transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:04] This is why you should always lie to your AI. I encourage people all the time.

Speaker 2:
[00:08] To lie?

Speaker 1:
[00:09] As much as you can.

Speaker 2:
[00:10] Tell me more.

Speaker 1:
[00:11] Every time you type into your AI, like whatever you use, I always encourage people to just throw it off the trail sometimes. Just be like, I'm a father of seven, and this is my life, and you know, this is what's happening.

Speaker 2:
[00:22] But you are a father of seven.

Speaker 1:
[00:25] Yeah, but if you're not a father of seven, you get what I'm saying? Just be like random things. I live in Bulgaria, and this is my story, and this is my world.

Speaker 3:
[00:32] But you do live in Bulgaria.

Speaker 2:
[00:33] Oh, I mean.

Speaker 3:
[00:34] You just don't tell people that.

Speaker 1:
[00:35] You know, I thought I was worried about the future. I should be worried about the present. I've got two state actors here. I'm trying to help you.

Speaker 2:
[00:41] What you mean is Asian provocateurs.

Speaker 1:
[00:51] This is What Now with Trevor Noah.

Speaker 4:
[01:15] Thanks for watching. Thanks for watching.

Speaker 1:
[01:28] This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card. Imagine this, you're at a checkout counter. You're ready to pay when you realize you don't have your wallet.

Speaker 5:
[01:38] Dun dun dun!

Speaker 1:
[01:40] You could drive all the way back home and you could get it, but you remember that you have your Apple Card on your iPhone. So you can tap to pay with Apple Pay. But you know, one of the things I do like about having my card on my phone is we live in a world where you lose your card and then you don't know where it is. And then you're like, what do I do? Well, if your phone is connected to your card and your card is connected to your phone, you know what's going on. The best thing about having the Apple Card connected to your phone is you know what every transaction is. You know, like sometimes you're like, what did I spend this month? The Apple Card will show you. One month, I had spent an obscene amount of money ordering videos online.

Speaker 2:
[02:15] Just videos.

Speaker 1:
[02:16] They were just videos.

Speaker 2:
[02:18] What kind of videos?

Speaker 1:
[02:18] That's not the point. The point is, I knew that I didn't want to order those videos anymore because I'd spent too much money on it. It was videos on how to not spend money online.

Speaker 4:
[02:30] I felt like I'd been duped.

Speaker 1:
[02:32] Point is, Apple showed me what I was spending my money on and I was able to change my spending habits and you can do it too. I earn up to 3% daily cash back on every purchase with my Apple Card. That's unlimited daily cash back no matter where I shop. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone. Subject to credit approval Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch terms and more at applecard.com.

Speaker 2:
[03:02] And also, there's words you're not allowed to use on this podcast.

Speaker 5:
[03:04] Which?

Speaker 2:
[03:05] Long story short, just long story.

Speaker 5:
[03:09] Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2:
[03:12] You know, long story short. We want the long version.

Speaker 1:
[03:16] Yes. Short story long is what we would like. That's what we're looking for. Good to have you here. Thanks, Trevor. It's funny, I was thinking about how to describe you, and I was like, you should just ask the man himself, because I just think of you as a thinker, which I hope doesn't reduce you down to just one activity, but you are one of my favorite thinkers in the world. And that's how I came across you. I actually think the first time I came across your work was on Twitter. And I remember being like, who is-

Speaker 3:
[03:46] Some of my best work is on Twitter.

Speaker 1:
[03:48] I mean, isn't that all of us?

Speaker 3:
[03:49] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5:
[03:51] My short form work.

Speaker 1:
[03:53] The books, I see. The tweets, my friend. Those 160 characters, how you nailed it. How you nailed it. No, seriously. And I remember even at the time, noticing that you approached every topic or every idea with a different bent, is the best way to put it. It always feels like you're thinking about thinking differently. And then even when I was getting ready for this interview, I was going like, wait, how do you think of yourself? What would you say like your primary job? Like if a five-year-old was asking you, Mr. Bremmer, what do you do? What would you say to them?

Speaker 3:
[04:29] I'd probably say, I try to understand how different countries around the world interact with each other, where the world's going. I'm a political scientist. I wouldn't say that to a five-year-old. Yeah, yeah, okay. That's bad for a five-year-old. But that is what I think of myself as. I don't think of myself as like a president of a firm or an entrepreneur or any of those other things. I've always been, ever since I majored in political science as an undergrad, I thought of myself, oh, this is cool. This is the one I want to learn about. I never traveled anywhere. Suddenly, I start traveling around the world. Oh, that's awesome. Those people are really different than what I thought they were, and I want to get that. So if you study humanity at that level, then you're a political scientist.

Speaker 1:
[05:10] On the lowest level or rather on the simplest level, I think of it like there was a time, I remember reading a book about this. I think it was in the 80s or somewhere there when American companies were working with Japanese companies, and they didn't realize how many of the things they considered respectful were disrespectful in Japan. And then whenever they had to go to Japan, they had to give them a manual to say, hey, I know this is how you see the world, but in Japan, this is how they see the world, and you need to interact with them according to their worldview. And when I read a lot of your work, that's what I find myself thinking about is I go, we're living in a world where even on geopolitical scale, countries sometimes don't seem to realize that other countries think differently to them. Is that a safe assertion?

Speaker 3:
[06:00] Completely, and not only that, but over time, these things are fluid. When I started in 1989, when I started my graduate degree career, that's when the wall came down.

Speaker 1:
[06:11] Berlin Wall.

Speaker 3:
[06:12] Yeah, and the rest of the world had a view of the United States in the context of like that Cold War and winning the Cold War and those ideas. And it's only been 35 years, and the view of the United States around the world has changed radically over that period of who we are, of what we do and don't stand for. That's super interesting, right? And so generations change too. The generation that remembered what it was like when you stood for something, or you fought for something, the generation of things like that doesn't matter anymore, right? So think about where China was 35 years ago. You go there and everyone was riding a bicycle, and now they're building better tech than we have in the United States. So it's not just this idea of, oh, countries are static, and I need to help you understand that when you go to Japan, it's different. It's also that your own place is changing, and how you're perceived as being is different than it used to be.

Speaker 1:
[07:10] How far do you think America is from how many Americans think about it currently in the world? Oh, I think it's... Like, take us through a little journey. So let's talk about that period. There's the period where America comes out of these wars, physical and otherwise, right? The Cold War is a world war. Vietnam War. But there's this moment, like America has this idea of itself, and the world has an idea of America. And I think some people are still sort of set in that and stuck in it, but it's clearly changed. What do you think has been the biggest shift?

Speaker 3:
[07:47] There have been a few. One, a big one, is that America used to be the place that wanted to trade with everybody. Free trade. Now tariffs are the principal tool that the Americans are using economically, and it's not just about Trump. Most people in the US, Democrats, Republicans, are saying, no, no, no, no, we don't want free trade. We want stuff that's built much more here, and we want more manufacturing here. And you think as well about immigration. And my grandma came through Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

Speaker 1:
[08:23] Where did she come from?

Speaker 3:
[08:24] Originally, they are Syrian Armenians.

Speaker 1:
[08:27] Oh, wow. Okay.

Speaker 3:
[08:28] Yeah. So they came over, and she's even on a little bench, on a little-

Speaker 5:
[08:31] Oh, wow.

Speaker 1:
[08:32] That's amazing.

Speaker 3:
[08:32] Kind of cool to see.

Speaker 2:
[08:34] Still now.

Speaker 5:
[08:34] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[08:35] I mean, I haven't been today, but I think so.

Speaker 5:
[08:38] Unless someone ripped it out.

Speaker 2:
[08:39] On these two cold days, she's out there in a bench.

Speaker 5:
[08:43] Still there. My old grandma.

Speaker 2:
[08:47] And you're out here, crept in Kashmir and wool.

Speaker 3:
[08:51] You and your textures.

Speaker 1:
[08:53] Eugene loves textures.

Speaker 3:
[08:56] So, and I think of the Statue of Liberty as a pretty iconic thing for the United States.

Speaker 1:
[09:03] Right.

Speaker 3:
[09:04] I mean, clearly that doesn't reflect who the United States is today, right? I mean, like welcoming immigrants from all over the world. Give me your tie or your huddled masses.

Speaker 5:
[09:14] That is nowhere close.

Speaker 1:
[09:16] Yeah. Now it's give me your people who have a million dollars to invest or $5 million to spend on citizenship.

Speaker 5:
[09:21] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[09:22] That's the new thing now.

Speaker 3:
[09:23] Sell me your golden visa.

Speaker 1:
[09:25] Sell me your golden visa.

Speaker 3:
[09:26] Right. And also let me see your social media history, by the way, the last five years. When I first saw that, I didn't see the context. Of course, you'd immediately think, oh, that's China. You would think that from around the world. Or you think it was Russia or some other authoritarian state that controls information. Turns out it's the United States. Most other people around the world would not have thought. That's not comporte with their view of the United States.

Speaker 1:
[09:55] I'm just thinking about how powerful the idea of a place is in that it can be so powerful that people don't notice when it is doing things that it said it did not stand for. Because what you just said, I don't know why, it just like jammed something in my brain.

Speaker 3:
[10:18] I saw the reaction immediately.

Speaker 1:
[10:20] No, it literally jammed something in my brain where I went, if you put out a news headline tomorrow and said, China is going to be scrubbing people's social media for... Anyone who comes into the country, they're going to look through their social media for five years and they're going to get access to your phone. How would most people react? They would go, I'm never going to China.

Speaker 2:
[10:39] But they'll be like, of course I expect it.

Speaker 1:
[10:41] Yeah. And they'll be like, what kind of country does this?

Speaker 5:
[10:42] So they're not bringing my phone, got to bring a burner, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3:
[10:45] It's a communist country, you don't trust them, authoritarian. The United States is, these things are fluid. Nations are fluid. Governments, these all things are identity. What do we stand for? Who are we? I mean, maybe the most consistent thing since I was growing up is money, in terms of what the United States stands for.

Speaker 2:
[11:05] Yeah, the dollar.

Speaker 3:
[11:06] The almighty dollar.

Speaker 2:
[11:07] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[11:08] But when I grew up, the US didn't only stand for the dollar, it stood for other things too. And I think that's becoming a challenge.

Speaker 1:
[11:17] You're always writing books about moments in time. And tweets, don't forget tweets. I'll never forget the tweets.

Speaker 3:
[11:22] Okay, good.

Speaker 2:
[11:23] When you guys first met.

Speaker 1:
[11:25] Our meet-cutes. You're always writing books about moments and ideas that speak to those moments. A power crisis, how the world is moving at a certain moment in time. I always wonder, especially from authors who tap into these moments in the zeitgeist, I always wonder what they're seeing that we're not seeing that leads to them writing that book. And I'd love to know what you're seeing now that would inspire a book that you would be writing for the future. What's capturing your attention and your imagination as someone who studies the world? Maybe the...

Speaker 3:
[12:00] So the book that I wrote that probably was most prescient was back in 2011. And I'm going to answer your question, just wanted to give you a thought about it. And about the G-Zero world. And this idea, not that I had some crystal ball, but that it seems so over determined by big structural factors in the world, by the fact that the Russians, when the Soviet Union collapsed, we said that we wanted to bring them in, the NATO-Russia Council, the G7 plus one. We never really wanted to bring them in. They were angry about it. They blamed us. And we said we wanted to bring China in. We did, but only if they were going to become Americans. Only if they actually accepted our economic system. They became free marketeers.

Speaker 2:
[12:43] They kicked their in.

Speaker 3:
[12:44] Right. They adapted their system, and they became much, much more powerful, but they were still Chinese, so we weren't happy about that. And then the United States increasingly had a whole bunch of people saying, well, all that stuff that we used to do, like sheriff of the world and architect of trade and promoting democracy, we don't really buy that stuff. So you put all those things together, it seemed to me wildly overdetermined that the world wasn't going to be Pax Americana, it wasn't going to be G7 or G2 or G20, it was going to be an absence of global leadership, that the US wasn't going to play the role it used to, but no other country or group of countries could come together and replace, at least not for a period of time. And so it seemed to me wildly overdetermined, even if some of these things were going to change, that the train had so much momentum pulling out of the station going downhill that the G-Zero was going to come. So I wrote that because a book should be something that stands up for a while. And the thing that I see now-

Speaker 1:
[13:48] Wait, before you move on from that, before you move on from that, I'd love to know how people responded to it at the time. Because I find a lot of these books and these ideas are welcomed when they meet their moments.

Speaker 2:
[14:01] Or in hindsight.

Speaker 1:
[14:02] Yeah, but when you release them, I'd love to know how people responded to you writing a book basically saying, not only would America not be the de facto respected and love power in the world, but power itself would diffuse, would find itself diffusing in this kind of way. How did people respond to that?

Speaker 3:
[14:22] I think they thought it was interesting.

Speaker 1:
[14:23] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[14:24] They thought it was intriguing. I think it played with a lot of different strands that people were picking up and looking at. There were a whole bunch of people that were looking at one or two pieces of that puzzle. But most people at the time thought, I was taking it too far.

Speaker 1:
[14:36] Yeah, I can imagine.

