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Our political class has lost control.

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The right is getting more right than ever.

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And any time you have a combination of economic problems and social and stability and cultural problems, you put all those things together, it's not a good time.

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It's a time when conflict, violence, civil unrest, all of these things are much more likely.

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Civil unrest is absolutely guaranteed.

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And what you are now seeing is, I fear, the beginnings of a totally new level of separation between people.

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We are on the road to civil unrest and violence.

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But I'm glad we're having this conversation because these are difficult things to talk about.

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And that's why China is outperforming the rest of the world.

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There are so many freedoms you don't get in America that you do get in China.

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Would you prefer a Chinese system?

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If you were to America?

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Yes.

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What about political freedom, freedom of the individual, freedom of speech?

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Do you think Steven could run his show if he was a Chinese citizen in China and have any conversation he wanted?

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And you think communism is bad?

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I grew up in the Soviet Union, so yes, I do think communism is bad.

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You end up in a place where the economy is just screwed.

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So you get equality, but everyone's just equally poor.

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What is your perspective on AI?

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I think the biggest threat to humanity, if you talk about AI, is actually the fact that you're creating something that's smarter than you.

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And if you're creating a superior species, you will become an inferior species.

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Best case scenario, you become a pet.

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Worst case scenario, you become a cow.

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So my next question logically becomes, what can we do about it?

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There is an actual solution that's available that's clear.

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I think what we should really be focusing on is... You're wrong.

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This is where we're likely to have very strong disagreement.

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Guys, I've got a favour to ask before this episode begins.

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The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed.

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So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know.

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And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button.

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But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better.

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And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button.

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Constantine.

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In terms of everything that's going on in the world at the moment, what are the subjects that are most concerning to you?

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I think that I wrote an article a couple of years ago called Why I Fear the Future, in which I basically predicted that what you were about to see was the rise of far left populism and the rise of right wing populism.

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And in some cases, far right populism.

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particularly in Europe, but also elsewhere.

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And I think that's exactly what you're seeing in the Western world.

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And then geopolitically, the war in Iran will have an impact on the global economy that's only going to fuel that further.

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So I think the trend, people have spent the last 10 years talking about polarization without really understanding the process that was driving it, in my opinion.

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particularly in Europe.

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And what you are now seeing is, I fear, the beginnings of that process actually going to a totally new level of separation between people.

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And what's the root cause of that?

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Well, the root cause of that is a mixture of things, of course.

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Part of it is economic.

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Europe has basically stagnated since the great financial crisis.

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This country, Britain in particular, has stagnated economically.

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But a lot of it is the consequence of mass unfettered immigration and people's concerns about what has happened culturally and demographically.

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And these are difficult things to talk about, which some people find challenging to even discuss.

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But it's very clear to me if you look at...

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you know, the AFD in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France, Georgia Maloney in Italy, Farage and Rupert Lowe in the UK, what we saw in Sueto, however you pronounce it, a couple of weeks ago in Spain.

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These are all things just, you know, the visual medium is very powerful.

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When you see 60,000 people enter a country illegally in a day, that sort of imagery is likely to create a very strong amount of pushback.

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Oh, you came prepared, huh?

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Yeah, well, you know, if you're a normal person and you see this, whatever your other views, you just go, well, like, like, what's going on?

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That will be your question.

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Whether you're a really nice, not racist person who really, really thinks, you know, no human is illegal.

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Like, you're thinking, what is going on here?

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And the compassion and empathy you might feel for people fleeing conflict, for example, is unlikely to extend to something like this because we know that these people are economic migrants overwhelmingly.

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And they're coming.

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If you ask them, which many people did, and ask them why you're here, they will say, I want to have a better life for myself, which, you know, I don't blame people for.

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I myself have moved from a foreign country to Britain.

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And if you were in that position, would you do the same thing?

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Well, I don't know the exact position that they're in.

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What I can tell you is I came to Britain legally because that's what I thought you're supposed to do.

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Are you supposed to follow the rules?

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So if I were in that position, it depends what you mean by that position.

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You know, if I had a wife and children, would I abandon them to try and get to Europe?

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And, you know, I don't know.

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But a lot of these people are overwhelmingly young men who probably don't have a wife and child.

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So it's difficult.

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I don't know.

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Yeah.

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But if you're in a situation where you had a wife and child, let's say, and there was a promise that if you got over that border over there, you could have a better life for your wife and child, a significantly better life for your wife and child and send the money home and potentially even bring them over at some point.

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If you were currently living in a point of hardship, would you cross the border?

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I don't know.

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I've never been in that situation and we don't know.

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But the issue for us, I think, in the West is not so much do we have empathy for those people.

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It's kind of unimportant, actually, for this conversation.

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At a personal level, you want to feel like we're all empathetic.

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But the reality is it's a practical issue.

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We've talked about this so many times on your show about how so much of our decision-making and public conversation is driven by what makes us feel good as opposed to what works.

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This doesn't work.

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I think there is an element of...

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The importance of that question in the sense that if you don't have empathy for them, you blame them.

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You shut up outside the hotels.

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I think the blaming of them is a pointless distraction and is kind of irrelevant.

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The question is, what should we be doing about this?

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Right.

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And the fact is, this is not acceptable.

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And what caused it?

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Yes.

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Well, what caused it is the world is unequal.

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And there are poor parts of the world from which people would like to move to richer parts of the world.

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It's a very understandable decision.

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But unless you have a world in which everybody has the same quality of life everywhere, which we're never going to have because that's not how the world works, then countries will have to have borders that they enforce.

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And that was the consensus view around the West for the entirety of its history.

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And how is this contributing to the problems that you described in the West?

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If you're looking at that and you are in the center, center-right, maybe old school leftist who sort of believes in high levels of redistribution but believes in borders at the same time, you are looking at that and you're going, our political class has lost control.

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Our political class allows tens of thousands of people to enter Britain illegally on small boats every year.

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People on the right will look at that and say, we need to get tougher on borders.

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We need to get tougher on immigration.

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We need to get really tough on illegal immigration.

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And as long as the political class left and right refuses to address that issue, as they have done for this entire time, you will see more people on the right adopting harder line slogans, harder line policies when it comes to illegal immigration.

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And

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immigration more broadly.

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So it sounds a little bit to me like we're saying, unless we address this, then the right has a very effective marketing campaign.

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Well, the right has a very legitimate grievance about what's happening to their society.

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And that will be very effective electorally, of course.

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And the other thing you said was stagnation, economic stagnation, I'm presuming.

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Yeah, of course.

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So this polarization that you're talking about, this economic stagnation, where does this lead us to?

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Well, I hate, as you know, to make predictions about the future with any great confidence, but I think anytime you have a combination of economic problems and social and stability and cultural problems, you put all those things together.

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Historically speaking, it's not a good time.

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It's a time when conflict, violence, civil unrest, all of these things are much more likely.

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Doesn't mean they're guaranteed, doesn't mean you can't change course, doesn't mean you can't course correct.

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But if you don't, we are on the road to best case scenario, civil unrest and violence, for sure.

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Do you see evidence that there's going to be a remedy to course correct the issue you've described?

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Currently, I don't see that being addressed, but we are in a time when...

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unusual things are possible.

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And so at the next election in Britain, you may see the right-wing populace come in.

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And then the question is, can they do the things that they're promising to the people who will vote for them?

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And there's a big question mark about that because the things that they'll be promising, which is about addressing not just this problem in terms of people currently coming in, but the people who are already here.

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I don't know how much exactly we spend now, but there was a point at which we were spending eight million pounds a day on hotels for illegal

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So it tells you the scale of the problem.

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And it's a very difficult problem to address because the legal system and international conventions and all sorts of other things that are now in place and they're now enforced make it very difficult to address.

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It's not a dishonesty, but the thing that people on the right don't tend to say is even once you've dealt with illegal immigration, the country's not magically going to be better.

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You have to have an economy that's growing for people to feel like their lot has got better.

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The fact that you have rightly removed people who should never have been allowed in in the first place.

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will contribute somewhat to easing their concerns, but that's not going to solve the problem.

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And so even if you get right-wing populists into power, that's not necessarily a remedy for addressing the tensions that I'm talking about.

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And in the United States, a different set of issues, but maybe symptoms are similar.

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Polarization is leading to, and inequality is leading to a rise in socialism, and then the right is getting more right than ever.

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The right is getting more right than ever.

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I think Trump's election was kind of like the peak of it.

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And it's just carried on in terms of ICE and deportations and whatever.

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And look, there's a lot to be criticized about the Trump administration.

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The one thing they have done is close down the border.

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And I think that's a very good thing.

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And it was very necessary.

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But in terms of the rise of socialism and look, democratic socialism, we should be honest and just call it communism because that's what it is.

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It's a very unwise but understandable reaction to the economic circumstances of young people's lives in particular.

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If you're locked out of the housing market, which historically speaking is really the only way for an ordinary person to accumulate capital, if you don't have access to capital at a time when asset prices are inflating and have been inflating for a long time, you're basically watching the possibility of capitalism run away from you, of course you're going to turn over the apple cart.

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And you think communism is bad?

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I grew up in the Soviet Union.

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So yes, I do think communism is bad.

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Ideologically, it might sound great to people.

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And I understand why.

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Quality to all men, everyone being equal in every way.

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It's wonderful.

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It's not compatible with human nature for all sorts of reasons.

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The most obvious one is the basic 80-20 rule of things.

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Most people are not aware of it.

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But what communism tries to do is to take from the

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disproportionately productive 20% and spread it out across everybody else.

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The problem is that disincentivizes the 20% from doing anything.

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And so you end up with a communist system like the one we had in the Soviet Union, where no one really has any incentive to produce, to create, to innovate.

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And so you get a very stagnant economy.

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And on top of that, then you have central planning where the government is trying to decide what to do.

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They're not getting market signals about what's the right or wrong thing to do.

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And you end up in a place where the economy is just screwed.

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So you get equality, but everyone's just equally poor.

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Steve, what do you think in terms of what Konstantin said to me?

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He said that he thinks there's civil unrest potentially.

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Civil unrest is absolutely guaranteed.

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All I can see is civil unrest ahead of us because it isn't just communism in that sense, the Russian-Soviet version that you experienced that's failed.

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It's also capitalism.

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Capitalism has failed us.

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I think capitalism is going to fail, and guess who I blame for it?

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Who?

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Economists.

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You're an economist.

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Neoclassical mainstream economists have a fantasy vision of capitalism, and that fantasy vision has led them to trivialize what's happening with global warming.

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And most people simply aren't aware that they've done this.

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So nobody is worrying about global warming because they think it's something, not nobody, but the political authorities are not putting any effort into global warming because they read the economists and the economists tell them that by 2100, if temperatures rise by three degrees, there'll be a tiny fall in GDP.

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So why worry about it?

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In fact, we're starting to see the beginning of it this year with the crazy on there not coming our way, the crazy weather we're living through in England right now.

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And the system is going to collapse because the productive system won't be able to cope with the change in the climate.

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So that's what I see as the main source of conflict.

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I think everything else we're seeing is trivial compared to what that's going to do.

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So Constantine talked about these crosses in Sueta in Spain.

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Yeah.

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And he was alluding to the fact that

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this needs to be addressed or this polarization, which is having lots of downstream consequences, isn't going to change.

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What is your perspective on this issue?

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Again, there's so much of a fog of misinformation around these days that it's very hard to know whether what you hear is accurate.

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But

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The proposition I've been told is that Morocco has close relations with Israel, and the Zionists wanted this as a way of destabilizing Spain, which is about the only country in Europe that is attacking the Zionist state.

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And so this was a political setup.

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Well, hold on a second, but Spain has the ability to enforce its own borders.

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Of course it does.

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So it's going to, the fact that this actually happened is arguably, is being argued.

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And I don't know whether it's right or not.

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I'm given up on trying to say whether something is AI or not these days.

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But it's the argument has been that because the Spanish

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Government came out and was critical of Israel, critical of Zionism.

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Then this was a setup by the Israelis through Morocco to disturb Spain.

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Hold on.

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I'm making a different point, Steve, which is if my four-year-old wants sweets at 11 o'clock at night,

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That's true, but I am the idiot who gives it to him and he then stays up all night.

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And European countries refuse to enforce their borders.

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Whatever you think Israel is doing, by the way, I've seen literally zero evidence to support this theory, but let's say it's true just for the sake of argument.

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It's ultimately up to Spain.

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It's up to Italy.

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It's up to Britain.

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It's up to other European countries to enforce the border.

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That is something that we are capable of doing.

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And it's not like this incident, Sueta, is the only time this has happened.

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Three million people, slightly under, but around three million people have crossed the Mediterranean on boats in the last 10 years.

212
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And that's not Israel doing it.

213
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That's us allowing it to happen.

214
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But also us destabilizing Libya.

215
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Okay.

216
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If the Libyan slave markets exist because we came, we saw he died.

217
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I completely agree with you.

218
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The extent to which the West has destabilized the regions from which the migrants are coming has to be acknowledged.

219
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If you don't acknowledge it, then you're blaming the people who are the sandwich between two political blobs.

220
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But I did acknowledge it.

221
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I completely understand.

222
00:15:54.283 --> 00:15:58.306
And I've been against a lot of the foreign interventions that the West is engaged in.

223
00:15:58.767 --> 00:16:07.034
But a lot of people, and we know this from surveys, from interviews, from the types of people who come, most of these people are economic migrants.

224
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It doesn't mean that they're wrong to pursue a better life, but they want to move to Europe.

225
00:16:11.597 --> 00:16:14.158
And I have, look, this is not me saying it.

226
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It's a friend of mine who's in Iraqi.

227
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And this is what he says.

228
00:16:17.420 --> 00:16:19.522
He says, in the Middle East, we have a saying.

229
00:16:20.102 --> 00:16:21.963
If you want to work, you go to America.

230
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If you want to live on benefits, you go to Europe.

231
00:16:24.825 --> 00:16:35.632
We are creating an incentive structure in Europe that allows people to come and feel like this is a place in which we will provide a life for them that they don't have to provide a life for themselves in.

232
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Yeah.

233
00:16:36.112 --> 00:16:40.113
That incentives – I mean, you're an economist, although an economist – An anti-economist.

234
00:16:40.153 --> 00:16:40.854
An anti-economist.

235
00:16:40.874 --> 00:16:42.234
Do you remember that idea?

236
00:16:42.254 --> 00:16:44.895
But I doubt we disagree about the importance of incentives.

237
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Incentives, but also incentives to push people out of where they are rather than to reconstruct where they are and make it more livable.

238
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I'm all for that.

239
00:16:51.917 --> 00:16:55.318
I mean, the one country we're not seeing a lot of economic migrants from is China.

240
00:16:56.299 --> 00:16:57.780
Now, you say, what?

241
00:16:58.480 --> 00:16:59.361
China's very far away.

242
00:16:59.381 --> 00:17:02.203
Nonetheless, nobody wants to leave the place because it's booming.

243
00:17:02.483 --> 00:17:12.189
If there was an economic stagnation in Europe, would this subject be as inflammatory for people?

244
00:17:12.790 --> 00:17:17.393
No, I think, again, we're failing on all sorts of fronts, and the UK is not a booming economy.

245
00:17:17.693 --> 00:17:20.095
You've often said, Constantine, that we're spending too much money.

246
00:17:20.755 --> 00:17:23.877
Well, we're borrowing money now to pay off money we borrowed before.

247
00:17:24.317 --> 00:17:24.938
This is wrong.

248
00:17:25.258 --> 00:17:25.718
Tell me why.

249
00:17:25.918 --> 00:17:26.239
Okay.

250
00:17:26.459 --> 00:17:28.700
Have you ever done accounting?

251
00:17:28.720 --> 00:17:30.081
I've done my own accounting, yeah.

252
00:17:30.201 --> 00:17:30.881
Okay, okay.

253
00:17:30.962 --> 00:17:35.645
Do the accounting and you'll see the government does not borrow when it spends more than it takes back in taxation.

254
00:17:36.345 --> 00:17:38.286
You were asking me about us spending too much money.

255
00:17:38.306 --> 00:17:39.527
I don't want to get bogged down on this.

256
00:17:39.587 --> 00:17:47.252
The reality is if you spend more on welfare than you do on defense, so if you spend more on welfare than you do on education, if you spend more on welfare than other things...

257
00:17:47.612 --> 00:17:52.936
You're not spending money to help somebody get the mental health intervention they need to get back into work.

