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

So every single year, Professor Ian Brahmov, 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 three 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 have been an immediate systemic risk to the global economy in our security. And artificial intelligence is eating its use. And we can talk about that. And lastly, I want to end on a point of optimism, can we take this craziness and turn it into a

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“In Brema, what is this document that I have in front of me here?”

This is our top risk 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 things that you list is 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 when I sat here in April? 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 three 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 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 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. It's the American system is not being challenged by the Chinese saying we don't want the Americans themselves and the leadership is saying we refuse to be the leader that we used to be.

So that's number one. Yeah. That is number one. This is a critical risk. That is a critical risk.

“That's the most important. And 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 risk 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. If anyone that doesn't

colour? 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

again somebody. I mean, you can't have an advanced economy without critical minerals and rare earths

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 long or 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 what 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 in confidence and unwillingness”

to take on expertise is ensuring that it will fail. He's quite unpopular on so many issues right now. He's going to lose in a big way in the mid-terms 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, right? Mostly, the reality is a future person, we're nearer now. Zoran Maldani,

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? It tells you that there's still a demand for something very different. And we don't know, as it comes 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 hit. There was a Yale poll in April, 26th. That said, Kamal Harris is leading the overall democratic field with 20 percent, narrowly edging out Gavin Newsom at 19 percent and keep

“huge change at 14 percent with AOC at 13 percent means literally nothing to me. You know, I think”

it was Jim Carville, the great Democratic political strategist that was talking about November. So, you know, the Democrats need to do, they need to all get on a plane and go to Turks and K-Cos until after the election. Say nothing, be absent, just do not be an allow. It's like the Sunsu, like when your opponent is making mistakes, stay out of their way. When you say the election, do you mean the midterm election? Yeah. So, for now, there's nothing happening except Trump

and the reaction to Trump. Then after that, we have a two-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, and then we can have a conversation. It is too early to talk about 20, 28 right now. I have to ask you then, what on earth is going on? I wonder when we're going to get there. You got this big map in front of us. Yeah, we haven't even

touched the Middle East. We literally haven't touched it. What is going on? Like, really take me

Yeah. Why would he do this after saying that he was the president that was going to stop all the wars? What is the big picture here? And literally one of the eight wars that he said that he had stopped was with Iran. This was not what he was voted in on. He was voted and 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 away 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. Right. So Americans wanted it into that. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. What the

“hell are you guys doing? We're not benefiting that. Stop it. Trump stopped it. So why do you do this?”

Why did he do this? Why did he do this? I think there are three reasons why he did it. I'll take you through. 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,

eight 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 oil? It was relevant to 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 going to see a few hundred thousand more barrels a day. But it's going to be years. If you

“saw that testimony by the CEO of Exxon Mobile, who said Venezuelan is not investable 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. Talk, 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. Excellent. You're 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

have 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 engagement. People that still have huge lawsuits that need to be resolved. So all of this stuff. But to get to here, I don't want to lose sight of

your why did Trump do the scenario. So the first point is beginning of the year. Trump goes in

to Venezuela. Right? It is the most successful military operation you can possibly imagine. Not a single American servicemen or woman is killed. They go in. They take maduro out. They don't kill them. They don't injure them. They bring them 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, Delcy 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 is has a different trajectory, but it's basically the same regime. And they say, whatever you want, we will work on. You want, we'll open our oil sector. We'll open our mining sector. We'll have better rags. We'll 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 is like blow your mind, right? Whole but hundreds of political prisoners, they have 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.”

They're 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. This Chile, right? This has been a serious issue. Trump's hugely feeling great. Successful. And I was like,

I can do that in Iran. I can do it even bigger. That's the first reason. That's the, I said,

three reasons. That's the first. 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

refinery in the world in Saudi Arabia. Those drone strikes you may remember. The Saudis and

“the Emirates were telling the Americans when you can do something. We need to take some action.”