Speaker 3:
[14:37] Most people thought, no, no, no, maybe it'll go that way, but actually we see a G2, it's going to be US. China, or actually it still packs Americana, and the US isn't in decline. I'm like, no, the US doesn't have to be in decline, but if it doesn't want to do these things, then it is personally removing itself from that role. It doesn't mean that the dollar suddenly is no longer the reserve currency. It doesn't mean that the US doesn't have all of this military capacity, but it still has to be willing to play that role. So yeah, I mean, I would say it did fine. It didn't undermine my work or anything, but it wasn't wildly accepted as, oh yeah, we all buy that in five, 10 years time that's happening.

Speaker 1:
[15:19] It's interesting to me that people who work even in governments don't seem to understand concepts and ideas that in my opinion should seem obvious. One that really struck me was the relationship between China and Africa, all the countries in Africa. The Biden administration would say, we see China striking up deals with, why are African countries dealing with China? They shouldn't be dealing with China. They should be working with the US, and you'd see all of these people come out and say these things. And I went, but America has abandoned Africa.

Speaker 3:
[15:53] They're not doing anything on the ground. Yeah, they're over a million Chinese living across Africa.

Speaker 1:
[15:59] It's over a million now.

Speaker 3:
[16:00] Well over a million.

Speaker 1:
[16:01] Wow, I didn't know it was that high.

Speaker 3:
[16:02] Yeah, it was something like 8,000 Japanese the last time I looked at it, and over a million Chinese. Wow. The Japanese asked the same question. We need to do more of them. I'm like, yeah, that's fine. But every single person that's on the ground, those are relationships.

Speaker 1:
[16:15] But now, okay, but help me understand this. How is it that a country can understand this until it doesn't? Is it because they take it for granted? Is it because they think that's the way it always will be? Like, how did the US ostensibly understand the value of going and building bridges physically and metaphorically in these other places? And then all of a sudden go, it doesn't matter anymore. And then wonder why like China would take over?

Speaker 3:
[16:41] I mean, two different types of answers. One's external, the other's internal. The external answer is that when you have a country that goes from everyone's riding bicycles and you aspire to have like a washing machine, to a million, to a billion plus person economy where they're middle income. And they've been growing at over 10% a year on average for 40 years. Damn. At scale, like that's never happened before. So I mean, you even had when Biden first became president, you may remember this, where he had this like statement on China where it's like, they're never going to compete.

Speaker 1:
[17:23] Oh yeah, I remember this.

Speaker 3:
[17:25] And it's because he hadn't been there. He hadn't been there when he wasn't serving.

Speaker 1:
[17:29] But do you hear what I'm saying? You're telling me that a president, not just of any, a president of the United States, looked at a country that most of the world was looking at as like a close competitor in terms of power and went, nah. How?

Speaker 3:
[17:48] They think they rip us off, they take things that we make, they make them a little bit better, they steal intellectual property, all of which has been historically true. But today, Trevor, you've got Europeans that are cutting deals with the Chinese saying, we're willing to let you invest in our country, but only if you engage in technology transfers to Europe.

Speaker 1:
[18:07] To Europe.

Speaker 3:
[18:08] From China.

Speaker 1:
[18:08] Imagine that.

Speaker 3:
[18:10] That wasn't happening even three years ago, and now it's happening. So these things, the point is these things change quickly. So what's the next thing? The thing, if I was to go back to your earlier question.

Speaker 1:
[18:22] What is happening now that you see could be happening then?

Speaker 3:
[18:24] Yeah, and I think one of the biggest things is that technology companies are becoming essentially sovereign as actors in the West. They are the ones that are not just writing the regulations, but they're actually creating the algorithms that they're deploying real time. They're experimenting on society and the economy and national security. And I think that within five, 10 years, some of these technology companies are likely to act like states on the global stage. That their level of power and influence will make them geopolitical actors. Not in China. In China, the state is controlling AI and the state is controlling what tech companies can do. But in the United States, really that development has been just turbocharged. And I don't see the willingness or the capacity in the US government to do much about that soon, and yet it's moving really, really fast. It's moving very fast. So we need to start asking ourselves, well, what does a global order look like when some of the principal actors are countries that do or don't have elections with citizens that they're meant to provide for? And some of them are companies with CEOs and owners and shareholders and business models, which don't look anything like governments. And we know that governments, some are rich and some are poor and some are more closed and authoritarian and some are more open and democratic. We don't even have models to understand what different types of companies are and what their business models are and their alignment with governance or not. So that's a real mindfuck if you want to think about where the world is going. And I think we need to start... Like, my field doesn't even have... Like, if you went to college and studied political science or international relations, there wouldn't be... You'd have American politics, you'd have comparative international relations. You wouldn't have, like, a branch that would look at companies as geopolitical actors. And yet, I would argue that we need to have that now.

Speaker 1:
[20:31] I don't know if it's the same, but could it be similar, obviously in a way more modern way, could it be similar to what the world experienced in and around the Dutch East India trading company? Because there was a time when the ships that were trading around the world were owned by companies that were almost more powerful than some governments, because they carried the spices, they carried the gold, they carried the people, they carried the... Do you know what I mean? And their influence and their power was such that they could shift your fortune.

Speaker 2:
[21:05] Yeah, they decided who's who.

Speaker 1:
[21:06] If they were on your side, they would give you alone as a country. They would decide where your military goes or doesn't. Do you think we... Is it that or do you think it's even...

Speaker 3:
[21:13] I think it's even bigger than that. The reason I think it's bigger is because if we imagine just a few years down the road, and you and I have both seen some of these presentations before, by the way, together. And the fact that you're going to have AI that is trained on our data, which means it will know us better than anyone, better than any government knows us, better than any spouse, member of our family, doctor, lawyer, accountant, what have you. And we're going to spend all of our time being intermediated by that AI. Yeah. Well, the company that controls that AI is going to have much more influence over us individually and anyone else in a society that is deployed with that AI than any government will. And I think that now that may cause a reaction, it may cause a revolution, it may break a state, it may force the state to nationalize them. I don't know, but that is the trajectory we are presently on. And that's way beyond talking about any East India trading company. That's like, you're not just your citizenship, your entire humanity, you're going to become more than or less than homo sapiens. You're going to be programmed by this thing. You'll become kind of a hybrid human being in some ways. But it won't be because of your relationship with the government, a passport, a citizenship. It's going to be because your relationship with that AI, which is owned by a company, which is created by a company. That's a wild evolution of a geopolitical model that you and I have grown up with, just kind of not even questioning what the assumptions are.

Speaker 1:
[22:55] This is why you should always lie to your AI. I encourage people all the time.

Speaker 2:
[22:58] To lie.

Speaker 1:
[22:59] As much as you can. As much as you can. Every time you type into your AI, like whatever you use, I always encourage people to just throw it off the trail sometimes. Just be like, I'm a father of seven and this is my life and this is what's happening.

Speaker 2:
[23:16] I'm a father of seven.

Speaker 1:
[23:17] Yeah, but if you're not a father of seven, you get what I'm saying? Just be like random things. I live in Bulgaria and this is my story and this is my world.

Speaker 3:
[23:23] But you do live in Bulgaria. You just don't tell people that.

Speaker 1:
[23:27] You know, I thought I was worried about the future. I should be worried about the present. I've got two state actors here. I'm trying to help you.

Speaker 2:
[23:33] What you mean is, a gent provocateur. What you're saying is actually very interesting because in South Africa, on the 16th of December is a day of reconciliation, which has been Ding'an's day before. It was commemorating the Zulus turning on the Dutch, on the Afrikaner, basically, after they sent them on a conquest to go fetch cattle from the Sutu King. But one professor was interviewed on radio and he was saying that, it is not about the history itself, it's that the history being taken away from the curriculum of a schooling system makes people lose their culture. Now, when everyone in the country that has 11 official languages start speaking one language, it's going to be very hard for them to believe that they are different. And he says that mistake was done by Japan at some point, where they focused too much on math and science, all the STEM subjects. And he says, they paused and hit the brakes and were like, introducing arts and culture back into society again. And as you say now, our interaction with America and how we know America is through pop culture, right? Fast food, movies, music, cigarettes, alcohol. And that's all we know. And for a long time, that was American culture. But you fast forward to 30 years from now, I mean, from then to now, if a South African visits America, there's very little that they see. In fact, we sometimes criticize other things and go, oh, we are far, far, far ahead.

Speaker 1:
[25:00] We're far ahead of this year.

Speaker 2:
[25:01] Yes. And that was always never the case. And also, you go to South Africa and more and more kids speak less of their home languages or indigenous or vernacular. And I think what you're speaking to is, it's almost like Trevor saying we're feeding into this homogenous society that we're going to end up being, which will not need the state.

Speaker 3:
[25:22] The AI runs.

Speaker 2:
[25:22] Exactly. We'll not need a president to tell people what to do. They'll just find it from a computer.

Speaker 3:
[25:27] That is the algorithm that you have. If I have maybe the thing that most determines your community, your connectivity, who you are, how you think, not your nation, not your actual physical community, certainly not your neighborhood.

Speaker 2:
[25:40] Your authority in your house does not lie with you anymore as the parent. It lies with the computer, because they can ask the computer what the story is.

Speaker 3:
[25:45] And one of the great values of the United States that I have always found has been the locality. Like when I grew up in Chelsea, Massachusetts, my entire world was my family, and just a few blocks around me is the public school that I could walk to and all those kids. And they came from different countries, but we were really, really tightly knit. That obviously is going to be blown apart when each of those individual kids has AI.

Speaker 2:
[26:10] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[26:11] Which is one of the reasons I think that this new Australian law that is saying under 16, no mass.

Speaker 2:
[26:17] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[26:18] I think that's clearly that should be global.

Speaker 2:
[26:20] No mass is a boxing term for when you're like, I can't take anymore.

Speaker 1:
[26:24] You say what?

Speaker 3:
[26:25] No mass.

Speaker 1:
[26:26] Is that someone trying to say no more?

Speaker 2:
[26:28] Yeah, like no mass.

Speaker 1:
[26:29] How did that start?

Speaker 2:
[26:31] I guess when you bend the knee.

Speaker 1:
[26:33] No mass. You don't mean physically.

Speaker 2:
[26:36] No mass. I don't know how it started, but it's a boxing term, right? Oh, okay. If you've had enough, you're like, ah.

Speaker 1:
[26:41] Do you think it's too late though? Like some people say, the cat's out the bag. It's too late for Australia to say kids can't have social media and that, because now there's the kids. No, I'm just asking.

Speaker 2:
[26:52] No, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[26:52] Too late for hope?

Speaker 3:
[26:53] Never too late for hope. I don't expect a question like that from Trevor.

Speaker 1:
[26:56] No, I'm asking you.

Speaker 5:
[26:57] I'm asking this.

Speaker 2:
[26:58] I was so disappointed in him as well.

Speaker 3:
[27:00] Were you? I can feel it from both of us. The father of seven, from Bulgaria.

Speaker 5:
[27:05] And no hope. Look what he's made of himself from those humble background.

Speaker 1:
[27:12] It was actually a man by the name of Ian Bremmer who taught me to ask questions that you yourself wouldn't necessarily ask and to think in ways that you wouldn't necessarily think to get a bit of strategic understanding of how the world might work. That's what he taught me.

Speaker 3:
[27:27] That's extraordinary.

Speaker 1:
[27:28] You should meet him.

Speaker 5:
[27:29] I should meet him. You should meet him. He sounds like a great guy.

Speaker 3:
[27:32] He really does.

Speaker 5:
[27:33] I think we can do it.

Speaker 3:
[27:34] Of course we can. Can we do it in the United States?

Speaker 1:
[27:38] Can anything happen anymore in the United States? I don't mean this in a facetious way, but can anything happen in the United States?

Speaker 3:
[27:46] People believing that the US was so broken, that the political system was so corrupt, so sclerotic, is what got us Trump. Most people that voted for Trump thought that democracy was more important than the people that voted against it.

Speaker 5:
[28:05] Because for them, the idea, and it's in the polls.

Speaker 3:
[28:10] Most people didn't think that the election was about democracy, but for those that did, more of them voted for Trump than voted for Kamala in the last election. It's because those people thought that the deep state, the administrative state, the system was so broken, just like my mom used to. My mom, when she was alive, she didn't finish high school. She cared a lot about me and my brother. That was her whole life. She's like, these guys will never take care of you. Not the government officials, not the CEOs, not the bankers, not the media, none of those fancy people. I got to fight for everything. If I have to steal, I'll steal because it's my kids. You have so many Americans over the past decades who feel that way about the government. That's what got you Bernie, it's what got you Mom Donnie, it's what got you Trump. It's the same thing. Why did Trump decide that he was going to welcome Mom Donnie in the White House? Because fundamentally, he gets that that's part of what got him there.

Speaker 1:
[29:05] He was saying, he said, like, we agree on a lot of stuff.

Speaker 5:
[29:08] Sure.

Speaker 3:
[29:09] Both in principle saying we want to stick it to the man. Now, Trump, of course, is also the man. So sticking it to himself, it's really impressive.

Speaker 1:
[29:18] He's able to occupy both roles.

Speaker 5:
[29:19] He tries.

Speaker 1:
[29:20] Yeah, no, in people's eyes is that he goes, I am the persecuted, and yet I exist in the realm of the persecutor. Like, it's an interesting dichotomy that he gets to occupy in that way.

