Interview With Alvin Toffler

MJ: Mr. Alvin Toffler, thank you for joining us today.

AT: My pleasure.

MJ: I wanted to start by asking you about some of your best known works. Could you tell us a bit about... first of all about Future Shock; when it was written and a general idea of what it's about?

AT: Sure, sure, but first I need to tell you something else, that needs to be underlined, particularly, I would say, in Japan. And that is that Future Shock, and all the books that are attributed to me, have been CO-written by my wife. They are really the products of two minds, two people. Her name is Heidi Toffler. And when Future Shock came out in Japan, my wife,who is blond, blue eyed, and very outspoken, got a headline in Mainichi that said "Japan suffers from Heidi Shock." Anyway, Heidi is my partner, and my intellectual partner, and everything we do we work together. So Future Shock was the product of about five years of research that we did in the late 1960's, and was first published in America in its first hardcover edition in 1970. It came out in Japan in 1971. And the basic thesis of the book was first that change was going to accelerate; things were moving fast, they were going to move faster. Second, that information was one of the driving forces in the new economy. Third, that what we were seeing was what we then called the general crisis of industrialized society, and that we were on the edge of creating a new society, a new form of society, based on a new kind of economy in which knowledge was central. So that was... that was Future Shock, which dealt with the difficulties that people, companies, and countries would have in adapting to high speed change.

QUESTION: You mentioned that your wife had CO-written most

of those works, but early... in the early books you are listed as the

author, and in the later books it's a co-author situation.

AT: Right, right.

QUESTION: Why?

AT: Because I could never persuade her, until relatively

recently. She's basically a private person. She has never felt

comfortable, particularly, in the public eye. She has her own very strong

views about matters, but has never felt the writer's need to see a byline,

and so on. For years I tried to persuade her that it was important for her

to have her name on the books as well, and she says, "Well, I don't care,

maybe they'll sell better if they just have your name on them" and so forth

and so on. But eventually, I persuaded her, because after a while she got

tired of people assuming that they were just the work of one person. And

she was right.

QUESTION: You made some predictions in Future Shock. Which

ones did you see actually come to fruition, and were there any that were

off base?

AT: I think the central thesis of the book, that change

was going to accelerate, now is an accepted fact. When we wrote it, people

said, what do you mean by acceleration, what do you mean by change, and so

on. And indeed, some people just couldn't fathom it. I think today

everybody accepts that change has been accelerating. So the central thesis

was correct. The secondary thesis was that people would find it difficult

to cope with rapid change. And indeed many people do. And even more so,

many organizations and companies do. And that is why you see very large

institutions and companies who have become dinosaurs, or have been wiped

out even because they can't change and adapt quickly to all of these

complex changes. So at a level of the general thesis, or thesis of the

book, I think it has all been correct. There are details, of course, that

are wrong. First, I think you'll find that we almost never, if ever, use

the word predict, because we don't believe it's possible to predict the

future with complete certainty. We wrote in that book, one of the more

amusing things, was a passage about throwaway products. And one of the

throwaway products we refer to were paper clothes. And in fact, that was

one of the products that never succeeded in the marketplace. In fact, I

still have half a drawer full of paper underwear from those days. Those

products never made it in the marketplace, but throw away products became a

very common fact of life. And we now have throwaway everything,

practically. So again, the more general comments were correct. But I would

say that the main weakness of Future Shock, and the thing that Heidi and I

would probably now rewrite, were we to redo the book, were its economics

which is important. And the reason for that was, that back in the '60's, we

were, as we say, still young and naive. Naive enough to believe economists.

And the economists then were almost united in the judgment that they

understood how economies work. The economy was just a big machine, and if

you manipulated it correctly, you could make it do what you wanted. And

they therefore said in effect hat America would never have another

recession or depression, and that all they had to do was, and this was

their actual slogan, was fine tune the system.

Now, people complained, when we wrote Future Shock, that it was too

visionary; too radical. In fact, it wasn't radical enough. Had we

followed through our own thesis, all the way, we would have said, no, no,

they're wrong, that these changes will eventually destabilize the economy,

and force radical changes in the economy as well. But we didn't. We said

that, OK, probably we will continue to see linear growth of the economy,

without many ups and downs, and terrible upsets. So we missed the boat on

that, because we were ready to accept the words of experts. We don't do

that so readily now.

