David McCloskey

It's not even the difficulty of predicting

these kind of dynamics, but just the impossibility of it.

I mean, because Timur Karan has this political scientist that we've been quoting frequently who's done this great work on kind of revolutions and revolutionary dynamics.

I mean, he's got this great line he was writing about 1989 where he says, pinpointing the specific event that pushed the bandwagon over the hill is akin to identifying the cough responsible for a flu epidemic.

You cannot predict these situations.

You actually can't.

Because that fear changing size point is, again, it's that shift.

It's that incredible shift of the private view becoming the public view.

And yeah, if the East Germans kill hundreds of people in Leipzig, maybe that private view stays private.

Well, I guess in some ways, I mean, you know, there are a couple examples from the Cold War of the Soviet Union and communist forces

crushing uprisings brutally and quickly.

Hungary in 56 and then in Prague in 68.

And I think in both cases, similar dynamics where everybody was surprised that it happened, but then the extreme brutality of the response ensured that fear didn't switch sides and prevented that revolutionary bandwagon.

Gordon, I guess that brings us to the third lens for looking at how an intelligence agency deals with and analyzes unrest, which is near and dear to my heart, which is the Arab Spring of 2011.

It did, yeah.

And I think there were many points here where this revolutionary bandwagon thing, it really resonates with me because you saw it not only spreading inside countries, but across countries throughout the Arab world.

And it was absolutely surprising.

Nobody had predicted that it would happen kind of to this broader point on...

You don't see these things coming.

By definition, they're unpredictable and you can't really forecast them.