Speaker 3:
[29:32] I, when I saw the felony convictions and the mugshot, that's when I was convinced Trump was going to win.

Speaker 1:
[29:41] Wait, really?

Speaker 6:
[29:42] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[29:44] Because that, because that made him seem like it is, the deep state is a thing or that- It can happen to anyone.

Speaker 5:
[29:49] The system was out to get him.

Speaker 3:
[29:51] Like, of all of the bad things that he did, of all of the real political cases that were out there and should have been brought, of the impeachments that were real, of the Republicans that said, no boss, right? It was the most ridiculous case that would not have been brought up as felony charges against another American that was politicized against Trump. That's where he got his felony convictions. And his entire election was a grievance-based election. It's like they're coming after you. I'm standing in front of them. Let them come after me. And they do want to take him down. And he was almost assassinated. And it was this close.

Speaker 1:
[30:29] It's this world of everything. It's interesting that you say the thing about the same, because I've seen people bristle at that comment. If you say, Bernie and... And they're like, how can you say? But AOC had a live on her Instagram, I think it was after... I think it was the midterms. I forget which election it was, but she had done really well. And most Democrats hadn't. And then she asked, just her followers online, she said, have any of you voted for me and for Donald Trump? And if so, please tell me why. Because she was sort of posing this question. She went, it seems like we're completely different. How would you vote for me and him? I don't understand that. And it was fascinating to see the responses that people gave. They said, while the two of you are not politically aligned, you both agree that the system is broken. And you both present yourselves in an authentic way, not honest necessarily, but authentic, which was an interesting semantic difference. And they were like, and we like that you both disrupt what was because it wasn't working for the rest of us. And that was an interesting insight to get from people themselves to say, oh, we're now living in a time where America especially, but in the rest of the world, we're seeing it as well, the system has pushed people so far that they're no longer incentivized by what's safe because it hasn't brought them safety, it hasn't brought them security, it hasn't brought them sustenance.

Speaker 3:
[32:08] The American dream no longer works for them.

Speaker 1:
[32:11] Yeah, so they've gone so then let's break it.

Speaker 3:
[32:12] More Chinese believe in a China dream today than Americans believe in an American dream.

Speaker 1:
[32:16] Wait, is that true?

Speaker 3:
[32:16] That is absolutely true. And that was not true when you and I were kids. So that's a radical transformation. We started this part of the conversation by you saying, can you still do things in the United States? Trump is living proof you can still do things in the United States. Number one, him personally with the greatest political comeback in American history. But beyond that, I would argue that we are in the middle of a political revolution right now. Trump is intending to ensure that there are no more checks and balances on his behavior as the executive of the United States. We see that with the way he is trying to weaponize the so-called power ministries, the IRS, the FBI, the Department of Justice to do his will in the way that he thought they were weaponized against him. You see that with his efforts to ensure that the principal enemy to the United States are his political adversaries. That's a political revolution. I don't know that he's going to be successful, and personally, I hope he's not. But I do hope he's successful in eliciting sufficient pushback from people that want to really change things.

Speaker 1:
[33:26] Okay. That's interesting. Just this idea of inspiring some movement, some idea, help us understand how to even begin thinking about these things. You're a big fan of strategic thinking. And what I like is how you break this down. I think a lot of people would consider themselves strategic thinkers. And based on your definition, they wouldn't fall into the category. Because I think most of us would think that if you ask anyone, are you a strategic thinker? And we're like, yeah, I think should I walk on 42nd Street or 45th Street? I think about that all the time. It's my strategy. And you're like, no, no, no. How you see the world is a strategic. Help us understand why you think it's so important to be a strategic thinker regardless of what station you occupy in life. Let's start with what it is.

Speaker 3:
[34:21] I think it's wanting to first define a problem before you act in response to it. The idea of something is uncomfortable and therefore I lash out. That's not strategic thinking. That's pain reaction. There are lots of problems, lots of challenges, lots of opportunities in the world. You couldn't respond to climate change until you had a population around the world that recognized, oh, here's the science, here's what's happening. We've got the following carbon in the atmosphere and it's leading to these changes. You can choose to decarbonize. You can choose to invest in new technologies. You can choose to adapt. You can even say, actually, we're getting so much benefit from the economic outcomes of globalization with oil and coal that we don't want to do that other stuff. Maybe there are lots of different effective ways to respond, but you can't even start to respond until you have identified the environment that you're in, the real honest to God environment you're in. That is true in climate, it's true in technology, it's true in geopolitics, it's true in the economy.

Speaker 1:
[35:33] It's true in life, I would say.

Speaker 3:
[35:34] It's true in life.

Speaker 1:
[35:35] It's in a personal relationship. It's first understanding what the situation is.

Speaker 3:
[35:41] Who you are, where you are.

Speaker 2:
[35:42] Yeah, so for the terrain and then have a battle plan.

Speaker 3:
[35:45] Yeah, because too many people want to get into the debate about what we should do before they've actually discussed where we are. So like this whole discussion of Trump good, Trump bad, let's first understand how we got to the point of Trump, because Trump is not the reason the United States is in the present situation. Trump is a beneficiary, Trump is a symptom, and Trump is an accelerant. But Trump only happens in a political environment where very large numbers of people believe that the system is already broken. So to be a strategic thinker about what needs to happen in the US, you have to understand that. And that makes you then think, well, maybe the political establishment, as we've been dealing with it for the past decades, is not the answer.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 8:
[38:41] Hey, everyone. It's me, Morgan Stewart, and I have a new podcast called The Morgan Stewart Show. Join me each week as I talk about pop culture, fashion, my personal life, and just a warning, I'm going to be giving my opinion on everything. I'll also have some really fun guests to join in on the fun. The Morgan Stewart Show is out now. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcast or watch full video on YouTube.

Speaker 2:
[39:07] People are always hopeful of younger leaders having better ideas. Is that true in politics? And do you think it will be true for the US as well?

Speaker 3:
[39:16] Well, I think younger people are increasingly the majority. So whether or not they have the answers, they will be the answers. So understanding those demographic changes is super, super important. Like Saudi Arabia, I was just in Saudi Arabia a little bit ago.

Speaker 2:
[39:32] What's it like?

Speaker 3:
[39:33] It's so different than 10 years ago, than 20 years ago. I mean, it's literally they're going through like a reverse Iranian revolution. Now, they have leadership which is, of course, deeply confident, and it's a monarchy and it doesn't brook political opposition. But they are transforming how societies work. It's not just that women drive, it's that they work, it's that they're educated, they're going out. They're like, there's a dating culture in Saudi Arabia. Now, it feels normal to an outsider in a way that 10 years ago, it felt like an alien repressive society.

Speaker 1:
[40:11] Now, you see, this is something that I feel like you're the perfect person to speak to about this, because you have to think of it, this is literally your job and this is what you consult on, this is what you work in, this is what you write about, this is what. How do you think any given person in any given country should think about other countries and the journey that they're on, in terms of getting to the place that we think they should get to? I know that sounds like a word jumble, it's like a word salad.

Speaker 3:
[40:38] There was a lot there, Trevor.

Speaker 1:
[40:39] Yeah, yeah, but I...

Speaker 2:
[40:40] Father of seven.

Speaker 3:
[40:41] Yeah, from Bulgaria.

Speaker 1:
[40:43] I haven't slipped in a long time, guys. So I think of it like this. Many people in the United States would say, nobody should do business with Saudi Arabia, no one should go to Saudi Arabia, no one should do anything in and around Saudi Arabia, because Saudi Arabia doesn't have free speech and they oppress gay people and it's a terrible place for women, et cetera. They'll say all these things, right? They'll say them. Some of them being very true, some of them may be outdated, they've changed, but people haven't changed knowing what has changed, right? I remember asking someone this question, not being pro-Saudi Arabia at all, by the way, I just said, but America wasn't always pro-gay rights, right?

Speaker 3:
[41:22] Correct.

Speaker 1:
[41:23] So do you think America should have been boycotted and sanctioned then? And people were like, well, no, but I'm-

Speaker 3:
[41:34] But sanctions on South Africa, of course, worked, right? Because here was a country that really didn't want to be isolated.

Speaker 1:
[41:40] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[41:41] And helped make them anti-apartheid.

Speaker 1:
[41:43] But did it work? Or did the apartheid government at some point realize they were just running out of steam?

Speaker 3:
[41:47] Both.

Speaker 2:
[41:48] No, they started to move. But because of the sanction.

Speaker 1:
[41:50] No, but that's what I'm asking.

Speaker 3:
[41:51] I mean, it accelerated the process.

Speaker 1:
[41:52] Right.

Speaker 3:
[41:53] There's no question. Without that international pressure, it wasn't going to move so much. And look, Americans, young people in America feel a lot differently about Israel and Palestine today than they did 20 years ago.

Speaker 1:
[42:02] Right.

Speaker 3:
[42:03] I'm growing up in the United States, Israel, principal democracy, and still a whole bunch of forefathers, parents, saying, hey, what happened in World War II? That's why they have a state. That can never happen again. We have to support that. Today, you've got Israel as by far the strongest country militarily in the region, able to determine outcomes with comparative impunity against its adversaries. And you have Palestinians who are living with next to nothing, and they feel like the little guy. They feel like the oppressors. There are a lot of young Americans that automatically are just not going to align with the stronger power. Irrespective of where right and wrong and history and the rest play. So the point is these things change. And I think this is kind of like a throughput of the conversation that we're having. No, it is. It's not just how you think about other countries. It's also about how you think about other countries and your own country over time.

Speaker 4:
[43:02] What's the trajectory?

Speaker 3:
[43:03] Are you making progress? No, the arc of history isn't always towards progress. It has to be moved by people, by leaders towards progress. And right now in the United States, we're living through a very uncertain time. If you'd asked me in 1989, when Gorbachev was in the Soviet Union, asked me to describe the Soviet Union as a country, is it a dictatorship or not? Is it an empire or not? And I would say, I don't know, because it was in process, right? It was going through an extraordinary political revolution. And it could have collapsed, it could have not, it was all pregnant with possibility. The United States today is like that. Damn.

Speaker 2:
[43:47] Yeah, same with South Africa with the sanction. It could have gone either way.

Speaker 3:
[43:50] It could have gone either way at the time.

Speaker 2:
[43:51] And most people think apartheid lasted very long. It wasn't actually very long, because obviously for it to become a republic from the British, giving it to the Afrikaners, they realized that sanctions will take them back half a generation actually, because they had just acquired all this wealth. And for a way to keep the wealth was to obviously relinquish power, but still keep the levers of power. And we're dealing with it now, 30 years after the first elections. So nothing much has changed. And you're right, it's just people adapting. And I think it was just young ideas of the people who were in government at the time, of the apartheid government who said, look, strategically, if we think about this, if we relinquish power, appease the West, and then put these people in power, we can still control the money. And it was true.

Speaker 3:
[44:31] And it was true for a long time actually. Yeah, and Becky, it was certainly true.

Speaker 2:
[44:35] 100%.

Speaker 1:
[44:36] And even to your point of that is like, Nelson Mandela had to be, it's funny, when you talk about people's perceptions of things changing over time, Nelson Mandela was widely seen as the person who orchestrated the impossible. He threaded a needle that was impossible to thread because he said, power is going to shift over from a minority to a majority. There will be no widespread bloodshed. There won't be any war. There won't be any purging of people.

Speaker 3:
[45:05] So there can't be pogroms against these people?

Speaker 1:
[45:07] Yeah, there won't be any Idi Amin. There won't be anything like that. They will still be involved in the echelons of power. And at the time, people went, oh, this is the only way it could be done, because the West, for instance, might just shut South Africa off. It might sort of do like a, like turn us into a Haiti, for lack of a better term, where they go like, no, they would though. They go, they could have just shut down South Africa and go like, we're putting sanctions on you. Even though you have freed yourself, we're putting sanctions on you. Yeah. And he did that. But it's interesting to see how, like a generation later, there are many people who go, he did the wrong thing. It should have been a revolution.

Speaker 2:
[45:44] He Mandela affected us.

Speaker 1:
[45:45] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[45:46] Because if you think about it properly, after the first elections, there were two terms that ran concurrently and two races heard them differently. The first one was transitional government. So white people still understood that they still had the levers of power. You had FEWD. Clark still being a secondary president. And then Rainbow Nation was for the black people. All of us were together in this whole thing. One had power, one had no power. And guess which one we went with?

Speaker 1:
[46:11] I loved the Rainbow Nation.

Speaker 2:
[46:12] Yeah, we're still in the transitional government, whether we like it or not. And all 30 years later...

Speaker 3:
[46:16] Again, it's the domestic and the international. You have to look at the internal and the external. And if the United States is going to be Israel's protector no matter what, then the behavior of the government and the way that the people react is going to be different than if suddenly they had the view that, oh my god, the Americans might actually be turning against us. And then we're in real trouble at that point because we no longer have that support, right? And that's true for so many different countries around the world that are going through significant transitions. The reason why the United States is so unusual is because the US is going through a political revolution at the same time that it is the most powerful country in the world.

Speaker 1:
[46:53] Oh, that's interesting. That's really interesting. Because commonly it would happen when things aren't going well.