QUESTION: Now in 1980, you published your next work, The

Third Wave.

AT: It wasn't our next book, but it was our next major

book.

QUESTION: Tell us about The Third Wave.

AT: The Third Wave, which took even longer to write, is a

book that said that a new kind of society, or civilization, as we'd call

it, is emerging. And what we said was that, perhaps ten thousand years ago,

the human race invented agriculture. It was some unknown

Einstein...probably a woman, who planted the first seed, and taught us that

you could make nature do what you wanted it to do. And that led to a

gradual shift, from hunting and gathering populations, and small tribal

groups, to the emergence of great agrarian civilizations: permanent

settlements; hierarchical political systems; decentralized, local agrarian

economies, all kinds of new religions, and so forth and so on. For about

ten thousand years, those were... that was the dominant way of life on the

planet. It's the way of life that still billions of human beings lead. All

you have to do is go into hinterland in China, for example, India, many

parts of the world. But about three hundred years ago, a second gigantic

change occurred. The first wave of change was caused by the agrarian

revolution. The second wave of change was the industrial revolution. And

that led to the creation of societies that were based on the substitution,

or the amplification, I should say, of human muscle power, through the

application of new energy sources. So that we then invented the steam

engine, and we began to invent a whole sort of brute force technologies,

and eventually gave rise to a new form of civilization, which is

characterized by mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption,

mass education, mass media, mass sports, mass entertainment, and even

weapons of mass destruction. What happened, as the sociologists and

historians teach us, was that the industrial revolution gave rise to a mass

industrial society. And that was true, whether in Japan, or in Sweden, or

in Korea, or in Russia, or in the United States, wherever you had

industrialization, despite cultural and historical differences, you had

these features, common structures, in the economy, in the society.

And basically what the third wave said is that that civilization is now

in its twilight, and that a new civilization, and a third gigantic wave of

transformatory change was taking... was underway. That this new way of

life would see the de-massification of mass production, the

de-massification of consumption, the de-massification of the media,

ultimately the de-massification of education, the de-massification of

entertainment, recreation, and even of military matters. And in fact we

think that is what is happening, that there are great centrifugal

pressures, pressures toward diversity, and internal differentiation, in all

of our societies, as we go through the transition from the smokestack age

to the computer age.

QUESTION: Now, when you say "de-massification..."

AT: Well, I'll give you some examples, if you like.

QUESTION: Is that the same as decentralization?

AT: No, but decentralization comes with it. What we mean

by de-massification... a good example is this. Heidi and I both, when we

were young, worked in factories, with our hands, not in white shirts and

ties. We worked on the automobile assembly line, she worked in the

aluminum steel... the aluminum foundry, I worked in the steel foundry. Our

job, as was the job of all the workers, was to turn out the longest

possible run of identical products. Well, that was what we knew as mass

production. And we'd been told by Karl Marx, by Henry Ford, by all the

schools of management, and so on, that mass production was the most

efficient way to produce products. Now if you go to the most advanced

factories, and this is certainly true in Japan, but also true in the United

States, and elsewhere in the world, you find that they're producing not

necessarily long runs of identical products, but customizing the products.

So there may be, you know, twenty seven hundred different models or

versions of a particular automobile. Or there may be choices that were

never available before. And in the US, the leading retailer, WalMart, in

an average WalMart store there are a hundred and ten thousand different

products. So why did this happen? Why did we go from a mass production

system, to what we call a de-massified production system? And the answer

is that whereas the mass production system depended upon brute force, dumb

technologies, the new production system depends on brain power instead of

muscle power, and it all based on computerization, automation,

robotization, and so on, which reduces the cost of diversity, so it is now

cheap to turn out customized products, whereas before it was very

expensive.

If you then look beyond the factory and look at how we distribute goods,

well, there's more and more direct mail, there's more and more niche

marketing, and the visionary marketers in the United States today don't

speak about mass marketing. They talk about particle marketing, marketing

one to one. That is, they then sell a product to one individual family, or

one person. And that, too, is made possible by data banks of information,

about the purchasing and consumption habits, interests of populations that

have been very very finely screened and identified. So you de-massify

production, you de-massify distribution and retailing and marketing, and

then you look at the media, and you find in the United States, and not yet

in Japan, and this is a major drawback for the Japanese,the fact that the

average American home, 65% of the American homes have cable, with 30

channels, and we're moving toward an infinity of channels coming into each

home.

