the Soviet Union into various Baltic states like we were talking about earlier in Russia and as well as their small areas that used to be part of the Soviet Union like Ukraine and those other places. 28:25.000 --> 28:26.880 What are your thoughts on this one, Will? 28:26.880 --> 28:30.000 Of being an internal versus external or – 28:30.000 --> 28:33.440 I mean, it shows the potential downsides of moving too quickly, right? 28:33.500 --> 28:43.380 I mean, essentially what Gorbachev did was turn an impregnable fortress of secrecy and intrigue into a glass house and gave everybody rocks. 28:44.020 --> 28:49.140 And they decided to launch them en masse and it didn't last long. 28:49.920 --> 28:51.400 That's one might imagine. 28:52.400 --> 28:52.780 Exactly. 28:53.380 --> 29:12.000 So this is an example of what started out as a top-down situation that ended up in an attempt at a bottom-up uprising and ultimately led to the dissolution of the organization as a whole, as a union as a whole. 29:12.000 --> 29:23.800 So it would be the equivalent of us breaking each individual state into its own country at this point within our United States. 29:24.560 --> 29:25.220 All right. 29:25.560 --> 29:33.640 So our next example is going to be sort of a cultural transformation, if you will. 29:34.280 --> 29:47.420 And if you want to grab the chart on our social media post about this, the cultural transformation is kind of led by embedded leaders and management from the inside, right? 29:47.420 --> 29:56.220 So they have the key drivers of this are going to be internal inefficiency, but competitive pressure from the outside. 29:56.340 --> 29:58.500 And our case study is going to be actually Microsoft. 29:59.780 --> 30:04.400 So Microsoft underwent a giant cultural transformation. 30:04.400 --> 30:23.380 Unlike the Gorbachev example, Satya Nadella was the CEO of Microsoft during this time, kind of led a cultural change in Microsoft that shows the potential of strategic and successful inside-only initiated change. 30:23.380 --> 30:32.240 So before Nadella became Microsoft CEO, Microsoft, as we all know, was an institutional giant, right? 30:32.240 --> 30:36.680 That was really hurting from a sort of know-it-all culture. 30:37.160 --> 30:40.300 So every team was working in internal silos. 30:40.600 --> 30:42.140 They weren't collaborating with one another. 30:42.280 --> 30:46.100 It was sort of a throw-it-over-the-wall kind of thing, as long as you checked your checkboxes. 30:46.100 --> 30:52.000 It's very similar to how people portray the government working internally. 30:52.340 --> 30:53.380 Collaboration was minimal. 30:53.860 --> 31:03.860 There was this sort of individualistic, risk-averse mindset that kind of stifled them making any changes to their software because they controlled it. 31:03.960 --> 31:13.440 I mean, they controlled basically the computer world for a very long time by taking what were business machines and putting them into people's homes so that they could use them in both. 31:13.440 --> 31:40.280 So as a long-tenured insider, Nadella was kind of in a position to understand the roots of these problems and create sort of a radical change in the company's culture as a whole by rapidly transforming the ethos and then underpinning that with cultural policy that supported that ethos change. 31:40.280 --> 31:54.520 And so the strategy that Nadella used was basically applying change management principles, something that the software and technology world uses very, very heavily even still today. 31:55.240 --> 32:01.280 His first step was to create a vision of a learn-it-all company, right? 32:01.320 --> 32:05.000 Which changes from a know-it-all to a learn-it-all company, meaning we'll work with anything. 32:05.320 --> 32:06.360 We'll work with everything. 32:06.680 --> 32:10.360 We'll learn all technologies and be masters of all domains. 32:11.240 --> 32:13.140 And it was more than a slogan, right? 32:13.180 --> 32:26.040 It was kind of a metaphor designed to create this sense of urgent change and urgent transformation to replace this old, rigid, siloed identity of Microsoft as a company. 32:26.840 --> 32:36.220 And it was a call to action, really, for every single individual employee to embrace a growth mindset, not a gross mindset. 32:36.480 --> 32:38.640 Basically, hey, look, learn from your mistakes. 32:39.360 --> 32:43.240 Look at your challenges as opportunities to make a positive change, right? 32:43.300 --> 32:44.020 Like, I mean, that's it. 32:44.620 --> 32:53.100 And to operationalize all of it, Nadella created a series of practical people-centered changes that aligned with models like ADCAR. 32:55.460 --> 32:58.740 And that model is basically a five-step program. 32:58.940 --> 32:59.940 You can look it up online. 33:00.040 --> 33:04.420 But if you do just a quick Google search, you can see that A stands for awareness. 33:05.100 --> 33:06.300 D is for desire. 33:06.760 --> 33:07.560 K is for knowledge. 33:07.700 --> 33:08.460 A is for ability. 33:08.640 --> 33:10.700 And R is for reinforcement. 