Speaker 3:
[47:04] So many countries around the world are not happy with what the US is doing, but they don't want to get into a fight because it's dangerous for them. And not just Mexico, not just Canada, but the Europeans. I mean, publicly, when they're meeting with the Americans, they're trying to find a way to, oh yes, you're brilliant and we got to find a way to work with you. We appreciate all your efforts and we'll get to the right peace deal with Ukraine, we'll get to the right trade deal between the two countries. Only the Chinese have hit the Americans' back hard and the Americans backed off.

Speaker 1:
[47:35] So when we're looking at that world, you said that first rule, first understand the lay of the land, first understand the situation before you react or respond to it. We are currently in a situation where, as you said, powers diffuse. People can work in different worlds. A good example is America being the number one exporter of soy to China, and then Brazil, I think, basically taking that spot from them.

Speaker 3:
[48:03] Then the Americans taking it back now.

Speaker 1:
[48:06] Yeah, because now going like we're going to work that deal, we're going to find who we pay with that. It's such an interesting, complicated puzzle that's constantly moving. So what is step two? When you have the information that's only applicable to now in this moment, what is step two or strategic thinking?

Speaker 3:
[48:21] Well, let's first recognize why step one is so hard today. Because if you're living in an environment where the basic, like the block and tackling of just what the information is, is completely divided on the basis of your political tribal affiliation, then you can't get to step two.

Speaker 1:
[48:38] How many times have we had this conversation? Can I tell you, it doesn't matter who we've spoken to, whether it's comedians, whether it's news anchors, whether it's politicians, whether it's analysts, whether it's political science, it doesn't matter who it is. Almost everyone has agreed on one thing, and that is one of the greatest threats facing society today, is the fact that we are not getting the same information. Not that we don't agree on it, just that we're not getting the same information.

Speaker 3:
[49:06] So you can't do strategic thinking if you are not together at least able to understand the lay of the land. Not what the solutions need to be, just the basic issues. The facts around a vaccine and its efficacy, the facts around an election and its outcome, and the fact that it was or was not free and fair. These are fundamental things that Americans today are incapable of agreeing on because their information ecosystems are completely different, are politicized, are treating them like products. Because we're not going to do strategic thinking as an American nation absent that, not possible. And we will therefore slip farther behind our competitive environment, our competitive advantage to other countries that can do that strategic thinking.

Speaker 1:
[49:52] So, when you see something like that, as somebody who studies the journey that countries are on and how nations rise and fall, is it absurd to think that America could sort of like eat itself from the inside out if everyone believes that nothing is real and nothing works and nothing? Because at some point, what people stop doing is they stop believing, they stop caring, and then they just sort of just like give that power to something or someone else. You know what I mean? People just walk away.

Speaker 3:
[50:22] I mean, I think as someone who's traveled all over the world and has spent most of my life studying other countries that have gone through transitions, when the US, as I've grown up, has been much more stable and so people think, oh, it's always going to be this way. You recognize that these are ephemeral points, that the US could go in a very, very different direction, that the institutions that you think are strong might not stand, that the leaders that you think will stand up for something might not stand up for something. And that could lead to widespread social movements in the United States, but it could also lead to wide repression and violence. I don't think that those things are imminent or likely today, but I recognize their possibility. You have to, anyone that has studied Latin America or the Middle East or Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia, anyone that has studied any of those countries, even like Brazil has gone through so much similar politically from what the United States has recently. And not very few Americans would say, oh, our country is like Brazil. No, actually these political dynamics are very similar. And if you end up with a political class that feels like if they lose, they lose everything. You heard Steve Bannon say this the other day, if we lose, we're all going to jail. If they really feel that way, if it's not just about losing an election, but if we lose, they're investigating us, they're throwing us in prison, ourselves, our families, maybe even violence.

Speaker 1:
[51:46] Now you don't even want to allow an election to become, why take the chance now?

Speaker 3:
[51:51] You have to control the outcome when it becomes about everything.

Speaker 1:
[51:54] Yeah, that's terrifying. It's terrifying.

Speaker 3:
[51:56] And that happens in so many different countries. You cannot tell me that there is something so exceptional about the United States, so unique in human history that it could not happen in the United States. It's a country that had a civil war where it literally tore itself apart over ideas. And it could happen again. Of course it could.

Speaker 2:
[52:17] There's that phrase that always scares me, the political class and what it breeds, right? I think we don't talk enough about that. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[52:24] What elements of it? Does breeding make you uncomfortable? Which part?

Speaker 2:
[52:31] Once you have people that will cling on to power by enemies necessary, then they start determining about, I mean, how the culture of that country is going to be like. The one person that's going to get into power, who's going to slip in after all is said and done, is going to want to stick in there. And we see it in this country, right? Someone brings in their relative, they get power. Then they have the people that are around them that have political power as well. Then it becomes a little cabal in the class that goes and negotiates deals with other countries, but they're not necessarily acting for the country. Then they start determining who's a figurehead that stands in there, but they're the ones who control the levers of power.

Speaker 1:
[53:01] Yeah, I mean, in South Africa, we see it as well, where it's like one of the great fears of any leader is losing the power, not because they want to do things for the country, but because they're scared of what will be done to themselves. Yeah. Because of what they've done.

Speaker 2:
[53:12] Yes. But obviously, in our country, it went with, it was political struggle credentials first, and then it became political dynasties, children of people who went and struggled.

Speaker 1:
[53:24] And then obviously, there's like our version of the Kennedys, essentially.

Speaker 3:
[53:26] I mean, President Trump was clearly willing to go a lot farther than I think anyone around him, his advisors, the Republican leadership, had imagined that he would at the end of the first term, when he lost to Biden, when he lost a free and fair election, both in terms of calling the Georgian election officials and saying, you got to do something for me, in terms of January 6, all of these things, which is why so many Republicans turned against him with that second impeachment, unprecedented in US history. That is exactly the sort of thing that people underestimate. And it's not just about Trump. When you see some of the decisions that are being made by the Attorney General right now, it's inconceivable in today's environment that the US. Attorney General would open an investigation against a member of the Trump administration in good standing. And yet that's exactly what an attorney general is supposed to do. Hmm. That's only changed in the last year. And yet there are so many examples of that happening in other countries around the world.

Speaker 1:
[54:26] When you're analyzing a lot of this, I've noticed in a lot of your work, you sort of take the approach that I feel like a doctor does with medicine or with surgery, where they almost don't have an emotional feeling towards a cancer, for instance, or they just observe the thing.

Speaker 2:
[54:45] Oh, yes.

Speaker 1:
[54:46] Do you get what I'm saying? I do get what you're saying. A lot of the time, I'll read your work or I'll watch you-

Speaker 3:
[54:50] I'm a little disturbed about it, but I get what you're saying.

Speaker 1:
[54:52] No, no, no, because I wonder if you... It feels like you've had to find a way to observe something unemotionally and then respond with your emotions if you wish to. But first of all, this is what I see is happening.

Speaker 3:
[55:06] Yeah, I'm glad you put it that way, because I mean, at least the doctor analogy, doctors are human beings. They're not robots, they're not automatons. They actually really care about their patients, but first, they have to do no harm. First, they have to try to understand and respond to what it is they're dealing with. Now, I could never be a doctor because I can't handle blood, right? And so many people say that, but it turns out I can actually emotionally handle all sorts of political distress. I don't get wound up by it.

Speaker 1:
[55:34] A lot of people can't. A lot of people can't.

Speaker 3:
[55:37] And I have no problem, by the way, I personally believe, and I've said this publicly, that Trump is unfit for office. I believe that for reasons we can talk about if you want. But I have no problem, Trump does things that are legitimately successful. When he does things that are more successful than Biden, and there are many of them, I have literally no emotional problem saying that publicly.

Speaker 1:
[55:57] But that's what I mean.

Speaker 3:
[55:57] Because it's obvious that that is the case. And people get mad at me. People that think that, well, wait a second, hold on, hold on. You can't say anything positive about Trump. But what do you mean? If he's successful, then you want me to call balls and strikes, right? Don't you want me to tell you what I actually think? You just want me to be your monkey, as John Stewart used to say.

Speaker 1:
[56:16] Yeah, but where do you think you got that from? I mean, living in a country where, as you said, it's become more and more tribal in and around politics. But where do you think you got that from? And what do you think you're holding on to?

Speaker 3:
[56:28] Well, first, I grew up with nothing, right? I grew up in the projects. I wasn't part of some political elite in the United States. So I didn't feel connected to that. Secondly, I traveled all over the place. Starting when I was a kid, 16, I went to the Soviet Union. Why? Because I was in college, because I was pushed ahead when I was younger. And it was an opportunity to go someplace for someone that had never been anywhere. And the Soviet Union behind the iron curtain. And then you find out, wait a second, the kids that are here are a lot like me. And I get really offended. I know that there are a whole bunch of people out there like you shouldn't think that just because you're black, you think this way, or just because you're a woman, you think this way. A lot of people think that because you're an American, you think a certain way. And I get hugely offended by that personally. Like the idea that I would hold certain political beliefs and values just because of what country I happened to randomly be born in.

Speaker 5:
[57:18] That's like a crazy thought, right?

Speaker 2:
[57:21] Well, your grandmother will argue the random part, but...

Speaker 1:
[57:24] But that was my grandmother.

Speaker 5:
[57:25] I'm not my grandma.

Speaker 1:
[57:27] I didn't make that decision. It is so funny. I remember talking to somebody about this once, and I said, one concept that has truly, truly, truly always evaded a certain part of my brain is like patriotism. In the sense where people go like, my country. Then I'm like, I'm not saying don't love your country, but you also have to admit it is pretty random that you didn't choose it. For the most part, people didn't choose it.

Speaker 5:
[57:52] I'm Catholic, not by fault at all. There are a lot of weird things about Catholicism that I do not support.

Speaker 3:
[57:58] But I grew up as a Catholic and I don't want to renounce it.

Speaker 1:
[58:01] That's what I'm saying. It's just like this world where you go, just this random thing happened, and I'm willing to accept parts of it and be proud of it. Also, I admit the randomness of it. I am American, which is random, but it doesn't mean I have to only think one way because of that.

Speaker 3:
[58:18] I'm also a Scorpio.

Speaker 1:
[58:19] Right? No, that explains a lot though.

Speaker 3:
[58:21] I know it does.

Speaker 1:
[58:22] No, that explains a lot.

Speaker 2:
[58:24] I'm a Scorpio too.

Speaker 1:
[58:25] Classic Scorpio. Yeah, I knew that. Classic Scorpio as well.

Speaker 6:
[58:27] Yeah. See?

Speaker 1:
[58:29] But equally random. I don't know what any of these things mean. I just learned you must just say that. When anyone tells you their star sign, the first thing you must do is like, ah, classic. And then you say the star sign. It doesn't matter what it is.

Speaker 2:
[58:39] Classic Sagittarius.

Speaker 1:
[58:40] You just say that all.

Speaker 2:
[58:41] See, that's what you did there. Classic Sagittarius.

Speaker 1:
[58:43] Classic Sagittarius.

Speaker 3:
[58:45] But I am a New Yorker. And that I chose.

Speaker 1:
[58:48] There you go.

Speaker 3:
[58:48] And I put a lot of time into that. And I really believe in being a New Yorker. And I was offended at the beginning. You remember that guy that was on LinkedIn, who Seinfeld called some asshole on LinkedIn?

Speaker 1:
[58:57] I don't know this week.

Speaker 3:
[58:58] What happened? At the beginning of the pandemic. And one of the, like, this influencer on LinkedIn, that is actually what he was known for, was being an influencer on LinkedIn. He was well known. Said that he was, that New York was never gonna come back. This was it for New York.

Speaker 1:
[59:11] Oh, I remember this. I remember this.

Speaker 3:
[59:12] And I was so personally offended by that.

Speaker 1:
[59:14] I remember this.

Speaker 3:
[59:15] You know, like, if you told me that America was over, I would be clinical about that. But I am passionate about New York.

Speaker 2:
[59:21] If only people knew there was a chink to your armor. Your politics and mass murder. I'm not emotional.

Speaker 5:
[59:26] But New York. New York! LinkedIn! Kill! Kill! Kill LinkedIn!

Speaker 3:
[59:32] Who is that asshole? I couldn't believe it. I mean, this is such an amazing city.

Speaker 1:
[59:37] Yeah, and Jerry wrote this whole thing about like, go out and see what it's going to be. It's like one, just one cycle of experiencing this. And it was actually a beautiful like piece, like an F you go out there and see what it's like. Once you've lived in New York, you can never live anywhere, was the idea behind it. Yeah, because this guy was like, New York's done. And Jerry was like, okay, go.

Speaker 2:
[59:57] Go somewhere else?

Speaker 1:
[59:58] Go anywhere else. And when you've had a few weeks of this and a few, you're going to see what's going to happen to you. You're going to come back to the city. You're going to, and honestly, almost everyone who left came back. Anyone who could sort of came, everyone went to Miami, everyone's Florida. Everyone came back to New York.

Speaker 3:
[60:15] I'd agree that, look, there is a real affordability crisis.

Speaker 1:
[60:18] Yeah, but that's not saying the hard place to live.

Speaker 3:
[60:19] Not saying the hard place to live, you're poor. The people who could afford, I still loved it.

Speaker 1:
[60:23] Yeah, the people who could afford were the ones who were like, I don't like it. And it's like, you're gonna come back.