So what we're doing is de-massifying the media. And if you look at

family structure, if you look at political life, if you look at, even

military matters, you find the mass movements are breaking down into small

grass roots movements devoted to special interests, like "save the whales",

or "change the tax system," or feminism, or a wide variety of political

issues. And they are becoming more important, politically, in this

country, than the political parties, which were essentially mass movements

of the past.

QUESTION: Is the corollary in government the

decentralization of power from Washington to your local city council?

AT: Yes, I believe that's true. Yes. And in fact if we

look at what's happening in business, large companies are increasingly

breaking themselves down into smaller profit centers, and smaller units,

which have more autonomy and freedom to operate as though they were small

businesses, then we see a great growth in small business in the United

States. I think the figures are something like, whereas the companies with

over five thousand employees have over the past x number of years reduced

their employment by about 2%, companies with under four employees have

increased 8%. So we see a great growth of small business, and the units

are becoming smaller, and there is a move toward decentralization. Now

when you begin to restructure the business sector and the economy, and

that's being done not because of some management theories,that's being done

because that's the only way to operate in today's... profitably in today's

world, then you're going to see parallel developments in the political

structure, and in the United States, under the new Republican majority in

the House of Representatives and the Senate, there is a tremendous push to

move certain Washington powers back down to, in our case, the states.

Moving it to the states may in fact be a mistake, but our constitution says

that those powers not directly granted by the states, or the constitution,

to the feds, must go back to the states. It may be that a wiser course

would be to send some of those powers back to regions, or directly to

cities, or even to non-geographical communities.

And of course you have the same discussion in Japan, I mean you have...

I can remember when prime minister Tanaka came forth with a plan for

remodeling the archipelago, as he called it, which was both a real estate

scam, and a plan for decentralization, and nothing ever happened, except

that he lost his power. But in a much better way, I believe this is what

Ohmae Kenichi is talking about. And I believe that in many many ways he is

correct.

QUESTION: What are the dangers that accompany the third

wave?

AT: There are dangers. There are many dangers. I think

that there are very subtle dangers that come with computerization. There

are.. and some not so subtle. For example, the information... the process

of informationalizing a society is accompanied by the informationalization

of militaries around the world. And that is, all armies, including the

self defense forces, and the Chinese People's Liberation Army, are all

racing to computerize, and also, we are developing new approaches to very

dangerous weaponry. An example of that is a shift from the manufacture of

special purpose weapons, to the creation of weapons made out of civilian

products, configured in ways that give them lethal potentials. This is in

our book Senso Do Heiwa. We call that the civilianization of the military.

And there's a great danger that what we now call dual use products could

wind up in the hands of very dangerous regimes around the world.

In Asia, I think that there's a great danger of instability. I think

that in China,we will not know probably for another ten or fifteen years

how the succession to Dung Xiao Ping has played itself out. Remember that

when Mao died, they installed Hau Kua Phung, he only lasted a year and a

half or two years. In Yugoslavia, it took ten years after Tito died before

the country exploded. China is bigger, more complex, and what you now have

in China is a good example of what we call wave conflict. You have perhaps

600 million peasants, who continue to live as their ancestors did,

scrabbling for survival in the fields, you have perhaps 100, 200, 250

million people who are living a kind of industrial, second wave way of

life. And now you're beginning to see introduction of third wave

technologies and third wave people, who use cellular telephones, drive

around in Mercedes, are... have more in common with their friends and

relatives in Taiwan, and Singapore, and Vancouver, than they do with the

rest of the Chinese population. And I believe that we're going to see deep

stresses within the Chinese political structure that arise from the

collision of these three different ways of life: an agrarian way of life, a

traditional smokestack, industrial, blue collar way of life, and now a

third wave way of life, and that... the changes are taking place at

extremely high speed, which makes it difficult for them to adapt to them,

and at a point which the communist regime has lost all credibility; Deng is

about to die, or perhaps has died, by the time this is broadcast who knows.

