Transcript of World Collapse Expert (Ian Bremmer): The Real Crisis Is What Comes After Trump New

These conversations aren't always easy, but nonetheless, they are important. So every single year, Professor Ian Bremmer, who's one of the world's leading political scientists, produces this risk report, and it highlights the top 10 biggest risks that everybody should be thinking about. And today, he's going to talk to me about the 3 that matter the most. So he predicts that a US political revolution is on its way.

The US has become the biggest driver of geopolitical uncertainty in the world, and in my view, Trump will fail.

And he also says that the other thing everybody needs to be talking about and aware of is what's really playing out with AI behind the scenes.

They created a model which is so powerful that they couldn't release it because it would've been an immediate systemic risk to the global economy and our security. And artificial intelligence is eating its users, and we can talk about that.

And lastly, I wanna end on a point of optimism. Can we take this craziness and turn it into a utopia with realistic solutions Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. Ian Bremmer, what is this document that I have in front of me here?

This is our Top Risks report. We put it out at the beginning of every year, try to help people around the world understand the risk environment globally.

So for the last 30 years, your firm has been trying to understand the world to help make better decisions based on the big picture of what's happening geopolitically.

Yeah.

And every year your firm releases this top risk report.

Yeah.

The 2026 one appears to be pretty prophetic because a lot of the things that you list as the top risks are playing out before our eyes. For anyone that hasn't read this report, what are the most important subjects? You wrote this in January. We're now sat here in April, I believe.

Yeah.

What are the most important subjects of the top 10 risks that you think we should talk about today?

I think that there are 3 that are really big. The first is that the United States has become the biggest driver of risk, the biggest driver of geopolitical uncertainty in the world. And we see that with the tariffs, we see that with Venezuela, we see it with Greenland, We see it with Iran. I mean, if there was that level of uncertainty in a smaller political system, and that happens all the time, we wouldn't care as much because the global impact would not matter. But everyone out there is affected by even small changes in the United States. Suddenly, big changes in the United States. The Americans are saying, "We no longer want to play by the rules that we set up historically. We don't want the free trade system that we put together. We don't want to be We don't want the global policeman that is paying for the collective security. We don't want the open borders that used to welcome so many people from around the world. We want a very different set of rules. The American system is not being challenged by the Chinese saying we don't want. The Americans themselves and the leadership are saying, "We refuse to be the leader that we used to be." So that's number one.

Yeah, that is number one.

And this is a critical risk.

That is a critical risk. That's the most important. Without any question. And again, I say critical in terms of it is happening right now. It is overwhelmingly likely, it's overdetermined, and the impact is massive. So there's no way you could look at the geopolitical order today and not say this is the most important thing that is not just driving headlines, but that's creating real movement in how the global economy works, how global politics works, global security. Everything is driven by this change.

And what's the second one?

The second one is the big question of how the second most powerful country in the world is responding to all of that. Now, we in the top risks piece talked about overpowered, overpowered being the global energy dynamic, how China has been working to build the most effective electric vehicles all over the world at scale, and the batteries all over the world at scale, and the critical minerals and rare earths for decades now, not just having access so they can exploit them, but also so that they can reprocess them.

For anyone that doesn't know what critical minerals are.

Yeah.

And how important they are to our everyday lives, could you give us some color there?

Sure. We're talking about All of these things that you take out of the ground, whether it's lithium, antimony—

Which is in all these devices.

In every device, in your car battery, it's in your missile systems and your advanced weaponry that keeps you safe at home or allows you to go to war against somebody. I mean, you can't have an advanced economy without critical minerals and rare earths. And, and the Chinese have been investing at scale globally in that capability for decades now, thinking long term. And a lot of the rest of us have not been thinking long term. We're like, just in time, globalization, how do we make the most money now for our next quarterly return? And that reality is making China not a better economy today, but it's setting them up for a much stronger long-term trajectory. So as a risk, you're going to ask me to do this, it is not as critical as the US political revolution because this is focusing on 2026 and China is playing out over a longer period of time, but it is absolutely severe because the Chinese understand that long-term, as countries are saying, the Americans are less predictable and we're more vulnerable to their sudden changes in decisions, many more countries are saying, "Well, we want to hedge and do more with the Chinese." And those decisions really matter.

If this continues, if this direction of travel continues, what happens next in terms of global order, in terms of the Middle East, in terms of all of these things we've talked about?

Trump will fail. And I think that the level of policy incompetence and unwillingness to take on expertise is ensuring that it will fail. He's quite unpopular on so issues right now, he's gonna lose in a big way in the midterms coming up in November, and that will make him look like a lame duck, and Republicans will start to think about their own futures as opposed to holding onto this 80-year-old guy. Having said that, we will not have resolved these underlying challenges for average Americans. So there will still be a demand for a political revolution in the United States. The question will be, will the next person that comes and captures that Are they going to be focused on themselves or focused on the country? Trump actually identified the symptoms and was able to benefit as a political entrepreneur twice from getting elected in free and fair elections, mostly. The reality is a future person, we're in New York right now, Zoran Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, is the mayor of New York City, which is like the capital of global capitalism and finance in the world. What does that tell you? That tells you that there's still a demand for something very different.

And we don't know, is it going to come from the left or the right? But we know that that level of uncertainty is growing. And it's not just growing in the United States, it's growing in the global order. Because if the Americans are no longer willing to act as the global leader, but no one else is capable of filling those shoes. You don't have a G7 or a G20 where governments come together and agree on the rules of the road. You have a G0, an absence of global leadership where people, the powerful, make the rules that are useful to them and the weak have to accept that, have to find a way to live under that. That's where we're headed.

There was a Yale poll in April 2026 That said, Kamala Harris is leading the overall Democratic field with 20%, narrowly edging out Gavin Newsom at 19% and Pete Buttigieg at 14%, with AOC at 13%.

Means literally nothing to me. I think it was Jim Carville, the great Democratic political strategist, that was talking about November. He said, "You know what the Democrats need to do? They need to all get on a plane and go to Turks and Caicos until after the election. Say nothing, Be absent. Just do not be and allow. It's like, you know, the Sun Tzu. It's like when your opponent is making mistakes, stay out of their way.

When you say the election, do you mean the midterm?

Midterm election.

Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. So for now, there's nothing happening except Trump and the reaction to Trump. Then after that, we have a 2-year-long, God help us, election in the United States. Billions of dollars will be spent and people will have far too much information about far too many of these people. Then we can have a conversation. It is too early to talk about 2028 right now.

I have to ask you then, what on earth is going on?

I wondered when we were going to get there. We got this big map in front of us here. We haven't even touched the Middle East. We literally haven't touched it.

What is going on? Like, really take me back to the beginning. What did Trump think was going to happen? How is this linked to Venezuela?

Yeah.

Why would he do this after saying that he was the president that was going to stop all the wars? Yeah. What is the big picture here?

And literally one of the 8 wars that he said that he had stopped was with Iran. This was not what he was voted in on. He was voted in, he ended the war in Afghanistan. I mean, he cut the deal with the Taliban. Was it a great deal? Yeah, for the Taliban it was pretty good, but it got the Americans out. 20 years, a trillion dollars fought on the backs of the Afghan people and of Americans, not wealthy Americans, not people like Trump that could find a way out of service, but poor Americans.

And Europeans.

Yeah. And Europeans who fought side by side with the Americans when the Americans asked them to, almost all of them sending troops and many of them wounded and dying in the same numbers, the same percentages, just as courageous as the Americans were. So Americans wanted an end to that. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. What the hell are you guys doing? We're not benefiting from that. Stop it. Trump stopped it. So why'd he do this?

Why did he do this?

Why did he do this? I think there are 3 reasons why he did it. I'll take you through them. First reason, you said Venezuela, not on this map, shouldn't be relevant to this map. Turns out it's relevant to this map. Trump had plans to take out Maduro. He's got a lot of people inside his administration that see this guy as a real problem. And by the way, a problem for the region. 8 million Venezuelan refugees destabilizing the region, lots of drug export destabilizing the region. So he had been planning to do something.

Was it also linked to the oil?

It was relevant. They have the world's largest oil reserves. It is going to take far more years than Trump will be in office to make that meaningful. So it sounds good from a branding perspective, and you're gonna see a few hundred thousand more barrels a day, But it's gonna be years. If you saw that testimony by the CEO of ExxonMobil who said, you know, Venezuela is not investible today and Trump was angry at him and all the other energy CEOs like, thank you for saying that, we're not saying anything. Like him, look at him, look at him. Not much courage among those CEOs publicly. So the oil is a great headline for Trump. It doesn't matter much for Trump's presidency. As we know.

Just to get some color on that, is that because they just can't, they have to build up lots of infrastructure to be able to extract it?