Speaker 2:
[60:27] But maybe what you guys are explaining is why the world has fallen in love with America, because we think the whole America is New York. Like a melting pot of cultures and ideas, and it's fast and it's moving and anything is possible. If you make it here, you can make it anywhere. Do you feel like that about New York? Is that why you are-

Speaker 3:
[60:42] Because I think New York is everywhere. It's everybody's here and everyone walks and everyone takes the subway, and it's a pain in the ass and it's smelly. And sometimes it's a little dangerous and there's grit, but we all, but human beings, we want to overcome, right? We give our best when there's some pushback, when there's some resistance in the band. And it's not, New York does that every day all the time. It does it when you're sleeping, it's still noisy. It does it when you wake up in the morning. There's nothing easing about this place. But every single thing, every piece of progress that you make in New York, you earned it. You had to work for it.

Speaker 1:
[61:21] It's a grind. It's a place is a grind. Yeah, the place is a grind.

Speaker 3:
[61:24] But it's rewarding as hell. And the people are so cool. And they're from everywhere. You have no idea what they do. You don't know who they are.

Speaker 5:
[61:30] You can bump it to anyone in New York.

Speaker 3:
[61:32] It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1:
[61:32] Well, I've said one of the things that I think makes New York such a special place is the fact that you can't opt out of many of the shit things of New York. And so because of that, like in South Africa, I noticed a crazy thing to say, but we had load shedding, right? The power blackouts and like the government, because of corruption, they didn't build up the power stations the way they should have. There's a whole long thing. Long story short, we have the schedule.

Speaker 3:
[61:56] You said you can't say that.

Speaker 1:
[61:57] What do you mean?

Speaker 3:
[61:58] Long story short.

Speaker 1:
[61:59] You're right.

Speaker 3:
[61:59] You said long story long.

Speaker 1:
[62:00] Literally before we started, you can't say long story short. No. You can't. No.

Speaker 3:
[62:04] Oh, I can't.

Speaker 1:
[62:04] You can't. I do that because you're our guest.

Speaker 3:
[62:06] But you can.

Speaker 1:
[62:07] You're our guest. I will still expand on the story. You said the one thing that could not be said. You can't say.

Speaker 3:
[62:10] Okay, fine.

Speaker 1:
[62:11] You can't say.

Speaker 3:
[62:12] Literally is the one thing you said.

Speaker 1:
[62:13] This is the rules of the administration.

Speaker 5:
[62:14] It was the rule. There was only one rule.

Speaker 1:
[62:15] No one is above the law except you. The lawmaker.

Speaker 5:
[62:18] That's how it works.

Speaker 1:
[62:19] Political elite.

Speaker 5:
[62:20] It's kind of like the United States. That's what it is. It's a revolution. In the house. I've just pardoned myself. I see.

Speaker 3:
[62:28] That's what I've done.

Speaker 1:
[62:30] So we started having these rolling blackouts in South Africa. Terrible thing for the country economically. Terrible thing for people. Couldn't get around. Traffic lights were out. You name it. Stores would go down. But it created the strangest thing that I think most South Africans never considered.

Speaker 2:
[62:45] Chinese solar panels.

Speaker 1:
[62:47] That too. And it was, by the way, China is killing it because of that everywhere in the world, even internally. They're just like the solar farm game is on another level. Shout out to China. The thing it created was a commonality that you couldn't escape. Every South African, rich, poor, young, old, black, white, Indian, you named it, experienced the electricity going out at the same time. It was this thing that all of a sudden connected you. And that's what I think New York does. You can't escape the traffic, you can't escape the subway, you can't escape the walking, you can't escape the cold or the hot or the humid or the smells or the sounds. Do you remember when Jeff Bezos wanted to build a helipad on his apartment building or something? And New York was like, where? And he was like, no, I want my helicopter. And they're like, no, buddy, come through the tunnel like all of us. No, no, they're like, no, buddy, there's no helicopters here. No helicopters are flying over the city like that.

Speaker 3:
[63:48] And 9-11 was that, of course.

Speaker 1:
[63:49] Yes, that changed everything. They're like, no, none of this. No, no. But that's my point is like, I think what it's created is a city where, while they're still definitely class will determine what you can and cannot do in different way. But still, members clubs haven't really blown up in New York, like where you pay to be part of, because the cool is still like the thing. You know what I mean? You go to a bar where-

Speaker 3:
[64:12] People want to stay in line. Exactly. If it's a really cool thing, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[64:15] Half of New York is people waiting in a line for a bagel they've heard about.

Speaker 2:
[64:18] I stood in line today and I was like, I don't like this poverty mentality.

Speaker 1:
[64:21] You think of it as that. In New York, it's sort of like a cool thing.

Speaker 2:
[64:24] It's an experience.

Speaker 3:
[64:25] There's a bagel place around the corner from my house. One of the most well-known bagel places in New York is called Apollo Bagels. Shout out to Apollo Bagels. They just opened like six months ago. There's always lines around the block. And so when Mamdani won as mayor and people said, it's going to be bread lines, I went outside and I took a photo of the bread line.

Speaker 5:
[64:45] And everyone's smiling and there's like dogs and everything. I'm saying, oh my God, bread lines in New York, the Mamdani effect is already in place.

Speaker 3:
[64:53] And of course, because it's social media, people think I'm serious.

Speaker 1:
[64:56] Oh man.

Speaker 3:
[64:57] Like, well, what do you mean?

Speaker 5:
[64:58] He's not even mayor yet, you idiot.

Speaker 3:
[64:59] I'm like, yeah, you got to stock up.

Speaker 1:
[65:01] Oh man.

Speaker 5:
[65:02] There's even going to be bread when Mamdani becomes mayor.

Speaker 3:
[65:06] We need more of a sense of humor.

Speaker 1:
[65:07] Can I tell you, I wish there was like a joke filter that you could put on the internet to tell people, other than writing, this is a joke at the end of, I don't know, it's just lost its, you know?

Speaker 3:
[65:18] You have to just own it.

Speaker 1:
[65:20] You have to own it?

Speaker 3:
[65:20] You have to just get right in and let people come at you.

Speaker 1:
[65:22] This is a man who's not worried about being shot in the streets. I will own none of these things, Ian. I will own none of them. I tweet far and few between now, because no one, literally, to your point of not understanding a reality, that has become part of the reality fracturing, is that humor has lost its context. Humor has lost its, oh, you will make, and then I've even seen people go, even when they find out it's a joke, well, you shouldn't make that joke, because someone might not have a sense of humor, because it might be a bread line. It's like, yeah, but that was the joke. That was the thing that we're living in. But I don't want to forget, wait, that's step two. Because we said step one is understanding the lay of the land. What do you do then? When you're strategic thinking, what do you?

Speaker 2:
[66:07] Once we all have a common thread.

Speaker 3:
[66:10] It depends on who you are and where you want to go. The reactions of different actors, once you understand what the problem is or what the opportunity is.

Speaker 1:
[66:20] That's when you just make your choice.

Speaker 3:
[66:22] What's your discount factor? How much does 10 years in the future matter to you compared to tomorrow? How much flexibility do you really have as opposed to do you pretend you have?

Speaker 1:
[66:33] Is this how you live like you or how much do you apply this to your daily life?

Speaker 3:
[66:36] A lot.

Speaker 1:
[66:37] Give me an example of just like-

Speaker 2:
[66:39] My man was in a queue for a bagel.

Speaker 1:
[66:41] He wasn't in the queue. He took a picture of the queue.

Speaker 3:
[66:42] I was in the queue.

Speaker 1:
[66:43] Oh, you were in the queue.

Speaker 3:
[66:44] I took it as a participant.

Speaker 1:
[66:45] Oh, okay.

Speaker 2:
[66:46] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[66:46] I feel like it's good to participate.

Speaker 1:
[66:47] No, no, no. I don't know. Well, you called it.

Speaker 2:
[66:49] Exhibit one.

Speaker 1:
[66:50] Yeah, you called it. It was in the queue. Yeah. Was the bagel worth it?

Speaker 3:
[66:53] The bagel? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[66:54] Some people say that these things feel like they're worth it because of the queue.

Speaker 3:
[66:58] Because of the queue.

Speaker 1:
[66:58] Others say that that's not true. What do you think?

Speaker 3:
[67:01] I believe that the experience is part of it. Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[67:04] So it's like a theme park, right?

Speaker 3:
[67:05] Yeah. Like if you buy a nice bottle of wine and people tell you it's a nice bottle of wine, you're going to feel it's a better bottle of wine because of the experience of having gone through that.

Speaker 1:
[67:11] When they tell you there's only 400 of these in the world. It's like I went to a theme park. I went to Six Flags. And I used to go to Six Flags all the time before anybody knew who I was.

Speaker 2:
[67:22] Why are they called Six Flags?

Speaker 1:
[67:23] I have no clue why they call it Six Flags. There's just Six Flags there.

Speaker 3:
[67:26] There are Six. Literally.

Speaker 1:
[67:27] There are Six Flags.

Speaker 2:
[67:28] What's on the flags?

Speaker 3:
[67:29] Different colors, actually.

Speaker 1:
[67:30] Yes, different colors.

Speaker 2:
[67:30] Oh, okay, okay.

Speaker 1:
[67:31] It's not like flags of countries, just triangle flags. But I used to go all the time. And you know, you wait and then you ride the rollercoaster and you do a thing. After I got the Daily Show once, I was going and then they like saw that I was coming and they're like, hey, are you coming to Six Flags? They're like, oh, you don't have to wait in any of the lines. And I was like, oh, I mean, now I've achieved. This is what I've worked for in life. And it didn't mean as you can I tell you one of the worst experiences I've ever had for a few reasons. One, I didn't realize how much of a theme park was fun because you stand in line with your friends for hours and just talk and laugh. And you get bored together. You hear screams the whole time. And you keep going like, I wonder what this is going to be like for me. And then when you walk to the next ride or back from it, and now you're decompressing, you're thinking about it. We went on, rode the same ride like four times back to back, only rode the best rides, didn't stop at any other rides on the way. We had headaches and we learned nothing more about each other as friends. It was the shortest theme park day I've ever had.

Speaker 5:
[68:32] Why did you read that wonderful?

Speaker 1:
[68:34] Do you know what happened? You guys had gone on a roller coaster.

Speaker 2:
[68:36] No one told me that.

Speaker 6:
[68:38] Back to back to back to back to back to back.

Speaker 3:
[68:39] There was the New York Times interview with the woman who had, she was a little disabled and she wanted to take her, like she had a, she couldn't walk properly, so she needed to have like, you know, sort of a walker or something.

Speaker 1:
[68:53] Oh, so it wasn't, okay, okay, got it.

Speaker 3:
[68:55] And she wanted to bring her daughter to Disney. And it was a huge, huge thing and she had to save up. And it was, and it described her entire experience compared to the experience of the guy that brought his family that could like pay to make sure they had, you know, a guide in advance, they got it to everything. And talked about how Disney in America, when Disney was started, it was the great equalizer. It was the one place that like, you know, was meant to be this idealist experience that everyone together could have together. And now it's not.

Speaker 2:
[69:23] Once you put on the Mickey or Minnie ears, we're all equal.

Speaker 3:
[69:25] And it's not, and it's not at all. And that is, there's still a few bits of it, like for example, the fact that the characters run around and everyone can take photos with them. But for most of the experience, it's become completely segregated. It has. And so, and that, and people, people don't like that. Shocking. They don't like that in aviation. Shocking. They don't like it in sports. Shocking. And New York is one of those places, which is a great leveler. There's so much about the city that no matter how much money you do or don't have, how much power.

Speaker 1:
[69:55] Yeah, there are fewer things you can escape in New York.

Speaker 3:
[69:57] There are fewer things you can escape. And, but I do think that there's self-selection. I think a lot of people that like this are people that have decided that is strategically interesting for them.

Speaker 2:
[70:08] Yes, that's what I was about to say.

Speaker 3:
[70:09] And I'm not sure that's true for everybody.

Speaker 2:
[70:10] Exactly that.

Speaker 3:
[70:12] I'm sure a big part of it is-

Speaker 2:
[70:12] If people who are in a position of privilege-

Speaker 3:
[70:14] I grew up as a striver.

Speaker 2:
[70:14] You can complain about those kind of things.

Speaker 1:
[70:16] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[70:17] Like a poor person who's gotten two days off to take their family there and they've been saving for a year, they would love to go on all the rides. But for you, because you're cosplaying and you're thinking, I love the struggle of reading in line and having one turkey leg at a time.

Speaker 1:
[70:31] That's not what I'm saying. First of all, that was a poor impression of me.

Speaker 2:
[70:34] I felt it. I think you could do much better.

Speaker 1:
[70:36] Yeah. I've seen you do much better impressions of me. That was a terrible one.

Speaker 2:
[70:41] First of all, I'm so sorry.

Speaker 1:
[70:43] That's not bad. That's not bad. No, this is what I'm saying. It's not about the...

Speaker 3:
[70:47] It's better than any impression I would have attempted, which would get me cancelled in a lot of places.

Speaker 1:
[70:51] No, I hear what you're saying, but I don't think it's that. I'll disagree with you on this.

Speaker 2:
[70:54] I don't think it's that.

Speaker 1:
[70:55] It's not about idealizing a struggle or it's not that.

Speaker 2:
[71:01] Cosplaying.