Trump didn't do anything. They'll get an angry. Right? Finally, the end of his presidency, he orders pretty bold move. The assassination of this incredibly charismatic military leader Custom Soleimani, the head of the Cudd's Force, as it was called in Iran. In 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 were developing their ballistic missiles, they're developing

their nuclear enrichment. Enraying enrichment, they're like stockpiling at higher level 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. succeeded. Trump's like, I want to part of that. That's successful. So he joins in.

“Second time Israel took casualties, but a hundred killed, I think, in the course of that 12-day”

war. The United States, Iran talk big, did not hit the Americans. They threw some missiles at that Alliday base in Qatar, the biggest U.S. 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 in Iran. I know they don't want to fight me. I killed the Supreme

Leader 86 years old. It's going to die anyway. He's not that popular among the Iranian

of 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 I was raising number two. 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 were willing occasionally to do what they could to undermine an incompetent decision that would hurt the country. And we saw that whether it was with Mike Pompeo, or Mad Dog Madness, right, 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 Basin. He also has some instagringly incompetent advisors, like Pete Heggseth, 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 Kane, who clearly thinks that this isn't really that idea. And understands that the military scenarios are super dangerous. And that the Iranians will be able to shut down the straight. And every military in the U.S. for the last 20, 30 years has gamed out how the Iranians could shut down the straight 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. The Milnegotiate will 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, these rallies 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 were 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 decentralize 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, these rallies 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, a critical infrastructure,

and stopping transit from the street. This is one of the questions I had is in several interviews

Do you really believe I know there was a meeting recently in Pakistan where they sent Jady Vance into negotiate with Iran? Do you think anyone is running around at the moment? Is there leadership

“in Iran? Is it possible to negotiate and control all of these dispersed forces at the moment?”

First, the ISD answer is it's impossible to know because this is right now that the internal decision

making of Iran is extremely buttoned up, and they talk into 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 and return, they are able to implement on that in short order. So we've seen a number of occasions in the last five 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 street by individuals that are being ordered by the central Iranian government to do that, but not operating by themselves. So in that regard, the fact that the Iranians showed up in Islamabad, 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 street 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 they've done all the 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 straight of whom he used

“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. Two or three. And then they're up. 21 hours means very substantive conversations on the entire range of topics that were of importance to the Americans, the 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 keeps calling and talking with vans more than 10 times over the course of this entire conversations. They're in regular contact. At that point, Trump says, "Okay, I'm blockading the straight." But just before Mark gets open on Monday, you also see reporting that, "Well, these talks that were a disaster were 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 once speech so far about Iran. Primetime speech. In that speech, he said, "Words almost over two to three weeks. Max, we're 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, "Strip, not my problem, streets. Let them take care of it. I hear that. I'm

the Iranians. Great. He can't take the second armic pain." He knows he doesn't have a military

solution. So it's not that the Iranians are only hearing for Trump. I'm going to 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. But of course. And then they also will be aware that he's becoming increasingly unpopular 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'll start the year Iran. You're going Trump's own people. I pressurizing him to get the hell out of here. Yeah. He's unpopular day by day. It's hurting his economy. Great. 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's a dentocracy. So he's going to be unelected at some point in a couple of years.”

They saw a China. China did this. Right. Last year, Liberation Day is a merit as Trump called it where he puts tariffs on all these countries. He puts these high tariffs on China. They hit back.

we're going to shut down your critical minerals. Suddenly CEOs are going to Mara Logo.

“They said, you got to deal with the Iranians or we're going to shut down our factory lines in red”

states. Trump has to back down. Right. So then 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 shot. He can't take a hit the way that unelected non-democracy's can. The Chinese, and now the Iranians over the straight. So what Trump is doing with announcing the blockade, and by the way, he hasn't broken the ceasefire. So even though a blockade is an act of war,

he still hasn't said, okay, you guys have to start hitting the Iranians again right now. So he, 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 president's 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 of 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 you saying, I would put it slightly differently. I think that after the 12th 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 want it. 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? What is this

war? Well, a Hezbollah, which is a terrorist organization, as recognized by Israel in 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 lived. 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 five to seven 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, has belong at the beginning. In 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 Lebanon, and no one can do anything over 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 it 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 in violence is a serious problem. That's number one. Number two,

every year to Israel. Even as is 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? And they have like a hundred plus. So