Oh yeah, and because all their engineers are gone. Most of them in the oil patch up in Canada, which has similar geology to it because they've destroyed so much of their infrastructure. It's broken down because the governance structure isn't there yet. They don't have people that are capable of actually ensuring that there will be contracts that you would follow through on, engage in. People that still have huge lawsuits that need to be resolved. So all of this stuff. But to get to your, I don't want to lose sight of your why did Trump do this in Iraq? So the first point is beginning of the year, Trump goes into Venezuela, right? It is the most successful military operation you can possibly imagine. Not a single American serviceman or woman is killed. They go in, they take Maduro out. They don't kill him. They don't injure him. They bring him to a jail in Brooklyn. Right here in New York, outer borough, but still counts, New York City, right? Extraordinary. And he's facing justice. And meanwhile, Delsi Rodriguez, right? Suddenly vice president becomes acting president. It's like, "Sir, we want to work with you guys. We don't want any of that." Right?

And so you've got a new government that has a different trajectory, but it's basically the same regime. And they say, "Whatever you want, we will work on." "Will open our oil sector. We'll open our mining sector. We'll have better regs. We'll try to improve the economy for the average Venezuelan." I mean, they're starting to become popular. In another year, if they had elections in Venezuela, it is not inconceivable that she would win in a democratic election, which just blows your mind, right? But hundreds of political prisoners they've released. I talked to leaders all over South America. They all think this was a success. This is enormously popular among the populations in those countries because they care about security. That's what they've been voting on. Their elections have been about the economy and local security, and Venezuela has been a problem for them, right? I mean, they're exporting people causing crime. Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Chile, right? This has been a serious issue. So Trump is hugely feeling great, successful. And now he's like, I can do that in Iran. I can do it even bigger. So that's the first reason. That's the, I said 3 reasons.

That's the first reason. Second reason, this is not Trump's first rodeo with the Iranians. In his first presidency, the Iranians were engaging in strikes against the Americans directly and with proxies, bases in Iraq, other places. Also were taking on strikes against the biggest refinery in the world in Saudi Arabia, those drone strikes you may remember. The Saudis and the Emiratis were telling the Americans, "When are you going to do something? We need to take some action." Trump didn't want to do anything. They're getting angry, right? Finally, the end of his presidency, he orders a pretty bold move, the assassination of this incredibly charismatic military leader, Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, as it was called in Iran. And Iran was so angry. And they were going to destroy the United States. Death to America. What do they actually do? Nothing. And then last June, Iranians are developing their ballistic missiles. They're developing their nuclear enrichment and uranium enrichment. They're like stockpiling at higher levels, 60%. And the Israelis want to go in. Trump's providing intelligence. He doesn't want to go. Kind of dangerous. The Israelis go in. It's enormously popular. It's going well.

Succeeding. Trump's like, I want a part of that. That's successful. So he joins in. Second time, Israel took casualties, about 100 killed, I think, in the course of that 12-day war. The United States, Iran talked big, did not hit the Americans. They threw some missiles at that Al Udeid base in Qatar, the biggest US base. They warned the Americans through Iraq before the missiles were launched. So it was very clear the Iranians didn't want any part of that fight. So Trump is thinking to himself, This is going to be awesome because I'm going to go in, I'm going to pull Venezuela and Iran. I know they don't want to fight me. I kill the Supreme Leader, 86 years old, he's going to die anyway. He's not that popular among the Iranian, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the IRGC, because they're the ones that really run the country. I'm going to have this huge military force that shows what I'm capable of doing. Then the rest of the Iranian leadership, they're going to want to work with me just like they did in Venezuela. So that was reason number 2. And then the most important reason.

The most important reason is that unlike Trump's first term, where he had people around him that were patriotic first and foremost to the country, and when they had disagreements with Trump, they let him know and they leaked, and they also, um, were willing occasionally to do what they could to undermine an incompetent decision that would hurt the country. We saw that whether it was with Mike Pompeo or Mad Dog Mattis, all of these people who were much more independent, strong actors. This time around, Trump has some really good advisors, people like Marco Rubio and Scott Bessant. He also has some staggeringly incompetent advisors like Pete Hegseth, for example, but what they all share is that they are first and foremost loyal to the president, and they will not tell him. They won't push back. And what he hears from them is shaded towards how brilliant he is, and that makes him think that he will be more successful even when the military thinks this is a horrible idea. And we just saw this with the reporting from the head of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Cain, who clearly thinks that this is a really bad idea and understands that the military scenarios are super dangerous and that the Iranians will be able to shut down the strait.

And every military in the US for the last 20, 30 years has gamed out how the Iranians could shut down the strait in a major conflict. And Trump hears very little of that and he's taking away, I'm incredible, I'm confident, I'm going to make this happen. Those are the reasons he went in.

And so he thought it would be take out the Supreme Leader, then they'll negotiate, we'll get a better deal, we'll have a political system there or political leader there that is obedient to us.

Yeah, it'll be— and it'll be maybe— it won't be a day, but it's not going to be a month.

And what actually happened?

That did not happen. What actually happened is the Americans took out— well, the Israelis took out the Supreme Leader and also took out a lot of the military leadership that the Americans had been speaking to, which is why Trump came out and he said, well, A lot of the guys we're talking to are dead now, so we don't really know who to work with. He said that in the— not even if it's true, and it was, you don't want the president saying that, right? He has no filter. So, which is one of the more interesting things about this presidency. What happened is the Iranian leadership was taken out. The response was immediately what they call this mosaic situation where they decentralized the military decision-making to local commanders because they were worried that the high-level commanders if they were on cell phones, if they were engaging with other commanders, the Israelis would know where they were and they'd be able to assassinate them. So then suddenly the Iranians were taking shots at other, at Gulf states, at critical infrastructure, and stopping transit from the Strait.

This is one of the questions I had is in several interviews that Trump has done, he alludes to the fact that he thinks he's talking to the right people. Do you really believe, I know there was a meeting recently in Pakistan where they sent JD Vance in to negotiate with Iran. Do you think anyone is running Iran at the moment? Is there leadership in Iran? Is it possible to negotiate and control all of these dispersed forces, um, at the moment?

First, the honest answer is it's impossible to know because this is right now— the, the internal decision-making of Iran is extremely buttoned up, um, and they ain't talking to anyone about that. But it's very easy to assess two things. First, that their ability to make centralized decision plans and implement them is real. So when their biggest gas field is hit and they say, "We're going to hit you back in return," they are able to implement on that in short order. So we've seen a number of occasions in the last 5 weeks where Iran has gone from statement made by the foreign ministry and by spokespeople to action taken by local commander in Iran, which implies that there is a centralized structure. We also see toll taking on the strait by individuals that are being ordered by the central Iranian government to do that. They're not operating by themselves. So in that regard, the fact that the Iranians showed up in Islamabad, in Pakistan, with significant leadership, with the foreign minister, also the speaker of the parliament, but also a team of experts who had briefs on negotiating on a number of different points on the strait and on ballistic missiles and on support of proxy actors and on the nuclear issue, which proved the most divisive in those 21 hours of talks, shows that this regime is still very much functioning.

Despite all of the Israeli and the American efforts to say that, you know, they've done all this incredible damage, this regime is still very much in place.

And they couldn't get a deal. So Trump announced that he's going to block the Strait of Hormuz himself.

Just hours ago. I think that that is also overstated. You have 21 hours of talks led by the Vice President of the United States. I assure you, if these talks were a disaster, They don't last 21 hours, 2 or 3, and then they're out. 21 hours means very substantive conversations on the entire range of topics that were of importance to the Americans and Iranians. Trump did not get the outcome he wanted ultimately. I'm not super surprised because the Iranians feel like they have more leverage right now than the United States thinks they do, and this frustrates Trump immensely. And so at the end, remember, he's calling and talking with Vance more than 10 times over the course of this entire conversation. They're in regular contact. At that point, Trump says, okay, I'm blockading the Strait. But just before markets open on Monday, you also see reporting that, well, these talks that were a disaster, we're going to engage in further talks. So maybe it wasn't such a disaster. Maybe what's really going on here is Trump wants to show that he still has more leverage to use against the Iranians because he's lost a lot of his leverage.

He gave a speech to the American people, one speech so far about Iran, primetime speech. In that speech, he said, "War's almost over, 2 to 3 weeks max, we are done." If I'm the Iranians and I hear that, I'm like, "Great, the Americans can't take this pain anymore. They can't take it." He keeps saying straight, "Not my problem, Straits." 'Let them take care of it.' I hear that, I'm the Iranians, great. He can't take this economic pain. He knows he doesn't have a military solution. So it's not that the Iranians are only hearing from Trump, 'I'm gonna destroy your civilization.' They're seeing what he's actually doing.

And he seems to change his mind a lot or not follow through on some of the threats that he makes.

Right, of course.

And then they also will be aware that he's becoming increasingly unpopular.

On this issue specifically.

On this issue.

On this issue specifically. He is underwater just like he was on Greenland where he eventually completely did a 180. He was going to put tariffs on all the Europeans that supported Denmark. He had to take Greenland. Those things went away.

So you sat there, you're Iran, you're going, Trump's own people are pressurizing him to get the hell out of here. Yeah, he's unpopular day by day. It's hurting his economy, right? His midterms, elections that are coming up, he's going to be severely hurt and he's going to lose power in that regard. So actually, the Iranian leaders, I mean they might be incentivized just to wait it out.

That's right, because they don't think they have to wait it out for months.