33:12.700 --> 33:30.300 He basically said, we'll announce the changes to the employees well ahead of time, explain the reasoning behind the change, include a plan, plan points and potential returns on investment, and then give the opportunity for employees to actually ask questions and also make suggestions on how to implement it. 33:31.820 --> 33:42.460 The D was for desire to gauge employees' reactions to see how they were going to react to it, identify people who really wanted to sort of take a leadership role within that change. 33:42.460 --> 33:53.860 And if employees were either resistant or indifferent, address their concerns and show their concerns how the change can actually benefit them as an individual. 33:54.220 --> 34:00.980 The knowledge part was just to provide training and coaching to make sure that they had the ability to do the change. 34:01.580 --> 34:06.980 And then A for ability is to schedule practice runs before the change is fully implemented. 34:06.980 --> 34:09.140 So that way they can monitor performance. 34:09.300 --> 34:14.000 They can follow the change, provide constructive feedback, and either show that it's working or not working. 34:14.480 --> 34:20.200 And then reinforcement to monitor the change over time to make sure that it sort of fulfills the desired outcome. 34:20.480 --> 34:30.180 And then use the positive feedback with a reward situation to recognize and encourage those people to keep following the new process. 34:30.180 --> 34:31.460 That's called ACTAR. 34:31.600 --> 34:36.560 It's used very heavily throughout businesses to make a large cultural change. 34:37.040 --> 34:40.720 But no one did it as well as Nadella. 34:40.720 --> 34:52.280 So he replaced the ranking system with a dynamic system that actually assessed the employees based upon what they contributed to the whole rather than to their individual teams. 34:52.280 --> 35:05.940 So it created this shift from individual performance to team collaboration and to promote a greater sense of belonging to a whole rather than I work on my tickets and that's what I work on. 35:06.000 --> 35:11.260 And when I'm done, I check off the box and I hand it to the next person because that's not in my job description kind of a thing. 35:12.400 --> 35:15.860 He also pretty heavily invested in his employees' professional development. 35:16.120 --> 35:21.300 All kinds of workshops, millions in training saying that, hey, look, the company values growth. 35:21.300 --> 35:28.300 They were changing the employee culture and were looking for those champions, right, to adopt that mindset. 35:28.700 --> 35:36.300 And Nadella also led by an example, demonstrating empathy, humility, fostered that environment of trust and inclusivity. 35:37.180 --> 35:41.160 The outcomes of this transformation were pretty positive. 35:41.340 --> 35:49.700 I mean, Microsoft's cultural shift is not only accepted, right, but it was fully integrated in the day-to-day work of their actual employees. 35:49.980 --> 36:01.420 I, being a Linux nerd, right, like loving the Linux world, they went from this, you know, boo, boo, Linux, no, just use Microsoft and we'll create a Microsoft version of everything that Linux can do. 36:01.520 --> 36:03.780 They went to this I love Linux thing, right? 36:04.240 --> 36:09.580 And it was an attempt to say, hey, look, whatever you want to work with, you can do it with Microsoft's products. 36:09.840 --> 36:15.580 They really did see a pretty giant transformation as a whole company. 36:16.140 --> 36:21.100 They embraced agility using the agile principles and the innovation. 36:21.940 --> 36:33.040 And basically, Microsoft has kept its reputation as one of the most valuable companies in the world because of Nadella's movements to change how Microsoft saw the world, right? 36:33.040 --> 36:47.720 And I think the key distinction between Mikhail Gorbachev and Nadella were not in their inside initiated approach, but rather the nature of the sort of institutions they were leading, right? 36:47.720 --> 37:02.800 So a corporation can kind of recenter its identity around a new political, sort of apolitical purpose and realign its internal structure to support the vision for what they want their company to be. 37:03.740 --> 37:07.840 However, in an authoritarian state, it's monolithic, right? 37:07.880 --> 37:10.600 There's a monolithic structure from within. 37:10.820 --> 37:16.980 Changing that identity, right, sort of just makes it risk total collapse every time you make a change. 37:17.460 --> 37:25.540 Because authoritarianism requires rigid stability and sort of might equals right is the ethos. 37:26.420 --> 37:34.060 Therefore, the efficacy of an inside initiated change is pretty contingent upon the institutional context. 37:34.240 --> 37:40.940 So that's sort of why I bring up the difference between Gorbachev and on Microsoft. 37:41.200 --> 37:44.880 I think there are a lot of distinctions that are important here at different levels. 37:45.020 --> 38:00.640 One of the challenges that you really can't, I mean, you just have to deal with the hand you're dealt in a sense, is that, like you said, Gorbachev is coming from this monolithic, you know, concentrated power, system of power, where, you know, the party had all the power. 