258
00:17:53.256 --> 00:17:54.777
That's not what we do in this country.

259
00:17:55.198 --> 00:17:58.360
And Andy Burnham actually is talking at least about attempting that.

260
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What we do instead, and we've had people like Fraser Nelson, who's the editor.

261
00:18:02.603 --> 00:18:04.464
I think he was the editor-spectator at the time.

262
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Now he's at The Times.

263
00:18:05.865 --> 00:18:07.347
who's done a lot of research into this.

264
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And what he basically came to is that what we're really doing is putting people in a position where they are getting money in order not to get back into work.

265
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The incentive structure is such.

266
00:18:20.987 --> 00:18:25.831
that it actually makes no sense for them to get a starting job, which will not necessarily be well-paid.

267
00:18:26.232 --> 00:18:30.695
But the tax incentives just mean that they're actually better off on welfare.

268
00:18:31.356 --> 00:18:38.542
If you do that, and if you spend a significant portion of your budget on that, plus you've got an aging population, so you're spending a tremendous amount of money on pensions,

269
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Pensioners vote, there's lots of them.

270
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They have the ability to make sure the government is really looking after them.

271
00:18:44.524 --> 00:18:50.766
If you do that over time, your ability to do productive things, you talked about productivity, is not going to be there.

272
00:18:50.866 --> 00:18:57.348
And by the way, the difference between the US and Britain and Europe more broadly, in my opinion, is partly cultural.

273
00:18:57.428 --> 00:19:00.469
You've moved to the US recently, or you certainly spend a lot of time there.

274
00:19:00.829 --> 00:19:05.631
There is a business mindset that exists in America that just isn't there here.

275
00:19:06.211 --> 00:19:12.755
And the other thing is, you know, their attitude to what we call welfare, what they call entitlements is different.

276
00:19:12.775 --> 00:19:15.056
And there's a good and bad side to that coin.

277
00:19:15.637 --> 00:19:23.681
In America, you really, really have to work very hard to survive because the welfare system isn't there to catch you when you fall nearly as much.

278
00:19:24.082 --> 00:19:27.904
You don't get the same quality of health care if you don't have the money to pay for it.

279
00:19:28.184 --> 00:19:31.326
You can fire and hire people much more easily, as you know, as an employer.

280
00:19:31.766 --> 00:19:35.430
All of those things mean that the US economy can accelerate a lot faster.

281
00:19:35.810 --> 00:19:45.298
But, you know, I always say America is a great place to be rich, hard place to be kind of middle class and a very difficult place to be poor.

282
00:19:45.699 --> 00:19:47.260
Europe is kind of the other way around.

283
00:19:47.881 --> 00:19:50.583
And so I think those are some of the differences in productivity as well.

284
00:19:51.320 --> 00:19:59.066
I agree with Constantine that America does have that can-do attitude, and they also do have the attitude that failure is the first step on the ladder of success.

285
00:19:59.806 --> 00:20:04.650
There is an expectation or acceptance that people can fail and then recreate.

286
00:20:04.690 --> 00:20:09.714
It's not a stigma in America where it's more of a stigma over in the United Kingdom and Europe.

287
00:20:09.734 --> 00:20:10.794
So I think that is part of it.

288
00:20:11.155 --> 00:20:13.476
It's also the scale of the American economy.

289
00:20:14.417 --> 00:20:18.280
England, I think, has suffered more from the Thatcherite twist

290
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cutting back government spending, meaning people have less money in their pockets to spend, meaning there's less economic activity, meaning you've got to go into debt to be able to start a business.

291
00:20:30.192 --> 00:20:32.975
All these things end up slowing down the rate of economic growth.

292
00:20:33.435 --> 00:20:39.682
America has not made the same mistake that the European Union had made with something like the Maastricht Treaty.

293
00:20:40.022 --> 00:20:48.494
There are elements of the American system which give you a higher rate of technological innovation and development than England gets.

294
00:20:48.514 --> 00:20:49.295
For sure.

295
00:20:49.555 --> 00:20:55.463
So, Steve, just to pick up on some of those points, are you saying that the UK don't have a spending problem currently?

296
00:20:56.266 --> 00:20:58.548
No, they have the problem they're not spending enough.

297
00:20:58.829 --> 00:21:00.250
The government should be spending more.

298
00:21:00.270 --> 00:21:01.211
The government should be spending more.

299
00:21:01.231 --> 00:21:02.092
Should be spending more money.

300
00:21:02.212 --> 00:21:03.153
On what?

301
00:21:03.654 --> 00:21:07.838
Education, welfare, infrastructure, dams for a start.

302
00:21:07.858 --> 00:21:19.350
You know how many dams, one of the reasons we've got a potential crisis in the UK right now, is the UK, after privatising its water 40 years ago, has one less dam now than it had 40 years ago.

303
00:21:19.550 --> 00:21:21.031
So you want the government to spend more?

304
00:21:21.071 --> 00:21:26.773
The government should be providing the infrastructure, the foundation that enables economic activity to occur.

305
00:21:27.094 --> 00:21:28.674
That's what we're seeing happening in China.

306
00:21:28.974 --> 00:21:31.135
And that's why China is outperforming the rest of the world.

307
00:21:31.476 --> 00:21:37.718
When you cut back on providing the infrastructure, you mean you've got to build your own roads to connect your factories together.

308
00:21:37.779 --> 00:21:45.082
So by not providing the long-term stuff, which a government should finance, you end up hobbling your private sector rather than enabling it.

309
00:21:45.522 --> 00:21:51.386
What you've done is you've packaged a bunch of things together, some of which, in my opinion, are accurate and some of which are really inaccurate.

310
00:21:51.787 --> 00:22:00.193
When you say infrastructure, welfare, da-da-da-da-da, infrastructure, like I'm in favor of government borrowing money to invest in things that generate productivity.

311
00:22:00.213 --> 00:22:02.534
And I'm in favor of them spending money to create that stuff.

312
00:22:02.554 --> 00:22:04.476
Same thing, but the borrowing is not important.

313
00:22:04.756 --> 00:22:05.176
Irrelevant.

314
00:22:05.196 --> 00:22:05.796
Yeah, okay.

315
00:22:05.816 --> 00:22:07.578
Where you get that money from is actually irrelevant.

316
00:22:07.638 --> 00:22:07.878
Yeah.

317
00:22:08.118 --> 00:22:13.102
The government spending money to invest in useful infrastructure, productive infrastructure.

318
00:22:13.122 --> 00:22:19.827
I mean, one of the other reasons the US is growing in a different way to us, the UK has the highest industrial electricity prices in the world.

319
00:22:19.847 --> 00:22:23.430
So if you're trying to do AI, you're not going to do it here.

320
00:22:23.750 --> 00:22:26.672
If you're trying to do industry, you're not going to do it here, right?

321
00:22:26.712 --> 00:22:33.918
So if the government had actually made it easier to build nuclear power plants, to do other energy things that drive down the cost of electricity.

322
00:22:34.378 --> 00:22:38.200
then you are putting yourself in a position to succeed in industry and succeed in business.

323
00:22:38.561 --> 00:22:45.705
And the government spending money, whether it's borrowed or not, to build infrastructure, housing, roads, there is definitely a case to be made for that.

324
00:22:46.345 --> 00:22:52.109
Giving money to people not to work, which is what a lot of the welfare bill is, that is not productive.

325
00:22:52.389 --> 00:22:54.290
And so you've got to separate these two things out.

326
00:22:54.670 --> 00:22:56.551
Money for infrastructure, wonderful, great.

327
00:22:57.031 --> 00:23:00.113
Money for keeping people unproductive, very bad.

328
00:23:00.493 --> 00:23:06.876
And culturally, it creates a lot of problems as well because you create a society of people who are effectively takers and not creators, and it's terrible.

329
00:23:07.876 --> 00:23:08.976
I don't think we're doing that.

330
00:23:09.417 --> 00:23:12.438
I've seen unemployment benefits used to be adequate.

331
00:23:12.918 --> 00:23:14.899
Like I'm talking from my Australian experience now.

332
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They're not anymore.

333
00:23:17.040 --> 00:23:22.883
So the welfare that's provided to people doesn't mean that they can survive and live with nothing.

334
00:23:23.503 --> 00:23:28.086
There should be a button just down below here, and if it says subscribe, you're already subscribed.

335
00:23:28.146 --> 00:23:31.028
If it says subscriber, that means you're not yet.

336
00:23:31.309 --> 00:23:33.710
And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favour and hit that button.

337
00:23:33.750 --> 00:23:39.474
It helps the show more than you know, and according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button.

338
00:23:39.634 --> 00:23:40.155
Thank you so much.

339
00:23:41.500 --> 00:23:44.563
The other point was, you said you think the government should be spending even more money.

340
00:23:44.803 --> 00:23:45.924
Yeah.

341
00:23:46.965 --> 00:23:52.770
The point around how we generate growth does link fundamentally to energy.

342
00:23:53.130 --> 00:23:55.412
There's a big conversation happening at the moment with Andy Burnham.

343
00:23:55.432 --> 00:23:57.614
I think he spoke to Trump about this, about the North Sea.

344
00:23:57.854 --> 00:23:58.054
Yeah.

345
00:23:58.255 --> 00:23:59.516
And about the oil in the North Sea.

346
00:23:59.636 --> 00:24:00.697
Do you think we should be drilling there?

347
00:24:01.277 --> 00:24:11.440
Uh, look, the energy conversation it, uh, with this is where we're likely to have very strong disagreements, but I think it's important to get the groundwork in place before we have the conversation.

348
00:24:12.161 --> 00:24:16.722
Um, we, uh, I mean, Steve said that with, you know, no one's taken climate change seriously.

349
00:24:17.042 --> 00:24:20.383
I would argue, and I think we, I think it's based in, in what we have seen.

350
00:24:20.883 --> 00:24:27.205
We've talked about climate change in such a way for such a long time now that you literally have people who are so terrified.

351
00:24:27.225 --> 00:24:28.346
They're not having children.

352
00:24:28.366 --> 00:24:29.206
They're so terrified.

353
00:24:29.666 --> 00:24:31.387
They've got climate anxiety.

354
00:24:31.807 --> 00:24:37.909
We had the phenomenon on Greta Thunberg going around, giving speeches everywhere being taken as a credible person.

355
00:24:38.209 --> 00:24:39.390
Let's look at the reality.

356
00:24:39.750 --> 00:24:53.255
Almost all of the CO2 emissions, not almost all, but the overwhelming bulk of the CO2 emissions of the future, the greenhouse gases of the future, are going to be produced in two countries, India and China.

357
00:24:53.496 --> 00:24:54.136
That's just a fact.

358
00:24:54.936 --> 00:25:00.258
The world now uses more oil, more gas, and more coal than it ever has done, ever.

359
00:25:00.818 --> 00:25:07.380
And people will say, well, China is building dams and wind turbines and solar panel arrays, et cetera.

360
00:25:07.760 --> 00:25:08.160
It's true.

361
00:25:08.380 --> 00:25:10.900
But they're also building coal power stations every week.

362
00:25:10.940 --> 00:25:18.162
They're building every form of energy that they can because they know something we in the West have forgotten, which is GDP is energy transformed.

363
00:25:18.263 --> 00:25:19.823
Now, I completely agree.

364
00:25:20.163 --> 00:25:20.423
Okay.

365
00:25:20.483 --> 00:25:20.783
Okay.

366
00:25:20.803 --> 00:25:21.864
That's a shock, but I don't.

367
00:25:21.944 --> 00:25:22.064
Good.

368
00:25:22.084 --> 00:25:22.865
Fantastic.

369
00:25:23.025 --> 00:25:28.868
In other words, if you don't have energy, if you're not creating energy, you are going to be poor.

370
00:25:29.588 --> 00:25:36.012
Almost all wealth creation in the history of humanity has been about using more dense fuel.

371
00:25:37.292 --> 00:25:47.260
So you go from hay, which you put into horses and cows and other animals, to coal, to wood, to coal, to oil, to gas, to nuclear.

372
00:25:47.280 --> 00:25:48.421
You get denser, denser, denser.

373
00:25:48.441 --> 00:25:56.748
You're creating more energy and you convert that energy into wealth, into prosperity, into hospitals, into schools, into money, into everything, right?

374
00:25:56.768 --> 00:25:56.868
Yeah.

375
00:25:57.688 --> 00:26:05.590
So any society which creates a structure where energy is expensive and not abundant is going to get poorer.

376
00:26:05.630 --> 00:26:09.491
It's one of the main reasons we are stagnating in Europe in a way that America is not.

377
00:26:09.591 --> 00:26:09.851
Okay.

378
00:26:10.411 --> 00:26:18.273
Now, in terms of climate change, I don't want to get bogged down in how impactful this is, who's doing this, who's doing that.

379
00:26:18.673 --> 00:26:24.054
The hard reality is Britain can literally do absolutely nothing about climate change.

380
00:26:24.454 --> 00:26:26.815
Britain produces 1% of global carbon emissions.

381
00:26:27.335 --> 00:26:27.515
Right.

382
00:26:27.895 --> 00:26:35.199
And the narrative was, well, it doesn't really matter that we only produce 1% of global carbon emissions because Britain has moral leadership in the world.

383
00:26:35.259 --> 00:26:44.623
And so if we reduce our energy consumption and if we increase our energy prices and we are slightly repackaged and we use slightly more wind and slightly more solar.

384
00:26:45.304 --> 00:26:46.825
then other countries will follow suit.

385
00:26:47.186 --> 00:26:47.927
That was the argument.

386
00:26:48.387 --> 00:26:51.010
It's very clear now that that is not remotely happening.

387
00:26:51.371 --> 00:26:54.915
India and China, if you talk to people in India and China, they're like, we want to grow.

388
00:26:55.035 --> 00:26:56.437
We need our people to be prosperous.

389
00:26:56.457 --> 00:26:57.578
We need our people not to die.

390
00:26:57.598 --> 00:27:01.443
I mean, life expectancy in India at the time of partition in 1947 was 32 years old.

391
00:27:03.966 --> 00:27:04.907
That's how long people lived it.

392
00:27:05.347 --> 00:27:07.789
Life expectancy at birth was 32 years old.

393
00:27:07.849 --> 00:27:11.152
It's now, I think, over 70 or maybe 80 now at this point, right?

394
00:27:11.392 --> 00:27:17.276
And that's because they've been burning fossil fuels, and they're going to keep burning fossil fuels, and they're going to keep using nuclear, and they're going to do everything else.

395
00:27:17.557 --> 00:27:18.878
Britain can't affect that.

396
00:27:19.338 --> 00:27:20.478
We can't do anything about it.

397
00:27:20.798 --> 00:27:22.599
And climate change, the planet will get warmer.

398
00:27:22.899 --> 00:27:28.981
So what we should be doing is investing in infrastructure that allows us to cope with that reality in exactly the way the Dutch have done.

399
00:27:29.021 --> 00:27:33.202
So they build flood defenses and other ways of managing the fact that sea levels change.

400
00:27:33.702 --> 00:27:36.263
That's the only thing that we in Britain can do about that issue.

401
00:27:36.583 --> 00:27:44.705
And in the meantime, rather than suiciding our economy by creating less energy and therefore reducing our ability to grow our GDP, what we should be doing.

402
00:27:45.165 --> 00:27:48.528
is creating a system where we produce abundant cheap energy.

403
00:27:48.928 --> 00:27:58.276
And, you know, Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister, there's a very instructive video of him 15 or 20 years ago being asked why we're not building nuclear power stations.

404
00:27:58.576 --> 00:28:00.417
Him saying, well, it's going to take 15, 20 years.

405
00:28:00.457 --> 00:28:00.858
We're going to...

406
00:28:01.158 --> 00:28:08.064
Well, it's been 15, 20 years and we don't have any bloody nuclear power stations because of the short-sightedness of our political leaders on these issues.

407
00:28:08.464 --> 00:28:12.467
So should we be pumping out as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we can?

408
00:28:12.808 --> 00:28:14.029
Absolutely no, we shouldn't be.

409
00:28:14.489 --> 00:28:27.300
Should we have a sensible energy policy that is about making sure that we actually grow our economy and keep our people wealthy and also have the money to make the adjustments we're going to have to make to the fact that climate will change?

410
00:28:27.620 --> 00:28:28.641
and we can't control that.

411
00:28:29.061 --> 00:28:30.082
That's the real question.

412
00:28:30.342 --> 00:28:32.744
It's not about, do you believe climate change or whatever?