I think that it's a democracy, so he's going to be unelected at some point in a couple—

They saw China. China did this, right? Last year, Liberation Day, as America— as Trump called it, where he puts tariffs on all these countries. He puts these high tariffs on China, they hit back, he does it again, they hit back again. He's like, I'm gonna do export controls. I said, well, we're going to shut down your critical minerals. Suddenly CEOs are going to Mar-a-Lago They say, "You gotta deal with the Iranians or we're gonna shut down our factory lines," in red states. Trump has to back down, right? So we've already seen that when a country has leverage over Trump and they can hit him, he has the most strong military in the world, but he also has a glass jaw. He can't take a hit the way that unelected non-democracies can. The Chinese and now the Iranians over the Strait. So what Trump is doing, doing with announcing the blockade, and by the way, he hasn't broken the ceasefire. So even though blockade is an act of war, he still hasn't said, "Okay, you guys have to start hitting the Iranians again right now." So this is still de-escalated compared to a week ago. A week ago, this looked much more dangerous than it looks today.

He's saying to the Iranians, "Hey, I'm willing to cut off your source of funds. I'm willing to stop you from exporting oil and making money off of it." Same Trump that suspended those sanctions on Iran because he wanted to keep the prices down. So that's what's happening right here.

Iran also, again, I'm trying to put myself in the mind of the incentive structure of the Iranian leaders. They can't let it be seen or known that dropping bombs on us made us pander to you. Because if they set that precedent, then for the next couple of decades, every American leader's going to know, okay, if you want Iran to play ball, all you do is take out their leadership, you drop loads bombs on everything they have, and then they come and negotiate with you and give up their nuclear weapons and everything else. So I imagine there's an element of the Iranians now going, if we buckle here, then for the rest of time, America are going to repeat this playbook.

I hear what you're saying. I would put it slightly differently. I think that after the 12-day war last June, the Iranians understood that their deterrent capacity had failed. They were incapable of preventing the Americans and the Israelis from hitting them and their proxies whenever they wanted. We've talked a lot about Iran. We haven't talked at all about Lebanon. There's another war going on in Lebanon right now. The Israelis are hitting the Lebanese very hard. There's over a million displaced people in the last several weeks.

Why? Why? What is this war?

Well, Hezbollah, which is a terrorist organization as recognized by Israel and the United States, though not everybody, Continues to have the ability to engage in strikes against Israel. Nowhere close to the strength of the Israeli military, but the Lebanese government promised to disarm them. They have not done that. And so Hezbollah has been able to continue to engage in missile strikes, relatively small numbers of missile strikes into the north of Israel where Israeli citizens live. There was a period of time after the October 7th attacks by Hamas where over 100,000 Israelis had to evacuate from their homes and their schools and the rest for like a year because Hezbollah was making their lives hell. Right? So what Israel is now doing is they're going to take territory, about 5 to 7 kilometers of Lebanese land. They're going to occupy it as a buffer zone to protect those Israeli civilians. From Hezbollah being able to hit them with their weapons. That is the intention here. And so what Iran understands is that their ability to deter Israel from hitting Hezbollah— Hezbollah at the beginning, on October 7th, Hezbollah was the most powerful non-state military in the world.

No one else was close. And today, Hezbollah has shown that their leadership gets targeted. And destroyed, assassinated across the board by the Israelis, that their military is incapable, their critical infrastructure can be disrupted, and that Israel can also hit Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, and no one can do anything in return to Israel.

There's lots of chaos going on in the world right now.

Yes.

Was there a way to have avoided all of this? Was there something that someone could have done further upstream to avoid all this chaos that we're seeing now in the Middle East? Like, what was the first domino that fell?

In Iran, you do have an enormously repressive regime that has the ability to take action against their own people in an incredibly brutal way, as we saw play out in January. And it's also a regime that does not respect the right of Israel to exist. It's also a regime that has been sending weapons and money and military advice to other revolutionary actors around the region, undermining security in Yemen, undermining security in Iraq, undermining security in Syria. So, I mean, the fact that at the core of the Middle East you have a revolutionary regime that was exporting instability and violence is a serious problem. That's number one. Number 2, Israel, America's top ally in the region. America first, but Trump still gives billions of dollars every year to Israel, even as he's cut off military aid and support for almost everyone, including for Ukraine, right? This country is very capable of now attacking all of its enemies and creating outcomes that it wants, whether or not it creates instability in those countries. We've seen that in Gaza and the West Bank. Right? I mean, reality is Israel is continuing to take more and more territory in the West Bank and no one can do anything about it.

They hit Lebanon really hard. No one can respond to that. So that is creating a reality where Israel is able to determine outcomes and even attack Iran directly with the United States. They felt very confident about taking that on and that there would not be backlash that would undermine Israel's own political survival. It wasn't an existential risk to Israel. And even if Iran developed nukes, which is everyone wants to prevent from happening, but Israel has their own nukes, right? I mean, they have like 100 plus. So those are two fundamental drivers of conflict and instability in the region. One aligned with the United States, one a revolutionary theocracy. There have been very positive developments in this region. Very positive developments. First of all, Syria. Assad was a brutal dictator that was overthrown by his own people, and his own military would not support and fight for him. And the Russians proved that they couldn't support him in a significant way. And so now you have an opportunity for Syria to become a representative government that can engage with others around the region and more broadly. That's a positive. You've got Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Qatar that are engaging in transformative domestic policies to attract investment from all over the world, to build experiences that everyone would want to travel and engage in, to create work opportunities that are far better remunerated than anything that foreign labor could get in their own home countries, allowing them to bring money home.

and in the case of Saudi Arabia specifically, they're taking 35 million people. Half of that economy used to be closed to women, and now they're bringing women into the economy. They're actually not just educating them, but they're giving them opportunities in every area of employment. That is one of the most extraordinary stories in the world today in terms of change in governance, and that continues. Then final point here is that in the context of this Iran war, We do. And in the context of a United States which is doing less global leadership, there are questions of how these countries that are aligned with the US want to ensure their own futures. And so we see increasingly two different blocs that are starting to form. You've got the United Arab Emirates together with Israel. You remember the Abraham Accords, which was Trump's big foreign policy success in his first term where he got these countries, the UAE and others, to recognize Israel and start doing a lot more tourism and business and technology transfers and the rest. So UAE, Israel, the United States, and India are increasingly aligning on national security and technology, and they're becoming more of an international bloc.

Based on this region. At the same time, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan long worked together on defense, are now much more public about an alliance. Pakistan is nuclear, Saudi Arabia is not, but Pakistan would provide them nuclear weapons if they really wanted it. That's absolutely something to think about. They are increasingly becoming a regional defense quad, 4 countries together with Turkey and Egypt. Big countries, big populations aligning more diplomatically and on defense, calling for a regional security architecture in the region, but that would not be easily aligned with the UAE, America, Israel, and with India. So that is also a significant tension. And in the context of all of that, 95 million people in Iran. Whose military has been substantially degraded, whose economy and industry have been substantially degraded, and who were already running their economy into the ground before the war happened. These guys aren't winners, they're survivors, right? They have influence over the Strait, but they're not winning, and this is dangerous long term.

Your firm makes a lot of predictions, so I, I wanted to ask you to help me try and look forward as to how this conflict might end. We're in a position now where it seems that the US aren't going to give up the demand to Iran that they cease to develop and pursue nuclear enrichment. It appears that Iran have said that they want the right, and they believe they have the right, they said this before this conflict started, to enrich uranium and to have nuclear power plants and all these kinds of things. So how does this end? Like, Trump's now, he's blockaded the Strait of Hormuz. We're in another standoff.

Ceasefire's in place.

The ceasefire's in place, which I think he said was 14 days. And we're now probably, what, got 9, 10 days left of that.

Yeah.

He's thinking a lot about his legacy. He can't be reelected. He talks sometimes about winning the Peace Prize and wanting to be on Mount Rushmore of presidents and all this. So he can't just leave. If he just leaves, then Iran carry on with their enrichment program. It goes down in history almost like a Bush failure, geopolitical failure. He can't just leave. He has to be seen to win, but also Iran can't let him be seen to win. So what happens?

I think unlike almost anybody else you can imagine, if he decided that he wanted to end this, he could end this. He could just leave and he would say, "I won." He's already said this in different ways. He said, "I don't even care about the nukes because we've We've already entombed them. They're under all this rubble. We've got satellite coverage. If the Iranians try to get at them, we can hit them back. He's already said that there's already a regime change. It's already new people. We can work, we can talk with these people. He already said the Strait isn't his problem, but of course he's also said different things sometimes in the same tweet. So he's picking and choosing. But what I'm suggesting to you is that Trump has already moved towards de-escalation.

You are spot on when you say he set the stage to back out. We won, regime changed, strait's not my problem, we have our own oil, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then, if you don't open that strait, I'm going to end civilization. Which didn't seem to fit. It seemed like he was setting the stage to back out and then suddenly the civilization tweet, I'm going to bomb your bridges and your nuclear power plants, which suddenly made me think, okay, so maybe he does really care about the strait.

And wasn't plausible, by the way. And there was no chance that he was actually going to do all that that evening.

So why didn't he just back out?