“those are two fundamental drivers of conflict and instability in the region. One aligned with the”

United States, one 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 the 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 blocks 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 in the rest. So UAE Israel, the United States and India, are increasingly aligning on national security and technology. And they're becoming more of a international block based on this region. At the same time, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan

long work together on defense are now much more public about the alliance. Pakistan is nuclear, Saudi Arabia is not the Pakistan would provide them nuclear weapons if they really wanted. That's absolutely something to think about. They are increasingly becoming a regional defense quad for 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 straight, but they're not winning. And this is dangerous long trip. Your firm makes a lot of predictions. So 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 U.S. aren't

going to give up the demand to Iran that they cease to develop and pursue nuclear enrichment.

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 straight off from the news. We're in another standoff. He sees fires in place. The cease fires in place,

“which I think he said was 14 days. And we're now probably, we've got nine ten days left of that.”

He's thinking a lot about his legacy. He can't be re-elected. He talks sometimes about, you know, wearing the peace prize and wanting to be on a rush more 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 a win. But also Iran can't let him be seen to win.

So, so how 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. It's not even care about the nukes because 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 straight isn't his problem, right? But of course, he's also said different things. Sometimes in the same tweet.

Yeah, right? So he's picking and choosing. But what I'm suggesting to you is that Trump has already moved towards the escalation. You'll respond on when you say he set the stage to back out to back out. We won. regime change. Yeah. It's not my problem. We have our own oil. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then, if you don't open that straight, I'm going to end civilization. Yeah. So, which, which didn't seem to fit. It seemed like he was setting the stage to back out. And then suddenly

the civilization to be, I'm going to jump on your bridges and you nuclear power plants. Which suddenly made me think, okay, so he maybe he does really kind of... And wasn't plausible, by the way. Yeah. And there was no chance that he was actually going to do all of that that evening. So why did he just back out? Well, I do not want to be Trump's psychologist. 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 resensibious. The thing he heard in saw last, he frequently focuses on. But he also watches the markets. Yeah. He seems obsessed with that.

“Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. That's what I saw many of the announcements he makes.”

So right before or right after the market opens, and obviously there's been a lot of insider trading concerns around that too. And people, there's 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 it. But you can't avoid that topic. What happens? You want to 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. There'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 straight.

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 straight 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. Everyone knew that. They were two weeks away if they had access to the material and they reprocessed the nuclear grade and they weren't stopped by the Americans of these realies. That's a lot of if hands, right? But here they've got influence over the straight. They haven't. 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. 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 straight itself. That is the good scenario or 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. At least it will compromise on the nuclear point. But in turn, they'll get more control over the straight. Yes. And what does that mean that they'll be able to decide who goes through that? They'll get a whole charge. Oh, they'll get a little 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

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 the 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 two weeks. Once Trump has them there,

he can use them. And there are lots of things he might use the money. He keeps saying, I keep

seeing them 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. 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 block. Block hate isn't taking the oil. Block hate is stopping the Iranians from getting the oil out. Take the oil is control the export facility on carguer. Right? And this is saying this, for anyone who doesn't know what carguer line is and the significance of it in the oil. So this is a comparatively small islands, but 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. Sent comm central command say that you can take carguer island with 12 to 15,000 men relatively comfortable. So where is carguer island? So carguer island is right about here. It's not in the straight 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 or actually take it out of this region somehow? Is that like another passage to either develop? Okay, no, no. Could you just stop the oil? He could stop the oil.

“Okay. But again, if he has control of carguer, the oil coming out of carguer 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 straight. 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 straight 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 gotten his secretaries in 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 want to join them. The joining him 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 isn't economic downturn with oil prices shooting up. Gas is over four bucks a gallon. Diesel's over five. Inflations ticking up, food prices are going up. He's wildly under water on affordability. And he is completely responsible for no one else's 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 new 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. And Poland, this is a very big issue. And 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 he's seen to now just be sort of colluding with themselves and getting together and saying,

conflicts and was, and the UK always seemed to come to the US at school. Yeah. And for the first time

ever, I'm watching the UK go actually, you know, you do this when you say I'm not doing this. I'm going to meet with Macron in France and we're going to huddle and go ahead 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, right? They're relying more on the Chinese. They're all over the country. They manufacture. They've got oil. They've got gas. They've got fertilizer, right? All the things