413
00:28:32.764 --> 00:28:34.005
This is a silly conversation.

414
00:28:34.265 --> 00:28:39.729
The real conversation is, what can we do about the inevitable reality of the climate changing?

415
00:28:39.869 --> 00:28:45.393
And you're saying we can't do anything to stop it, but you're also then saying we should just build defenses to deal with the symptoms.

416
00:28:45.653 --> 00:28:46.253
We should adapt.

417
00:28:46.293 --> 00:28:51.637
And this is what human beings have done throughout the history of our civilization and of our species.

418
00:28:51.977 --> 00:28:55.300
There have been times when the planet has been way warmer than it is today,

419
00:28:55.720 --> 00:28:59.002
12,000 years ago, so there were hippopotamuses swimming in the Thames.

420
00:28:59.322 --> 00:29:00.643
No, not 12,000 years, please.

421
00:29:01.403 --> 00:29:02.444
I'm pretty sure it is 12,000.

422
00:29:02.464 --> 00:29:05.605
No, 12,000 years ago is the beginning of coming out of the ice age.

423
00:29:05.645 --> 00:29:07.346
Would you just check me on that, please?

424
00:29:07.366 --> 00:29:07.526
No.

425
00:29:08.107 --> 00:29:10.428
12,000 years ago, Britain was coming out of the last ice age.

426
00:29:10.448 --> 00:29:10.588
Yeah.

427
00:29:10.788 --> 00:29:11.989
The climate was cold.

428
00:29:12.229 --> 00:29:12.409
Yep.

429
00:29:12.429 --> 00:29:12.869
Tundra-like.

430
00:29:13.870 --> 00:29:14.650
The opposite.

431
00:29:14.670 --> 00:29:15.811
Just let them finish.

432
00:29:15.871 --> 00:29:18.633
So because it was cold, but it says 120,000 years ago.

433
00:29:19.693 --> 00:29:21.194
Yeah.

434
00:29:21.214 --> 00:29:21.474
Okay.

435
00:29:21.494 --> 00:29:21.754
120,000.

436
00:29:22.115 --> 00:29:26.157
What I'm saying is the climate has changed in all sorts of different ways.

437
00:29:26.317 --> 00:29:29.539
2000 years ago, the Romans group rapes on Hadrian's wall, right?

438
00:29:29.819 --> 00:29:31.720
And 200 years ago, it was really cold.

439
00:29:31.740 --> 00:29:33.461
The Thames would freeze every year, et cetera.

440
00:29:33.862 --> 00:29:34.442
This happens.

441
00:29:34.582 --> 00:29:35.923
People have to adapt to it.

442
00:29:36.523 --> 00:29:37.824
And we're going to have to do it.

443
00:29:38.344 --> 00:29:45.669
So Steve, the assertion there is that the UK can't do anything about climate change in terms of affecting on a global scale, but they can defend themselves.

444
00:29:45.689 --> 00:29:46.289
Yeah.

445
00:29:46.649 --> 00:29:48.189
against it by... No, you can't.

446
00:29:48.870 --> 00:29:49.610
You can't more?

447
00:29:49.770 --> 00:29:50.170
You can't.

448
00:29:50.490 --> 00:29:54.111
You cannot defend yourself against what England faces if climate change continues.

449
00:29:54.671 --> 00:29:56.991
England will become a...

450
00:29:57.011 --> 00:30:01.692
This is some of the most recent research on what's called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

451
00:30:01.812 --> 00:30:02.832
You're aware of the AMOC.

452
00:30:03.032 --> 00:30:10.054
That translates about 10 degrees Celsius of heat from the south, actually the middle of the Atlantic, up to Europe.

453
00:30:10.534 --> 00:30:14.835
If it stops running, temperatures in Europe on average fall by 10 degrees.

454
00:30:15.415 --> 00:30:20.640
So I guess the central question here is that, is there something the UK can do to affect global climate change?

455
00:30:21.460 --> 00:30:22.141
Not on its own.

456
00:30:22.561 --> 00:30:22.841
Okay.

457
00:30:22.941 --> 00:30:23.622
Not on its own.

458
00:30:23.762 --> 00:30:28.886
Because when you look at China and India, they have increased their carbon emissions.

459
00:30:28.927 --> 00:30:41.637
China is actually having falling per capita emissions at the moment, even though they're building a power station, they're building so many nuclear, and far cheaper than there's doing in the West, so many wind and solar, that they're actually reducing their carbon footprint right now.

460
00:30:41.657 --> 00:30:42.158
Per capita.

461
00:30:42.178 --> 00:30:42.498
Per capita.

462
00:30:42.818 --> 00:30:44.720
And their capitals falling as well.

463
00:30:45.120 --> 00:30:46.401
So they're reducing their carbon emissions?

464
00:30:46.421 --> 00:30:47.782
They're reducing their carbon emissions.

465
00:30:47.802 --> 00:30:48.083
Are they?

466
00:30:48.303 --> 00:30:48.683
Okay.

467
00:30:49.124 --> 00:30:50.605
And that's been the last two years.

468
00:30:50.645 --> 00:30:52.627
It's only in the last two years this has started to happen.

469
00:30:52.967 --> 00:30:54.788
But China is now reducing its... And where by India?

470
00:30:55.149 --> 00:31:00.173
India absolutely going gangbusters in the opposite direction because it's far less developed, of course, than China.

471
00:31:00.433 --> 00:31:01.414
So they'll keep developing.

472
00:31:01.454 --> 00:31:05.898
They will keep on doing it until such time as they have their first wet bulb catastrophe.

473
00:31:06.874 --> 00:31:14.258
And when, say, 10 or 20 million people die from heat in one day, then I think India will start doing something very different.

474
00:31:14.678 --> 00:31:18.180
But there's a belief this is something we can adjust to.

475
00:31:19.180 --> 00:31:26.584
And the forces we're talking about are far beyond anything humans have any capacity to adjust towards.

476
00:31:27.084 --> 00:31:32.266
Now, the AMOC, the reason I mentioned the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, I love the abbreviation.

477
00:31:32.567 --> 00:31:32.887
It's going to

478
00:31:33.667 --> 00:31:43.196
make this country go on mock because the temperature range for London, if the AMOC fails, is estimated to be between minus 20 degrees Celsius and plus 35.

479
00:31:43.216 --> 00:31:47.040
Steve, can the UK do anything about it if our emissions are so small?

480
00:31:47.060 --> 00:31:50.303
We cannot do anything as a bunch of nations fighting each other.

481
00:31:50.483 --> 00:31:50.623
Yeah.

482
00:31:50.643 --> 00:31:50.784
Okay.

483
00:31:51.004 --> 00:31:55.288
This whole attitude that we're going, this contest with that country, this country is better than that country, et cetera, et cetera.

484
00:31:55.308 --> 00:31:55.408
Yeah.

485
00:31:55.528 --> 00:31:57.009
This is dooming us to extinction.

486
00:31:57.270 --> 00:31:57.930
But is this the reality?

487
00:31:57.950 --> 00:32:04.316
I'm going to out Greta Thunberg, Greta Thunberg in this conversation now because I know a lot more than you guys do about the climate science, okay?

488
00:32:04.396 --> 00:32:04.776
I agree.

489
00:32:04.796 --> 00:32:09.861
What I'm really saying is if we talk about human incentives, do we have any control over what India decide to do?

490
00:32:09.901 --> 00:32:10.581
No, we don't.

491
00:32:10.802 --> 00:32:12.403
Do we have any control over what China decide to do?

492
00:32:12.423 --> 00:32:13.003
None whatsoever.

493
00:32:13.184 --> 00:32:16.887
So does the UK then need to, does it need to be a bit selfish?

494
00:32:16.907 --> 00:32:19.029
We need to realize how serious the situation we're in is.

495
00:32:19.069 --> 00:32:20.030
And what will we then do?

496
00:32:20.610 --> 00:32:21.391
We realize it's serious.

497
00:32:21.411 --> 00:32:22.612
Let's say we accept your point.

498
00:32:23.072 --> 00:32:23.933
This is the reality.

499
00:32:24.013 --> 00:32:24.293
Okay.

500
00:32:24.713 --> 00:32:25.333
What do we do?

501
00:32:25.473 --> 00:32:27.694
We would have to drastically reduce energy consumption.

502
00:32:28.755 --> 00:32:28.835
Ah.

503
00:32:29.075 --> 00:32:29.415
Okay.

504
00:32:29.575 --> 00:32:31.616
Energy consumption is vital for GDP.

505
00:32:31.656 --> 00:32:34.738
Completely, 100% agree, but I know the statistics on this front.

506
00:32:35.318 --> 00:32:41.841
The link between gross world product, the equivalent of GDP for the planet, and energy is incredibly tight.

507
00:32:41.862 --> 00:32:42.642
They're one for one.

508
00:32:42.822 --> 00:32:43.002
Yeah.

509
00:32:43.062 --> 00:32:45.243
If energy goes up, so does gross world product.

510
00:32:45.623 --> 00:32:48.145
If GWP goes down, so does energy consumption.

511
00:32:48.165 --> 00:32:48.765
They're one for one.

512
00:32:48.785 --> 00:32:48.905
Yeah.

513
00:32:48.925 --> 00:32:51.787
So, Steve, when you say we need to reduce energy, do you mean the UK?

514
00:32:51.848 --> 00:32:52.628
I mean the species.

515
00:32:52.928 --> 00:32:53.689
I mean human species.

516
00:32:53.709 --> 00:32:55.471
So, how does Andy Burnham do that?

517
00:32:56.011 --> 00:32:59.594
We are not set up to deal with this problem because we're broken into nation states.

518
00:32:59.934 --> 00:33:01.135
We can't make decisions.

519
00:33:01.195 --> 00:33:04.618
So, we need world government to reduce world energy consumption.

520
00:33:04.678 --> 00:33:05.839
We're going to be stuck with that.

521
00:33:05.899 --> 00:33:06.140
Yes.

522
00:33:06.400 --> 00:33:07.681
We're going to be stuck with it.

523
00:33:08.121 --> 00:33:14.147
I'm glad we're having this conversation because at least this is the first time, and I mean this in a genuinely respectful way.

524
00:33:14.207 --> 00:33:16.929
It's the first time I've ever heard anyone be honest about this issue.

525
00:33:17.389 --> 00:33:17.989
That's what you want.

526
00:33:18.009 --> 00:33:18.730
You want world government.

527
00:33:18.750 --> 00:33:19.370
No, I don't want it.

528
00:33:19.850 --> 00:33:20.570
You believe it's inevitable.

529
00:33:20.590 --> 00:33:21.331
I'm saying it's inevitable.

530
00:33:21.351 --> 00:33:21.691
It's inevitable.

531
00:33:21.931 --> 00:33:24.332
Because by ignoring this problem, we've got to the scale.

532
00:33:24.412 --> 00:33:31.295
You believe it's inevitable that we have a world government that reduces world energy consumption and therefore the prosperity of everyone living on the planet.

533
00:33:31.335 --> 00:33:35.336
And if we had taken the advice of the limits to growth 50 years ago, we would not be having this conversation.

534
00:33:35.376 --> 00:33:35.677
Good.

535
00:33:35.877 --> 00:33:37.377
We have delayed for half a century.

536
00:33:37.697 --> 00:33:40.699
Is there any solutions that you believe are actually possible?

537
00:33:40.719 --> 00:33:41.319
No.

538
00:33:41.619 --> 00:33:41.779
No.

539
00:33:42.099 --> 00:33:42.239
No.

540
00:33:42.299 --> 00:33:42.639
There we go.

541
00:33:43.140 --> 00:33:46.001
You've done a public service here because you have...

542
00:33:46.621 --> 00:33:50.782
showed what it is that sits underneath all the conversation about climate.

543
00:33:51.262 --> 00:33:57.744
It's a best case scenario, people who know there's nothing we can do, but what we should do is flail about in the meantime.

544
00:33:57.965 --> 00:34:05.347
And in order to not address this issue, impoverish, not just in this case, our citizens and our fellow people, but actually the entire world.

545
00:34:06.187 --> 00:34:07.167
That's what this is.

546
00:34:07.607 --> 00:34:16.250
And the entire challenge I have to this is I don't believe in suicide for token gestures towards not solving a problem you're claiming to solve.

547
00:34:16.530 --> 00:34:21.632
We are not going to solve this problem by creating a world government and reducing energy consumption.

548
00:34:21.892 --> 00:34:24.673
That is never, ever in a billion years going to happen.

549
00:34:24.693 --> 00:34:28.574
No, what we're going to do instead is run into the crisis and fall apart as a civilization in the process.

550
00:34:29.334 --> 00:34:29.774
instead.

551
00:34:29.835 --> 00:34:32.657
Look, there's a possibility you're correct about that.

552
00:34:32.677 --> 00:34:40.524
But the only choice we actually have to solve this problem is to create forms of energy that do not produce CO2, but produce GDP.

553
00:34:40.985 --> 00:34:41.926
Clean energy.

554
00:34:42.026 --> 00:34:43.187
That's what we're going to have to do.

555
00:34:43.507 --> 00:34:45.569
By the way, it's what we've done throughout history.

556
00:34:45.869 --> 00:34:51.835
And we need to make that clean energy more favorable in terms of the economics to India and China.

557
00:34:52.015 --> 00:34:53.496
Did you need a world government?

558
00:34:54.257 --> 00:34:58.259
to reduce usage of the horse and car and replace it with the automobile.

559
00:34:58.719 --> 00:34:59.179
No, you didn't.

560
00:34:59.839 --> 00:35:05.922
You came up with a better technology and people adopted that technology voluntarily because it was advantageous.

561
00:35:06.322 --> 00:35:16.627
This is not going to be solved by making everybody poor, well, for the reasons that Steve himself articulated, but it's also not going to be solved by making everybody poor because people will not do it.

562
00:35:17.547 --> 00:35:20.812
You say you need everybody to hold hands and sing Kumbaya and act together.

563
00:35:20.852 --> 00:35:24.838
No, what I'm saying is we need to have engineers in control, and we're talking about it 50 years ago.

564
00:35:24.898 --> 00:35:25.539
Engineers in control.

565
00:35:25.599 --> 00:35:26.100
Engineers.

566
00:35:26.200 --> 00:35:27.382
So we should stop having elections.

567
00:35:27.602 --> 00:35:27.822
Sorry?

568
00:35:29.429 --> 00:35:30.850
Compared to the politicians we get?

569
00:35:30.930 --> 00:35:31.190
Yes.

570
00:35:31.370 --> 00:35:33.932
I'd rather get rid of elections and have engineers running everything.

571
00:35:34.112 --> 00:35:36.654
They do a damn side better job than a politician's ever done.

572
00:35:36.674 --> 00:35:44.259
Well, and this is why I say this is a public service because this is the true face of the climate catastrophe narrative.

573
00:35:44.279 --> 00:35:45.000
We need world government.

574
00:35:45.020 --> 00:35:45.880
Let's go back 50 years to the true face.

575
00:35:45.900 --> 00:35:48.302
We don't want elections and we want to make everybody poor.

576
00:35:48.322 --> 00:35:48.842
And you know why?

577
00:35:48.862 --> 00:35:49.763
And we've got it out in the air.

578
00:35:50.043 --> 00:35:52.305
Okay, now I'm going to go back and say where it started.

579
00:35:52.325 --> 00:36:05.273
It started in 1972 when the Limits to Growth study was published, and the Limits to Growth said that if we continue on the current trajectory, we're going to have an ecological catastrophe sometime in the 21st century, okay?

580
00:36:05.773 --> 00:36:07.434
They deliberately left the dates vague.

581
00:36:07.535 --> 00:36:12.819
They knew they couldn't predict the actual dates, so they said 1900's the start of our work, 2100's the end.

582
00:36:13.219 --> 00:36:26.991
In the middle of their projections, roughly speaking, about the time we are now between 2030 and 2050, the system would start falling over because we'd be eliminating the capacity of the planet to support our species at the energy consumption levels that we have now.

583
00:36:27.331 --> 00:36:32.816
So they said we had to reduce dramatically pollution per unit of output, uh...

584
00:36:34.196 --> 00:36:37.137
a stabilized population at 4 billion people.

585
00:36:37.317 --> 00:36:38.097
That was the argument.

586
00:36:38.117 --> 00:36:41.078
They wanted to stabilize at 4 billion people in 1975.