Well, I do not want to be Trump's psychologist, Yeah, it is very clear that he is impulsive and that he does not have much impulse control, nor does he create around him mechanisms that create impulse control, that enforce impulse control. He's on his phone all the time. He watches the media relentlessly. People engage with him from all over the world on his cell phone, and he has recency bias. The thing he heard and saw last he frequently focuses on.

But he also watches the markets.

Yes.

He seems obsessed with the stock market.

That's why so many of the announcements he makes are right before or right after the market opens. And obviously there's been a lot of insider trading concerns around that too. And he's concerned about personal enrichment and people around him making billions of dollars. That plays in too. I wish it didn't. It's horrible to talk about, but you can't avoid that topic. What happens? You want to know what happens? I don't have a crystal ball. No one does. But where I think this could be going on the basis of that, the most likely outcome is that the ceasefire is eventually extended, that we have those talks that were 21 hours that were substantive. There'll be more talks, maybe not with the vice president, but there'll be more talks. They'll become more substantive. And that eventually I expect that the Iranians are more likely to give on the nuclear issue. And on enrichment if they're able to maintain a privileged position on transit through the Strait, because that will help provide them with money and with security. They get a level of deterrence if everybody knows these guys could shut down the Strait in the future. That helps them.

They never had nukes. They weren't going to get nukes. If they got nukes, they were going to get blown up. Like, everyone knew that. They were 2 weeks away if they had access to the material And they reprocessed the nuclear grade and they weren't stopped by the Americans and Israelis. That's a lot of if-ands, right? So, but here they've got influence over the strait. They have it, they've used it, they're using it, they're making money. Trump does not have a military plan to hit them back. So I think that is the most likely outcome. And if that is the case, then over time the Iranians will cut more deals with more countries. To get more oil out. And meanwhile, there will be, after the ceasefire is in place and strong, then the Europeans and other countries, the Indians, other countries will come in and they will start escorting ships to create a more secure environment in the strait itself. That is the good scenario, or it's the less bad scenario, because all of this should have been avoided.

I want to make sure I'm clear on this scenario. You're saying that they'll concede on the nuclear point around potentially, at least somewhat.

I think they will compromise on the nuclear point.

But in turn, they'll get more control over the straits.

Yes.

And what does that mean? That they'll be able to decide who goes through there? They'll get a toll charge.

Oh, they'll get a toll charge. And by the way, you could define them charging the toll as part of the reconstruction money that they're going to need for the war that they just saw.

Reparations for that.

I mean, they'll call it reparations. No one else will call it reparations, but that's fine. I think that is The good scenario, again, the less bad scenario, and I would say it is more likely than not. There is another scenario, right? And the other scenario is that everything that Trump has been saying is because he doesn't yet have a military plan. Over the last days, with all this ceasefire, there's still this new aircraft strike group that is motoring its way over to the Gulf. You got thousands more American troops that are heading into position, ground troops, right? They're going to have almost 15,000 total that will be deployed by Trump since this war started. They're going to be there in the next 2 weeks. Once Trump has them there, he can use them. And there are lots of things he might use them on. He keeps saying, I keep seeing him go back. Before I was talking about all the ways he was saying, we don't need to defend the strait. We don't need the nuclear, that we can hit them. But he also has been saying we should take the oil. I've heard him say this on a number of occasions.

I've also seen him say, if just the American people were a little more patient, we could take the oil. What does he mean by taking the oil? That's not a blockade. Blockade isn't taking the oil. Blockade is stopping the Iranians from getting the oil out. Take the oil is control the export facility on Kharg Island. Right.

And can you explain this for anyone that doesn't know what Kharg Island is and the significance of it in the oil situation?

This is a comparatively small island. It's about half the size of Manhattan. It's not incredibly fortified or defended, and it's very close to the Iranian shore, and it is responsible for 90% of the export of Iranian oil. CENTCOM, Central Command, say that you can take Kharg Island with 12,000 to 15,000 men relatively comfortably.

So where is Kharg Island on here?

Yeah, so Kharg Island is right about here. It's not in the strait itself, but it is— this is— it's right off of the Iranian coast. And we're talking about 90% of Iranian oil export comes out through there. So if the Americans take it, obviously very easy for the Iranians to be engaged in strikes against them. But the Iranians will not be able to get any oil out. So suddenly the Americans have far more leverage over the Iranian economy, right? In a very direct way, in a very targeted way. And that is the way that you take the oil.

Could Trump take the oil, actually take it out of this region somehow? Is there like another passage through that doesn't involve— okay, so no, no, he could just stop the oil.

He could stop the oil. Okay. But again, if he has control of Kharg, The oil coming out of Kharg, if you want to have, bring it to market, the only ones that could do it would then be the Americans. Now, the Iranians at that point could still disrupt the strait. And there are other conversations, there are other military plans about how you might be able to take coastal regions, raids on the territory that would take out more ballistic missile sites, go after their drones. All of this takes more troops, all this takes more casualties, but would also give you more capacity to eventually enforce a navigable strait with escorts, which right now you can't do. Right now, the Iranians can prevent you from getting any ships out if they wish to. I think that the likelihood that Trump is ultimately going to make that order is well below 50%. I think that the worst scenario is not the more likely one because he understands how unpopular it will be. But it does mean that he's going to have to sell a pretty ugly pig with lipstick on it. It means that because this was the problem Trump has is he can't blame anyone else for this.

Yeah.

He's the decider. Like he did it. I mean, he's got his secretaries and cabinet that are all saying, well, the war, it's up to Trump. He's got the war goals. It'll be over when he says it is. It's all about Trump. He can blame NATO for not wanting to join him. They're joining him. It was his war of choice. And he's never been responsible directly for an economic downturn. I mean, the pandemic wasn't his fault. This is an economic downturn with oil prices shooting up, gas is over $4 a gallon, diesel's over $5, inflation's ticking up, food prices are going up. He's wildly underwater on affordability and he is completely responsible for it. No one else is responsible.

And zooming out even further, when we think about this on a global scale, you've got Russia Who are at war with Ukraine. That seems to have just completely vanished from the news cycle, by the way.

It has not in Europe, I promise you. But in the United States, they're talking a lot less about it. It's true. In Poland, this is a very big issue. In the Baltics, it is a very big issue.

And then you've got China, who must be laughing because it looks like the United States are just sort of self-harming themselves.

Yep.

And then you've got Europe, which is the last power who seem to now just be sort of colluding with themselves and getting together and saying, listen, we're not going to help the US anymore. I grew up through all these little conflicts and wars, and the UK always seemed to come to the US as a call. And for the first time ever, I'm watching the UK go, actually, no, you do this one yourself. I'm going to meet with Macron in France and we're going to huddle and go it alone. What is that big picture? And which part of that big picture is most pertinent to talk about?

Yeah. China's the most pertinent because it's the most powerful. Russia's the easiest to deal with, which is that for the Russians, they don't have much that they produce that's manufactured. They don't have very good technology. They're relying more on the Chinese.

They've got oil though, haven't they?

That they manufacture. They've got oil, they've got gas, they've got fertilizer. All the things with the prices have just spiked through the roof, that's what the Russians have. That's where their power is. And so they are making so much more money. Their economy was really getting squeezed with all the sanctions. Now they're getting so much more for everything that they actually sell, and the Americans have reduced sanctions like they did on Iran against Russia because Trump cares about the markets, as you say. So Russia's in a better position for that reason, and they're in a better position because all the weapons the Americans have been selling to the Europeans to get to Ukraine, America now needs to get to the Middle East. So the Ukrainians are going to have a harder time defending their cities against Russian ballistic missiles, against Russian drones. So this clearly means that Putin will be much, much less interested in a ceasefire, which, let's face it, he wasn't really very interested in to begin with. Trump, at the beginning of this term, promised he would end this war. He was hugely frustrated. He goes to Israel to announce the Gaza ceasefire.

It's a big win. The Knesset, the Israeli parliament, they're standing ovation. And he's like, you know, I thought I was going to get the Russia war done and I failed it. I haven't been able to do that. I got this one instead. Trump never brings up his own failures, but this really bothers him. So here you've got yet more ability for the Russians to say, we're going to persist. And it makes it more likely that Trump will eventually do a deal with the Russians over the heads of the Europeans. So that's the Russia issue kind of in a little box. Now, Europe, we already talked about how Europe is having its problems economically. It doesn't have the productivity, it doesn't have the growth.

What did Europe do wrong in your view? Like, how did, yeah, I'm a European, I guess. I was born in Botswana in Africa, but I moved to the UK when I was young. So I guess I'm British. What did the country do wrong? Because the country was so strong and powerful and respected when I was younger, and I love Britain, but it appears on a global stage that that perception has changed. The US are talking to us like a lapdog.

Yeah.

At Davos, I saw the talks. They're like, you need to get your shit together and be stronger and stop being so woke, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. Well, first, the Americans talking to the Europeans that way has a lot more to do with the change in administration. Okay. I don't think any other Democratic or Republican president would do what Trump is doing to his closest allies. I think that's more unique. But it is certainly true that over the last 30 years, there have been two really big geopolitical shifts. The United States has shifted its orientation, but not its geopolitical power. But in terms of power shift, you've got the rise of China and the Global South, India in particular after China, but China's the biggest piece of that. And then you have the decline of American allies. Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea— these are countries, most of which are contracting demographically, right? The countries, most of which, that have much flatter growth and much more reduced productivity than the United States. They've not been investing in their own defense. They've not been investing in their own technology. So what you see is an asymmetry At the same time that the Americans are saying, "We're not interested in the rest of the world. We don't want to do all this stuff. Don't want to fight the wars, don't want free trade," you're also seeing a reality where those countries don't bring as much to the table in a conversation with the United States.