I'll tell you a joke my wife and I make about China. We say that there

are three basic scenarios. One is, Deng Xiao Ping dies, and there is a

smooth succession. The second is that Deng Xiao Ping dies, and there is a

violent succession. And the third is, Deng Xiao Ping refuses to die.

So anyway, I think that there are dangers, military dangers emerging,

that are very closely related to the emergence of the third wave, there are

political instabilities coming, and there are also subtle and personal

things. For example, we are now developing technologies that digitize

imagery, as we all know. In fact, the television camera, by the time it

gets on the air, will have been digitized, and so on. I don't know how many

Japanese viewers saw the American movies In the Line of Fire or Forest

Gump, but in these movies you see how it is possible to take pictures, and

living people today, and digitize them, and put their images into

historical settings, so that it is impossible to tell the difference.

Nobody seeing In the Line of Fire could guess that Clint Eastwood is not a

Secret Service man in John F. Kennedy's protective squad. Nobody seeing

Gump could guess that Tom Hanks did not talk to President Nixon. And there

was a recent article in a publication called Scientific American, which

discussed these technologies, and gave three photographs as examples of

what could be done.

Photograph one: President Bush and Margaret Thatcher. He's walking, it

looks like they're in the Rose Garden outside the White House. He's

walking, and she's about six feet behind him. Picture two: slightly

manipulated. They're walking side by side. Picture three: They're now

walking side by side, they're holding hands, and he's whispering in her

ear. All digitized, and you can't tell the difference. So what is

happening, I believe, is that Hollywood... with the help of special

effects from Hollywood, and from the new technologies, we're creating the

capability of using that camera to lie to you in ways that were never

before possible. And not just television, but movies as well, and so on.

QUESTION: And future societies will have no way of knowing

whether something is accurate or not.

AT: Very difficult. Therefore what we're seeing is an

attack in a sense on truth itself. And what we've said elsewhere is that

the technologies of deception are outrunning the technologies of

verification. So there are a lot of dark sides and problems that we have to

deal with, and perhaps the deepest of these all will be those that arise

out genetic manipulation, manipulating the gene to create new life forms

and new creatures. And even, who knows, a radical extension of human life;

a whole set of ethical and moral questions, that none of our political

systems, and not even in our religions are prepared to cope with.

QUESTION: How important will it be for...

AT: By the way, we wrote about that 25 years ago in Future

Shock, but they're coming to roost today.

QUESTION: How important will it be for religious and moral

principals and values to continue to prevent the kind of things you're

talking about, or is there a role for that in the future?

AT: Well, I think we're seeing a great resurgence of

religion, in the... which is a consequence of the breakdown of not only

industrial technology and industrial society, but of the morality and

values that came with an industrial society. As we move out of the

industrial age, into what some have called the post-industrial age, or the

third wave society, everything changes. Family structures begin to change,

political structures eventually will have to change. And as... And in

parallel with that, I think we will see, and are seeing all ready, a great

searching. And that helps explain the rise of all kinds of peculiar cults

like Aum Shinrikyo, or many, many in this country, perhaps less dangerous,

but some, who knows will be more dangerous. And it also, by the way, it

also, it helps explain the great rise of Islam as a political force, and of

the Vatican as a political force.

QUESTION: I guess what I'm asking you is...

BLACK OUT

QUESTION: The new Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, is a

big fan of yours, has been talking about your books, and I think he

actually asked his colleagues to read your books, and has a reading list.

AT: Oh, yes. He held up a reading list to all members of

congress, and indeed, by extension, to the whole country, and said there

are several very important books to read, and we were sort of honored,

flattered, and surprised to see ourselves on list with the Declaration of

Independence, the Federalist Papers, the works of De Toqueville, all of

which are very important in American history. And of course, we enjoyed, we

enjoyed the excitement that followed that.

But we've known Newt Gingrich for many, many years before he became,

not only before he became Speaker of the House, but we knew him before he

even became a politician, because we've known him and his wife Marianne for

many, many years. We first met him when he was a young college professor.