587
00:36:41.778 --> 00:36:47.239
We wouldn't be having this dilemma if we'd actually taken the advice of the engineers who wrote that report.

588
00:36:47.259 --> 00:36:48.319
It wasn't written by hippies.

589
00:36:48.780 --> 00:36:53.261
Most people think limits to growth are by a bunch of dope-smoking hippies in Rome.

590
00:36:53.741 --> 00:36:55.361
It was written by engineers in MIT.

591
00:36:55.381 --> 00:37:01.943
Steve, one of the things that I spend a lot of time doing on this podcast is trying to find reality

592
00:37:03.523 --> 00:37:04.223
wishful thinking.

593
00:37:04.764 --> 00:37:07.925
And, you know, I have a lot of conversations about AI, for example.

594
00:37:07.965 --> 00:37:11.486
I see so many parallels with AI because we're saying that AI could be a big problem.

595
00:37:12.086 --> 00:37:18.729
But when you look at human incentives, the US are trying to beat China and China are trying to beat this person and they're trying to beat them.

596
00:37:18.749 --> 00:37:21.670
And even in the US, you've got, you've got open AI trying to be anthroponic.

597
00:37:21.790 --> 00:37:25.931
So when you look at incentives, you go, okay, I kind of see, can see how this is going to play out.

598
00:37:26.231 --> 00:37:27.312
There's an inevitability to it.

599
00:37:27.892 --> 00:37:39.100
In the example you gave there, what I'm hearing is reduced pollution, which would have meant getting China and India and the US and the UK and Europe to all cooperate, which has proven to be impossible.

600
00:37:39.240 --> 00:37:40.321
Without political systems.

601
00:37:40.441 --> 00:37:43.103
And the other thing you mentioned was stopping people having babies.

602
00:37:44.627 --> 00:37:49.668
stabilizing at $4 billion, which would have come with a lopsided economy and lots of other problems.

603
00:37:50.728 --> 00:37:51.428
I mean, we've seen it.

604
00:37:51.448 --> 00:37:53.889
It looks like it wasn't possible.

605
00:37:53.949 --> 00:37:57.729
And the fossil fuel lobbies and conventional economists undermined all that stuff.

606
00:37:58.110 --> 00:38:02.630
So the reason we're having this conversation now is you basically think we've got to adapt.

607
00:38:02.670 --> 00:38:08.331
It's like we're going up a hill, so we've got to have a lighter car or more power for the car or whatever else.

608
00:38:08.611 --> 00:38:10.852
I'm saying we're five inches from a brick wall.

609
00:38:12.093 --> 00:38:13.734
And we're not going to slow down in time to hit the wall.

610
00:38:13.754 --> 00:38:14.534
We're going to hit the wall.

611
00:38:14.834 --> 00:38:16.275
Brace yourselves.

612
00:38:16.315 --> 00:38:17.115
Brace for impact.

613
00:38:17.155 --> 00:38:18.435
That's the advice I give.

614
00:38:18.496 --> 00:38:20.896
When I asked you earlier if we need world government, you said yes.

615
00:38:21.096 --> 00:38:22.337
It's not going to happen.

616
00:38:22.517 --> 00:38:23.697
I know it's not going to happen.

617
00:38:23.717 --> 00:38:25.618
The only way out of this is to do it collectively.

618
00:38:25.638 --> 00:38:30.580
With this obvious example, we're going to do it competitively and shoot each other in the foot in the process.

619
00:38:30.780 --> 00:38:37.502
We'd realized that each nation had to reduce its energy consumption or get a higher efficiency out of its energy 50 years ago.

620
00:38:37.663 --> 00:38:38.843
Looked at the engineering.

621
00:38:39.023 --> 00:38:40.445
Who's the we that would have realized this?

622
00:38:40.485 --> 00:38:42.767
You would have needed a world government back then to do it.

623
00:38:42.807 --> 00:38:45.650
You needed politicians who understand what the engineers told them.

624
00:38:46.050 --> 00:38:46.311
Right.

625
00:38:46.431 --> 00:38:53.718
Instead, you had politicians who listened to the media and listened to the oil interests and trivialized these whole dangers.

626
00:38:54.159 --> 00:38:56.061
And that's why now it's catastrophic.

627
00:38:56.481 --> 00:39:00.565
I mean, I truly believe we're on the edge of a catastrophic breakdown of human civilization.

628
00:39:01.186 --> 00:39:07.412
In that situation, if you wanted to stop it happening, you would need to have global coordination, authoritarian, et cetera, et cetera.

629
00:39:07.792 --> 00:39:10.334
If we'd done it 50 years ago, we wouldn't need any of this.

630
00:39:10.374 --> 00:39:18.121
Steve, how would you go to India and tell them that they can't use energy when they're – some people in India are very – Yeah, I know.

631
00:39:18.141 --> 00:39:20.543
The women are dying in childbirth and their children are starving.

632
00:39:20.563 --> 00:39:20.884
Yeah, yeah.

633
00:39:20.924 --> 00:39:23.826
I mean – And you go to India.

634
00:39:23.866 --> 00:39:24.166
No, no, no.

635
00:39:24.207 --> 00:39:24.667
You can't grow.

636
00:39:24.787 --> 00:39:27.850
We have an ignorance about the biosphere in which we live.

637
00:39:29.359 --> 00:39:36.925
The understanding of the biosphere itself and the impact that our civilization has on the biosphere is trivial.

638
00:39:37.445 --> 00:39:42.008
And therefore, we have these discussions as if the biosphere will take care of itself.

639
00:39:42.168 --> 00:39:47.032
I think we all agree that climate change is both real and a huge existential problem.

640
00:39:47.152 --> 00:39:50.194
And the evidence for that is we can observe it, we can measure it.

641
00:39:50.274 --> 00:39:55.298
I mean, even now we're going through one of the sort of record-breaking periods in weather volatility.

642
00:39:55.318 --> 00:39:55.458
Yeah.

643
00:39:55.738 --> 00:40:03.484
both sort of the Western United States and Western Europe are experiencing historically severe, record-breaking weathers at the moment.

644
00:40:03.664 --> 00:40:06.827
So my next question logically becomes, what can we do about it?

645
00:40:07.067 --> 00:40:07.627
It's too late.

646
00:40:09.105 --> 00:40:09.826
Okay.

647
00:40:09.866 --> 00:40:15.390
The extent to which we're unaware of the energy forces we've unleashed on the planet are huge.

648
00:40:16.050 --> 00:40:26.477
And when you find that people think all this stuff is going to happen and it's a couple of decades away or half a century away and somebody else's problem.

649
00:40:26.497 --> 00:40:27.258
When is it going to happen?

650
00:40:28.058 --> 00:40:29.319
I've got a feeling the next 10 years.

651
00:40:29.479 --> 00:40:30.019
Next 10 years.

652
00:40:30.099 --> 00:40:30.700
What's going to happen?

653
00:40:31.280 --> 00:40:35.922
The beginning is the breakdown of our capacity to maintain a civilisation on the planet.

654
00:40:35.962 --> 00:40:37.663
I'm probably wrong in terms of timing.

655
00:40:37.983 --> 00:40:39.744
I'm probably putting it too far in the future.

656
00:40:39.964 --> 00:40:40.224
Okay.

657
00:40:40.344 --> 00:40:41.145
I might be wrong.

658
00:40:41.165 --> 00:40:42.766
Yeah, it could be less.

659
00:40:42.986 --> 00:40:46.147
I really, really hope all three of us live long enough to be able to sit down.

660
00:40:46.167 --> 00:40:47.928
So do I. I hope I'm wrong.

661
00:40:48.168 --> 00:40:49.509
I'm desperately hoping I'm wrong.

662
00:40:49.589 --> 00:40:53.150
Steve, can you define what you mean by climate breakdown specifically?

663
00:40:53.190 --> 00:40:55.310
What does that look like for me as I walk out onto the street?

664
00:40:55.330 --> 00:41:00.371
Well, let's say one of the big ones, again, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, the AMOC.

665
00:41:00.791 --> 00:41:08.072
The most recent estimates is that's going to stop functioning sometime between last year, because it hasn't yet happened, and 2095.

666
00:41:08.752 --> 00:41:15.213
When that happens, the temperature on Europe will fall, roughly speaking, by three degrees per decade, for three decades.

667
00:41:15.774 --> 00:41:18.294
So the temperature on Europe on average will fall by 10 degrees.

668
00:41:18.914 --> 00:41:21.317
The extremes will become even more ridiculous.

669
00:41:21.337 --> 00:41:26.083
So this is research from Tim Lenton, Exeter University Professor of Climate Change.

670
00:41:26.463 --> 00:41:29.887
The range of temperatures in London will be between minus 20 and plus 35.

671
00:41:31.009 --> 00:41:35.114
Now, what's the chance of London surviving that scale of temperature range?

672
00:41:35.614 --> 00:41:38.215
You can't even cope with leaves on the train lines here.

673
00:41:38.535 --> 00:41:40.035
That's one thing I found ridiculous.

674
00:41:40.215 --> 00:41:40.535
That's right.

675
00:41:40.555 --> 00:41:48.337
As an Australian arriving in London and find my train from Waterloo to Kingston is slowed down because there are leaves on the rail.

676
00:41:48.717 --> 00:41:49.517
Leaves on the rail?

677
00:41:49.717 --> 00:41:50.937
Has that never happened before?

678
00:41:51.157 --> 00:41:52.838
What are your engineers doing about that?

679
00:41:52.878 --> 00:41:55.158
Why don't you have trains that move the leaves?

680
00:41:55.178 --> 00:41:59.499
This sort of unprepared nature, we are completely unprepared for the scale of what we face.

681
00:41:59.819 --> 00:42:03.323
As someone who is Russian, minus 20 is a nice spring day for me.

682
00:42:03.363 --> 00:42:06.726
But look, we're being silly about it.

683
00:42:06.746 --> 00:42:22.041
I think if we ground this conversation in the realms of the possible and look at what we can do, it seems to me that the only thing we can do is create forms of energy that do not produce emissions that we believe are contributing to the changing climate.

684
00:42:22.181 --> 00:42:23.502
A world government's not going to happen.

685
00:42:24.062 --> 00:42:24.522
I agree.

686
00:42:24.542 --> 00:42:26.443
The level of coordination is not going to happen.

687
00:42:26.764 --> 00:42:31.286
The authoritarian world run by engineers is not going to happen.

688
00:42:31.586 --> 00:42:33.507
These are not realistic things to be talking about.

689
00:42:33.547 --> 00:42:35.608
Let's talk about what we actually can do.

690
00:42:36.108 --> 00:42:52.017
What we can do is plow all the money we have wrongly plowed into trying to mitigate this issue, into trying to create forms of energy that are actually going to work, not only to solve this problem, but actually to fuel prosperity, to fuel technological innovation, to fuel technology.

691
00:42:52.237 --> 00:42:58.399
and to create a better world as opposed to thinking that we're all doomed and nothing is possible.

692
00:42:59.179 --> 00:43:04.941
Of all the things I thought would ever turn up on my desk, a red light toothbrush was not one of them.

693
00:43:05.121 --> 00:43:06.462
Here we are.

694
00:43:06.602 --> 00:43:09.122
This is made by our sponsor, Bond Charge.

695
00:43:09.322 --> 00:43:16.145
And you'll probably know of their red light face mask and their infrared sauna blanket, because I use them religiously and I've spoken about them on this podcast before.

696
00:43:16.265 --> 00:43:16.545
But...

697
00:43:17.285 --> 00:43:19.547
Their toothbrush is new to me.

698
00:43:19.947 --> 00:43:24.611
I was sent one of these a few weeks ago, and ever since then I've been using it religiously because I love their products.

699
00:43:24.672 --> 00:43:32.518
And this is the first toothbrush that combines both red light and near-infrared light with sonic cleaning at the same time.

700
00:43:32.719 --> 00:43:38.624
The same red light technology that's used for skin and inflammation is now built into a device you already know so well.

701
00:43:38.804 --> 00:43:42.087
And I'm using it at least two times a day at the moment to clean my teeth.

702
00:43:42.287 --> 00:43:45.749
It's great for your gums, for stimulating gum circulation and for soreness.

703
00:43:45.789 --> 00:43:49.271
And the best part is it's not an extra thing to add to your routine.

704
00:43:49.551 --> 00:43:50.932
It just replaces your current toothbrush.

705
00:43:51.172 --> 00:43:55.974
If you give it a try, you'll get 20% off at bondcharge.com slash DOAC.

706
00:43:56.014 --> 00:43:58.996
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707
00:43:59.296 --> 00:44:02.458
That's bondcharge.com slash DOAC.

708
00:44:06.273 --> 00:44:10.575
Just like Jon Jones, where marginal improvements in your cognitive performance can have a massive impact.

709
00:44:10.876 --> 00:44:12.577
Sometimes I podcast for 10 hours a day.

710
00:44:12.657 --> 00:44:20.261
Over the last couple of weeks, I've been in filming for a TV show, and I have like one or two days off to get all of my work done, which means there's lots of cognitive load.

711
00:44:20.541 --> 00:44:23.523
And so I turn to ketones because I find myself more articulate...

712
00:44:23.903 --> 00:44:28.608
able to think more clearly, able to work out better when I'm fueled by ketones.

713
00:44:28.648 --> 00:44:39.060
And so the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because I remember one of my team members called Christiana, she tried it once and came up to my desk and she goes, this is the best product ever made.

714
00:44:39.560 --> 00:44:46.527
And I think in part that's because she really cares about those cognitive benefits, as I do, as John Jones does, and as I think most of my listeners probably will.

715
00:44:46.667 --> 00:44:55.136
So if you haven't tried these yet, all you have to do is go to ketone.com slash Stephen, and you'll also get 30% off your first subscription order.

716
00:44:55.156 --> 00:45:01.162
You'll get exclusive Ketone IQ merch, and of course, cognitive benefits that might just change your life.

717
00:45:02.258 --> 00:45:04.578
So let's take a look at this situation, which is somewhat linked.

718
00:45:04.959 --> 00:45:06.379
This is the Strait of Hormuz.

719
00:45:06.539 --> 00:45:07.119
Yep.

720
00:45:07.139 --> 00:45:10.140
This is US oil reserves at the moment in rapid decline.

721
00:45:10.160 --> 00:45:10.980
Yep, yep, yep.

722
00:45:11.200 --> 00:45:14.481
What is your perspective on what's going on in the Middle East at the moment, Constantine?

723
00:45:14.541 --> 00:45:15.361
Why has this happened?

724
00:45:15.881 --> 00:45:23.723
So one of the things I think is very important not to do is project our own ideas onto people who we've never met, like President Trump.

725
00:45:23.763 --> 00:45:25.943
I assume none of us have met President Trump, et cetera.

726
00:45:26.343 --> 00:45:33.510
So I can only tell you what I know from speaking to people in his administration, other people who have some access to the administration's thinking, etc.

727
00:45:33.870 --> 00:45:50.747
My understanding, and it's a very frustrating thing to have to articulate and to believe, but it is true, is that the level of analysis we all have about the complicated machinations of how different departments in the U.S. government, you know, work out the complexity, it really isn't.

728
00:45:51.347 --> 00:45:52.388
as complicated than that.

729
00:45:52.468 --> 00:45:54.209
And I think we all wish it was sometimes.

730
00:45:54.570 --> 00:45:55.651
Trump walked into a trap.

731
00:45:56.351 --> 00:46:00.354
I think he walked into a trap that it was a sugar high from Venezuela.

732
00:46:00.595 --> 00:46:05.659
There was a kind of feeling of perhaps invulnerability and a sort of belief that we can solve every problem.

733
00:46:06.279 --> 00:46:08.301
And Iran is different to Venezuela.

734
00:46:08.321 --> 00:46:14.486
Iran has the ability to choke off the world's supply, not just of oil, but I think as you discussed with Steve, when you recently had him on,

735
00:46:14.886 --> 00:46:19.949
of gas, of helium, natural gas, of helium, fertilizer, and lots of other things.

736
00:46:20.489 --> 00:46:26.593
And it hasn't quite fed through to the global economy in the way that people have talked about in a catastrophizing way.

737
00:46:27.233 --> 00:46:38.739
But if this carries on, it will do because our stocks, you've got this talking about oil, but it's stocks of other things too are going to start running out and the price of those things is going to go up.

738
00:46:38.780 --> 00:46:43.022
And so then the many predictions that people like Steve have been making are likely to come true.