38:00.640 --> 38:07.540 And people were suspicious of each other and they were encouraged to be suspicious of each other and to report crimes and things like that. 38:07.600 --> 38:15.680 Like they created a culture of suspicion and distrust and then tried to engender immediate trust by just opening up all the books on everything. 38:15.800 --> 38:19.340 And when all that did was basically validate everybody's worst fears. 38:20.400 --> 38:32.640 Whereas Microsoft had, you know, the advantage of being, you know, a corporation and a democratic society and they had some things that were tailwinds for them instead of headwinds. 38:33.040 --> 38:39.020 But also you had management, you know, willing to follow through and to commit to making the changes. 38:39.360 --> 38:47.020 And I think management could lead by example without sort of blowing up the whole system to prove that they meant what they said. 38:47.500 --> 38:55.740 So I think there are some challenges there that were inherent, but it's important to notice some of the hallmarks of successful versus unsuccessful internal change. 38:56.560 --> 38:56.960 Exactly. 38:57.440 --> 39:04.960 So the next sort of use case or example case is the Arab Spring that we talked about a little bit earlier. 39:04.960 --> 39:08.880 Now, this originated from a mass movement. 39:09.060 --> 39:10.720 Now, this was in 2010 to 2012. 39:11.020 --> 39:14.100 I don't know why I was thinking it was in the 70s. 39:14.180 --> 39:17.060 I think there was some sort of, I think that was the Shah of Iran. 39:17.300 --> 39:22.320 But anyway, he was actually, this is what they were fighting was what happened in the 70s. 39:22.400 --> 39:24.880 But the Arab Spring was from 2010 to 2012. 39:25.700 --> 39:32.480 And that is a perfect example of sort of this bottom up outside initiated change. 39:33.440 --> 39:46.400 And it's a, it goes to show really how it's potential for massive change and the challenges that can arise from external influence. 39:46.900 --> 39:53.200 So the revolutionary wave began with the self-immolation of a street vendor in Tunisia. 39:53.200 --> 39:59.020 I think this was the setting himself on fire, if I'm not mistaken, in Tunisia. 39:59.220 --> 40:00.220 And it was a protest, right? 40:00.220 --> 40:00.840 And it was a protest, right? 40:00.840 --> 40:14.560 Like it was an act of protest against public discontent with authoritarian regimes, with the economic hardship and the lack of political freedom that they experienced there. 40:15.240 --> 40:36.540 And it's a classic example of how low external efficacy, how we perceive the ability for an institution or government to make change among the populace, where a single act of defiance, this person, sparked a widespread sense of shared grievance. 40:37.260 --> 40:42.680 And the belief that collective action could actually force the government to change. 40:43.180 --> 41:05.800 So there were additional subsequent uprisings in countries like Egypt, Libya, and then Tunisia were kind of driven by the domestic social movements that use the collective identity and social networks, which at this time is starting to become pretty heavily used across the world, to mobilize people in vast numbers, right? 41:05.800 --> 41:25.320 So this aligned with resource mobilization theory, which kind of says that movements succeed by gathering and deploying both material resources like funding and actual people power with non-material resources like legitimacy and social networks to achieve their goals. 41:25.320 --> 41:32.340 One of the goals here on the overlap has always been to align with resource mobilization, right? 41:32.440 --> 41:41.500 To gather people to create change and to create a movement that has the ability to create change from the bottom up rather than from the top down. 41:42.300 --> 41:46.080 But the outcomes of these movements varies widely. 41:46.080 --> 41:57.400 And really it sort of depends on to what degree external intervention is influencing those movements. 41:57.700 --> 42:08.200 So the research actually shows a strong correlation between external influence and the failure to achieve a stable democratic outcome. 42:08.200 --> 42:16.060 For example, in Tunisia, where that actually began, they had a successful transition to a free and democratic state. 42:16.200 --> 42:21.220 Now, this was partly because it received very little foreign aid. 42:21.820 --> 42:33.680 The Tunisian opposition was compelled to organize and create stable institutions on its own, which allowed for a strong foundation to achieve a post-revolution state. 42:33.880 --> 42:47.260 What Will was talking about earlier with that transforming from a transitory movement into a stable governing body, they were able to do that very quickly because there was not a whole lot of outside forces, right? 42:47.300 --> 43:00.240 In contrast, however, Egypt and Libya received significant amounts of financial, diplomatic, and even military and warfare support from the U.S., the EU, the Gulf states. 43:00.240 --> 43:03.640 They experienced much less stable outcomes. 43:04.520 --> 43:08.720 In Egypt, intervention actually contributed to the failure of the revolution. 43:09.200 --> 43:11.620 It led to an autocratic regime. 