And I gave a speech... after we wrote Future Shock, I gave a speech in

Chicago, to an educational conference, and this young professor from

Georgia flew up to hear me speak. And so that's where we first met. And as

I say, we've had a very warm, friendly relationship all of these years. In

fact our daughter sometimes calls him Uncle Newt.

QUESTION: How is Newt Gingrich implementing Heidi and Alvin

Toffler's ideas?

AT: Very selectively and partially. Newt is a politician,

he has to keep his party with him, he has to respond to powerful

constituencies within the Republican Party, which include some

constituencies that Heidi and I sharply disagree with. And as a result, I

think that he has been primarily preoccupied in the last year with what I

would call old business. I mean the Contract with America, which were ten

particular promises that the Republicans under Newt's leadership made; they

were going to accomplish these things... were primarily things that have

been on their agenda for many, many years, and not terribly exciting, or

novel, or interesting. However, there were certain key things that were.

The central thrust, of the Gingrich revolution, as it has been called, is

to devolve power out of Washington. That is directly in line with what we

have written in The Third Wave, and Future Shock, and almost all of our

works. So that is the central direction of the change he is pushing, falls

directly in place. There... The places where America by now is pretty well

aware, we disagree with our friend, we disagree with him over some very

important moral issues. For example, whereas Newt has to respond to a very

powerful Republican constituency that hates the very thought of abortion,

my wife and I believe that women should have the right to choose. And

that's a source of great, passionate disagreement in America.

QUESTION: Do you think he doesn't actually believe that, or

does he believe it and respond to his constituency?

AT: I think that Newt... Let's put it this way. Among the

politicians we know, Newt probably believes more of what he says than most

other politicians. I do know that, oh, fifteen years ago, Heidi and I and

his own wife were up late at night arguing with him these very issues. And

his wife and my wife said Newt will kill you if you don't say (joking )

that this is wrong. But we would like to see him take a very firm stand

in favor of choice. I doubt he will do that, because it risks losing a

major chunk of the Republican support.

Similarly, we believe very strongly in religion... in religious

freedom, but also freedom for non-believers, people who do not have any

explicit religious beliefs. And we believe that there needs to be a very

clear separation between what we call in America, church and state. Newt is

himself religious, and argues that the traditional distinctions between

church and state, that existed going back to the American revolution, that

his definition of the distinction between, or the barrier between church

and state are different from our definition, and so there are many issues

on which we disagree.

But Newt, for example... one of the key changes in America, in the work

force. That we have seen, and that indeed we wrote about in The Third....

in Future Shock, 25 years ago, and in Die San Tsunami, 15 years ago, was

that we said that people would start working at home. At the time that

that was published, we were ridiculed. We were called visionaries, fools,

for suggesting anything as crazy as that. Well, today

in the US something between 25, and 30, or 40 million people do some or

all of their work at home. And increasing... The numbers are increasing

very very rapidly with the use of PCs, communication technologies, and so

on. Now, we regard that as a move toward the third wave. That's a move

out of the 9 to 5, rote repetitive, muscle work of the factory; that

pattern of work.

Who's in favor of it, and who's against it? What you find is that the

two groups, institution groups in America who oppose it, are the trade

unions, because it's much harder to organize people when they work at home,

and the tax people; the Internal Revenue Service. Who's in favor of it?

Newt Gingrich. Newt wants to make it easier for people to work at home,

rather than more difficult. Look at the Internet. Just recently, a

Democrat senator, from Nebraska Exon, pushed through a bill in the American

Senate to censor pornography on the Internet. It was indeed a truly stupid

bill, because the internee is not an American phenomenon. It is a global

phenomenon, and there is no way that it's going to be able to... there's no

way that law can even be properly enforced, because information and images

and stuff flow across borders instantaneously. It was Newt Gingrich who

publicly attacked that censorship, and said, while of course, we're against

pornography addressed to children, that you can't deal with it with the new

technology of the Internet, the way you tried to deal with movies, or

television or previous technologies that are radically different. So he...

he became an instant hero to the computer community, and the... and the

young people basically who have made the Internet into a phenomenal new

communications vehicle for the third wave.