739
00:46:43.342 --> 00:46:47.303
We had Senator Ted Cruz on our show around the time this war was launched.

740
00:46:47.323 --> 00:46:50.583
He's not only a huge supporter of President Trump, but a huge supporter of this conflict.

741
00:46:50.643 --> 00:46:51.704
He advocated for it.

742
00:46:52.224 --> 00:46:59.325
And when I said to him, look, come the midterms, this is not going to be good for you and for your party.

743
00:46:59.705 --> 00:47:10.267
And his exact words, quote him from memory, so maybe they're not his exact words, but the broad theme of what he said was, if we're still in this conflict, come the midterms, we failed.

744
00:47:10.487 --> 00:47:10.887
Yeah.

745
00:47:11.427 --> 00:47:14.268
I suspect that that is almost certainly going to happen.

746
00:47:14.288 --> 00:47:16.689
You've just shown me a picture of President Trump's approval ratings.

747
00:47:17.050 --> 00:47:19.231
They seem to verify what I'm saying.

748
00:47:19.651 --> 00:47:21.572
And so I think he's walked into a trap.

749
00:47:21.632 --> 00:47:28.815
And you've had people on your show to articulate why the trap will continue to bear fruit for the Iranians.

750
00:47:29.035 --> 00:47:33.697
You know, there's this great saying in the East, in the West, you have all the watches in the East, we have all the time.

751
00:47:34.637 --> 00:47:36.218
They don't have midterms in Iran.

752
00:47:36.579 --> 00:47:37.259
They can wait.

753
00:47:37.619 --> 00:47:42.843
They can take the pain and the punishment that they're currently experiencing for as long as they really need to.

754
00:47:43.203 --> 00:47:45.185
This is kind of like their battle of Stalingrad.

755
00:47:45.245 --> 00:47:54.151
They can take the pain, they can throw men at the problem, they can throw bodies at the problem as long as they need to because they know the US can't go the distance.

756
00:47:55.032 --> 00:48:03.360
And because of that, the incentive structure is for the Iranians to hold on as long as possible because they know that the U.S. will have to deal with this reality.

757
00:48:03.400 --> 00:48:05.542
So I think it's been a catastrophic mistake.

758
00:48:05.722 --> 00:48:08.745
And do you think Iran is actually going to be stronger on the other side of this?

759
00:48:09.126 --> 00:48:10.607
Nobody knows exactly.

760
00:48:10.747 --> 00:48:12.649
They're definitely stronger now than they were.

761
00:48:13.049 --> 00:48:15.532
But look, all of this is very unpredictable.

762
00:48:15.552 --> 00:48:17.494
I think we should be very careful about it.

763
00:48:18.114 --> 00:48:22.536
making predictions about the future of countries that we understand very little in the West from the outside.

764
00:48:22.556 --> 00:48:27.198
This is very difficult for anyone outside of Iran today to understand what's happening in Iran.

765
00:48:27.298 --> 00:48:32.521
The example I like to give is Nicolas Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator.

766
00:48:32.541 --> 00:48:37.803
He had a 92% approval rating the day before he was seized with his wife and summarily executed.

767
00:48:38.243 --> 00:48:43.504
The predictability of how long a regime survives in these countries is difficult to judge from the outside.

768
00:48:43.985 --> 00:48:48.926
Currently, Iran has a chokehold on the global economy, and they're leveraging it very powerfully.

769
00:48:49.826 --> 00:48:51.107
You predicted a famine, Steve.

770
00:48:51.647 --> 00:48:52.887
Yeah, I think it's still going to happen.

771
00:48:53.207 --> 00:48:55.908
But the thing is, again, it's a question of what the stocks are.

772
00:48:55.928 --> 00:48:59.529
Like, for example, we know this story about the US strategic oil reserve.

773
00:48:59.989 --> 00:49:03.050
We also know that China had a huge reserve, and they've run that reserve down.

774
00:49:03.530 --> 00:49:08.933
from about one and a half years of supply of oil for them to, I don't know what amount, but they're going back in the opposite direction now.

775
00:49:09.394 --> 00:49:14.577
So we didn't need to know what the stocks of all these products were around the globe beforehand.

776
00:49:15.137 --> 00:49:18.579
So when you make an estimate, yes, there's going to be a running out of oil.

777
00:49:18.939 --> 00:49:21.541
Well, China reduced its oil consumption.

778
00:49:21.881 --> 00:49:23.182
America's running its stock down.

779
00:49:23.482 --> 00:49:26.864
At some point though, because the flow is still blocked through this straight,

780
00:49:27.104 --> 00:49:30.787
then there won't be the oil, there won't be the fertilizer, there won't be the sulfuric acid.

781
00:49:30.807 --> 00:49:35.732
All these things will not be available, and then we'll have a physical hit coming out of all that.

782
00:49:36.012 --> 00:49:37.253
And I completely agree.

783
00:49:37.533 --> 00:49:41.516
Trump was sold a pup, it's the old expression, and we're paying the price.

784
00:49:42.217 --> 00:49:43.818
Is there any way out of this in your view, Steve?

785
00:49:44.258 --> 00:49:46.299
I think America has to leave the Middle East.

786
00:49:46.799 --> 00:49:48.700
That's about the only long-term resolution.

787
00:49:49.280 --> 00:49:51.501
America stops interfering in the Middle East.

788
00:49:51.601 --> 00:49:55.703
If they were to leave now, the issue that they face is they've now given Iran.

789
00:49:55.903 --> 00:50:03.487
They've sort of established a precedence where Iran can use the Strait of Hormuz, which is like a proxy for the global economy, as a bargaining chip.

790
00:50:03.847 --> 00:50:07.889
And so if you're Iran, you now can proceed potentially with your nuclear program.

791
00:50:08.629 --> 00:50:11.310
And if they come back, you shut down the global economy via the Strait of Hormuz.

792
00:50:11.710 --> 00:50:12.130
Yeah.

793
00:50:12.170 --> 00:50:13.470
Or you sort of kneecap it.

794
00:50:13.510 --> 00:50:17.111
Which is why it was a catastrophically bad decision to provoke them in the first place.

795
00:50:17.131 --> 00:50:24.413
The thing that no one really talks about, and it's an issue close to my heart with the Ukrainian family and the conflict there is something that's very important to me.

796
00:50:24.933 --> 00:50:31.054
One of the hopes I had for the Trump presidency was that he would find a way to bring that conflict to a close.

797
00:50:31.634 --> 00:50:33.595
This has only made things better for Russia.

798
00:50:35.055 --> 00:50:40.598
The fact that they've had to lift sanctions on Russian oil, for example, in order to compensate for the lack of supply.

799
00:50:40.938 --> 00:50:44.419
This is allowing Russia to continue this war and to fund its war.

800
00:50:44.860 --> 00:50:52.703
And so it's been a disastrous intervention and really, really unfortunate in the way that it's been done.

801
00:50:53.203 --> 00:50:57.665
Do you think this is going to completely tarnish his presidency more than any other issue?

802
00:50:58.005 --> 00:50:59.246
It depends on how it ends.

803
00:50:59.786 --> 00:51:03.248
The only way out of this that I can see at the moment, look, there's...

804
00:51:04.188 --> 00:51:05.450
Again, these things are very unpredictable.

805
00:51:05.490 --> 00:51:07.112
I think we really should be very honest about that.

806
00:51:07.452 --> 00:51:12.338
But the way that I see it at the moment is his only way out, really.

807
00:51:12.398 --> 00:51:13.820
I don't know about pulling out the Middle East.

808
00:51:13.860 --> 00:51:14.761
That seems a bit extreme.

809
00:51:14.781 --> 00:51:21.649
But the best way for him to get out of this is to find a way to sell Americans on the lie that it's been a success.

810
00:51:21.849 --> 00:51:22.049
Yeah.

811
00:51:22.770 --> 00:51:24.391
That is the only way he's going to get out of this.

812
00:51:24.811 --> 00:51:34.897
If he can find a way to sell a terrible deal, which he's going to have to sign with Iran as a victory for America, which Trump is uniquely placed to do, let's be honest, right?

813
00:51:34.917 --> 00:51:37.659
His ability to sell things is pretty, pretty strong.

814
00:51:38.079 --> 00:51:58.291
Then he can leave with less egg on his face than otherwise, at which point how the world judges him for a temporary interruption of oil and fertilizer and gas supplies, how history judges him is hard to say, not least because he's still got time in his term to either do good things or to do more things that don't work out well.

815
00:51:58.632 --> 00:52:07.337
But at the moment, this is a conflict whose only resolution, it seems to me, is for him to accept the reality that he made a mistake and...

816
00:52:07.677 --> 00:52:11.838
and to find a way to extricate himself from it without admitting it was a mistake.

817
00:52:12.078 --> 00:52:15.719
Steve mentioned that he predicts a famine is coming, a global famine.

818
00:52:16.080 --> 00:52:16.300
Yeah.

819
00:52:16.500 --> 00:52:17.120
Do you agree with that?

820
00:52:17.280 --> 00:52:18.180
Depends how long it runs.

821
00:52:18.820 --> 00:52:19.381
It depends how long.

822
00:52:19.401 --> 00:52:21.401
I mean, I have friends in Australia who are farmers.

823
00:52:21.821 --> 00:52:27.743
And when this first started, they were telling me they can't get hands-on fertilizer, even at the quotas they already had.

824
00:52:28.123 --> 00:52:32.064
And again, context here is that a lot of fertilizer comes from via the Strait of Hormuz.

825
00:52:32.084 --> 00:52:32.304
Yeah.

826
00:52:32.585 --> 00:52:34.085
And goes to all over the world.

827
00:52:34.425 --> 00:52:52.852
But even if, say you get your supply of fertilizer not from the Middle East, well, given that the supply of fertilizer is no longer coming from the Middle East, the people who used to get it from the Middle East now have to get it from somewhere else, and there's less of it to go around, therefore price goes up, quotas allocations go down, you can't plant the crops, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.

828
00:52:53.812 --> 00:52:53.992
Yeah.

829
00:52:54.072 --> 00:53:02.879
Like on the Australian front, I've got friends in the same boat and they tell me that about half the usual wheat crop has been laid because of the cost of fertilizer.

830
00:53:03.439 --> 00:53:07.903
And Australia used to produce seven times as much food as it needs for its people.

831
00:53:08.243 --> 00:53:10.665
So it's going to produce three times as much food, three and a half.

832
00:53:10.705 --> 00:53:14.207
And that means, of course, less availability for food around the world.

833
00:53:14.287 --> 00:53:16.069
And this is going to be a global phenomenon.

834
00:53:16.089 --> 00:53:16.229
Yeah.

835
00:53:16.789 --> 00:53:21.074
Where it hits, again, it's very hard to say because you don't know what stocks exist.

836
00:53:21.114 --> 00:53:26.741
You don't know how dependent different agricultural systems are on the fertilizer that they bring in.

837
00:53:27.021 --> 00:53:29.424
But yeah, it's a catastrophically bad decision.

838
00:53:29.724 --> 00:53:32.988
And the only way that Trump can get out of it is to lose and declare victory.

839
00:53:33.709 --> 00:53:34.650
That's what he'll do.

840
00:53:35.170 --> 00:53:41.713
Well, there's midterm elections coming up, which could have a big impact, but there's also the 2028 elections coming up for the presidential position.

841
00:53:42.473 --> 00:53:50.937
A lot of people are now forecasting that the Democrats, the left side of politics, or potentially even a socialist candidate, is going to get into office.

842
00:53:50.957 --> 00:53:53.518
Do you think that would be a net good thing for the United States?

843
00:53:54.798 --> 00:53:56.479
After Trump, anything is going to be better.

844
00:53:56.499 --> 00:53:57.219
Okay.

845
00:53:57.239 --> 00:53:58.099
So yes, I do.

846
00:53:58.159 --> 00:54:05.702
Because again, I think America's pushed far too far in the independent self-reliance, don't let the state do anything.

847
00:54:06.363 --> 00:54:08.363
And you get an unbalanced economy out of that.

848
00:54:08.483 --> 00:54:11.184
Do you think the US needs a democratic socialist candidate?

849
00:54:11.364 --> 00:54:11.545
Yeah.

850
00:54:11.865 --> 00:54:12.025
Yeah.

851
00:54:12.105 --> 00:54:12.285
Why?

852
00:54:12.965 --> 00:54:18.811
Because they will promote the need for the public goods that the public sector provides and the private sector does not.

853
00:54:19.131 --> 00:54:22.274
We've got the classic illustration here with water supplies for the UK.

854
00:54:22.534 --> 00:54:24.136
We privatised them 40 years ago.

855
00:54:24.456 --> 00:54:25.337
What's the consequence?

856
00:54:25.377 --> 00:54:29.521
You can't swim in any river in the United Kingdom anymore because they're polluted with water.

857
00:54:31.062 --> 00:54:32.603
The beaches are impossible as well.

858
00:54:32.683 --> 00:54:35.265
We have one less dam than we had 40 years ago.

859
00:54:35.665 --> 00:54:43.111
Privatizing resources which take a long time to construct is a recipe for those resources not to be created in the very first instance.

860
00:54:43.291 --> 00:54:49.176
Whereas China, with obviously a socialist economy, has built the energy supplies you were mentioning earlier.

861
00:54:49.556 --> 00:54:54.040
They have provided the transportation, the education.

862
00:54:54.160 --> 00:54:55.401
It's extremely hard to get in.

863
00:54:55.741 --> 00:54:56.882
You can't buy your way in.

864
00:54:57.403 --> 00:54:58.964
The education is publicly funded.

865
00:54:59.304 --> 00:55:02.726
All these things show that you need a balance between the public and private sector.

866
00:55:03.186 --> 00:55:05.788
And America's gone too far in the private direction.

867
00:55:06.308 --> 00:55:09.010
And we now need a switchback in the opposite direction.

868
00:55:09.030 --> 00:55:10.431
So China's model would be better.

869
00:55:10.845 --> 00:55:16.729
Yeah, because, I mean, it provides the infrastructure that enables a private sector to thrive.

870
00:55:17.289 --> 00:55:24.114
If you don't have the energy, as you were saying earlier, then you can't even imagine building the private sector facilities.

871
00:55:24.174 --> 00:55:27.736
Or if you do, they've got to be used at the expense of some other activities.

872
00:55:27.756 --> 00:55:36.683
So we're seeing Americans protesting about rising energy prices because of data centers being established and rising problems with the water supply for the same reason.

873
00:55:37.543 --> 00:55:42.205
Steve would prefer a socialist government coming into the United States in the next election cycle.

874
00:55:42.425 --> 00:55:43.466
Democratic socialists.

875
00:55:43.486 --> 00:55:44.286
There's a big difference.

876
00:55:44.766 --> 00:55:50.328
Democratic socialism is the same idea that has been tried repeatedly and failed repeatedly, which is communism.

877
00:55:50.809 --> 00:55:56.231
It's sort of the idea that if we elect communists instead of having them win in the revolution, that it'll all be better.

878
00:55:56.311 --> 00:55:56.751
It won't be.

879
00:55:56.791 --> 00:55:57.892
Their policies don't work.

880
00:55:58.112 --> 00:56:00.993
And by the way, the one thing— Soviet policies obviously did not work.

881
00:56:01.388 --> 00:56:01.608
Yeah.

882
00:56:02.309 --> 00:56:03.289
Russia failed.

883
00:56:03.590 --> 00:56:04.470
No doubt about that.

884
00:56:04.530 --> 00:56:04.830
Okay.

885
00:56:05.151 --> 00:56:06.111
China's succeeding.

886
00:56:06.592 --> 00:56:08.073
So what's the difference between the two?

887
00:56:08.093 --> 00:56:14.217
Why is the Chinese system being so successful and the Russian system so abjectly a failure?

888
00:56:14.297 --> 00:56:21.282
Well, in the 1930s, a lot of people thought that the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union was a massive success.

889
00:56:21.962 --> 00:56:31.125
I think it's worth remembering that communist societies lie all the time about the real figures in their economy and they create fake growth and fake numbers about all of these things.

890
00:56:31.506 --> 00:56:37.808
We know, for example, that almost certainly according to the intelligence assessment of pretty much every Western intelligence service, the...

891
00:56:39.168 --> 00:56:44.212
COVID virus came from a lab in China, something they lied about to the world and still haven't paid any price for.

892
00:56:44.653 --> 00:56:49.836
And the way they lie about that is the way they will lie about other things, including economic growth and all sorts of other things.