So the so-called Draghi plan, the 800-page plan by the former central bank head in Europe, the ECB, Mario Draghi, they called him Super Mario. He had this competitiveness report that all of these things that the Europeans needed to do and he would say the Brits as well, to, to address that, to build entrepreneurship, to spend in ways that would actually bring a return long term, to like invest in new technologies, to reduce red tape. The plan is there, but unlike the United States, unlike China, Europe is not a country. Europe is 27 countries in the EU. And the United Kingdom, which decided for Brexit. It's a lot harder when you don't have scale. It's just harder. And when you have elections every couple, every few years, it's just more challenging. You can't do the sort of stuff that the UAE or the Saudis or the Singaporeans or the Chinese can do at scale long-term. So as a consequence, what did Europe do wrong? Europe focused, Europe believed that the world after the wall came down in 1989, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, they believed that the world was just going peaceful, that everyone was going to have a system like the Europeans did, so they didn't need to invest in defense.

And it was okay if they didn't invest in lots of technology because they had friends that they could work with and maybe their growth wouldn't be as big, but their quality of life would be so high. And they were completely wrong. China did not. They got wealthier, but they didn't suddenly align with the United States and Europe. China didn't become a free market economy. China didn't become a democracy. China is a consolidated dictatorship under Xi Jinping with no term limits and with control of the economy, state control of the economy. And that's not an easy environment for the Europeans to be comfortable being non-competitive.

A lot of this comes down to energy and productivity.

The cost of it.

The cost of energy. So a lot of these countries decided to carry on drilling oil and pursuing nuclear, and a lot of the European countries decided to go for net zero, where they tried to focus more on sort of sustainable energy sources, whereas China didn't seem to give a fuck, quite frankly. The US didn't really seem to care much. And then also on this point of entrepreneurship and innovation, the US and China have both really aggressively pursued entrepreneurship and innovation and new technologies, whereas one could make the case that the European environment has been less friendly to new technologies and innovation.

So the Chinese You said the Chinese didn't really give a fuck. Not true. The Chinese have invested in everything. So the Chinese know that they still need lots of dirty coal in order to power their industry, but they also have invested like nobody else in green technologies at scale.

Solar and things like that.

Solar and wind. And their car companies are the electric vehicle leaders in the world, and batteries that are the best batteries, the most efficient batteries at scale in the world, and all of the The raw materials that go into producing those, the Chinese have invested in this for decades now and nuclear. While the Europeans have shut, with the exception of France, France has heavy nuclear and that's helped them in this crisis, most of the Europeans have turned away from nuclear. The Europeans have not done an all for all approach. The Europeans have done a, let's lean into green, but let's make other technologies more challenging. Including nuclear, which should be seen as a green technology. So yeah, there's no question that that has inhibited growth in Europe. The United States has been on again, off again. You've got one administration that's leaning into green, the next one that's not. When America should be doing— America today is the world's leading oil producer by a long margin, and fracking natural gas as well by a long margin, doing incredible work there. Yet the United States is actively undermining the ability to also produce clean technologies for energy.

Texas produces more sustainable energy than any other state in the United States. Red Texas. So I mean, it's not like this is— these energy technologies are not Republican or Democrat. They are at scale becoming cheaper. You need all of them. And so the Europeans made a mistake in not recognizing that you need everything.

Everybody says that the United States is the world's leading superpower, and that has been the case, you know, hard to argue against that for a long time. Is that set to change? Is China set to become the world's leading superpower?

Not soon, um, but the trajectory, the present trajectory, if it continues, clearly would challenge America's dominant position, clearly. I mean, the US has— the dollar is the global reserve currency right now. Nothing else is close. And transacting in the dollar is a huge advantage for the Americans who can continue to print money with reckless abandon and run massive deficits and have lower interest rates as a consequence. China does not have a convertible currency. They don't have rule of law. If they opened their currency to become convertible, there'd be massive capital flight, and political instability. That's what they worry about. So they don't compete with the US there. China's military is still a fraction of the capabilities of the US. They're watching what's happening in Venezuela, in Iran. They don't have that capacity. They're not close. They're building their nuclear weapons out. They're building their conventional weapons out. They have never fought a naval war. They have— it's decades since they fought a ground war. They're not capable of doing these things.

So is there any concern with China?

Yes.

What is that concern?

The concern with China is that the most, the world-changing new technologies out there, the Chinese are investing at scale and the Chinese are now either at parity or ahead of the Americans and everyone else by a long margin in many of the core technologies that matter most in the world.

And what does that potentially mean that is worth paying attention to? Why does that matter?

It means that they can set the rules, they can set the standards, they can sell the products that you need them, that if they determine that they're going to shut you off, you're dead. Right? I mean, think about what happened. The Europeans were so dependent on Russia for gas and for oil, and the Russians invade Ukraine, they want to shut it down, and it destroys the European economy. The Americans are doing just fine. The Americans are building and get so many of their semiconductors from TSMC in Taiwan. I'm sure you've talked about that before on your show. Well, what happens if China decides that they want to cut that off? If they have that capacity, the Americans are really screwed. So you don't want to be in a position where one country, an adversarial country that you don't trust, have a good relationship with, suddenly produces all this stuff that you desperately need or your economy will fall apart. And yet that is the trajectory with President Xi. If China had elections coming up in November, I'd be worried, right? Because you can just imagine a situation where the Chinese being more short-term would say, "Well, look, the Americans are distracted with Iran." And the Europeans are distracted with Ukraine.

Now is our time for Taiwan because we really want to get all that support. So let's gin it up. Chinese aren't doing short-term at all. They're doing long-term. The Chinese are thinking for 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road, and they're investing that way. They're taking very little risk. They're making no regret moves to set themselves up long-term while the Americans are doing all this short-term stuff, all this electoral cycle stuff. That's the worry. If the Americans, the biggest danger to the United States is not China, it's America. It's America getting in its own way and not investing in having the best products, the most competitiveness, the most attractive place to study, the most attractive place to live, the most attractive place to work.

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I'm 100% more productive using this app despite spending 50% less time typing, and that might confuse you, but let me explain, which is exactly why I invested in Whisper Flow. They're also one of our sponsors on this podcast. Whisper Flow turns your speech into text so you can send it in any app or device at any time. And I promise you, it doesn't seem to ever make mistakes. This is the most accurate voice dictation I have ever used after a decade of trying to get one to work. Not only does it save me a ton of time, it also corrects your speech if you change your mind mid-sentence before turning it into text. On the device. I love it, and I know my team loves it too, because when I posted it in our Slack channel asking if anybody wanted a pro version, half the office said yes, and they had it within an hour, which tells me everything. This is the tool you and your team need to speed yourselves up and to capture those important ideas so that they don't disappear. Head over to whisperflow.ai/stephen to download it now. That's W-I-S-P-R-F-L-O-W ai.stephen. You did a TED Talk 2 years ago in June.

It was published on June 14th, 2023, and it's done tens of millions of views on YouTube. It is titled The Next Global Superpower Is Not Who You Think.

Yeah.

And I was looking at the comments section earlier, and some of the top comments are, you called it a year ago and you were 100% right. There's another one here saying, "Hello, writing to you from a year in the future. I have some bad news about 2025. You were right." What were you right about?

I guess what they're saying, you and I have been talking about the US and China and traditional geopolitics. What I was saying is that increasingly the world is moving beyond geopolitics and that the most important new global leaders aren't countries. They're technology companies that are writing their own rules. I was looking how the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that that war started not on the 24th of February, but the 23rd of February when Microsoft found out about all of the cyber strikes that were hitting Ukraine and made the US government and the Ukrainian government aware of it. I look at Elon Musk and providing Starlink. If it wasn't for that, I'm not sure that the Ukrainian government was going to be able to fight these guys on the ground. They wouldn't have been able to communicate. Zelensky might be gone. These were companies. The US government at that point was scared about sending all the military support, but the companies were making a big difference. Now I see that these new AI tools, like we saw with Anthropic and Mythos—

For anyone that doesn't know, Anthropic released a new AI model which they say is so capable that it presents the world with a really fundamental security risk to all of our technology. They say in their report that in testing, this new model, this new type of AI could find security vulnerabilities in lots of different applications and software applications that we use. So essentially, it posed a cybersecurity risk. It could hack a lot of tech banks and—

critical infrastructure, your power grid, water systems, anything with software. And, and not just like the things that a hacker could get to, but every bug that could be exploited. So it's so powerful that they couldn't release it because it would've been an immediate systemic risk to the global economy and our security.

And do you believe them? I say this because I heard some people debating whether this was marketing talk.

Mm-hmm.