43:12.880 --> 43:14.220 You remember what autocracy is? 43:14.280 --> 43:15.280 Why don't you tell them, Will? 43:15.720 --> 43:23.900 Well, it's like a self-rule is kind of the idea there, but it's a rule by one individual, right? 43:24.000 --> 43:24.880 Like it takes over. 43:24.920 --> 43:25.240 Yes. 43:26.200 --> 43:32.200 Sort of, that's a better way to describe it, but it's sort of the way I look at it. 43:32.300 --> 43:33.760 I mean, it's despotism, right? 43:34.240 --> 43:37.660 Controlled by a strong leader who rules unilaterally. 43:38.940 --> 43:39.340 Exactly. 43:39.500 --> 43:41.880 Basically, they have unlimited power. 43:42.640 --> 43:46.820 Some despot has unlimited power and governs the whole country. 43:47.820 --> 43:49.440 Sorry, it sounds so real. 43:49.720 --> 43:55.180 So, essentially, Egypt actually returned to an autocratic regime, and we know who that was. 43:55.340 --> 44:04.560 In Libya, they actually had foreign intervention, which, I mean, it had to happen because essentially it was failing as a whole, and it was a humanitarian crisis. 44:06.100 --> 44:19.240 But there were multiple warring factions that were trying to take control of the government in the vacuum that came from the Arab Spring movement, which just led to innocent people's eyes. 44:19.760 --> 44:24.160 Yeah, I think what this highlights is the problem is that, I mean, you can see there's a tipping point here, right? 44:24.220 --> 44:35.240 There's an obvious, it says something about the situation when someone is willing to or chooses to light themselves on fire, literally, rather than continue living under the government that they're under. 44:35.520 --> 44:42.880 And that's the only way they can both communicate their frustrations and also address them is to literally light himself on fire. 44:43.320 --> 44:54.220 But the challenge is that you have to have something, you have to have a picture of what a good government would look like or what things look like after you've replaced this horrific, you know, terrorizing government. 44:54.740 --> 44:55.740 What happens next? 44:55.820 --> 45:00.380 And I don't think there was a sense of what was going to happen next, a clear sense of that in the Arab Spring. 45:01.000 --> 45:05.080 And a lot of people, I think, believe that led to the failure of the project. 45:05.080 --> 45:13.620 Although it certainly achieved revolutionary change, it didn't create a sustainable path forward for those governments. 45:14.440 --> 45:15.480 Well, for sure. 45:16.000 --> 45:26.000 I also think that when you're dealing with help, right, from external forces, you're also subject to the desires and whims of the external forces. 45:26.200 --> 45:33.360 And in some cases, they might be to just destabilize you so that they can take advantage of you in some way, right? 45:33.500 --> 45:43.880 I mean, foreign intervention can actually make the conflicts longer and disrupt the internal process of building consensus within those institutions. 45:44.180 --> 45:47.220 I mean, I can I can name like, I don't know, 90 countries. 45:47.300 --> 45:50.920 The United States has done it over over something as simple as oil. 45:51.240 --> 45:53.820 Yeah. So that's that's I mean, that's another example. 45:53.920 --> 45:55.720 That's an example of a bottom up. 45:55.780 --> 46:03.420 Again, if you're following along with that little graph we're posting on a blue sky, you can see that that is sort of a mass populist movement. 46:03.420 --> 46:05.100 Right. Comes directly from the outside. 46:05.100 --> 46:13.220 It really sort of is driven by public discontent, low efficacy as an institution as a whole. 46:13.560 --> 46:14.440 So let's take a look. 46:14.520 --> 46:18.100 Now we're going to take a look at a sort of forced adaptation. 46:18.380 --> 46:28.300 External stakeholders basically from the outside using market forces and reputational damage to enact change within an organization. 46:28.680 --> 46:33.500 The example for this is actually going to be Papa John's. 46:33.500 --> 46:39.760 Papa John's pizza, you guys all remember, kind of embroiled in turmoil because apparently Papa John was kind of an asshole. 46:41.260 --> 46:48.880 But but out so outside change really isn't isn't our outside initiated change really isn't limited to political revolutions. 46:49.580 --> 46:52.700 It's kind of a growing and powerful force in the corporate world as well. 46:52.700 --> 47:02.440 And we're seeing it with things like, you know, the whole GME to the moon thing with the stock market, you know, that was driven largely by a an amassed group of people. 47:03.480 --> 47:08.740 Shareholder activism and consumer boycotts kind of represent a shift in power dynamics. 47:08.740 --> 47:22.020 We just saw it recently with Target kind of forcing institutions to change their policies, to change their viewpoints, to change the way that they're acting out in the world to adapt to pressures from their internal hierarchies. 47:22.020 --> 47:28.280 And the company's like Papa John's pizza is a good example of this. 47:28.280 --> 47:33.300 The company crisis was triggered by John, who was literally the face of the brand. 47:33.380 --> 47:34.260 He was in every commercial. 47:34.580 --> 47:35.940 He was the brand. 