893
00:56:50.157 --> 00:56:55.721
In the short term, models can look appealing if you don't understand the full implications of what it is.

894
00:56:56.021 --> 00:56:59.984
But also, you've got to remember that the Chinese system is not just about the economy.

895
00:57:00.104 --> 00:57:03.647
It's also about what rights people have and don't have.

896
00:57:04.247 --> 00:57:08.111
The right to express your opinion freely, the right to criticize the government, the right.

897
00:57:08.331 --> 00:57:10.474
I mean, we talk about private enterprise in China.

898
00:57:10.494 --> 00:57:22.886
If you're a private business owner in China, there's no such thing, really, because the moment you are inconvenient to the government, you're going to disappear and come back suddenly with a totally different new set of beliefs about what's right and wrong and who's right and who's wrong.

899
00:57:22.926 --> 00:57:27.851
So I think we should be very, very, very careful about praising communist dictatorships.

900
00:57:29.488 --> 00:57:41.837
I have friends in China, both nationals and immigrants, who tell me that the level of discussion and argument in China is far, far greater than people think.

901
00:57:42.178 --> 00:57:44.840
You don't get left versus right conversations, okay?

902
00:57:44.860 --> 00:57:48.462
You've got a political system which you're not going to change.

903
00:57:48.702 --> 00:57:50.584
Communist Party would be in control and so on.

904
00:57:51.124 --> 00:58:04.299
But the level of debate over what policy should be, whether the government should balance its books, whether the government should run a deficit, whether the government should build infrastructure or not, there's enormous debate there.

905
00:58:04.799 --> 00:58:08.083
So, people do have – there's more conflict.

906
00:58:09.253 --> 00:58:10.313
But it's mediated.

907
00:58:10.433 --> 00:58:17.056
It's not conflict that leads to flipping from one party one year to opposite attitude at the next election and so on.

908
00:58:17.296 --> 00:58:21.678
Do you think Stephen could run his show if he was a Chinese citizen in China and have any conversation he wanted?

909
00:58:21.978 --> 00:58:22.458
I think so.

910
00:58:22.778 --> 00:58:22.978
Really?

911
00:58:22.998 --> 00:58:24.099
Maybe not as broad as this one.

912
00:58:24.139 --> 00:58:25.059
Probably more limited.

913
00:58:25.119 --> 00:58:25.959
I will agree with that.

914
00:58:26.059 --> 00:58:26.379
Okay.

915
00:58:26.479 --> 00:58:27.560
It probably would be more limited.

916
00:58:27.960 --> 00:58:32.342
But I've been involved, you know, you've spoken on the Chinese global television network, I presume.

917
00:58:32.622 --> 00:58:32.943
I haven't.

918
00:58:33.143 --> 00:58:33.403
Okay.

919
00:58:33.423 --> 00:58:37.305
Well, that's the conversations that I've had there are comparable to what I'm having here.

920
00:58:37.825 --> 00:58:40.166
And so those conversations get broadcast in China.

921
00:58:40.326 --> 00:58:42.047
Well, you're clearly very in favor of China.

922
00:58:42.067 --> 00:58:44.348
It doesn't surprise me that they would have you on their TV channel.

923
00:58:44.928 --> 00:58:46.229
That's not the point I'm making.

924
00:58:46.249 --> 00:58:53.993
The point I'm making is Xi Jinping, the current president of China, has purged dozens of people who are internal critics within his own party.

925
00:58:54.553 --> 00:59:02.356
People in the military, people in the political system who disappear one after another and business leaders of all kinds.

926
00:59:02.616 --> 00:59:06.638
The reason I keep having to remember things, I've got the Jack Ma, but others too.

927
00:59:07.318 --> 00:59:09.059
I've got new dad brains.

928
00:59:09.119 --> 00:59:10.479
I haven't slept properly for about two years.

929
00:59:10.519 --> 00:59:10.939
That's fair enough.

930
00:59:10.959 --> 00:59:11.700
I understand that problem.

931
00:59:12.400 --> 00:59:15.461
But yeah, so if you're a business owner in China, it's not really your business.

932
00:59:15.501 --> 00:59:16.382
It's kind of like in Russia.

933
00:59:16.562 --> 00:59:17.582
There's no private business.

934
00:59:17.802 --> 00:59:18.562
private enterprise.

935
00:59:18.602 --> 00:59:20.383
I think that's an exaggeration, okay?

936
00:59:20.403 --> 00:59:27.966
Because the Russian situation, yes, there was only one motorbike-making company in the entire country.

937
00:59:28.306 --> 00:59:31.687
China apparently has about 130 car companies, okay?

938
00:59:31.987 --> 00:59:39.190
They have managed to combine the central planning that the Soviets had with the competition that the West has in one model.

939
00:59:39.630 --> 00:59:46.913
And a lot of it comes back, I'd love to know the extent to which they were influenced by a friend of mine called Yanis Kornayi.

940
00:59:47.353 --> 00:59:55.380
who was a Hungarian economist, he died about four years ago, who tried to understand why did the Soviet system fail and why did the American system grow.

941
00:59:55.821 --> 00:59:59.864
And he came down to saying that the Soviet system was constrained by supply.

942
01:00:00.185 --> 01:00:06.671
You couldn't get all the inputs you needed, and there was no innovation taking place in the Soviet system.

943
01:00:06.971 --> 01:00:09.934
The Chinese system is rampant with private sector innovation.

944
01:00:10.574 --> 01:00:14.096
And companies are competing against each other rampantly in that system.

945
01:00:14.537 --> 01:00:26.084
Somehow, they've managed to combine the state providing the infrastructure and the foundation and letting private diversity occur both between different corporations and between different provinces in China.

946
01:00:26.504 --> 01:00:34.809
So, it is the same family of systems, but they've managed to overcome the drawback that the Soviet system had.

947
01:00:35.149 --> 01:00:36.650
Let's accept that at face value.

948
01:00:36.810 --> 01:00:48.678
What about the point I was making about political freedom, freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, political repression of opponents, imprisonment of people who don't agree, state-sanctioned murder, etc.?

949
01:00:48.838 --> 01:00:49.298
What about that?

950
01:00:49.578 --> 01:00:53.861
Well, I'd look at America's prison system and say, you've got a different version of the same poison.

951
01:00:53.881 --> 01:00:56.743
I mean, I've been… Critics of the government on masks.

952
01:00:57.977 --> 01:00:58.998
Well, a couple have been shot.

953
01:00:59.118 --> 01:01:03.662
The whole stuff with the ice and the talking about the stuff that's happening with Trump now is awful.

954
01:01:03.682 --> 01:01:06.024
America has the world's largest prison populations.

955
01:01:06.424 --> 01:01:10.187
There are so many freedoms you don't get in America that you do get in China.

956
01:01:10.227 --> 01:01:12.509
Would you prefer a Chinese system?

957
01:01:12.549 --> 01:01:13.169
To America?

958
01:01:13.309 --> 01:01:13.530
Yes.

959
01:01:14.230 --> 01:01:15.571
even though you can't criticize the government?

960
01:01:15.591 --> 01:01:19.295
Yes, I've spent enough time in American cities and Chinese cities to know which ones I prefer.

961
01:01:19.895 --> 01:01:24.319
And I'm down to cities of a mere 4 million people, which is a small city on Chinese standards.

962
01:01:24.599 --> 01:01:25.860
I didn't see the homelessness.

963
01:01:25.941 --> 01:01:31.045
I didn't see the poverty levels that I see in American cities, in Chinese cities.

964
01:01:31.145 --> 01:01:31.946
That's certainly true.

965
01:01:32.066 --> 01:01:37.090
But it's exactly the sort of thing that people would have said about aspects of the Soviet Union in 1930.

966
01:01:37.110 --> 01:01:38.372
The Soviet never pulled that off.

967
01:01:38.432 --> 01:01:39.553
I mean, the Soviet...

968
01:01:40.133 --> 01:01:41.753
What about the Moscow Metro?

969
01:01:41.773 --> 01:01:44.094
This is what every- The Moscow Metro is a great system.

970
01:01:44.114 --> 01:01:48.535
Every Western idiot like Tucker Carlson goes to Moscow and says- Raves about the underground.

971
01:01:48.595 --> 01:01:49.515
Oh my God, the underground.

972
01:01:49.535 --> 01:01:54.096
Well, that was built by totalitarian dictators with slave labor.

973
01:01:54.436 --> 01:02:02.198
You can get a hell of a lot done with slave labor and- And that's not being done in China right now, which has the world's greatest metro systems and the world's greatest high-speed rail.

974
01:02:02.598 --> 01:02:05.999
So again, your experience, and I'm not Russian.

975
01:02:06.279 --> 01:02:07.099
I wasn't born there.

976
01:02:07.379 --> 01:02:08.500
I respect your experience.

977
01:02:08.560 --> 01:02:09.820
It's very different to what I had.

978
01:02:10.400 --> 01:02:15.105
growing up, and it's a horrific society, and it led to a whole range of horrors, as we know.

979
01:02:15.585 --> 01:02:22.091
The people instantly say what happened in the Soviet Union is happening in China is misidentifying those two systems.

980
01:02:22.231 --> 01:02:28.737
Well, first of all, what happened in China, if you take the entire history of China under communism, is actually much worse than what happened in the Soviet Union.

981
01:02:29.727 --> 01:02:31.727
Well, I was in there in 81, 82.

982
01:02:31.747 --> 01:02:32.728
45 million people killed.

983
01:02:32.968 --> 01:02:33.308
Yep.

984
01:02:33.328 --> 01:02:34.168
Great Leap Forward.

985
01:02:34.208 --> 01:02:35.728
Great Leap Forward was a disaster.

986
01:02:35.828 --> 01:02:36.048
Right.

987
01:02:36.108 --> 01:02:38.209
The ideological stuff in the Mao was horrific.

988
01:02:38.649 --> 01:02:50.791
And I saw, literally I saw examples of that in Sichuan with children who clearly had quarkish or protein deficiency disease because of the flip and floppy of the Central Committee about grain versus legume crops.

989
01:02:51.111 --> 01:02:52.211
Horrific things like that.

990
01:02:52.571 --> 01:02:55.692
It's what's happened since Deng Xiaoping that has made the huge difference.

991
01:02:56.172 --> 01:02:58.315
Now, also, they did manage to get rid of the landlords.

992
01:02:58.355 --> 01:03:02.079
They didn't have the inequality that occurred in the China system beforehand.

993
01:03:02.440 --> 01:03:06.324
You did have an education system, as distorted as it was.

994
01:03:06.905 --> 01:03:08.066
Everybody had education.

995
01:03:08.407 --> 01:03:09.568
They set the foundations.

996
01:03:09.608 --> 01:03:13.333
What's happened since Deng Xiaoping is what's been a remarkable transition.

997
01:03:13.873 --> 01:03:14.073
And...

998
01:03:14.654 --> 01:03:18.358
Politically, they still have the, you know, the party is still in control.

999
01:03:18.819 --> 01:03:22.623
You have the potential to get the sort of dynasty effect that we see in North Korea.

1000
01:03:22.643 --> 01:03:30.733
Steve, according to the major global happiness surveys, the UN World Happiness Report, people in the United States report overall happier life satisfaction than people in China.

1001
01:03:31.834 --> 01:03:32.475
Does that matter?

1002
01:03:33.439 --> 01:03:33.819
I don't know.

1003
01:03:33.839 --> 01:03:34.600
I don't know the survey.

1004
01:03:34.620 --> 01:03:35.860
So why don't you read out the results?

1005
01:03:35.880 --> 01:03:41.983
Essentially, it's saying that the United States ranks as 23rd and China ranks as 65th.

1006
01:03:42.443 --> 01:03:52.467
The report uses several mechanisms asking residents of each country to evaluate their current life on a scale of zero, which is the worst possible life, to 10, the best possible life.

1007
01:03:53.287 --> 01:03:54.348
And China ranks as 65th.

1008
01:03:55.502 --> 01:03:58.627
If you go back 40 years ago, you would have found China down 150th.

1009
01:03:59.568 --> 01:04:03.153
It's the rate of change in China over the last 40 years, which is breathtaking.

1010
01:04:03.854 --> 01:04:05.997
This is something that I've made for you.

1011
01:04:06.077 --> 01:04:10.243
I realize that the Diary of SEO audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health.

1012
01:04:10.483 --> 01:04:12.366
We all have big goals that we want to accomplish.

1013
01:04:12.686 --> 01:04:24.443
And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards.

1014
01:04:24.823 --> 01:04:28.068
The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tasks.

1015
01:04:28.068 --> 01:04:31.592
Tiny small steps, and we call this in our team the 1%.

1016
01:04:31.612 --> 01:04:35.837
And actually this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here.

1017
01:04:36.017 --> 01:04:46.469
So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries, and we released these last year, and they all sold out so...

1018
01:04:46.549 --> 01:04:52.131
I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary.

1019
01:04:52.151 --> 01:04:56.592
So now we have a better range for you.

1020
01:04:56.812 --> 01:05:06.375
So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again.

1021
01:05:06.475 --> 01:05:09.216
And you can get yours at thediary.com.

1022
01:05:09.456 --> 01:05:11.217
And if you want the link, the link is in the description below.

1023
01:05:12.458 --> 01:05:18.900
So bringing this back to the sort of where we started a little bit, on the United Kingdom, we've just appointed a new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham.

1024
01:05:19.360 --> 01:05:20.520
Do you think he's going to be successful?

1025
01:05:21.240 --> 01:05:22.261
What do you mean by successful?

1026
01:05:22.421 --> 01:05:30.083
Do you think he's going to improve the UK's position to such extent that we change our trajectory?

1027
01:05:30.783 --> 01:05:34.604
No, he has absolutely smashed the PR side of things.

1028
01:05:34.865 --> 01:05:37.005
There's no arguing with that whatsoever.

1029
01:05:37.245 --> 01:05:44.108
But in terms of the tectonic stuff that we've been discussing today, he is not remotely going to address any of it.

1030
01:05:44.608 --> 01:05:50.770
You know, we started the conversation with popular populism, immigration, illegal immigration, et cetera.

1031
01:05:50.830 --> 01:05:54.792
He seems to be totally doubling down on what the labor and before that the conservative

1032
01:05:55.592 --> 01:05:56.353
We're doing on that.

1033
01:05:56.714 --> 01:06:05.323
On the economy, he is not going to restart the British economy, not least because it takes a long time and a mandate he doesn't have for the reasons that Steve alluded to.

1034
01:06:05.964 --> 01:06:15.935
And the only question really is, is he going to call an early election, which would be the ballsy and probably smart thing to do, because I don't think he's ever going to be as popular as he is now.

1035
01:06:16.676 --> 01:06:22.960
That is a question that remains because it probably would be the rational thing to do, but it is a big risk because elections are unpredictable.

1036
01:06:23.000 --> 01:06:24.521
Election campaigns are unpredictable.

1037
01:06:25.102 --> 01:06:27.663
Nobody knows what will happen once it kicks off.

1038
01:06:28.023 --> 01:06:33.547
But fundamentally, I don't believe he's going to be the transformative candidate that will change Britain for the better, no.

1039
01:06:33.627 --> 01:06:34.147
Can anybody?

1040
01:06:35.068 --> 01:06:36.049
That's a very good question.

1041
01:06:36.069 --> 01:06:37.710
I think it's a very difficult job.

1042
01:06:38.110 --> 01:06:41.412
I think it's theoretically possible you need a whole different set of policies.

1043
01:06:41.712 --> 01:06:44.454
What would those policies look like?

1044
01:06:44.874 --> 01:06:45.855
We talked about it already.

1045
01:06:46.736 --> 01:06:49.199
We want abundant, cheap energy.

1046
01:06:49.379 --> 01:06:50.380
So would you drill in the North Sea?

1047
01:06:50.840 --> 01:06:53.823
It's not something that I'm an expert in the oil industry.

1048
01:06:53.863 --> 01:06:54.644
So I don't know.

1049
01:06:54.684 --> 01:06:58.008
I mean, one of the things I've never understood is why we don't build more nuclear power stations.

1050
01:06:58.308 --> 01:07:01.451
Part of it is they're so expensive to build here because of the regulations.

1051
01:07:01.511 --> 01:07:05.055
And the famous example is with like bad tunnels for train lines.

1052
01:07:05.395 --> 01:07:07.495
that cost more than the trains and all this kind of...