For them as a company to say, look, look how powerful we are. That we're not going to release this model because it's going to cause that much harm. Or do you think they are being responsible?

It is inconceivable to me that a company that is this capable of raising money and this capable of talking to the markets is not going to have a communication strategy that is fully aligned with that. So of course there's marketing here, but this was a real risk. When you have Jerome Powell, the chief of the Fed, and Scott Bessant, the Secretary of Treasury, looking at this and immediately calling an urgent meeting of all the CEOs of the banks saying, we have to deploy this internally. And you have JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon is by far the best at cybersecurity in terms of the big banks and the big US institutions, and considers this a 5-alarm fire. I take this very seriously. I think this is actually a big deal that also happens to be useful for Anthropic's marketing, not least because Anthropic had just been in a big fight with the Defense Department and the US Defense Department saying, we don't want these Anthropic guys because like, they're not, they're woke, right? I mean, they don't, they refuse to let us use and deploy their AI in our targeting or our surveillance. So we're gonna take them outta our system.

Well, it turns out you can't afford to take these guys completely out of your system because what they're doing is too important for American national security. So the timing is convenient from that perspective, but this risk is real and it's real because it needs to be deployed immediately to find these bugs and to patch them before other people have those tools, because other people will have these tools in very short order.

And so on the scale of risks that we have in front of us here, critical, severe?

Yep, also severe.

Okay.

Again, would be critical if we were talking about 2 years out, Because we're talking about this year and it's already April, it just happened. I would say severe, but my God, underappreciated. Because the amount of attention this gets on headlines compared to Iran or Venezuela, compared to China, is still tiny.

And is that because of unemployment, because AI is going to take our jobs, or is it something else? Is it the nuclear— what is it?

No, I mean, if what I just mentioned with Anthropic, like if suddenly your systems are hackable by anyone that has access to this tool, your markets are going to go down. Your banks aren't going to work. Your data is going to be stolen. Imagine if the Russians have that capacity, what they would do with it. If the Iranians today had that capacity, what they would do with it. They will. These AI tools are becoming available to anyone with a laptop or a cell phone. So, I mean, suddenly in the same way that the war in Russia-Ukraine, Russia's much bigger than Ukraine. And yet in the last 3 months, Ukraine has actually taken territory back from Russia. How is that possible? Technology, drones, right? They have become the most capable drone producer in the world at scale. So much that when the Iranians were attacked by the United States and they counter-hit, what did the Americans do? They called Zelensky, remember the guy that didn't say thank you, in the White House and they said, "Could we have your help with your drone technologies in figuring out how we combat Iran for our Gulf allies?" So technology's changing the world so fast and it turns out that the biggest way it's changing our security and the economy is AI.

On this point of AI, I actually was watching a video this morning before you arrived, which I thought I'd show you because it's quite dystopian, but What you'll see in this video is true and it's happening around the world, and I don't think anybody has any ideas. This is the video. I'll play it for those of you that are looking at the screen at the moment. Can you tell what's going on in this video from watching it?

It looks to me like the work that they are doing is being monitored real time presumably by some external source. You're going to suggest to me that the external source that's monitoring them is not a human being, but is artificial intelligence.

Yes, kind of. What's happening is a company has paid these Indian workers to wear cameras on their heads to watch their hands to train the AI so that the AI can do that job in the future.

To remove the workers. From those jobs.

Yes. So it's kind of like sitting on the branch of a tree and you yourself cutting— there's this meme I'll throw up on the screen. It's of a guy sat on the branch of a tree and he's cutting the branch himself. And what you're seeing here is because the AI companies and the robotics companies need real-world data of these jobs being done, they're now asking the workers in the factories to record themselves doing it so that they can replace them.

Yeah, it's, um, I laugh because it's slightly terrifying, It's slightly terrifying, and yet it's also slightly empowering, depending on what we decide to do with the wealth that comes from this. Because let's face it, most human beings do not want that work to be what self-actualizes them.

What kind of political system do you need, or social system do you need in such a world where a lot of the work that we do today is being done by these intelligent machines, and a huge amount of people don't have work? I was saying to you before we started recording, a friend of mine called me the other day and he had had a conversation with one of the most successful technologists in the world that everybody knows. And he said next year is the year where the unemployment because of AI really will take hold and people are going to get increasingly annoyed. They also said that they think the Democrats, even though I think this person might be Republican, they think the Democrats are going to win the election because the impact of AI is going to be so severe next year in terms of unemployment that people are going to associate the Republicans with being the pro-AI party. And I saw another report last week saying that AI is now less popular than ice in the United States. And just as a podcaster who has conversations about this, I know people are not happy.

I know they're not happy. I see it in the comment section, in part because we don't see it flowing down and making people's lives better. We see major corporations getting richer.

And so the funny thing, that video you showed me, most people in the Global South are very excited, enthusiastic about AI. Because they think it's going to give them tools to improve their human capital, to improve their opportunities. China, the Chinese are very excited about AI because they think that it's going to make their lives better. The Americans, the Europeans are not. They worry that this is actually going to undermine their jobs, particularly their white-collar jobs, their knowledge worker jobs. And what I think is going to happen politically, I don't I don't agree that we're going to see massive unemployment in the US next year. I think there's going to be much more friction. And most CEOs don't want to get rid of a lot of their workers unless they have to. So unless there's a major economic downturn that gives them that excuse, I think it's going to take a lot longer. And I also think that social mobilization, longshoremen in the United States said, "No AI, you're going to protect our jobs." And they were willing to actually demonstrate. They mobilized and it kept AI out. There'll be a lot of resistance that will slow this process down.

But what I do think is going to happen, I think you'll see it politically. I was talking to someone I know reasonably well, a senator, US senator who was saying, "Can't talk right now." And pro-technology person, pro-business person, centrist, someone you and I would recognize as such, say, "I can't talk about data centers." I've never seen people, my constituents, so upset about an issue as they do about data centers.

AI data centers.

AI, they said it. No jobs, energy prices going up, water prices going up, zoning looks horrible in their neighborhoods. They're growing like topsy, huge amount of investment. Everyone hates these things. I mean, Trump in the United States won on the back of a lot of men Many of whom had good jobs and were making good money, but they didn't necessarily have advanced degrees. And they felt like the world was moving away from them. They saw robotics and automation on their factory lines. They saw free trade and jobs going to much poorer, much less expensive labor around the world, China especially, but India, other countries. They saw immigrants coming in, but you're not taking care of me and my family, so why am I letting that happen? You see this in Europe too. This is the Nigel Farage movement, lots of stuff. They voted Trump in not once but twice, despite everything he is, everything he stands for, they voted for him. We haven't seen women with advanced degrees, urban and suburban, worried about their jobs and worried about their kids. And that wave of populism is coming absolutely in 2028. And that is, AI is a very big piece of that.

AI, data centers, and the rest. So in that regard, I agree. That there's going to be a real political wave here. And I don't yet know who the political figures are that are going to respond to that. I don't think that person today exists in the political spectrum. I haven't seen that person.

It appears that the least popular job, or at least popular people in society at the moment, are AI CEOs. I mean, you're probably seeing what's going on.

Well, you saw what Sam Altman just had, you know, the Molotov cocktail that was thrown at his house.

And then yesterday again, they said someone shot at his house yesterday, yesterday night again, which obviously nobody should support violence of this type.

My God, no. But it's not surprising. And we also had the CEO of UnitedHealthcare gunned down a year ago, just a few blocks from where you and I are having this conversation right now. There is general anger at the elite. And it's true that the wealthiest people in the United States right now, happen to be those tech owners.

Is there a solution here where the technology which presents us with tremendous potential upsides can thrive and be successful and make our lives better, but also the average person, the working class people can also capitalize and benefit from this technology?

Of course there is.

What does that look like?

Well, I mean, first of all, these technologies are already doing extraordinary things in improving productivity and in reducing waste. I mean, recycling doesn't work very well, but with AI, you can recycle in a way that would allow you to actually get that trash product back into a productive format. Who wouldn't want the, the ability to make micro adjustments in, um, the way that an airplane is navigating real time because of AI that reduces fuel consumption by 10%? Or improve agricultural use. In Ethiopia, you've got over 100 million people and they don't know what to plant and where and when. Suddenly you optimize for that, they have cheaper food. These are amazing things. Every day I see uses for these technologies in companies around the world that blow my mind. But I also see, and again, I focus on politics, and if we blow ourselves up, it's not going to be because of technology. If we blow ourselves up, it's going to be because of people and politics.

What do you mean by that?

That the system is deploying these technologies in inhumane ways. It's allowing the benefits of the opportunities to be captured by a small number of individuals, a small number of companies that write their own rules and don't care about people that are getting angry. So when you ask, violence is the wrong thing. But if you're seeing that people are getting so angry that they're starting to do things that they see the only way that they think that they can respond is outside of the legal framework, it's not by voting for somebody new, but it's by mass action or even violent action, then the politics are really broken.

So do we need like universal basic income or something? Or does there need to be an AI tax or?