47:36.080 --> 47:37.180 He was Papa John. 47:37.280 --> 47:37.460 Right. 47:37.540 --> 47:39.520 He made controversial public statements. 47:39.520 --> 47:39.900 Right. 47:39.900 --> 47:46.680 And and subsequent internal misconduct allegations led to a really large loss of public trust. 47:46.680 --> 47:50.060 And ultimately, the stock tanked. 47:50.060 --> 47:59.140 I mean, the company was facing a threat from both its founder internally, as well as a threat from its stakeholders. 47:59.580 --> 48:06.040 So the board originally sort of responded to the threat was kind of and they were kind of defensive. 48:06.040 --> 48:06.440 Right. 48:06.560 --> 48:11.500 They the internal threat was sort of a defensive move, a poison pill, a pill, they called it. 48:11.740 --> 48:19.080 Stockholder rights plan designed to prevent John, the founder, from actually regaining control of the company. 48:19.180 --> 48:22.240 A poison pill is a defensive tactic. 48:23.100 --> 48:32.320 It's basically used to dilute the stake of a hostile acquirer by and by the board time to make a decision in the company's long term interests. 48:34.400 --> 48:37.920 Do you know a whole lot about like poison pills in this scenarios? 48:38.760 --> 48:40.380 I wouldn't say I'm an expert on it. 48:40.480 --> 48:41.000 I mean, stretch. 48:41.280 --> 48:46.900 But it's basically just the idea that you take something that could be deadly to you because, you know, be deadly to the acquirer. 48:46.960 --> 48:55.960 Right. So it's like it's taking your own value so that you're diminishing the ability of anybody else to come in and do it themselves or take control. 48:56.820 --> 48:58.200 So it's. 48:58.440 --> 48:58.540 Yeah. 48:58.620 --> 49:02.560 And so they released all the information, essentially, like they released the internal stuff. 49:02.560 --> 49:05.860 They basically were like they pulled a Gorbachev. 49:06.000 --> 49:06.120 Right. 49:06.180 --> 49:11.680 They just they they went all full glass nost and said said, look, here here's what it is. 49:11.700 --> 49:12.180 And it sucks. 49:12.520 --> 49:21.340 And so while the board was actually fighting that internal battle and responding to the external pressure, 49:22.480 --> 49:26.720 that reputational damage actually led to massive financial losses. 49:26.720 --> 49:27.020 Right. 49:27.060 --> 49:29.620 And really a negative impact on public opinion. 49:29.860 --> 49:35.560 At that time, Papa John's like my wife and I still don't don't order pizza from Papa John's. 49:35.760 --> 49:41.000 We try to stick to local if we can every now and then I am guilty of eating Domino's over Pizza Hut. 49:41.180 --> 49:42.320 It's just my personal preference. 49:42.680 --> 49:43.380 Don't come at me. 49:43.780 --> 49:44.920 Don't at me in the comments. 49:45.200 --> 49:49.720 But otherwise, I prefer I prefer local brands or local chains to those. 49:50.080 --> 49:52.740 It's because of part of this thing before before this. 49:52.840 --> 49:53.720 I didn't really think about it. 49:53.780 --> 49:54.520 It was pizza, right? 49:54.820 --> 49:58.760 Like it was either good pizza or it was bad pizza or it was delivered pizza, 49:58.900 --> 50:01.540 which was neither good nor bad. 50:01.540 --> 50:05.360 It was both filling and soggy for some reason. 50:05.900 --> 50:14.900 But the point I'm making there is people were actively boycotting Papa John's and that forced the board to make a decision. 50:15.980 --> 50:24.620 The ultimate resolution wasn't just like a change within the board that were they were like, let's just drop this or let's just do this and we can fix it. 50:24.660 --> 50:29.040 It was actually a hybrid solution driven by external pressures. 50:29.700 --> 50:34.140 So the company's board under that pressure appointed Jeff Smith. 50:34.920 --> 50:47.200 The CEO of the firm called Starboard Value as its new chairman, which effectively brought in an outside force to the inside of the company to actually turn it around. 50:48.200 --> 51:09.520 Now, this case of Papa John's actually demonstrates that the court of public opinion and the power of the shareholder collectives can actually be a mobilized external force enough to compel that institution to make radical changes that its internal leadership might be unwilling or unable to make by themselves or unilaterally. 51:09.720 --> 51:10.120 Agreed. 51:10.440 --> 51:16.320 I mean, that's if you wait until change is forced upon you, it's usually going to be something very painful. 51:17.240 --> 51:26.880 That's one thing we can learn from a lot of these examples is if the leadership doesn't take initiative and doesn't have a plan for a path forward, it's probably going to be devastating. 51:28.000 --> 51:28.480 Exactly. 51:28.480 --> 51:29.620 These radical transformations. 51:30.740 --> 51:31.140 Exactly. 51:31.620 --> 51:34.520 That is the outcome of that one as far as I'm concerned. 51:34.700 --> 51:47.860 At the same time, I do think that because of this, it's also led to situations that are forced into this situation or at least forced to look like this sort of thing happened so that they can make rapid change. 