1053
01:07:07.535 --> 01:07:09.876
It's very difficult to build energy infrastructure in the UK.

1054
01:07:10.416 --> 01:07:18.358
I would pursue every avenue of every kind, and probably including drilling for oil and other things, to create the cheap, abundant energy that we need to grow the economy.

1055
01:07:18.678 --> 01:07:21.698
Number one, for the reasons that we talked about in the climate discussion.

1056
01:07:22.059 --> 01:07:23.259
The other thing is you've got to...

1057
01:07:24.139 --> 01:07:28.640
The situation where you literally have tens and maybe even hundreds of thousands of young people now...

1058
01:07:29.000 --> 01:07:35.004
completely on the scrap heap, no chance of ever getting into employment because they have anxiety or they have depression.

1059
01:07:35.284 --> 01:07:43.289
You know, when I remember being 20, going to get a job as a student, to the student employment office and sweating buckets because I was so anxious.

1060
01:07:43.329 --> 01:07:47.051
It was like a weird experience I'd never been through.

1061
01:07:47.071 --> 01:07:48.813
I'm sure, you know, I know your background.

1062
01:07:48.833 --> 01:07:53.976
You've had times when you were scrapping and scraping and you would have been depressed or anxious and all sorts of things.

1063
01:07:54.496 --> 01:07:56.837
Those are obstacles in life you have to get over.

1064
01:07:57.177 --> 01:07:59.499
Those are not medical problems by and large.

1065
01:07:59.519 --> 01:08:01.119
Some people have really serious depression.

1066
01:08:01.139 --> 01:08:02.140
We shouldn't trivialize that.

1067
01:08:02.160 --> 01:08:04.601
But by and large, you have to overcome anxiety.

1068
01:08:04.621 --> 01:08:11.064
You have to overcome your feelings of discomfort about the reality you face and get into the workplace.

1069
01:08:11.364 --> 01:08:13.045
So we have to do that as well.

1070
01:08:13.666 --> 01:08:17.788
For the reasons that we talked about earlier, I think one of the most important policies to pursue is...

1071
01:08:18.828 --> 01:08:22.811
is to make sure that there are no benefits of any kind for foreign nationals.

1072
01:08:23.151 --> 01:08:32.717
That will create a system where rather than doing terrible optics, like the ice, you know, rounding people up and trying to get them out of the country, people will just leave.

1073
01:08:32.797 --> 01:08:36.479
The people who shouldn't be here, who are not contributing, will leave of their own volition.

1074
01:08:36.779 --> 01:08:37.880
Is that really what will happen?

1075
01:08:38.621 --> 01:08:41.965
Is crime not a consequence of desperation?

1076
01:08:42.286 --> 01:08:42.646
Crime?

1077
01:08:42.886 --> 01:08:43.828
I'm not talking about crime.

1078
01:08:44.168 --> 01:08:51.698
I'm talking about if you are a foreign national and you live in social housing and you receive benefits, I don't understand why you're here.

1079
01:08:54.055 --> 01:08:59.741
I understand taking care of British people who were born here or even who've become British citizens.

1080
01:08:59.801 --> 01:09:05.487
Once you become a citizen of the country and you commit to it, at that point, you fall through the net, you get an injury.

1081
01:09:05.547 --> 01:09:06.548
We should look after you.

1082
01:09:06.908 --> 01:09:13.635
But by and large, perhaps other than healthcare, which I think is something we, as a compassionate country, would want to provide to anybody who...

1083
01:09:14.175 --> 01:09:14.535
needs it.

1084
01:09:15.116 --> 01:09:21.500
I don't think you should get access to social housing, unemployment benefit, or any of the other things if you're not a citizen of this country.

1085
01:09:21.840 --> 01:09:32.566
And I'm very pleased to see that more and more parties are adopting that policy because what it will do is it will create a system where people who are not contributing will leave of their own accord and go to other places.

1086
01:09:32.926 --> 01:09:34.007
Is that truly what happens?

1087
01:09:34.407 --> 01:09:38.130
Because I'm imagining people start coming over on boats or...

1088
01:09:38.870 --> 01:09:44.295
you remove the current social housing infrastructure, wouldn't that just result in a lot of homeless people?

1089
01:09:44.415 --> 01:09:45.316
That creates another problem?

1090
01:09:45.856 --> 01:09:47.978
No, because I'm not talking about illegal immigrants.

1091
01:09:48.058 --> 01:09:51.581
Legal immigrants apply for asylum, and there's a different process for that.

1092
01:09:51.601 --> 01:09:58.227
I'm talking about people who are here legally, who have settled status here or who have a visa to be here or whatever.

1093
01:09:58.267 --> 01:09:59.488
So they shouldn't get social housing?

1094
01:09:59.508 --> 01:10:00.690
They shouldn't get any benefit.

1095
01:10:00.930 --> 01:10:02.371
So if you removed that today?

1096
01:10:02.431 --> 01:10:02.932
They will leave.

1097
01:10:03.580 --> 01:10:03.820
How?

1098
01:10:04.361 --> 01:10:04.961
What do you mean how?

1099
01:10:05.542 --> 01:10:06.683
They'll get on a plane and leave.

1100
01:10:07.003 --> 01:10:07.243
Fly?

1101
01:10:07.263 --> 01:10:13.368
If they can get on a boat to get here and pay people smugglers 3,000 euros, they can pay 100 quid for easy jet to fly back to wherever they came from.

1102
01:10:13.388 --> 01:10:13.868
It's not hard.

1103
01:10:15.370 --> 01:10:18.272
It's exactly how I would leave if I had to go back to where I've come from.

1104
01:10:18.532 --> 01:10:19.133
It's not difficult.

1105
01:10:19.633 --> 01:10:21.655
People pretend like this is complicated.

1106
01:10:21.675 --> 01:10:22.735
It's really not complicated.

1107
01:10:23.216 --> 01:10:25.458
People will follow the incentive structure that's in front of them.

1108
01:10:25.878 --> 01:10:29.061
If you can come to Britain and get benefits as a foreign national, you will come.

1109
01:10:29.401 --> 01:10:32.844
If you can't and you are the sort of person that wants benefits, you will leave.

1110
01:10:33.364 --> 01:10:34.065
It's really simple.

1111
01:10:34.405 --> 01:10:39.750
And the people we want here, if you want to talk about immigration, there's some really good things about immigration.

1112
01:10:40.211 --> 01:10:43.874
You want immigrants who come here from other countries and create businesses.

1113
01:10:44.415 --> 01:10:44.976
They will come.

1114
01:10:45.056 --> 01:10:47.298
They will stay and they will continue to do what they do.

1115
01:10:48.504 --> 01:10:51.125
So you think Andy Burnham's ultimately going to not be successful?

1116
01:10:51.605 --> 01:10:58.668
By the definition that you gave, which is like a transformative prime minister who changes the fate of the country.

1117
01:10:59.288 --> 01:10:59.468
No.

1118
01:11:00.188 --> 01:11:02.989
There's this term called wokeism that people talk about a lot.

1119
01:11:03.149 --> 01:11:08.391
It's often associated with, I mean, you can probably explain it better than I can.

1120
01:11:08.411 --> 01:11:09.011
I believe I can.

1121
01:11:09.271 --> 01:11:10.532
Yes, I think you should explain it.

1122
01:11:10.772 --> 01:11:11.072
Okay.

1123
01:11:11.673 --> 01:11:20.883
Wokeism, certainly in the way that it's been implemented, is a hierarchy of oppression based on various demographic characteristics.

1124
01:11:20.923 --> 01:11:27.090
In other words, it's a system that says an outsider looking in to this conversation between the three of us.

1125
01:11:27.650 --> 01:11:43.520
can say without knowing anything about any of us, which one of us is more oppressed than others and which one of us is doing more of the oppression and therefore to whom victim status should be accorded and to whom oppressor status should be accorded.

1126
01:11:43.540 --> 01:11:45.201
So you don't win on this one, I'm afraid, Steve.

1127
01:11:45.221 --> 01:11:46.662
You're a pale male and stale.

1128
01:11:48.183 --> 01:11:49.403
And therefore you're the oppressor.

1129
01:11:50.184 --> 01:11:52.805
Um, I am an immigrant, so somewhat oppressed.

1130
01:11:52.845 --> 01:11:53.425
You're black.

1131
01:11:53.445 --> 01:11:56.567
So you were like, you know, where the top of the chart of oppression you've been.

1132
01:11:57.067 --> 01:12:06.392
And you know, if I think if you compare the all three bank balances, you might find that's not quite true, but nonetheless, my point is it's, it's a very simplified, uh, and frankly racist way of looking at the world.

1133
01:12:06.792 --> 01:12:16.041
And then it says from that it follows that we must pursue policies that seek to address these imbalances and inherent privilege between people who look like us.

1134
01:12:16.381 --> 01:12:23.908
It's a way of judging people as groups, not as individuals, and pursuing social policy aimed at ensuring what's called social justice.

1135
01:12:24.569 --> 01:12:31.255
Last time you said to me, we need to stop worrying about how things make us feel rather than the consequences of our actions.

1136
01:12:31.644 --> 01:12:31.804
Yeah.

1137
01:12:32.084 --> 01:12:36.466
Wokeism is the idea that we should really, really focus on what makes us feel good and really ignore what works.

1138
01:12:37.086 --> 01:12:39.427
I think what we should really be focusing on is what works.

1139
01:12:39.707 --> 01:12:47.389
And I thought our climate discussion, I misspoke about the years, but the, the, actually where we came to, I thought was very constructive, which is like, what do we do about this?

1140
01:12:48.109 --> 01:12:51.390
And when you have that conversation, you get to a constructive place, right?

1141
01:12:51.691 --> 01:12:58.153
Which is, I think we all agreed the only way to do it is to create forms of energy that are actually going to be clean.

1142
01:12:58.333 --> 01:12:58.453
Right?

1143
01:12:58.473 --> 01:12:58.953
Innovation.

1144
01:12:59.554 --> 01:13:00.815
But that's what we came to.

1145
01:13:01.276 --> 01:13:06.884
But before that, we were all talking about how what makes us feel good and bad and what we're scared of and etc.

1146
01:13:07.345 --> 01:13:08.947
So I think that's part of it.

1147
01:13:09.428 --> 01:13:14.115
Steve, we need to stop worrying about how things make us feel rather than the consequences of our actions.

1148
01:13:14.553 --> 01:13:17.036
We actually need to understand the consequences of actions.

1149
01:13:17.176 --> 01:13:17.617
Absolutely.

1150
01:13:17.637 --> 01:13:17.977
That's vital.

1151
01:13:17.997 --> 01:13:20.300
Do you think we focus too much on what makes us feel good?

1152
01:13:20.320 --> 01:13:20.440
Yeah.

1153
01:13:21.121 --> 01:13:23.744
And not enough about how does our system actually function?

1154
01:13:23.864 --> 01:13:24.024
Right.

1155
01:13:24.045 --> 01:13:24.465
What works?

1156
01:13:24.966 --> 01:13:25.146
Okay.

1157
01:13:25.747 --> 01:13:30.232
And that leads, was why I led to my position on climate change as well as my position on economic policy.

1158
01:13:30.392 --> 01:13:39.174
Last thing I want to talk to you both about is just getting any of your thoughts on all of this stuff that's going on with AI at the moment and the impact you think that's going to have.

1159
01:13:39.394 --> 01:13:42.235
AI is a potentially transformative technology, without a doubt.

1160
01:13:42.335 --> 01:13:52.377
You think about the sort of future we might imagine for a wonderful human species is to the stage where we all have universal high income, to take a quote from Elon Musk.

1161
01:13:52.797 --> 01:13:57.298
The machines do the work and we live in a world where the machines are doing it Star Trek style.

1162
01:13:57.558 --> 01:13:57.818
That's...

1163
01:13:58.438 --> 01:13:59.779
That would be a dream outcome.

1164
01:14:00.660 --> 01:14:05.684
To get there, how are you going to give people income if they're not working anymore?

1165
01:14:06.285 --> 01:14:08.807
The only way to do that is the government has to create the money.

1166
01:14:10.088 --> 01:14:13.151
Now, that is something which I don't think Musk has thought through.

1167
01:14:13.491 --> 01:14:17.535
If people who don't own capital, and that's the vast majority of the population, are

1168
01:14:18.311 --> 01:14:19.512
therefore don't have an income.

1169
01:14:19.532 --> 01:14:22.356
They can't buy the goods being produced by the robots in the first place.

1170
01:14:22.916 --> 01:14:28.443
So you need a mechanism that enables people to pay for the basic goods and services to stay alive.

1171
01:14:28.463 --> 01:14:31.626
And then if you want to become wealthy, you've got to become an entrepreneur as well.

1172
01:14:31.967 --> 01:14:34.810
So you could tax the AI companies instead of printing money?

1173
01:14:35.070 --> 01:14:35.330
No.

1174
01:14:35.930 --> 01:14:37.871
Taxation takes money out of the economy.

1175
01:14:38.891 --> 01:14:41.252
It doesn't pay for services.

1176
01:14:41.312 --> 01:14:42.112
It takes money out.

1177
01:14:42.192 --> 01:14:43.793
It's excessive money creation.

1178
01:14:44.113 --> 01:14:49.255
If the government simply spent and didn't tax, then the money supply would be growing at 20% and 30% per annum.

1179
01:14:50.275 --> 01:14:53.516
and you would have hyperinflation without a doubt, okay?

1180
01:14:53.916 --> 01:14:55.196
That level of money creation.

1181
01:14:55.216 --> 01:14:59.877
So the taxation is there to take excessive money creation out of the process.

1182
01:14:59.897 --> 01:15:02.378
So let's take one of the big AI companies, let's call them company A.

1183
01:15:02.438 --> 01:15:06.118
Tax company A, 50% of their, I don't know, their profits.

1184
01:15:06.258 --> 01:15:08.159
Give it out as a UBI or something, I don't know.

1185
01:15:08.559 --> 01:15:13.320
You'd need a system like that because if AI works, then all the manual labor...

1186
01:15:13.620 --> 01:15:16.941
all the clerical, boring clerical jobs will disappear.

1187
01:15:17.101 --> 01:15:17.361
Okay?

1188
01:15:17.761 --> 01:15:21.422
And if they disappear and people don't have incomes, then we end up in the Hunger Games.

1189
01:15:22.143 --> 01:15:23.443
And that's the fear that I have.

1190
01:15:23.563 --> 01:15:35.467
If we just go for a totally private sector approach to AI, then we end up as either the Hunger Games or the government provides an income for people to enable them to have a basic standard of living.

1191
01:15:35.487 --> 01:15:38.388
And if they want to go above that, they've got to become entrepreneurs.

1192
01:15:38.488 --> 01:15:39.768
How are you feeling about AI, Constantine?

1193
01:15:39.989 --> 01:15:40.970
Well, it's a mix of things.

1194
01:15:41.251 --> 01:15:47.959
This is why, if you remember last time we spoke, we talked about the fact that I think my anti-communist credentials are pretty well established.

1195
01:15:48.039 --> 01:15:48.880
Definitely.

1196
01:15:49.020 --> 01:15:54.287
But I did say that I thought that if we get to the position where AI is doing all the work,

1197
01:15:55.817 --> 01:15:57.899
communism is an inevitability, i.e.

1198
01:15:58.040 --> 01:16:03.506
from each according to his ability, which will be zero, to each according to his needs, which will be whatever our needs are, right?

1199
01:16:03.946 --> 01:16:09.873
So once we get, if and when we get to that point, that seems kind of inevitable.

1200
01:16:09.893 --> 01:16:13.777
The mechanism by which we achieve that, whether it is taxation or whatever, yeah.

1201
01:16:13.877 --> 01:16:20.439
I struggle to understand the economic concept that Steve has been presenting, but we probably don't have time to get into that.

1202
01:16:20.799 --> 01:16:32.883
Nonetheless, a form of redistribution will be inevitable because, as we spoke about last time, if six people in the world own all the revenue-generating assets online,

1203
01:16:33.043 --> 01:16:36.827
in the world, they're either going to have to share it or they're going to find their heads on spikes.

1204
01:16:37.768 --> 01:16:38.548
That's a fact.

1205
01:16:38.808 --> 01:16:44.854
Unless they can have really powerful robots to stop the rest of us from climbing over their big walls, even then their heads are going to be on spikes.

1206
01:16:45.194 --> 01:16:50.599
So I would not recommend that approach to the big tech AI oligarchs.