Speaker 1:
[71:02] Yeah, it's rather understanding... Okay, so think of it like with parents. You and I have spoken about this. One of the strange gifts that comes from having a parent who doesn't have money is that when they say no to you for something that you want, it's because they don't have money. Mom, can I have that toy? No. Why? We can't afford it. Mom, can I have that cereal? No. Why? We can't afford it. Those clothes? No. Why? We can't afford it. It's a really simple response to a request. It is hard to think that there's a world that exists that would create some sort of friction or a terrible relationship when you have to explain the no for no reason. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2:
[71:48] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[71:49] So there's people who have money and the kid goes, can I have that? No. Why? Because no. But why? Because I said so.

Speaker 2:
[71:56] Wow.

Speaker 1:
[71:57] Because I say, now, I'm not saying that one is a gift in the nicest sense.

Speaker 2:
[72:04] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[72:05] But everything in life comes, you know, my motto is every gift is a curse.

Speaker 2:
[72:08] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[72:08] No matter what you say. A big country, good for you, also bad for you. Good luck uniting a big country. Yeah. Oil.

Speaker 3:
[72:15] A curse.

Speaker 1:
[72:15] Exactly. It's a curse. Oil is like, we've got to talk about Venezuela's oil, by the way. I want to know what you think about this whole saga. But what I mean about these things is I didn't realize, I don't want to wait in lines more, but I didn't realize what I was getting by being in the line. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. I genuinely didn't realize it. And I think the same holds for like a New York or one of those places is, you don't realize what the hassle of having to be on the subway does for you as a person until you don't have it. Most things that are a hassle have some sort of benefit that you aren't able to appreciate until you remove the hassle and then you go, oh, shit, there was a side of this that I didn't know.

Speaker 3:
[72:57] This brings me back to the strategic thinking question and how one goes the second step. And the fact that New York has this great equalizer forces people to behave in ways that are somewhat similar. There's one thing that I can think of that is a great equalizer, no matter who you are, no matter what your station in life is, no matter how rich, how poor, how powerful, how powerless, there's one thing we all have. Dendroft. We have the same exact amount of it as well. There's time.

Speaker 1:
[73:22] Time.

Speaker 3:
[73:22] It's all we have. It's all we have. That's the great equalizer. And so really, once you understand the environment, the opportunity, the challenge, the thing that you most need to key on is, how do I respond to that in terms of how I want to be spending my time?

Speaker 1:
[73:39] Oh, I like that.

Speaker 3:
[73:41] And I spend a lot of time personally thinking strategically about that. What are the things that I want to be doing? How much do I want to travel? How much do I want to engage in the following ways with the following people? What do I want to spend my time doing? I've organized my company that way, I organized the people that work with me that way, the kinds of things I work on and I don't work on. It's all about the time that I'm actually spending.

Speaker 1:
[74:05] Don't go anywhere because we got more What Now after this.

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Speaker 8:
[74:39] Hey, everyone, it's me, Morgan Stewart, and I have a new podcast called The Morgan Stewart Show. Join me each week as I talk about pop culture, fashion, my personal life, and just a warning, I'm going to be giving my opinion on everything. I'll also have some really fun guests to join in on the fun. The Morgan Stewart Show is out now. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcast or watch full video on YouTube.

Speaker 9:
[74:59] You wouldn't take financial advice from a 72 hours in a single day alpha influencer, would you? Same goes if you're in a car accident or any accident. Who you choose matters. That's why Morgan & Morgan exists. They're the largest injury law firm in America, and they've built a reputation by actually winning cases, not just talking about it. Over a thousand lawyers across all 50 states and $30 billion recovered. Injured? Go to forthepeople.com/podcast. That's forthepeople.com/podcast.

Speaker 1:
[75:36] Do you ever have to advise governments? I know you work with companies, but do you ever have to advise governments?

Speaker 3:
[75:41] I talk to foreign leaders all the time.

Speaker 1:
[75:44] Do they take your advice, or do they just listen to you?

Speaker 3:
[75:46] I think for many of them, I'm kind of like a geopolitical therapist.

Speaker 5:
[75:52] Because these are people with no time.

Speaker 2:
[75:55] That's a good one.

Speaker 1:
[75:56] What a line.

Speaker 3:
[75:56] They're the busiest people. Geopolitical therapists.

Speaker 5:
[75:59] They're the busiest people.

Speaker 3:
[76:01] They have no time. The fact that they're giving you an hour or half an hour if you're a head of state is like the most valuable thing they could possibly give you. And what they spend most of their time working on is really, really pressing, immediate, narrow problems. And what they really want to be doing, because they're head of state, or they're a foreign minister, or they're what have you, in a position of real authorities, they want to be able to spend a little time thinking about how the world is changing. And that's really what I think we end up spending most of our time doing, is giving them a little bit of that that they don't have. And I'm not blowing smoke up their ass. I'm not telling them what they want to hear. I'm very happy if we have disagreements on stuff, because I don't need anything from them. I'm not working for them. I'm not taking money from them. It's just a sharing of information.

Speaker 2:
[76:51] For a person like you who's met every sort of powerful person in the world, I suppose this question might be a bit weird, because revealing our strategy, when we do this podcast, we always think our guests must not feel the transition between them having a normal conversation with just anybody and being interviewed. It's not an interview. So they must get through a pathway. They can get through what they do, and then we can just also understand who they are. So what strategy did you think you're going to use to get through to who we really are as hosts of this podcast? When you're thinking about it, you're like, what's going on?

Speaker 3:
[77:22] I feel like I know Trevor a little, both as a public figure, but also because we've met informally a few times. I feel like we're simpatico. I certainly have a warmth towards his curiousness and his knowledge and interest in policy and global stuff, which meant that I didn't have a strategy. I'd have much more of a strategy, but someone I've never met before, I don't know who they are, I don't know what engages them, I don't think that there might be a gotcha, that kind of thing. Here, it's much more, no, I'm going to show up and I'm going to see what Trevor's going to talk about, and I want to be maximally open to that. I want to go whatever direction is going to be most interested, and that's okay. That's what I do on stage with an audience. I don't necessarily know exactly what I'm going to talk about, but I see the audience, I see what they react to, and then I move. We moved a lot because I said something early on that I saw really touch Trevor. That was really interesting. That was a moment where suddenly he was like, oh, wait a second, technology does this. I hadn't considered that before, it changed his worldview a little bit. Let's mine that because that's a point of friction, but also curiosity.

Speaker 2:
[78:30] Yeah. Open-mindedness is a big part of strategy, right?

Speaker 3:
[78:33] Open-mindedness is essential to strategy. Again, not necessarily open-mindedness in understanding yourself, but open-mindedness in the fact that everything external is changeable, and any opinion that you hold about the rest of the world, you better be open to having a change because even if it's not changing now, it will change in the future. You're going to be wrong about almost everything over time. What does it say about predictions? Either make a prediction or offer a time frame, never give them both. So these things change. I wrote a book called The J-Curve, and it was about a relationship between the country's openness and its stability. At the time, countries that were most open were also most stable. A big piece of that was because technology was helping to drive that, the communications revolution. If you had access to the internet, that was a threat to authoritarian states, but it was a strength for democracies. Today, top-down technologies are much more consolidating and much more powerful. The surveillance revolution, the data revolution. If you're a big monopoly platform or a government with access to data, you have a lot more influence and you can create a lot more stability, you have a lot more power. The J-Curve today looks more like a you. This was a seminal thing that I spent years of my life on. It was really important to my career. I teach it now and I tell my students, it's no longer applicable. It's changed, it's wrong now. Every single thing that I've written about, I have to be ready for it to be wrong at some point it will be, because the world is changing.

Speaker 1:
[80:06] I feel like this is such a liberating viewpoint to have in life, if we all felt like that.

Speaker 3:
[80:15] Because I think, it's kind of geopolitical Buddhism.

Speaker 1:
[80:18] It really is though, because if we hold on to our ideas as if our ideas are us, then we are afraid to let go of our ideas because we feel like we're letting go of a piece of ourselves. If somebody challenges our ideas, we feel like they're challenging us. But if you can, as you say, separate yourself from the idea, then it can change, it can be challenged, it can be wrong, it can move, it can shift, do you know what I mean? It's essential. It can create a world where-

Speaker 2:
[80:44] It's 100% that. I think also interpersonal relationships are a good training ground for that. I think for you at that age to go all the way to the Soviet Union and meet other young people and exchange ideas, I'm sure when you came back to New York, to your peers, you were someone else, right?

Speaker 3:
[80:58] Well, at the time it was going back to Boston, which is where I was living back then, yeah, it was completely different. I had felt like I had this huge experience that had opened my mind to stuff that I thought was impossible before.

Speaker 1:
[81:08] What was the thing that shocked you the most? I know you said when you were there, the kids were the same as you, what do you think shocked you the most? From what you had been told about the Soviet Union, what changed Ian's mind when he was actually there?

Speaker 3:
[81:21] I think the fact that they knew as little about me and us as I knew about them, I thought that somehow because I hadn't traveled anywhere and because I knew how cloistered I had been, again, projects, public school, just a few blocks, I thought that would be true of other kids, that they'd know a lot more because they were like, I was going to Moscow and that was a big city with millions of people. Absolutely nothing. For example, do you remember the Sharper Image?

Speaker 1:
[81:46] The gym?

Speaker 3:
[81:46] The store.

Speaker 1:
[81:47] What was it?

Speaker 3:
[81:48] The Sharper Image. It was a weird little store that sold-

Speaker 1:
[81:52] Everything.

Speaker 3:
[81:52] Gimmicks, gadgets, little gadgets. We used to have in the days before smartphones and all the rest, we had cordless phones. The Sharper Image sold a cordless phone that you could probably talk, you know, they had a little like antenna.

Speaker 1:
[82:11] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[82:12] So you could probably talk 50 feet away from the base. But this cordless phone was not only cordless, but it also was waterproof and it floated. So that you could have a phone call in your pool.

Speaker 1:
[82:25] Yeah, in your pool.

Speaker 3:
[82:26] In your pool. And I remember having a conversation about like the different stuff, because they all wanted like Levi's jeans or Marlboro cigarettes. That was like the big thing, access to that kind of stuff, bring ballpoint pens, because pens suck, you know, all that kind of thing.

Speaker 5:
[82:39] And I was telling them, I said, Can you bring for me ballpoint pen?

Speaker 3:
[82:43] Ballpoint pen, of course.

Speaker 1:
[82:44] Please, Ian, I need ballpoint pen. Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[82:49] It would be very nice.

Speaker 3:
[82:51] I pay much money for ballpoint pens.

Speaker 1:
[82:54] Wait, what pens did they have?

Speaker 3:
[82:56] Oh my God. I mean, they were like skill craft pens, but down three notches. You remember those?

Speaker 1:
[83:02] My brain can't imagine a world without a ballpoint pen.

Speaker 3:
[83:04] I know. And it hasn't changed very much. Like we still make those. They're still cutting edge in 2025. Ballpoint pen, they really work. Well, see, we were early to that game. They were late, apparently. So and this is why they're in Ukraine today.

Speaker 1:
[83:15] To go get ballpoint pen.

Speaker 3:
[83:17] They have all the ballpoint pen extraction.

Speaker 2:
[83:18] I can only imagine you had customs, two suitcases full of ballpoint pens and blue jeans.

Speaker 3:
[83:23] So we were, you know, we're talking about all this stuff.

Speaker 2:
[83:26] I told them, I'm a purveyor of goods.

Speaker 5:
[83:29] Let me see your pockets.

Speaker 3:
[83:32] So we're talking about this. And so I told them about this store. There's a store at Faneuil Hall, Quincy Market. Quincy Market, as we'd say back in Boston.

Speaker 5:
[83:38] Okay.

Speaker 3:
[83:39] A little towards the area. And there was a sharper image there. And I said, you know, they have these stores. It's not cheap, but they have all this crazy stuff. There's all kinds of stuff. So I told them about it. I said, well, there's a light, there's a lamp. And if you touch the lamp and it's a metal lamp, it'll turn on. They didn't believe me. Didn't believe me. I had no way of showing it. They didn't photo. I told them about this phone that you could use. First of all, the idea, phone has to have a cord.

Speaker 1:
[83:59] Yes, of course.

Speaker 3:
[84:00] Okay? And you wouldn't use a cordless phone in your bathtub.

Speaker 1:
[84:03] Yeah, of course not.

Speaker 3:
[84:04] But there are people, my aunt had a pool. My aunt, she built a house and she was like the one middle-class person in the family. She built a pool.

Speaker 1:
[84:10] The one aunt with the pool. Always the one rich aunt or uncle. Yeah, always the one rich aunt or uncle.

Speaker 3:
[84:15] They did not believe that this was possible, that a private home would have a pool in your backyard and you'd have a phone call and it wasn't, this blew their minds.

Speaker 1:
[84:23] I love that you thought you were blowing their minds with the phone. It's cordless. You can talk anywhere. And in the pool even, and they were like, wait, wait, you have your own body of water in the back of your house. No, no, look Ian, you can fool us with some things. How can man-made lake just be at the back of house?

Speaker 3:
[84:43] You have tanker traffic on this.