51:47.860 --> 52:05.420 In the case of sort of a hostile takeover from the board perspective is that they can either leak something about one of the owners or one of the board members in order to cause this upward motion from the bottom to change the top. 52:05.660 --> 52:08.240 It's now become a playbook for corporate change. 52:08.760 --> 52:09.280 Exactly. 52:09.960 --> 52:12.600 So that leads to our last one, our last example here. 52:12.600 --> 52:31.180 And this is sort of a negotiated transition with both the elites and the opposition and taking a sort of a hybrid approach of inside and outside, leveraging both, and then driven by internal and external pressures. 52:31.400 --> 52:34.480 And that is the end of apartheid in South Africa. 52:34.480 --> 52:41.020 What do you remember from the apartheid situation in South Africa from your kid brain perspective? 52:41.560 --> 52:43.960 Because we were rather young when this came down too. 52:45.020 --> 52:49.080 Yeah, I mean, I remember Mandela, right? 52:49.840 --> 52:57.840 I remember the sort of protest from his imprisonment, his sort of nonviolent protest. 52:58.420 --> 53:10.200 And I remember Bishop Desmond Tutu, I think, was the one who came in and helped negotiate the path forward for a group, you know, for two groups who couldn't be more diametrically opposed. 53:10.380 --> 53:25.240 I mean, the elites, whites, who basically just robbed South Africa for generations versus, you know, the indigenous people or the people who the country ostensibly belonged to, you know, who had been oppressed for all that period of time. 53:25.240 --> 53:29.860 And the fact that they were able to find a way forward is amazing to me. 53:29.980 --> 53:32.240 I mean, nobody's necessarily happy. 53:32.320 --> 53:35.020 Nobody feels like the justice was fully served. 53:35.520 --> 53:39.720 But it's a lot better on South Africa than it could have been had that been the case. 53:40.020 --> 53:42.700 I think that's what a lot of people saw. 53:44.280 --> 53:46.000 Yeah, I definitely agree with that. 53:46.060 --> 53:48.080 So let's kind of get into the breakdown. 53:48.280 --> 53:49.060 Let's talk about this. 53:49.060 --> 53:55.200 So if you're not familiar or you're only vaguely familiar, I won't I won't do a deep dive on this one. 53:55.280 --> 54:02.580 But this is a reasonably fresh sort of event from the perspective of the world. 54:02.580 --> 54:14.260 So the end of apartheid in South Africa is kind of an example of how a pure inside and a pure outside approach to change sometimes doesn't fit the bill. 54:14.400 --> 54:14.680 Right. 54:14.720 --> 54:31.540 It was it was a negotiated transition, as Will said, that kind of defied that binary choice that showed that the power of a hybrid model where converging internal and external forces create sort of an enabling environment for radical change. 54:31.540 --> 54:38.780 The the apartheid system dying was kind of the result of a confluence of pressures for decades. 54:38.780 --> 54:49.500 Outside forces, namely, literally everybody else that wasn't in South Africa, applied a lot of pressure on the South African government, both from the U.N., from the U.S., the EU. 54:49.760 --> 54:56.440 Humane or human rights associations and human rights organizations throughout the world, NGOs, applied pressure on the South African government. 54:56.660 --> 55:10.940 The U.N. kind of led the call for the economic and cultural sanctions to be placed on South Africa, which placed a significant burden and a really big challenge to the South African economy. 55:10.940 --> 55:26.060 Then the at the end of the Cold War in the late 80s played a big role by kind of removing the apartheid regime's justification as a bulwark against communism, eroding its support from powerful nations like the United States. 55:26.060 --> 55:45.240 At the same time, decades of constant, often incredibly violent protests from black South Africans led by the African National Congress created an unsustainable and ultimately an unstable internal environment. 55:45.240 --> 56:00.420 Now, the African National Congress was actually outlawed and its leaders were subsequently imprisoned. Its persistent resistance and its increasing instability of the country weakened the white government's commitment to maintaining its repressive system. 56:00.420 --> 56:14.380 The key to radical change was not the victory of one side over the other in this case, but really the recognition by both sides that the keeping things as they are, the status quo could really not be maintained. 56:14.380 --> 56:24.880 And I'm going to quote here, could neither be maintained by force forever, nor overthrown by the opposition without considerable suffering, end quote. 56:25.900 --> 56:31.120 So it created kind of a window of opportunity for a settlement that could actually be negotiated. 56:31.380 --> 56:37.720 The change was kind of done through a series of bilateral and multi-party negotiations. 56:38.260 --> 56:45.120 So between the ruling National Party and the African National Congress, it was kind of an elite-driven process. 56:45.120 --> 57:00.360 So the elite process was the mechanism of change, but it was successful because of the prior decades of both external and internal pressure that made the status quo really untenable. 