“with the prices have just spiked through the roof. That's what the Russians have. That's where”

their powers. 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 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, but canness at 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

that they haven't been able to do that. I got this one instead." Like 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 the 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. Well, 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, where 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 U.S. are talking to us like a laptop. 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 up a little off." Yeah. Well, first, the Americans talking to the Europeans

that way has a lot more to do with the change in administration. I don't think any other democratic or Republican president would do what Trump is doing to his closest allies. That's more unique. But it is certainly true that over the last 30 years there have been two really big geopolitical shifts. Right? 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 is 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. We 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 druggy plan, the 800-page plan, by the former central bank head in the Earth, the ECB, Mario Draghi. They called him Super Mario.

He had this competitiveness report. All of these things that the Europeans needed to do, and he would say the Brits as well, to address that, to build on entrepreneurship, to spend in ways that would actually bring a return long term. It's like invests 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

elections, every, you know, so a 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 it scale”

long term. So as a consequence, what did Europe do wrong? You're focused. You're 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 to be peaceful. 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 in 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 that's a not an easy

“environment for the Europeans to be comfortable being non-competitive. A lot of this come down”

to energy and productivity. 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 isn't seem to go far, of course, 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 use the Chinese they're going to give a fuck. Not true. The Chinese haven't 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 materials, the raw materials that go into producing those, the Chinese have invested in this for decades now. And nuclear. While the Europeans have 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 the 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 credible 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. 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 open their currency to become convertible. They

“remassive 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 and 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've never fought a naval war. They have its decades since they fought a ground war.

They're not capable of doing these things. So is there any concern with China?

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 long margin in many of the

“core technologies that matter most in the world. And what does that potentially mean?”

That is what I've 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. 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. It destroys the European economy. The Americans are doing just fine.

The Americans are building and get so many of their semiconductors from TSMC and Taiwan. I'm sure you've talked about that before in your show. 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 the stuff that you desperately need or

your economy will fall apart. And yet that is the trajectory we present on us. If China had elections coming up in November, I'd be worried. Because you know, 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 like all that support. So, China's 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 word. The Americans, the biggest danger to the United States, not China. It's America. It's America getting in its own way and not investing in having

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Head over to WhisperFlow.ai/diven to download it now. That's W-i-s-p-r-f-l-o-w.ai/diven. You were in the TED talk two years ago in June, it was published in June 14th, 2023, and it's done tens of millions of views on YouTube. It is titled The Next Global Superpower, it is art, who you think. 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. This, 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,

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 the Ukrainian government was going to be able to fight these guys. On the ground, they wouldn't have been able to communicate with 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. If 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 and type of AI, could find

security vulnerabilities in lots of different applications and software applications that we use.

So essentially, it posed a cyber security risk. It could hack a bank to banks and critical infrastructure,

your power grid, water systems, anything with software. 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 have been an immediate systemic risk to the global economy in our security. And you believe them, I say this because I heard some people debating whether this was marketing talk 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. And 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 Bessent, 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 JP Morgan. Jamie Diamond is by far the best at cybersecurity in terms of the big banks and the big US institutions. And it considers this a five-alarm fire. I take this very seriously. I think this is actually a big deal that also happens to be useful for anthropics 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 going to take them out of 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 haven't rid of us here. Critical severe. Yeah, also severe. Again, it would be critical

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

“And it's not because of unemployment because AI is going to take on 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 dad is going to be stolen. You know, you're a 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 rushes much bigger than Ukraine. And yet in the last three months, Ukraine has actually taken territory back from Russia. How is that possible? Technology drones, right? They are become the most capable drone producer in the world. That scale so much that when the Iranians were attacked

“by the United States and the counter hit, what do the Americans do? They called Zulensky. Remember”

the guy that didn't say thank you in the White House and they said, "We have your help with your

changing the world so fast. And it turns out that the biggest way it's changing our security