Speaker 1:
[84:46] It is a crazy concept when you think about it. But having a swimming pool is one of the most ridiculous ideas ever. One of the things that I found out about that blew my mind was you can draw a direct line between places that have a shit ton of swimming pools in their houses, and the racism laws that were in the country. Really? Yeah. In the United States, almost nobody had a swimming pool, and then they changed the laws and they said black people could swim in public pools. Then suddenly white people said, I get to have pools. Yeah. Then obviously there was the fights, and there were people. Was it Mr. Rogers who had his friends' feet in the pool with him? If you remember that, and people were like, Mr. Rogers, how could you do this? You're going to have a black man in this little pool thing with you. Then pools did this in America. All of a sudden people were like, all right.

Speaker 2:
[85:38] I'm not going public anymore.

Speaker 1:
[85:39] Not only did private pools blow up, public pools started getting shut down. People were like, well, maybe we shouldn't fund public pools. South Africa as well. Public pools used to be like the thing. I grew up swimming in a public pool. And then after democracy fully, people were like, maybe we just swim at home. Everyone just swims at home.

Speaker 2:
[86:01] The cordless pool.

Speaker 1:
[86:02] And yet another thing, we need civic spaces.

Speaker 3:
[86:04] We need civic spaces. Places where we can meet these people, these kids.

Speaker 2:
[86:08] Public phone. I mean, floaty phone.

Speaker 1:
[86:12] Yeah, so you're with the Russians. You're telling them about the public phone.

Speaker 3:
[86:14] Not just blew their minds. And the fact that I hadn't considered, there were so many different components of that story that I hadn't remotely considered would be strange or interesting to them. And it allowed us to have this wild open moment about how different we were, but we were the same kids.

Speaker 1:
[86:31] Having that experience combined with you doing what you do, what do you think we misunderstand about Russia right now in this moment in time? And I say this as somebody who has always, not always, maybe for the past six years, been fascinated by how America has misread Russia over the years and then acted based on that misreading. Is this something that you think the world doesn't understand about Russia right now?

Speaker 3:
[86:59] Just how disrespected they feel. I mean, this is a country that's lost empire. This is a country whose total economy is smaller than Canada. This is a country that used to take such pride in having the best culture of anyone in the world, that all of their college kids had read all this incredible literature and knew all the top arts. And now the government has stopped investing in this completely. In science, they had the world-class scientists, Soviet Union Collapse, and all these American companies would go and IBM and Boeing and they'd hire the best scientists, mathematicians, and they don't have that anymore. And you feel this sense they have such pride, such Russian pride in their nation, in their history. It's not about money. It never was about money. Remember, this is the whole system of they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.

Speaker 1:
[87:46] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[87:47] Right? But the personal connections and the history. And this is a place that yes, there's a lot of suffering, there's a lot of tragedy, but you get through it because there's a lot of sense of responsibility and greatness. And they have lost so much of that.

Speaker 1:
[88:00] I know you can't predict another reality, but do you think it would have been different if the US and the world had done a better job of bringing Russia in posts?

Speaker 3:
[88:10] Of course.

Speaker 1:
[88:11] You think it would have been different?

Speaker 3:
[88:12] And I also think it would have been different if their own oligarchs that were connected were not so rapacious, were not so kleptocratic, did not rip everybody off and take that money out of the country for themselves. Both of those things. So the economic shock therapy that the Americans offered to them was nowhere near what was useful for them given the ability to strip out the wealth. And also the fact that the Soviet Union dropped in America's laps, you kind of won it. You didn't fight over it. It wasn't like World War II where you almost lost your way of life for everybody. Here it was like, well, we don't need to rebuild these guys. We rebuilt the Japanese. We rebuilt the Germans. These were our enemies. It wasn't just our allies, we rebuilt them. And then we created the UN. That was American.

Speaker 2:
[88:53] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[88:54] I mean, it's funny because now you have Americans saying, UN, globalists. Those were actually our morals. They were our ideals. I'm very proud of the UN.

Speaker 2:
[89:02] The League of Nations.

Speaker 3:
[89:03] I love having it in New York. And I think that one of the reasons why Americans today don't like the UN, especially elites, is because we feel a sense of shame that we no longer are living up to the values and standards that we create. And so, yeah, I think those things really matter. And I think that we did not cover ourselves in glory in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, because we were doing so well. We were kings of the world. Everyone just was going to be like America, so we didn't have to do anything. Let them come at us.

Speaker 1:
[89:37] When you look at Venezuela today, I was joking with Eugene about this the other day and I said, as much as America will say certain things, it is funny how half of the stories slash all of them end in oil. Doesn't matter what it is. They'll be like, Iran, terrible regime and the plotting in the oil. Iraq, Saddam Hussein, this evil person, weapons of message, oil. What they're doing?

Speaker 2:
[90:07] Gaddafi.

Speaker 1:
[90:08] Oil.

Speaker 5:
[90:09] Gaza.

Speaker 3:
[90:09] Oil.

Speaker 5:
[90:09] Oh my God.

Speaker 2:
[90:11] Nigeria.

Speaker 1:
[90:11] Oil.

Speaker 3:
[90:13] No, we don't care as much. That was the counterpoint.

Speaker 1:
[90:16] That's true as well, though, but I'm saying being in there. If there's somewhere America goes into, though.

Speaker 5:
[90:21] Oil. Oil.

Speaker 3:
[90:22] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[90:24] I'm sure it's not that simple. I'm sure it's not that simple. But if you are, and you are literally somebody who studies this for a living, what do you make of this situation? Are these the actions of a country that might end up fighting another war with a country that happens to have oil? No. No, you don't think so?

Speaker 3:
[90:47] First of all, because Trump, I think, really does fundamentally understand that the US has gotten involved in a lot of very expensive, long wars, and he's willing to do anything to stop that. He doesn't want boots on the ground and many years on him. I mean, he ended the war in Afghanistan by cutting a really crappy deal with the Taliban, but at least the end of the war. And then Biden was kind of stuck actually ending the war, but Trump made that happen. And so I think the likelihood that Trump, under any circumstances, would say, okay, let's send a whole bunch of young men and women to go and fight in another country. I don't think he's doing that.

Speaker 1:
[91:22] The funny thing though is-

Speaker 3:
[91:22] They'll send them in the US.

Speaker 1:
[91:23] I think it's, yeah, the funny thing though is I think it's more money thing. I don't know, do you remember the, I think it was around Syria when Bashar al-Assad was, he launched one of his, one of many of like his most heinous campaigns, it was just like a moment.

Speaker 3:
[91:39] Was this chemical weapons or you mean before that?

Speaker 1:
[91:41] I think it was around that time, but there was an image of a young child on the cover of the New York Times, I think it was, on the front page, this child in his like ashen face, just post like a strike or something. And I think it was Ivanka Trump who showed the image to Donald Trump. And he was so moved by her being so moved that he said he's gonna respond. And then they bombed a few parts of Syria, right? And then afterwards he came out and they were like, oh, is this gonna be a full scale? And he came out and he was like, we're not, we're not, he's like, we bombed them and he's like, you know how much it costs? One rocket. I can't believe he's like, had I known, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have sent it. I wouldn't have shot it. One of these, I wouldn't have shot. I wish I could take it back. He's like, I wouldn't. And it was interesting to me that he, from what I observe of him, is more against war because he doesn't like the country spending the money on it.

Speaker 3:
[92:38] I think he's gotten more used to it, as we've seen with Iran and the 12-day war. I think he's gotten more used to it with all the rockets against the ships, the little tiny boats that are bringing the drugs. I also think that personally, this is a guy who did everything he could using his personal connections to avoid the draft.

Speaker 1:
[92:57] The bone spurs.

Speaker 3:
[92:58] Yes, and he understands that that was something that one should avoid. That war was scary for him, and war is scary for a lot of young men and women. So I think he comes to that, honestly, historically, whatever it is. I think there are lots of reasons why they're talking about going in. I think that for Marco Rubio, who comes from Florida and has a very strong Cuban constituency and a bunch of Venezuelans too, and they see this as a dictatorship, and they see Cuba as a dictatorship, and he's always wanted to remove these brutal leaders. He thinks if you get rid of Maduro, then you can also start the dominoes with Cuba. He might not be completely wrong about that, but it's not an immediate direct effect. I do think that the oil matters. Rick Grinnell, who was the special envoy without portfolio for Trump and was involved in the first administration as well, he was ambassador to Germany for a while. You may remember, tall guy was a Fox News guy. He was engaged on the Venezuela brief at the beginning of the administration, had been talking to the oil companies in the US, and was trying to see if a deal could be made that would allow them, would have them crack down on the drugs, would get the Americans to actually invest more broadly in Venezuela. Also, a lot of illegal oil going, evading sanctions from Venezuela using these ghost tanker fleets through Cuba to China. By the way, same tankers that the Russians and the Iranians use, which is why Putin called up Maduro to support him after the Americans seized a tanker. Because it was like, wait a second, we use that tanker. It was interesting. I absolutely think that because the Grinnell effort didn't work, that now you're seeing this country has more oil reserves than any other country in the world.

Speaker 1:
[94:49] Geez, I didn't know that.

Speaker 3:
[94:49] More proven oil reserves, more than Saudi Arabia, more than the United States.

Speaker 1:
[94:52] Geez, I didn't know that.

Speaker 3:
[94:54] Trump certainly, if Maduro is gone, with whatever military government is immediately in charge and maybe some transition eventually to someone that could be elected, the deal he doesn't care about democracy in Venezuela, he cares a lot about cutting an investment deal where the Americans are going to get a big piece of that oil, just like the critical minerals deal that he forced Zelensky to sign, if he was going to keep providing intelligence and defense support to the Ukrainians. So yes, I do think the oil plays, but I don't think it's been the principle driver.

Speaker 1:
[95:25] I wonder when I hear some of these stories, I don't know if it was ever true, but I sometimes wonder if America has given up its moral authority and moral superiority to be able to say these things in the world. I actually think to, I think it was, I think it was Israel's Prime Minister or somebody high up in the government who came and gave a speech at the UN. You know when people were complaining, they're like, Oh, Israel did this when they bombed in Qatar. And they were like, Oh, to do this on another nation soil. And then they were like, America did it. And they listed off a few other countries and they did it. They're like, So how are we different? And it was an interesting moment because it was weird that the response to, why did you break the international law was, we all do. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 3:
[96:22] Of course I do. And it is, on the one hand, the fact that the United States has historically held itself up as some exceptional, indispensable nation, means that even though the Americans have given so much more in foreign aid, even though the US has played so much more of a leadership role in the IMF and the World Bank and doing so many things that really matter, and philanthropy also in promoting Americans to do that. But when the hypocrisy happens, and let's face it for the US, the hypocrisy happens at huge scale in Iraq or in Abu Ghraib, or in Guantanamo and so many examples of this, or with the global financial crisis, so many examples of this, then suddenly all of these other countries are pointing fingers. And the Americans were never as much of a shining light beacon on the hill as we put ourselves out. And let's face it, we almost didn't get involved in World War II, and that would have been a huge mistake. We were late to the game, and it was only because of Pearl Harbor. And it was the America first concept started then with Lindbergh and the movement of why would we care about these Europeans way over there?

Speaker 1:
[97:31] Has nothing to do with us.

Speaker 3:
[97:32] Has nothing to do with us. Here are shades of that today, right? In the National Security Strategy document, for example, and with Trump saying, you guys have your problem, Ukraine's far away. But still, if you had to compare the United States with what the Chinese would do globally, or what the Russians would do globally, over the last 50, 60, 70 years, you would unbalance take the US. Now, the question is today, would you still make a strong call for that? Not as clear. A lot of countries around the world would say that the United States has become actively adversarial. A lot of countries would say that. The Canadians would say that, which is crazy.

Speaker 1:
[98:13] Yeah, Canadians never say anything mean.

Speaker 3:
[98:15] Yeah, and now they do. And they won an election on that. And their population is saying, we gotta find a way to just work more with the Europeans, work more with everybody than the Americans. And they're so incredibly integrated with the US economy. It's not like, and security. It's not like they have much of a choice, but it's hugely popular in Canada to say, we can never go back to the trusted relationship we used to have with the US. And their tourism down to the US has fallen off a cliff. They're really upset because they feel like we no longer stand for the things that they thought we stood for. And if the Canadians feel that way, who are basically Americans, just a little colder, then how do you think the other people feel that don't have those relationships with us? That's sad.

Speaker 1:
[98:58] What are some of the questions you have now that you haven't yet found the answers for?

Speaker 3:
[99:04] In the world?

Speaker 1:
[99:05] Yeah, just things that you're pondering and puzzling through, but you haven't yet struck on a satisfactory answer.

Speaker 3:
[99:12] Well, I want to know when artificial intelligence can provide answers on a large number of topics that are as good or better than human beings. I want to know what that does to political power. I want to know how the Chinese Communist Party deals with that when Xi Jinping is supposed to be like the oracle from which all information comes down. Is it repression? Does it change their system? I'd love to know that.

Speaker 1:
[99:40] Maybe they'll just have like a... They'll just... Their AI... I think their solution is the easiest. They just have to make sure that their AI just says... Like you say to AI in China, Hey, what's happening here? Or how do I fix this? And then their AI must just be like...

Speaker 2:
[99:55] Xi says...

Speaker 1:
[99:55] I just asked Xi and... Xi was saying that you should put your... Yeah, put the cupboard together like this. You know, Xi actually told me how this works. ChatCCP. I like it.