I don't think that you go from everybody has a full-time job or aspires to a full-time job to universal basic income in a year. I, I, I don't think that happens, but I could easily see pilot programs that say instead of a 5-day work week in the following areas that we think are gonna be disrupted, it's gonna be a 4-day work week or a 3-day work week, and we're gonna pay you the same amount of money, but that additional day every week is going to be on AI training that will allow you to have a job, you to be more effective in your existing job, because only the people that know how to deploy these tools are gonna have a job in another 3 or 5 years, or we'll allow you to transition. But you've gotta start spending the money on that now. And that guy that you had that conversation with, I've been watching him publicly. He's not part of the solution. He's saying, "I think the Democrats are gonna win. Oh well, I'll be fine. I'm still worth a lot of money, but I'm not gonna do anything to actually help facilitate this." Like if the people people that are most capable of being aware of these challenges and of addressing them are instead all in winner-take-all mode, then obviously we're going to have a breakdown in society.

It's a tricky situation, isn't it? Because we've seen what happens when governments get involved in technology. Sometimes, you know, even in the UK, fr, and the European Union. Bloody hell. I remember speaking to, I don't know if I have permission to say his name either, but he is the CTO of one of the biggest technology companies in the world. And he was explaining to me that they can't release their features, this particular piece of hardware, we can't even release it in Europe because the European Union have so much regulation that they've actually created a bunch of issues for us as companies. One of them was that in this particular device, the European Union demand that the battery can be taken out and put back in again. And what this actually means, he was explaining to me, is that we're going to have to buy loads of batteries and keep them on the shelf, and then they're going to go bad. And actually, it's going to be worse for the environment. But also, it means that the devices are no longer waterproof. So more devices are going to break, which is even worse for the environment.

And this overregulation that's happening—

Which means that the Europeans are nowhere in terms of technology.

And not competitive.

They're nowhere competitive.

And do you know what he said to me? He goes, And I don't think what the Europeans don't realize is we just don't need their market anymore. He said Brazil's coming online and all these other big markets are coming online as buyers. So we just can decide just to not sell to Europe.

So there are 3 systems out there, broadly speaking. One system, the United States system, most power in the hands of the private sector, so much so that they're able to capture the regulatory process, write their own regulations. That turns out that system drives an enormous amount of growth and wealth. The problem is that lots of average Americans do not benefit from it because nobody is looking out for them. Then they get angry and then they lash out, right? The Chinese system where the state actually captures the private sector and they say what the private sector can and can't do, and frequently they own the private sector, state-owned enterprises, right? And that system drives an enormous amount of growth over the long term. but the people have no say over what is and what is not allowed. And that creates a lot of dissent and this lying flat, and we're not a part of the system and the solution. Then you have the Europeans, and the European system is very oriented towards, we want to make sure that the social contract works for the citizens. We're very interested in having all of the benefits that people need, but we can't afford them because our system is so heavily regulated and so anti-entrepreneurial.

That we don't drive the growth that would be necessary to keep paying for the people. So obviously each of these systems have challenges, but the problem comes not in the nature of the system, but in when they become extreme. Americans today want a New Deal, whatever that New Deal looks like. And Trump won because of that. He won because he positioned himself as the outsider that would make sure those things happen. Right? He was the guy that was going to end the wars. He was the guy that was going to invest in the United States. America first, not these other countries first. People like that. Take care of your people.

That's what they want.

People are voting for very simple things. They want to be taken care of. They want to have opportunities for themselves and their families and their communities. They don't want to feel despair. That's what the American dream was all about. That's why my grandparents came here. My grandma, Armenian, you know, fled, her family fled the genocide. She came on Ellis Island. That's why I'm here. I came and I started a company in a land that had great opportunity, but most Americans don't believe that applies to them anymore. And you asking me all these questions about AI, the answer is very simple. Give these people the opportunity to create a dream for themselves and their families in their own countries. If they don't have that, they will eventually revolt against you.

Is that what history tells us happens next in such a situation where the people feel more and more powerless and they feel like they have less and less opportunity?

It doesn't happen everywhere. I mean, let's face it, we've got 25 million people in North Korea that have been, you know, ruled by, you know, a cult figure who they essentially worship for decades now. So history doesn't necessarily tell us that the story always goes well. But in a democracy, in a democracy, Sometimes democracies go bad, but what we see frequently is pushback against people that are kleptocratic, but it's people that put themselves above the system. And we've seen that in many cases, in many democracies all over the world.

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So many of you have asked us if we could bundle the conversation cards with The 1% Diary. For those of you that don't know, every single time a guest sits here with me in the chair, they leave a question in the diary of a CEO, and then I ask that question to the next guest. We don't release those questions in any environment other than on these incredible conversation cards. These have become a fantastic tool for people in relationships, people in teams, in big corporations, and also family members to connect with each other. With that, we also have the 1% Diary, which is this incredible tool to change habits in your life. So many of you have asked if it was possible to buy both at the same time, especially people in big companies. So what we've done is we've bundled them together and you can buy both at the same time. And if you wanna drive connection and instill habit change in your company, head to thediary.com to inquire and our team will be in touch. I think the part that I still have this big question mark in my head about is what you do about that.

I was reading this morning that Jeff Bezos is investing or raising money, raising $100 billion for, I think it's called Project Prometheus, which is his own AI company. You've got Elon with xAI, you've got Anthropic, you've got Dermis at Google and Sundar, you've got OpenAI, Sam Altman, you've got all these big tech CEOs that are trying to sort of raise superintelligence, like, like it's a child.

Yeah.

And if they are to be successful, one would, one would assert that intelligence itself is the most powerful commodity, like currency or commodity, that there isn't on planet Earth. So those that you wield—

and commodity is right, because Altman talks about you're going to need to pay for intelligence the way you pay for water.

Yeah.

Or pay for gas. And that, that average American hears that and goes, what, what, I'm gonna have to pay for intelligence?

Yeah.

That that feels like something we have free will over. Suddenly you don't. Suddenly a company has control over that.

You know, if you had a wand and you could wave the wand and solve this techno oligarchy, yeah, what would you do?

I want 3 things. I want 3 types of governance. First, I want to make sure, um, that the United States and China start to have AI arms control conversations. When we were fighting the Soviets There were no arms control discussions until after 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. We almost blew up the entire world. That was super dangerous with much, much lower levels of technology. And then after that, we said, oh, maybe we should have a hotline between the two leaders. Oh, maybe we should have deconfliction. Maybe we should not invest in certain areas. Maybe we shouldn't try to develop Star Wars defense, for example. Maybe we should have some arms control agreements that limit "Look, you know what we do so that it's safer?" We desperately need that between the Americans and the Chinese. That's number one. Number one. Second thing we need, the financial markets. We all need the financial markets, right? We need them systemically. When there's a financial crisis, the whole world comes together to get out of the financial crisis. And it doesn't matter if you're capitalist or communist. The People's Bank of China, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, The Fed, they all work together because they are first and foremost technocrats who understand that we need the markets to function.

You need something like that for AI. You need an AI stability board so that whenever there is a model that creates a danger to us globally, like Anthropic just did last week, that model is dangerous to all of us globally because any software with a potential bug in it, is findable by that model and it can be exploited. That's incredibly dangerous weapon. So we don't want everyone to have that. So you need at scale, because everyone's going to develop this stuff, you need an AI stability board like the Financial Stability Board that is governed by technocrats, by people that have an independent capacity to identify threats to the systemic environment, the AI environment that we need to work, that can communicate that to the people that have power and that can immediately attack and address it, right? That's the second thing we need. We don't have that yet. The third thing we need is we have to have an ability to fund AI for people that otherwise would not be able to take advantage of it. We've got half of Africa that doesn't have electricity. The, the gap between people with electricity and people who don't have electricity is gonna be a hell of a lot worse when it's AI.

It's gonna be a gap between people that act like empowered human beings, hybrid individuals that have AI as a principal relationship and can deploy that knowledge, and people that we won't even treat as human beings.

Like a different species almost.

Like a different species. That's unacceptable. We can't allow humanity to develop that way. So we have to spend the money to ensure that everyone has access. We aren't close to that.

What about the domestic economy here in the United States or in the UK or any of these countries that are developing the technology?

Same as the last point. It's the exact same thing.

Okay, so you've got to also fund—

Yeah, it can't just be global. I mean, the Americans will not care about this if this is like for Sub-Saharan Africa. They'll be like, whatever, right? It's them. I'm saying this is something that is necessary for humanity. But when I looked at Artemis going around the moon, we're looking down. I don't see borders. I see 8 billion people. I mean, if anyone that came down that wasn't being shot up from the Earth and came down, anyone that came down to the Earth would look at us and they say, oh, look at this thing, 8 billion people. They don't see borders, right? And the first thing they would learn if they learned how we actually operate with our 8 billion people is, wow, you guys, given the technology you're developing, you have nowhere near adequate governance for 8 billion people. You guys are all divided into, and all of these short-term decisions you're making. That are so inefficient and you're going to destroy yourselves. That's what they'd say. That's what they'd say. And I say that as a person who is a citizen of the country that created the United Nations because we understood the last time we almost destroyed ourselves in a world war, we can't do that anymore.

So we need more global governance. We need more forums that bring everyone together, not that divide us apart. We're not heading in that direction right now.

We are not heading in that direction right now.

Yes.