There are many, many issues on which we would agree with Newt. Newt is a

strong supporter of the space program. We agree with that. Newt

understands the value of technology. He... He also... He is not a blind

pro-technology person, but he understands how important it is. We agree

with that. Newt understands also, as far as foreign policy is concerned,

that this is in fact a dangerous world, that the Cold War... the so-called

end of the Cold War has not eliminated risk, but has made a much more

disorderly world. And he is... he is much more he understands a lot about

the role of the military in world power, not just as a tool used for force,

but as a way to avoid violence. And the most important uses of the

American military over the past 50, 45-50 years, has in fact been to deter

violence, rather than to create violence. There have been exceptions, but

certainly in the US - Japanese relationship, our military relationship

has been the great stabilizer for the Asia/Pacific region, and as I say,

Newt understands the nonviolent uses of the military. I think that's

really important. So, there are many, many things on which we agree, and

there are a few things on which we sharply disagree.

(Question, then answer is interrupted)

(After break)

QUESTION: Many Americans in one form or another fear a

strong central government of some kind will accompany this third wave

technology a one world type government. Are those legitimate fears, and

what are your thoughts?

AT: Well, I think that there's a great deal of foolishness

and naïveté on all sides with respect to that issue. On the one side, you

have a bunch of people marching around in the forests wearing camouflage

suits, and carrying the current equivalent of muskets, and they're going to

protect the great American nation against the invasion of UN forces.

This is such a lunatic notion; the UN could not fight its way out of a

wet paper bag. Nor could it make a sense... a bunch of sensible decisions

about any of this. The UN is an extremely weak organization, and is not

to be taken seriously in these terms.

Now, what is underlying the fear is not the United Nations, which is

bureaucratic, and obsolete in many ways, and so on, but in fact the growing

integration of the world economy. It is, it is the fact that more and more

countries are more and more closely interconnected economically that gives

a sense of the loss of sovereignty. People worry about that, and feel

strongly that they're losing control of their own existence.

A very good example... Our analysis of this issue of nations, and

nationalism, and sovereignty goes like this; that if you are a basically,

backward, agrarian economy, people in that kind of a society see the nation

building, the creation of independence and sovereignty as a step toward

modernization, by which they typically mean industrialization, second wave

industrialization. And that is why you see in many parts of the world,

agrarian groups, or very... or communities that are just in the early

stages of industrialization demanding nation-state status, a seat in the

United Nations, a flag, an army, a currency of their own, and are

passionately... passionate nationalists.

Now the irony of all of this is that when you look at the more... the

societies with more advanced economies, including the US and Japan, you

see that sovereignty itself and the nature of the nation itself is being

totally redefined. I wouldn't perhaps go quite as far as Ohmae Kenichi in

saying it's the end of the nation-state, but the nation-state is becoming

less important because other groups and forces are becoming more important

on the global stage.

Islam is not a nation-state, but it sure has political and international

power. The same thing is true, as I said earlier, of the Vatican. The same

thing is true of other forces, like Green Peace.

Not long ago, there was a big dispute between the Shell oil company and

the European Union. The Shell oil company was going to sink an oil

platform, I believe in the North Sea. And Green Peace, a civil society

organization, an organization made up of ecology oriented individuals

protested this. And before you knew it, Shell had been forced to back

down. And they decided they would not then sink it, they would dismantle it

and do something else.

Now what happened there is Green Peace compelled action by the European

Union as a whole, and by Germany and so on. So here you have an

organization that is not a nation, that is not a state, that is not a

corporation, that is not a religion, but has the power to shape decisions

made by governments, and even by groups of governments. This is a different

world than the world of nation-states that grew up with the industrial

revolution.