57:01.600 --> 57:13.500 The South African case kind of demonstrates that the efficiency and efficacy of an inside-initiated change is not a standalone phenomenon, right? 57:13.540 --> 57:17.160 It's kind of dependent on a broader context of external forces. 57:17.960 --> 57:23.300 The end of apartheid was really messy. It was very contentious. It was a protracted process. 57:23.300 --> 57:30.780 Political violence was almost continuous throughout even the negotiations in how to put an end to apartheid reasonably. 57:31.800 --> 57:36.060 Now, obviously, these things are not really still resolved. 57:36.180 --> 57:39.480 They're resolved at a legal level. They have not yet been resolved at a cultural level. 57:39.480 --> 57:49.380 We're still seeing massive amounts of income inequality and unjust actions coming from predominantly the white crowd in South Africa. 57:49.380 --> 57:56.620 But this end of apartheid did actually create a new democratic constitution, right? 57:56.780 --> 58:01.340 And they had their first non-racial elections in the history of the country. 58:01.880 --> 58:08.760 So this model of change kind of highlights the need for a dynamically hybrid approach. 58:08.760 --> 58:18.640 Outside pressure creates the conditions for negotiation, while inside leaders willing to make concessions and embrace that new future or that vision can actually carry it out. 58:18.980 --> 58:23.820 Boringly, I created a comparative matrix of case studies and their outcomes. 58:24.620 --> 58:31.420 So I will also post that on the socials for you guys to check out just to see how nerdy I actually am. 58:31.420 --> 58:38.160 But I wanted to sort of ask Will what your viewpoints are. 58:38.440 --> 58:44.460 What's your takeaway from kind of seeing each of these positions and how they turned out? 58:44.520 --> 58:51.140 Now, obviously, you know, I mean, they're all use cases with specific scenarios and drivers and histories and stuff like that. 58:51.200 --> 58:56.780 But is there anything that sort of threads through all of these things for you that goes, you know what? 58:56.820 --> 58:58.360 I think that ellipses. 58:58.360 --> 59:24.240 I think that if there's a through point here in this or an idea that runs through all this for me, it's just that at some point you have to have the buy-in of someone who has power in the existing system or has the capacity to effectuate a sustainable system after the revolutionary point, after the radical transformation, in order to have a successful transformation. 59:24.240 --> 59:36.180 So if you're going to have any kind of sustainable life after a revolution, so to speak, you either need the buy-in of the people in power who can make the changes necessary to bring that about. 59:36.720 --> 59:41.360 Or you have to have some sort of, at the very least, you have to have some sort of plan for what happens after the revolution. 59:41.620 --> 59:42.360 Or somebody does. 59:42.940 --> 59:43.820 Somebody does, yeah. 59:44.980 --> 59:49.320 If you don't have a plan, somebody's got a plan for what happens in your country after you're done. 59:49.880 --> 59:50.280 Right. 59:50.280 --> 01:00:03.580 I think for me, what I saw was that the more complicated the problem or problems, the more nuanced, the grayer the solution became. 01:00:04.020 --> 01:00:07.040 And sometimes, I mean, sometimes they achieved it, sometimes they didn't, right? 01:00:07.280 --> 01:00:14.300 Ultimately, the more complex the problem, the more complex was the solution. 01:00:14.860 --> 01:00:23.560 I think it's really easy to hear someone speaking from a populist perspective saying, the answer is simple. 01:00:24.420 --> 01:00:32.260 All we have to do is, and then here's a list, a top-down ordered list of everything that we need to do to make radical change in our country. 01:00:32.380 --> 01:00:34.060 Far more simple than you ever realized. 01:00:34.060 --> 01:00:40.760 For me, it's that it's far more complex than any one person can have a simple answer for. 01:00:40.880 --> 01:00:41.320 Agreed. 01:00:42.900 --> 01:00:43.340 Yeah. 01:00:43.580 --> 01:00:47.340 So that is basically it for this podcast. 01:00:47.520 --> 01:00:51.120 It wasn't necessarily to come out of here going, you know what? 01:00:51.340 --> 01:00:52.040 You know what works? 01:00:52.160 --> 01:00:54.060 A top-down approach always works. 01:00:54.300 --> 01:00:56.560 Or, hey, a bottom-up approach is the only path. 01:00:56.600 --> 01:01:01.740 Or even, hey, why can't we all just find the magical middle and come to some conclusion? 01:01:01.740 --> 01:01:22.560 I think it's highlighting that we need to break apart specific areas of identified areas of change and tackle it from multiple approaches based upon what our skill sets are to resolve the problem that we have. 01:01:22.560 --> 01:01:26.060 And look, I think it's fair to say, like, we all have a problem right now. 01:01:26.980 --> 01:01:30.120 The problem is the government is not working for us. 01:01:30.340 --> 01:01:33.820 And I think that's universal to the American experience right now. 01:01:34.380 --> 01:01:40.060 None of us currently feel like the government is doing what it can to benefit us. 01:01:40.260 --> 01:01:48.420 And I'm not trying to whitewash and sort of gloss over the terrible atrocities that the current administration is doing. 