I mean, we're certainly heading in the opposite direction in every sense of the word.

We're heading in the opposite direction in most senses of the word. But technologically, one could imagine that we're developing the tools that will help us move in that direction if we wish to.

There is another version of the future, isn't there, where sometimes I question whether it's possible because the human condition is so contaminated with all of these sort of darker parts of ourselves. But sometimes I wonder if there is like a version of the future which is utopia.

I don't see how there isn't. I mean, I don't see how you allow human beings to create the kind of tools that we have and not have the ability to use them for good. The big stories of the world over the past 50 years, my lifetime, those big stories have been about growth. Those big stories have been about about how human beings are living for longer with better education and better healthcare and more wealth and less starvation and less poverty. Those have been the big stories of the last 50 years. Now, you can say maybe it's a blip, but actually when you look at human history on the planet, it's generally moved towards more capacity. We've just had a couple of really bad episodes.

And information spreads so quickly that we hear about these bad episodes in a way that we wouldn't have otherwise. It feels—

that's for sure—

the algorithm's serving me up what's going on 10,000 miles that And I worry the most about that.

I worry the most about people getting programmed. I'm not worried about artificial general intelligence. I'm worried about human beings becoming more computer-like. When you spend all of your time on your smartphone, that is a computer programming a human being. And we're acting more like the computer when we know that we're not like that. We know that we're more like who we are over the last, few hours. We're sitting here, we're having a conversation with each other. I've never met you before. We know a bit about each other, but we're having a real conversation. That's a humane conversation. As soon as it gets intermediated by algorithms, as soon as you get programmed into a lane, we become much more inhuman. And I worry, that's why I hate prediction markets. The idea that we're going to, instead of looking at our political institutions as things that we built that serve us, instead we create a casino out of them. And we only care about whether we're in or out of the money. Human beings don't operate that way. Companies that want to line their pockets make us work that way. We're being forced away from being our better selves.

We need regulations and governance models and companies that help us be more of our better selves.

What's interesting is as a podcaster, you sit in this really interesting position where I don't have a boss or an overlord telling me who I can interview and who I can't. And my team, know me so well now that they would never even mention the implications of me interviewing someone to me. And what I say that is like, they would never come to me and say, Stephen, you should interview Ian, but just so you know, this is his politics. And if you interview him, these people might scream at you. They know me so well that they would never even mention it. So I say this to say that I have the opportunity to be like truly independent. That means that last week we had Ivanka Trump on, I had Michelle Obama on, then Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, and I've interviewed Mem Dani. And it's funny when you sit in this position and you look at the list of people that want to come on the show and that you've asked, can we reach out to these people? And you see every name, and yet you know that this, having a conversation because of the algorithms, with someone that half my audience don't agree with is going to cause like real anger, real anger.

But like, it's what I also find to be really funny is like when I meet these people in real life that half my audience hates, for some reason you connect with them. I can see like a lot of the time they have a disagreement about the path, but they all agree on the destination.

Well, no one's a villain of their own story. The one thing I would tweak of what you just said, you said, um, because you're independent, you have the opportunity right, to do what you want and to say what you want, to interview whoever you want, handle you. I think you have the obligation.

Yeah.

In this environment, independence is a responsibility because there are so many people that are not in your position or my position that aren't independent, that can be fired, and they do not have the same opportunity. And instead, we can't be angry at those people. We have to recognize that, no, we are fortunate enough to be independent. And if you can't be fired, we have an obligation to be out there and above the 50% of people that are going to hate you for whatever reason.

Can I ask you a question then? Do you think I need to say something to the audience on why this is so important?

Of course you do. I think you do that through your conversations, but I think being mindful of it is important. I mean, it's about being authentic to who you are. I mean, you and I may not have exactly the same values. We may not have the same priorities. But if you're being honest about yourself with your audience about what matters, you're doing that through your podcast, your conversation. It's about never selling out when you do that. It's about never pulling back and saying, oh no, that might irritate someone, so I'm not going to say it. That's not who you are. You can't do that. Right? Because again, that's what mainstream media does, and that's why they're in trouble.

I completely agree. And I think it's funny because sometimes I think that the audience might not understand that. But the reality is in the real world, when I go outside and I speak to people, they understand that and they appreciate that. It's just sometimes I think vocal minorities that really don't want to hear from someone that disagrees with them at all. But I just—

Are they really vocal minorities or are they bots? Are they algorithmically created? When you and I are on the street and people come up to us, it's over and it's random.

Yeah.

It's overwhelmingly friendly.

Yeah.

Maybe, you know, I think the digital world is not really a human world. And that's why it's so much more important to do more live, just get out there, also do more long form. The more that we can do to resist the algorithm, the better we'll be as a planet, the better we'll be as a species.

I'm so in love with the idea of like talking to people you disagree with or just have a difference of opinion with. I'm so in love by that. I remember reading a quote once that said, if you have the same opinion, If you have the same complete set of opinions as one group of people, those are not your opinions. And I find that to be really, really true because I can steal and take ideas and opinions that I agree with from almost everybody that I speak to. And this is such a strange position to take in an algorithmically driven world where the echo chamber will unbelievably reinforce and protect me if I just choose a side. That's right.

And part of my life that resists this is that my view is that If you hold the same opinions as the world is changing, you will be wrong. True, yeah. But the algorithm doesn't want you to change your views.

Is there any closing remarks that you have for the listeners based on the journey we've been on?

I mean, again, I know you're based, you're Brit.

I live in Los Angeles as well.

Yeah, I know. But still, I mean, you got an accent and I mean, you're global. We're 4 years old, we bought Botswana, right? That whole story. Um, I mean, the fact is that you've managed to build something global without promoting irresponsible lies and hatred and dislike. And I don't, I don't think you're bad for people, right? And we need more of that. Look, I mean, I, I, I think about, when I think about where power is coming from, it's not just tech companies, it's also people outside of established political forced. When I was a kid, I was— here's what we're talking about. I was in second grade. I think my teacher's name was Miss Criticos. She was Greek. And she was asking us, we were talking about the elections, and she was asking us who wanted to be president. And she was talking about what it meant to be president. I remember raising my hand, of course, and everyone's talking. I was thinking how cool it would be. And then all of a sudden she says, Ian, well, why would you want to be president? And I looked around and I realized that I was the only person that had my hand up, which did not make any sense to me at the time.

I would not have my hand up today. I thought when I grew up, I really believed that like public service was the ultimate expression of how you make a difference. That is no longer true. But it's not because our system is so broken, it's so bad. It's rather that we have created all sorts of opportunities for people to really make a difference globally. Outside of political institutions. And I've devoted my life to that professionally, and I think it's incredibly important. Right? And maybe people don't all agree with me all the time. Obviously, that's fine. But they do know that I really care about what I'm doing, and I'm trying to get better over time. Right? That's all we can do. And I don't think that has to be— it turns out I'll go through my life, and hopefully I'll have a long and healthy life. And I don't think I'll ever have served in public office, but hopefully continue to have more and more impact in a good way over time.

Yeah, I remember hearing Neil deGrasse Tyson say something very similar where he said the most powerful people on planet Earth are no longer the elected. They are those that influence the electorate because they end up going to the polls and making that decision. And so it is a huge amount of responsibility in such a world for people like yourself who I do think do a public service in educating all of us. I mean, look at all these books in front of me.

Yeah.

Unbelievable how many books you've written and how incredible they all are.

I don't know how you found them all, but they are out there. Yeah, yeah.

I'm going to link all of them below. And I would ask my audience to take a look at the variety of different— I think this is the most recent one, The Power of Crisis. That's the most recent, yeah.

Another one coming out next year.

Part 2?

Yeah.

What's the new book coming out? Don't have a title yet. Oh, you don't have a title?

Okay.

No. The Power of Crisis: How 3 Threats and Our Response Will Change the World. And in this book, you talk more about AI as one of those Threats as well, but I'm gonna link them all below. And I highly recommend people go and follow you both on your YouTube channel where you make content frequently about these issues as they're evolving if you want to keep in touch with Ian's perspective. And also over on your X page, you've got over a million followers over on X.

I do.

Big audience over there. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. Okay. And the question left for you is, I cannot read this.

Okay, here we go.

When you are on your deathbed, How will you describe your life?

Unanticipated.

Sounds like a good life.

Definitely. I mean, you know, let's face it, my optimism comes from the fact that we have no idea what we did to deserve being here. So every day is kind of like it's a bit of a gift, right? The more you can remember that, the more I think the better off we are.

Ian, thank you. I really appreciate all the nice things you do. And you, I've been watching you for many, many, many, many years. And whenever the world descends into turmoil and I'm looking for someone who can turn the lights on for me, you're the person that I come to. Typically on YouTube, I watch most of your stuff on there, but I also follow you on X and find your takes incredibly accessible and demystifying, which is I think exactly what we need more of at this time. So you are doing a public service, even though you're not running a country. You're helping people like me understand all of this craziness and therefore hopefully live better lives and make better decisions as to who we elect and how we think about the world and how we treat one another. So thank you for doing that. It's a great service to humanity.

Well, it's very motivating to hear that, frankly. And I promise you I'll keep doing my best. Thank you.