“in the economy is AI. On this point of day, I actually was watching a video this morning before”

you arrived, which I thought I'd show you. Because it's quite, 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 what you can. 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 where 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 off of her 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 well data of these jobs being done. Then I was asking the workers in the factories to aware of themselves doing it so that they can replace them. Yeah. It's um, I love 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-actual

is just done. 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 she 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 are 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 than just as a podcast to who has conversations about this. I know people are not happy. I know they're not happy. I see

in the comments 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 and 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 traps, their knowledge worker jobs and what I think”

is going to happen. 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. 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 long, shortmen in the United States like said no AI, you're going to protect our jobs and they

were willing to actually demonstrate them mobilized and it kept AI out. They'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, in 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 center, AI, they said that no jobs, energy prices going up, water prices going up, zoning looks horrible in their neighborhoods, they're growing like top sea, huge amount of investment, everyone hates these things. I mean, Trump in the United States won on the back of a lot of men who many of whom had good jobs and

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 said, 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, right? They voted Trump in, not once, but twice, despite everything he is, everything he stands for they voted for. 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 2021 and that is an AI is a very big piece

of that AI data centers in 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've probably seen what's going on with Sam Altman just had a, you know, the Maratav cocktail that was actually thrown at his, and then 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 United Healthcare gun down you know, 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 be, be thriving be successful in make our lives better, but also the average person, the work in 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 ability to make micro adjustments in 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 a cheaper food, but 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. Which we mean by that, that the system is deploying these technologies in in you main ways. It's allowing the benefits of the

opportunities to be captured by a small number of individuals, 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 any to be an AI tax? So 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 don't think that happens. But I could easily see pilot programs that say instead of a five-day work week in the following

areas that we think are going to be disrupted, it's going to be a four-day work week or three-day work week. And we're going to 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 need to be more effective than your existing job because the only the people that know how to deploy these tools are going to have a job another three or five years or will allow you to transition. But you've got to 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 going to win”

oh well, I'll be fine. I'm still worth a lot of money. But I'm not going to do anything to actually help facilitate this. If the people that are most capable of being aware of these challenges

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 for at the European Union

“bloody hell. I remember speaking to, I don't know if I'm 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 it also means that the device is in a longer waterproof. So more devices are going to break which is even worse for the environment. And this over-regulation, which means that the Europeans are nowhere in terms of competitive. And not competitive. And you know, he said to me, he goes um,

and I don't think what the European said realises, we just don't need their market anymore. He said Brazil is 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 three systems out there, right, 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 right their

own regulations. That turns out that system drives 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 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.

We're not a part of the system of 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 like having all of the benefits that people need. But we can't afford them because our system is so heavily regulated. So anti-entrepreneurial that we don't drive the growth that would be necessary to keep paying for the people, right?

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 for 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, our minion, you know, 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 ask 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 than 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 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 push back 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.

70% of people who add something to the online cart never actually buy it. And that number is

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at Shopify.com/bottler that's Shopify.com/bottler and don't tell anybody. We have finally caved in. So many of you have asked us if we could bundle the conversation cards with the 1% diaries. 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 diaries 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 want to drive”

connection and instill habit change in your company, head to the diary.com to inquire and our team will be in touch. I think the part that I still have this big question mark my head about is what you do about that. I was reading this morning at Jeff Bezos' Investing or Raising Money,

raising $100 billion for, I think he's called Project Pamytheus, 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 open AI, Sam Altman, and got all these big tech CEOs that are trying to sort of raise super intelligence like it's a child. And if they are to be successful, one would assert that intelligence itself is the most powerful 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, we'll pay for getting that

“average American here's that and goes what? What? I'm going to have to pay for intelligence?”

Yeah. That feels like something we have free will over, suddenly you don't. Something a company has control over that. You know, if you had a wand and you can wave the wand and solve this techno, you know, oligarchy. Yeah. What would you do? I want three things. I want three types

of governance. First, I want to make sure 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 like have a, 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, 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, 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 capitalists are 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 the 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 the 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 attract and address it. 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 gap between people with electricity and people don't have electricity is going to be a hell of a lot worse when it's AI. It's going to gap between people that act like

deploy that knowledge and people that we won't even treat as human beings.