01:01:49.120 --> 01:01:55.200 But the people who elected him ultimately just wanted to see the government change. 01:01:55.540 --> 01:02:02.020 They wanted to see the government be more efficient or, in some cases, cease to exist. 01:02:02.040 --> 01:02:07.120 But ultimately, we can all agree that the government isn't working for us. 01:02:07.180 --> 01:02:13.660 And I think we're coming quickly to a place where there's not a table big enough for all of us to sit at and figure it all out. 01:02:13.720 --> 01:02:27.800 I think, especially with the erosion of trust, the erosion of science and sort of the adoption of this unitary command theory and unifying power into ultimately an autocracy is not the answer. 01:02:28.520 --> 01:02:36.880 And I think more and more people, hopefully more and more people, but seemingly more and more people are starting to wake up to that fact and go, I didn't vote for this. 01:02:37.200 --> 01:02:55.720 And there's a whole lot of our listeners who we know already you didn't vote for this, but the way to affect change is not necessarily to tell the person who's fighting on the inside that they're dumb or fighting on the inside or the person who's fighting externally by showing up to protest that they're dumb because that's never going to change anything. 01:02:55.960 --> 01:02:57.880 The truth is it'll all change something. 01:02:58.880 --> 01:03:05.880 All of it together is the only way to change for the better permanently. 01:03:06.600 --> 01:03:07.580 Does that make sense to you, Will? 01:03:08.100 --> 01:03:09.280 Yeah, it does. 01:03:09.400 --> 01:03:11.740 I mean, it's all part of the equation. 01:03:11.960 --> 01:03:23.320 And I think the problem is we're reaching a point where people are kind of exhausted and suspicious of each other and all the things we talked about and all the problems that we see in other situations like this. 01:03:23.900 --> 01:03:32.160 And yet this is the time where we need clear systems thinking to kind of step in and say, what does this look like? 01:03:32.220 --> 01:03:33.520 What does the path forward look like? 01:03:33.520 --> 01:03:41.300 And we're running out of people with the wherewithal and desire and energy and ability to do that. 01:03:41.940 --> 01:03:51.380 So, you know, we're running out of time to make a change that doesn't cost us, you know, what we have, what we've built over the past 200 plus years. 01:03:52.100 --> 01:03:52.120 Yeah. 01:03:52.260 --> 01:03:58.300 I think the ultimate goal is to do it with the least loss of life as possible at this point. 01:03:58.300 --> 01:04:03.720 Like, it just seems like we're heading down a path where no matter which way we go will lead to the loss of lives. 01:04:03.980 --> 01:04:09.040 And we're running out of the runway to have a no lives lost solution. 01:04:09.360 --> 01:04:19.120 And also not doing anything is also leading to the loss of life already and loss of homes and loss of well-beings and efforts and everything. 01:04:19.120 --> 01:04:23.540 Well, on that cheery note, we're so happy you tuned in with us today here at the Overlap. 01:04:23.640 --> 01:04:25.600 I am super happy to have Will back. 01:04:25.680 --> 01:04:26.460 I hope you are too. 01:04:27.160 --> 01:04:28.980 And I'm sure he's happy to be back. 01:04:29.080 --> 01:04:30.540 Are you happy to be back, Will? 01:04:31.200 --> 01:04:32.060 Very much so. 01:04:32.180 --> 01:04:32.500 Excellent. 01:04:32.500 --> 01:04:36.700 My alternative was not a plan of my own making or a desire of mine. 01:04:37.700 --> 01:04:38.100 Absolutely. 01:04:38.100 --> 01:04:38.780 I'm glad to be back. 01:04:38.940 --> 01:04:39.520 I hear you there. 01:04:40.240 --> 01:04:41.260 Thanks again, guys. 01:04:41.320 --> 01:04:47.780 Remember to check out our Overlap page on Mastodon, our Overlap page on Blue Sky. 01:04:48.080 --> 01:04:49.380 You can check us out. 01:04:49.520 --> 01:04:51.000 You can recommend us to friends. 01:04:51.140 --> 01:04:52.060 You can share our posts. 01:04:52.180 --> 01:04:52.700 You can like. 01:04:52.700 --> 01:04:57.720 You can subscribe through Apple Podcasts or through Spotify or go to our website. 01:04:57.960 --> 01:05:02.220 And you can subscribe using Mastodon if that is a platform you use. 01:05:02.420 --> 01:05:04.620 Our platform is directly integrated with Mastodon. 01:05:05.040 --> 01:05:07.660 So when you subscribe to us, you'll see our new posts as they arrive. 01:05:08.300 --> 01:05:13.960 Otherwise, if you subscribe on your own platform, you will see our posts as they subscribe, as you subscribe. 01:05:14.880 --> 01:05:16.020 Thanks so much for being here. 01:05:16.020 --> 01:05:25.980 Next week, we are going to be talking about crypto, AI, electric cars, what they all have in common and what the future looks like. 01:05:26.500 --> 01:05:28.560 So we will see you next week. 01:05:29.140 --> 01:05:31.940 And for now, that is the Overlap. 01:05:32.340 --> 01:05:33.680 Thanks, everyone. 01:05:34.560 --> 01:05:35.080 Take care. 01:05:35.080 --> 01:05:35.100 Take care. 01:05:35.100 --> 01:06:05.080 Thank you.