Speaker 2:
[100:06] Sometimes it would be like, that's what Xi said.

Speaker 1:
[100:09] That's a nice one. That's what Xi said.

Speaker 3:
[100:11] That also works.

Speaker 1:
[100:11] That actually works.

Speaker 3:
[100:12] Together.

Speaker 1:
[100:13] Look at this.

Speaker 5:
[100:13] We got a show here.

Speaker 1:
[100:14] I mean, this is doing something. No, honestly, I genuinely think this is just me with my just wandering through the streets brain. I have no company nor do I have any credentials. I think AI is going to be a greater detriment to free nations than to nations that have a stranglehold on their politics and their populations because there they can work to constrain the thing, whereas in the other one, they're like, ah, it's like, let it go and see what happens. And then it's like, oh, okay.

Speaker 5:
[100:47] Well, that was the whole point.

Speaker 3:
[100:49] That's why the J-curve became the U. That is the whole point.

Speaker 1:
[100:52] That's what I mean, though. That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 3:
[100:54] I think I'm not sure those are free nations for very long. If it turns out that the companies control the algorithms, the AI, and suddenly you're not a citizen, you're actually just a product of a business model.

Speaker 1:
[101:02] Okay, okay, so that's one thing you're pondering.

Speaker 2:
[101:04] You're an un-elected leader all of a sudden.

Speaker 1:
[101:06] Yeah, you do.

Speaker 3:
[101:07] I mean, a second big thing I want to know is what happens with the social contract when people that are white collar, knowledge, labor, increasingly no longer has productive stuff to do.

Speaker 1:
[101:17] Can I tell you, that is one of the biggest ones that people take for granted, because it's exactly that. It's a social contract that keeps us all moving along. And when it's gone, think of everyone in an office whose job is only about moving information around and remembering it and dispersing it. And if your company makes a system that does that everywhere, maybe you can tell me this, because I've never gotten a satisfactory answer from CEOs and from companies. I go, why would you do this? As I understand- Why would you do what? As I understand business, the point of a business is to provide some sort of service for somebody who will then pay you for it. But like Henry Ford understood, you need the people who can buy your thing. Yes. So he paid his workers a certain amount of money, and he made his car a certain price so that they themselves could buy it.

Speaker 2:
[102:15] Yeah, his first consumers.

Speaker 1:
[102:16] Yeah. But if companies are going to make themselves fully AI, AI will advertise, AI will plan trips, AI will do the work, then where's the business?

Speaker 3:
[102:30] That is a huge question. And you worry that, first of all, some of these people are so racing ahead, are so short-term in their orientation, that they're not worried about that, just want to get their first and cash out, because the models and the money that's being raised is so extraordinary.

Speaker 1:
[102:48] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[102:48] That's driving the economy. And second, of course, there's a collective action problem to it. If you don't do it, someone else is going to. Yeah. Right. So there's the race level of it. And then there's also the disbelief. It's the view that, yeah, there'll be other jobs. There's always other jobs. Something else will come up.

Speaker 1:
[103:08] I do believe that, but I think the issue, to borrow from what you were saying, is time.

Speaker 3:
[103:13] And government.

Speaker 1:
[103:14] Everything can be figured out. The problem is, do you have the time to figure it out? Do you get what I'm saying? If everyone loses their jobs over a hundred years, let's say the job of Candlemaker goes away over a hundred years, I think people will be fine. But if tomorrow, a job that is done by a lot of people disappears instantly, you don't have time to figure out what the next job is.

Speaker 3:
[103:36] I hope that's right. And I think that's right. But of course, it didn't work out that way for horses, right? I mean, you know, suddenly you have steam power and the horse population goes down to 10% of what it was in one generation because, you know, horses are then useful.

Speaker 1:
[103:50] Oh, you think our population might...

Speaker 3:
[103:52] Well, I hope not. I'm just saying that I know that when you suddenly have technology that surpasses the total capacity, the total productive capacity of that entity, you no longer need the entity.

Speaker 1:
[104:04] No, but this is where I think, honestly, on a human level, I do think we will create a new thing because all jobs are invented. The issue is, I don't know that we'll have the time. This is where I'm agreeing with you. I go, you do it too quickly and then... Do you understand what I'm saying? What do you think you would do in the revolution?

Speaker 2:
[104:24] Making candles.

Speaker 1:
[104:26] No, like genuinely, like do you ever think about... Like Ian, what do you think you would... Do you think you would be like part of helping? No, I honestly wonder that. You don't think about this at all?

Speaker 2:
[104:34] No, no, I don't think about it.

Speaker 1:
[104:35] Like, let's say it all goes to shit, the thing's falling apart, the people now is like, where do you see yourself in the mix?

Speaker 2:
[104:40] I always think...

Speaker 1:
[104:41] Front lines, planning?

Speaker 3:
[104:43] I'd be a dissident.

Speaker 1:
[104:45] Oh, you'd be a dissident?

Speaker 3:
[104:45] Absolutely, because I mean, if you think about back in the Soviet Union, before the collapse, there were lots of people that tried to do what I do. They just didn't do it like for money. They didn't do it legally because it was illegal. So what did they do? I mean, they did Samizdat literature. They do like informal coffee house conversations, but they still tried to bring truth to people, to their fellow citizens. If that were to truly happen in the United States, I'd still do what I do. I would just do it less effectively and I'd be repressed for it.

Speaker 1:
[105:14] You'd be on the front lines, Eugene.

Speaker 2:
[105:16] I think that with everything that changes, things have been changing since the beginning of time. But I think it's the people that have institutional memory that are lamenting the change sometimes. I think the younger generation is not as worried about the changes that we're facing. I mean, there's kids who don't even know what a house phone looks like.

Speaker 1:
[105:33] Well, I hear what you mean.

Speaker 2:
[105:34] What we are lamenting is the world as we know it. It's no different from how when you're in a queue, you were lamenting being in a queue.

Speaker 1:
[105:41] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[105:42] You remember?

Speaker 1:
[105:43] The world that didn't exist. You don't have an idea of the world that didn't exist.

Speaker 2:
[105:47] I'm thinking, what we are doing now, we are here to preserve what was. Even in conversations like this, there will always be a job for these kind of people. It's almost like the books of the future. There will always be people who remember how things were and will try in their small circles to keep things the same. The person who bakes the bread themselves, although...

Speaker 1:
[106:10] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[106:11] I'm with you. So this idea sharing will always be... And we've been saying this, that what we're not realizing is the portals to this information for the future is digital media. The podcast, the YouTubes. People in 100 years time, if they want to really know how things were done, just like how people are making handcrafted binders for books, they will go and listen to how things were done. There'll be a person who's interested in disseminating the information and getting things done. But what we can't stop is things changing. They are always going to change, especially if there's money involved. Change is inevitable. And like you said, it's a race now. If you don't do it, someone else will.

Speaker 3:
[106:48] Did the Bob Iger, I think was right about this, is you've never... No one's ever been successful trying to stop technology from happening. So, I mean, it's not about saying we're not going to do it.

Speaker 5:
[106:59] It's going to happen.

Speaker 3:
[107:00] The question is being aware of what it is and trying to align yourself with it. How do you want to spend your time given how fast it's changing?

Speaker 1:
[107:07] Yeah. Okay. And then what's like a third question you have? So, the first one, the second question was about AI.

Speaker 3:
[107:14] Yeah. The third one is about whether or not we are going to have increasing global governance to respond to global challenges, right? So, you think about how so much of these new technologies, how fast they move. Are we going to have a U.S.-China agreement the way we did after the Cuban Missile Crisis between the US and Soviet Union so that we didn't blow each other up? We created a hotline. We didn't have any arms control until we almost blew up the world. Do we have to wait before we almost blow up the world to have agreements on how we're going to try to manage collectively these new technologies that are incredibly powerful to advance humanity, but also are really dangerous in the hands of the wrong people? Bad actors that would want to create a bioweapon or that would want to knock out an economic marketplace or flood the world with disinformation and fake videos, that can't just be handled in a country by country basis. There are adversaries out there. We need to make sure that we're not using them against each other. Right now, we don't have any AI arms control. We don't even have the beginning of that negotiation. So we don't have 20 years for that. So this administration is going to have to engage. Very interesting. You probably saw that Trump gave this long speech at the UN this year, back in September.

Speaker 1:
[108:45] Yeah, the one where he said like, basically, you guys suck and was it was a, I mean, there were funny parts of the speech. It's the one, the escalator speech. Yeah, the escalator speech. It was really interesting.

Speaker 3:
[108:54] At one point, he actually said, there was something he said, a new program that he wanted the US to start, that he asked the UN to be a part of, which you'd never expect him to do that. He said, I'm really concerned about the spread of bio weapons, and we want to have like a new US led global initiative on that, and the UN has to play a role. Now, he didn't come up with that. But the point is he didn't kill it, and no one around him killed it. You can't do this stuff unless there's some kind of global cooperation. It can't just be America first on protection of the world from these advanced technologies. There are some things in the world we still have to cooperate on, and yet we're not moving in that direction right now. Almost none of the big political trajectories are towards more cooperation. It's all towards fragmentation. It's all towards picking a side. There's some stuff that we need to actually work together on. So I'm really interested to see how does that start to happen, and does it require a big crisis? Yeah, it does. Or can we start to actually plant some of the seeds to allow for that without them?

Speaker 1:
[109:53] So just so that you leave us on a good note, what have you seen geopolitically that's given you a fuzzy, warm feeling?

Speaker 3:
[110:00] The fact that as the United States is playing less of a global leadership role, that other countries around the world actually don't want these institutions to fall apart. They may not be able to be the United States themselves, but they want these things to work. They want countries around the world, even China. They're saying, well, no, we still want the UN. We still want to pay our dues for the UN. We still want the IMF. We still want the World Bank. We still want their programs. We still want the World Food Program. We think these things are important. We still want trade agreements. Well, so if the US isn't going to be able to do all the trade right now, well, then the EU and Mercosur will try to sign something up, and India will work with Australia. There's more of that. So there is an effort to create more resilience in the system, and everything is not just about, oh my God, the United States isn't going to be papa, and so we all have to cower and be on our best behavior. Oh, this is going to strike us. No, there's actually more than just the US out there, and a lot of it is trying to find a way to ensure that we still have stability.

Speaker 1:
[111:04] I love that. It's what I told my seven kids, now that I'm not around, you guys are going to step up, and you're going to do something for yourselves.

Speaker 3:
[111:11] I'll take three, he'll take four.

Speaker 2:
[111:14] Can we move to where?

Speaker 3:
[111:15] Bulgaria.

Speaker 2:
[111:17] You bring a whole lot of ballpoint pens and blue jeans.

Speaker 1:
[111:20] That's my favorite one, is the ballpoint pens and the blue jeans. Just you doing that in... Did you ever go back and meet any of those people?

Speaker 3:
[111:27] Oh, God, yeah, of course.

Speaker 1:
[111:28] You did?

Speaker 3:
[111:29] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[111:29] Oh, man, on LinkedIn. That's amazing.

Speaker 3:
[111:31] Yeah, it was really cool.

Speaker 5:
[111:32] Not on LinkedIn, I mean.

Speaker 1:
[111:33] No, when did you first go back and connect? Like, who did you like...

Speaker 3:
[111:35] Oh, it would have been, I mean, probably three years later, two years later, 88, I think it was.

Speaker 1:
[111:39] And then you went back and then you...

Speaker 5:
[111:40] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[111:41] I mean, I was pen pals with these kids. Again, this is pre-internet.

Speaker 1:
[111:44] That is so cool.

Speaker 3:
[111:45] So you're then writing notes to these kids. Yeah, it was wild.

Speaker 2:
[111:48] With your fancy ballpoint pen.

Speaker 3:
[111:49] Yeah, right?

Speaker 1:
[111:50] Just flossing in their faces.

Speaker 2:
[111:51] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[111:52] Dear Vlad, I write this to you elegantly and with the smoothest precision that a ballpoint pen can provide.

Speaker 2:
[111:58] And then Vlad was like. Dear Ian, I'm glad.

Speaker 1:
[112:05] That's dope. It's really beautiful. Well, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much. Thank you for showing us a new way to see the world.

Speaker 2:
[112:12] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[112:13] I think that's, you know, that's honestly one of the things that you've changed most in my life, which I appreciate. It's just the idea of like, learn to see it, meet the people who don't see it the same way you do, talk to them about why, understand it, and then you go from there. I really appreciate that. Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[112:29] That means something to me. Thanks a lot to me.

Speaker 1:
[112:31] This was really fun. Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[112:32] Yeah, that's really cool.

Speaker 1:
[112:35] What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with SiriusXM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin and Jess Hackl. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random Other Stuff by Ryan Harduth. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now?

Speaker 6:
[113:06] Hi, I'm Gabby Windy with Long Winded, and I'm not gonna lie, I'm desperate. I'm desperate for your attention in any way possible, so listen to my podcast, won't ya? It has great insights, exceptional humor, and plenty of pop culture to fill your dark souls. And some even say it's a great way to fall asleep due to my soothing voice. And I don't take that personally, fall asleep. A listen is a listen even when you're sleeping, and a view is a view even with your eyes closed. If you dare, and it doesn't take much gumption, enjoy. Listen to Long-winded wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 9:
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