“Like a different species or human. 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 don't close to that. What about the domestic economy here in the United States, who are in the UK or any of these countries that are developing this house? The same as the last point. It's the success. Okay. So you've got to also fund... It can't just be global. I mean, the Americans will not care about this. This is like when they're supposed to have an Africa

or whatever, right? It's down. I'm saying this is something that is necessary for humanity. But when I looked at our our Temus 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. 8 billion people. They don't see borders." 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 developing, you have nowhere near adequate governance for 8 billion people." You guys are all divided into all of these short-term decisions you're making that are so inefficient and you are going

“to destroy yourselves. 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 forms that bring everyone together, not the divided support. 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 the opposite direction, 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 you know contaminated with all of these 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 is. 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 how human beings are living for longer with better education and better health care 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 humans history on the planet, it's generally moved towards more capacity. We've just had a couple of really bad episodes and an information spreads so quickly that we hear about these bad episodes in a way that we wouldn't have had the lie set fail. The algorithm's serving me up. What's going on? 10,000 miles that way. 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, much more

“in you than. I worry. That's why I hate prediction markets. The idea that we're going to instead”

of looking at our political institutions has things that we built that serve us instead. We create a casino out of them. We only care about whether we're in or out of the money that 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 podcast, you sit in this

really interesting position where I don't have like a boss or an overload 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. I want to say that is like they would never come to me and say Steve and 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. I say this to say that I have the opportunity to be truly independent and that means that you know last week we had a Vulcan trampoline, had Michelle Obama, Michelle Obama and then

Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom and I've interviewed Mendani and it's funny when you sit in this position

and that you've asked, you know, 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 you really funny is like when I meet these people in real life that half my audience hates for some reason 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 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 panel 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 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 you want to ask you a question that do you think I need to say something to the

“audience on why this is so important? Oh of course you do. I think you do that through your”

conversations but I think being mindful of it is important. It's about a 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 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 that's not who you are. You can't do that because again that's 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 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 that really don't want to hear from someone that disagrees with them at all but I just say really welcome minorities or are they bots? Are they how many really create it? No. When you and I are on the street and people come up to us and it's over and it's random. It's overwhelmingly friendly.

“Maybe I think the digital world is not really a human world and that's why it's so much more important”

to do more lives. Just get out there also do more long from 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 there. I'm not a 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 still 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 an algorithmically driven world where the echo chamber will unbelievably reinforce and protect me. I just choose a side. That's right. And part of my life that resist this is that my view is that if you hold the same opinions as the world is changing you will be wrong. But the algorithm doesn't

want you to change. Is there any closing remarks that you have for the listeners based on the journey we've been on? I mean, I know you're based on your bread. I live in the sun just as yeah, I know. But still, I mean, you got an accent and I mean, you're global, you agree with four

“years old. That's why I write the whole story. 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 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 force. When I was a kid, I was, here's what we're talking about. That's a second grade.

I think my teacher's name was Ms. Critical. She was 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 I've reverberated my hand, of course, and everyone's talking I think how cool it would be. And then all this is the E and the white white, why do you want to be present? 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

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. And maybe people don't agree with me all the time. Obviously, that's fine. But they do know that I really care about what I'm doing. 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 DeGrosse Tyson say something very similar when he said most

powerful people in kind of Anthony 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 and educating all of us. I mean, look at all these books in front of me. Unbelievable. How many books you've written and how incredible they will are. I don't know how you've out of them are, 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 panel. That's nice. Yes,”

yeah. Another one coming out next year too. Yeah. What's the new book? Can I have a tunnel yet? Oh, you don't have a tunnel? The power of crisis, how three 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 going to 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 the ins perspective and also everyone, your x page,

you've got over a million followers over an act. I do. Big audience over there. We have

they closing traditional on this podcast with the last guest leaves a question for next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is I can't read this. Okay, here we go. When you are on your deathbed, how will you describe your life? Uninticipated. 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? Even 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 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 you have stuff on there, but 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.

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