Now we come to Japan and the United States. I'm always amused at the

change in the nature of our relationship. Heidi and I were sitting in

the... in our suite at the Okura hotel, when we heard that as part of the

structural impediment initiative talks, the Americans were demanding of

Japan that Japan change its retail distribution system and allow chain

stores, and other mega stores to flourish. It struck us that the demand by

the Americans for Japan to change its retail distribution system was not

just a matter of just sort of economic technicalities, but in fact a very

important social change and political change. It threatens a whole strata

of what we call "Mom and Pop" small businesses; families, and so on. And so

Japan was being asked to make a social change, and not just an economic

change. And in addition, it was being asked... and the LDP was being asked

to make a political change, and it was dangerous for the LDP, because this

is a community that supports the LDP. It struck us that if the United

States had gone not to Tokyo, but had gone, say, to Brasilia, or gone to

any Latin American capital, with the same demands, the response would have

been burning effigies of Uncle Sam in front of embassies, marching crowds

screaming "Yankee go home," "Invasions of our national dignity," and so

forth and so on. But how did Japan respond? None of that happened. Japan's

response was very interesting to us. It took months before there was in

fact a formal response. And then the Japanese said, 'well, OK, we'll

accommodate you, we will make these changes, but we think America should

improve its education system, think long range,' and so on. Now what we

were doing, both of us, were invading each other's cultural and social

sovereignty in ways that former colonies would have found intolerable. And

I believe that as we move toward the third wave, the inter dependencies

become more dense between the advanced third wave economies. And that's why

you see a kind of neo-nationalism rising. And we now know that governments

are losing control of the levers of power. In the United States, and even

to some degree Japan, the governments are losing their monopoly of violence

or their control of violence. They're losing control of economic matters,

because the world currency markets, the foreign exchange is so tremendous

that the central banks aren't big enough to influence that market very

deeply or consistently. They're losing... certainly losing control over

information flows. Lee Kuan Yew can say all he wants, don't allow

satellites or cable television to bring certain kinds of programs into

Singapore, but if in fact he tried to make that happen, he would find it

extremely difficult to keep information out, as did the Russians. And the

Singaporean economy would suffer the consequences of such a policy. So. The

three basic levers of power that states have: the power violence, or the

control of violence, the power of money and economics, and the power of

information are all slipping from their grasp. And the result is that we're

moving into a completely new way of life which could bring with it a great

deal of instability, some chaos and anarchy, and people are frightened. And

so they go back to "Why can't we have the nation as it once was?" Well,

you can't have contradictory things simultaneously without great strains

and difficulty.

QUESTION: Would you tell us about a typical day in your

life these days, if there is such a thing?

AT: Well, the answer is there are several different kinds

of typical days. One typical day is just being on the telephone all day

long, talking and responding to outside requests and so on. A second kind

of typical day is spent on airplanes and airports, and moving across the

world, because in the last year for example we've been... either one of us

or both of us together have been everywhere from South Africa to Brazil,

Argentina, Colombia, Japan, Sing... not Singapore, Kuala Lam pore, Manila,

and so forth. We travel constantly - Switzerland, France - all over the

world. So we do an extreme... We have an extremely heavy travel schedule,

and that then puts us in touch with extremely interesting people all around

the world, who we think are either making change, or resisting change,

which helps us try to understand what's going on. A different typical day

is in between all of those things. It's staying home, it's reading, it's

going out to lunch with a note pad, and reading, or outlining a chapter or

an article, being quite alone and so on, so there are many kinds of typical

days, and then, like any family, we have our own personal, you know,

matters to deal with, such as health problems to deal with occasionally,

and so on. Not our own, mainly, but in our family.

QUESTION: How did you meet your wife, and did she have any

idea what she was getting into when she married you?

AT: Well, OK, we met in probably August of 1948. We've been

married for 45 years. From that first date, we were basically inseparable,

except for about three weeks, when, before we got married, we had the usual

fight, we separated for about three weeks, and then I was in a bookstore,

and I saw... I said, well, I'm going to have to get a new girlfriend. And

I saw a beautiful blonde from the back looking at some books, and I saddled

up to her, and I started to say "Do you find that book interesting?" so we

could... I could have a conversation with her, and she turned around, and

it was Heidi again. And from that day on, we've been inseparable. We met

through a college classmate. Somebody who was in my class, a young girl in

my class had gone to high school with Heidi, and introduced us. And the

answer is neither one of us knew what we were getting into. Neither one of

us would have dreamt that our lives would have taken exactly the turn we

did, except in one respect, that is that I knew from the time I was seven

years that my destiny was to write. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I had

role models in the family; an uncle and aunt who were intellectuals during

the Great Depression, and who... and my family as well greatly honored the

word, the written word, and so this is what I wanted to do since I was a

child. And Heidi and I have been lucky enough to have what we think are the

world's best jobs.

QUESTION: Thank you for joining us today.

AT: My pleasure