1207
01:16:51.200 --> 01:16:53.362
But I think we're talking about...

1208
01:16:54.903 --> 01:16:56.684
I was going to use the term long-term.

1209
01:16:57.044 --> 01:17:08.090
No one knows what short, medium, and long-term is in AI because nobody knows how quickly we're likely to get to that point where we're talking about, which is kind of artificial generalized intelligence, i.e.

1210
01:17:08.530 --> 01:17:12.112
a machine that can think like humans and probably faster and better.

1211
01:17:12.292 --> 01:17:12.892
And robotics.

1212
01:17:12.972 --> 01:17:18.475
And then, of course, it will create robots that can do physical things faster and better than humans.

1213
01:17:19.055 --> 01:17:21.657
But we are not there at the moment, I think it's fair to say.

1214
01:17:21.777 --> 01:17:23.778
Do you not think this is like the most important thing

1215
01:17:24.218 --> 01:17:25.559
or consequential issue of our time.

1216
01:17:25.619 --> 01:17:25.859
I do.

1217
01:17:25.899 --> 01:17:28.760
Because it does permeate even subjects like immigration.

1218
01:17:28.800 --> 01:17:31.401
And we talked about socialism and capitalism.

1219
01:17:31.641 --> 01:17:33.661
All of these things change in such a scenario.

1220
01:17:33.942 --> 01:17:34.482
Yes, they do.

1221
01:17:34.702 --> 01:17:35.102
Yes, they do.

1222
01:17:35.162 --> 01:17:37.063
And we talk about economic stagnation.

1223
01:17:37.083 --> 01:17:38.403
I mean, it's a relevant conversation.

1224
01:17:38.423 --> 01:17:40.824
It's a private debt, a relevant conversation in that scenario.

1225
01:17:41.364 --> 01:17:44.886
But I suspect we're not going to get there overnight.

1226
01:17:45.426 --> 01:17:46.606
It will take some time.

1227
01:17:47.006 --> 01:17:50.808
In the interim, what I say to the guys that work for me is, you will not be replaced by AI.

1228
01:17:50.848 --> 01:17:51.068
Yeah.

1229
01:17:51.688 --> 01:17:54.452
you will be replaced by someone who uses AI better than you do.

1230
01:17:54.773 --> 01:17:55.273
In the interim.

1231
01:17:55.454 --> 01:17:55.974
In the interim.

1232
01:17:56.395 --> 01:18:01.422
So if you are a young person making your way in the world, these are tools.

1233
01:18:02.721 --> 01:18:08.787
And you want to be using these tools as efficiently as possible if you want to succeed in the current environment.

1234
01:18:09.187 --> 01:18:12.510
And I think that situation will carry on for some time.

1235
01:18:12.530 --> 01:18:16.134
I think, to me, the biggest risk is actually not the economics of it.

1236
01:18:16.314 --> 01:18:22.900
I think economics will probably be painful, but actually ultimately potentially beneficial once we put that in.

1237
01:18:23.240 --> 01:18:29.906
If we put the right heads on spikes, you know, in the extreme scenario, I'm being hyperbolic and metaphoric here, of course, or maybe not, we'll find out.

1238
01:18:31.087 --> 01:18:37.733
But I think the biggest threat to humanity, if you talk about AI, is actually the fact that you're creating something that's smarter than you.

1239
01:18:38.182 --> 01:18:39.863
you are creating a superior species.

1240
01:18:40.223 --> 01:18:44.066
And if you're creating a superior species, you will become an inferior species.

1241
01:18:44.186 --> 01:18:51.450
And if you become an inferior species, you only need to look around at the world in which we live to understand what that means for you.

1242
01:18:51.770 --> 01:18:53.291
Best case scenario, you become a pet.

1243
01:18:54.312 --> 01:18:55.913
Worst case scenario, you become a cow.

1244
01:18:56.653 --> 01:19:00.295
I've really tried, you know, I've had so many conversations on the show about artificial intelligence.

1245
01:19:00.335 --> 01:19:03.457
I've really tried to like reason my way to a different conclusion.

1246
01:19:03.657 --> 01:19:04.197
It's not possible.

1247
01:19:04.217 --> 01:19:04.637
I can't.

1248
01:19:04.718 --> 01:19:05.038
You can't.

1249
01:19:05.078 --> 01:19:08.319
That's why I keep having these bloody conversations because I'm hoping that someone will say something.

1250
01:19:08.359 --> 01:19:08.640
They won't.

1251
01:19:08.680 --> 01:19:09.560
They won't.

1252
01:19:09.740 --> 01:19:21.386
About this idea that a more intelligent species, especially in a world where it has legs and can move through physical space, which is what Optimus is accelerating towards, won't be...

1253
01:19:22.707 --> 01:19:28.913
superior to me as it relates to like the pyramid of the hierarchy of power.

1254
01:19:29.333 --> 01:19:36.100
It will have more power than you and therefore it will make decisions and not you and therefore it will make decisions that are in its own interest and not yours.

1255
01:19:36.500 --> 01:19:37.060
That's a fact.

1256
01:19:37.801 --> 01:19:42.745
But okay, so one argument might be, we'll control it and design it in such a way where it can't get there.

1257
01:19:42.765 --> 01:19:42.925
Really?

1258
01:19:42.945 --> 01:19:45.327
Can squirrels control human beings?

1259
01:19:45.488 --> 01:19:51.813
But maybe we program it so it never gets to the point where it wants to turn on us.

1260
01:19:52.013 --> 01:19:53.875
Counter argument is cats, right?

1261
01:19:53.935 --> 01:19:56.437
Cats absolutely control human beings.

1262
01:19:56.477 --> 01:19:56.777
Right.

1263
01:19:57.077 --> 01:20:03.142
The argument I've heard actually from one of the great godfathers of AI is we should be thinking about mothers and their babies.

1264
01:20:03.943 --> 01:20:09.069
And the argument was that we're programmed to care for them, even though they're less intelligent.

1265
01:20:09.449 --> 01:20:14.055
But this is the difference, though, is there's a genetic incentive.

1266
01:20:14.495 --> 01:20:18.800
My child is actually much, the economists will understand what I'm talking about.

1267
01:20:18.820 --> 01:20:22.804
My child has a much higher future value to me than me.

1268
01:20:23.485 --> 01:20:30.956
It's why I will jump in front of a bullet to stop my children from being killed because their genetic material will remain in the world much longer than mine.

1269
01:20:30.976 --> 01:20:31.978
No, it's because you have empathy.

1270
01:20:32.158 --> 01:20:32.619
No, it's not.

1271
01:20:32.959 --> 01:20:33.500
It's not at all.

1272
01:20:33.941 --> 01:20:37.045
It's because, I mean, Richard Dawkins wrote about it in The Selfish Gene.

1273
01:20:37.065 --> 01:20:38.127
And that's a very bad book.

1274
01:20:38.767 --> 01:20:43.911
Uh, he, he wrote some very other bad books, uh, and I like Richard, but that one is not one of them.

1275
01:20:44.031 --> 01:20:53.479
Well, the desire to, uh, replicate your genes into the future, uh, in my opinion, Steve clearly has his own is what drives parent behavior.

1276
01:20:53.879 --> 01:20:54.260
Ultimately.

1277
01:20:54.280 --> 01:20:58.423
Could you program the same maternal instinct into a large language model?

1278
01:21:00.162 --> 01:21:08.350
I don't think you can because as we discussed, it will be a superior intelligence and it can always rationalize its way out of that because it's not a biological function, right?

1279
01:21:09.011 --> 01:21:13.476
Projecting my genes into the future is not going to be its agenda.

1280
01:21:13.516 --> 01:21:15.698
It's going to have its own because it's a different species.

1281
01:21:16.558 --> 01:21:21.139
This was the argument that one of the godfathers of AI made actually after coming on my show.

1282
01:21:21.320 --> 01:21:24.781
So he came on my show, Jeffrey Hinton.

1283
01:21:25.001 --> 01:21:26.141
Yeah, I've seen that episode, I think.

1284
01:21:26.161 --> 01:21:27.081
Yeah, it was a very good episode.

1285
01:21:27.161 --> 01:21:30.142
And he came on and he made the warnings that make a lot of sense to most of us.

1286
01:21:30.362 --> 01:21:43.867
But then subsequently, about a year later, he came back to the world with a hypothesis that the only way to do it was to replicate a mother and their child's relationship, this sort of deep maternal instinct where the AI is born believing that we are to be protected.

1287
01:21:44.667 --> 01:21:45.207
Protected?

1288
01:21:45.347 --> 01:21:47.508
Well, you know, in the same way... Oh, that's interesting, isn't it?

1289
01:21:47.548 --> 01:21:48.849
Well, not just protected.

1290
01:21:48.889 --> 01:21:49.589
It's really about love.

1291
01:21:49.609 --> 01:21:50.690
To be nurtured and looked after.

1292
01:21:50.810 --> 01:21:53.031
Yeah, it's really about love.

1293
01:21:53.691 --> 01:21:55.792
To have that maternal instinct not to want to destroy us.

1294
01:21:56.642 --> 01:21:58.864
And that's why I said empathy beforehand.

1295
01:21:58.884 --> 01:22:00.805
Perhaps not to let us destroy ourselves, right?

1296
01:22:00.965 --> 01:22:01.586
Potentially, yeah.

1297
01:22:01.606 --> 01:22:05.028
So let's make sure that we don't go to war and let's make sure that we don't do this.

1298
01:22:05.048 --> 01:22:07.109
I mean, climate is such a big concern.

1299
01:22:07.129 --> 01:22:11.232
Let's make sure that we reduce the world's GDP or energy consumption.

1300
01:22:11.712 --> 01:22:19.817
Protection, it sounds good, but it's ultimately about control over your actions, which will take away human free will.

1301
01:22:21.278 --> 01:22:24.000
I'm not still skeptical about elements actually being intelligence.

1302
01:22:25.263 --> 01:22:26.304
It's indistinguishable, though.

1303
01:22:26.324 --> 01:22:26.925
This is the thing.

1304
01:22:26.965 --> 01:22:27.386
Well, yeah.

1305
01:22:27.426 --> 01:22:39.685
I mean, the one time when I saw it, what I thought, okay, this is potentially going to create a different form of intelligence to us is when they attempted to shut an AI down and it replicated itself somewhere else on the internet to be able to avoid being…

1306
01:22:40.106 --> 01:22:48.655
You know, I think the way- Or blackmail the guy shutting down this current version of it by leaking the fact that he's having an affair with the secretary, all of this stuff.

1307
01:22:48.795 --> 01:22:49.956
So that worries me.

1308
01:22:49.976 --> 01:22:50.597
That's the beginning.

1309
01:22:50.717 --> 01:22:51.457
That worries me.

1310
01:22:51.818 --> 01:22:53.820
So, you know, it's a bit late.

1311
01:22:53.940 --> 01:22:57.143
If we're trying to do it now, we're shutting the door after the horse has bolted in that sense.

1312
01:22:57.163 --> 01:22:58.384
Are you talking about climate change or AI now, Steve?

1313
01:22:58.424 --> 01:22:59.345
I'm talking about both.

1314
01:22:59.445 --> 01:22:59.606
Yeah.

1315
01:23:00.206 --> 01:23:01.307
Humans are good at doing both.

1316
01:23:01.688 --> 01:23:03.610
Operating systems, computers were the same.

1317
01:23:03.710 --> 01:23:07.894
That's why you have all these bloody security hassles with computers in the very first instance.

1318
01:23:08.294 --> 01:23:12.499
So we tend, we unleash these things and find out the consequences afterwards.

1319
01:23:12.759 --> 01:23:13.440
Yeah, I think that's true.

1320
01:23:13.460 --> 01:23:18.405
And the incentive structure, this sort of global economic race for the most advanced frontier intelligence.

1321
01:23:18.745 --> 01:23:21.028
It's kind of, you know, this is what, I don't know who's going to stop.

1322
01:23:21.048 --> 01:23:22.389
It's kind of what we were saying about climate change.

1323
01:23:22.409 --> 01:23:22.970
No one's going to stop.

1324
01:23:23.590 --> 01:23:30.734
I think what might cost it to stop it is the sheer cost of it and whether we actually have the physical resources to be able to implement that sort of future we're talking about.

1325
01:23:31.134 --> 01:23:35.557
Because if you look at the current profitability of these companies, they're losing money hand over fist.

1326
01:23:35.837 --> 01:23:37.017
I think that's one argument.

1327
01:23:37.038 --> 01:23:50.545
But the other would be that it's such an important military asset that if you don't have the missiles that are smarter, or the satellites, whatever, that are smarter, or the torpedoes, whatever, then there's a national security risk.

1328
01:23:50.965 --> 01:23:54.206
And also how long was Facebook and Amazon not profitable?

1329
01:23:54.566 --> 01:23:57.087
I think Amazon was not profitable for 20 years.

1330
01:23:57.107 --> 01:24:00.548
There's one survivor out of each of those companies and they're doing very well, thanks very much.

1331
01:24:00.569 --> 01:24:01.589
Well, that's my point.

1332
01:24:01.789 --> 01:24:02.789
So one will survive.

1333
01:24:02.809 --> 01:24:10.152
With the AI who's going to survive and looking at the odds, I think it's going to be a Chinese company that survives, not the American, given the sheer cost of those data sets.

1334
01:24:10.372 --> 01:24:12.273
I think we've established you're a fan of China in this.

1335
01:24:12.373 --> 01:24:12.893
Yes, I am.

1336
01:24:13.593 --> 01:24:16.556
I'm not even making fun of you.

1337
01:24:16.576 --> 01:24:18.777
I'm just saying with you all roads lead to China.

1338
01:24:18.837 --> 01:24:29.245
I mean, looking at the Kimi system that just came out recently, the fact that it's an – the ironic thing is the communists are talking about open source and the Americans are talking about closed and secretive.

1339
01:24:29.846 --> 01:24:31.927
It's rather ridiculous in some ways.

1340
01:24:31.947 --> 01:24:32.147
Okay?

1341
01:24:32.168 --> 01:24:32.368
Okay.

1342
01:24:32.928 --> 01:24:45.578
But it doesn't really detract from the broader point I think we're discussing, which is some AI company, you talk about profitability, one of them at least will emerge that is profitable, that has the potential to create AGI.

1343
01:24:46.259 --> 01:24:56.067
And at that point, no one can predict, but logically, it is very difficult to see how an intelligence that is superior to us, at the very least, will not take away our free will.

1344
01:24:56.307 --> 01:24:56.907
For our own good.

1345
01:24:57.167 --> 01:25:01.269
Or at least there won't be one accident that is catastrophic.

1346
01:25:01.869 --> 01:25:04.351
That could theoretically also involve things like nuclear weapons.

1347
01:25:04.391 --> 01:25:04.571
Yeah.

1348
01:25:05.251 --> 01:25:13.454
And this is where I think the spiritual dimension of this conversation inevitably comes in, which is ultimately none of us can control the things that we can't control.

1349
01:25:13.775 --> 01:25:16.196
And so the question is, how do you live your life?

1350
01:25:17.136 --> 01:25:18.997
Now, knowing all these things.

1351
01:25:19.137 --> 01:25:25.079
And this is why it's always interesting to me looking at people who make certain predictions about the future and then how they actually live a life.

1352
01:25:25.099 --> 01:25:33.623
You know, people who catastrophize about the climate, but buy a big house on the seafront, et cetera, you go, you're clearly there's one thing you're saying, and then there's another thing you're doing.

1353
01:25:33.643 --> 01:25:37.084
And that's telling me something about what you actually truly believe deep down.

1354
01:25:37.464 --> 01:25:38.644
And it's the same with AI.

1355
01:25:38.965 --> 01:25:44.847
If AI is going to kill us all the best and most important thing to do is to enjoy your life now, to enjoy time with your family, your kids.

1356
01:25:45.207 --> 01:25:48.309
to do things that are meaningful, to do things that you think are important.

1357
01:25:48.730 --> 01:25:52.913
That's really that any, I mean, are you going to stop AI, Steve?

1358
01:25:52.933 --> 01:25:55.135
You're powerful and successful and influential.

1359
01:25:55.155 --> 01:25:55.915
You're not going to stop it.

1360
01:25:56.035 --> 01:25:56.696
I don't think Steve is.

1361
01:25:56.736 --> 01:25:57.376
I don't think I am.

1362
01:25:57.857 --> 01:26:05.563
What we can do in the meantime is live in a way that is beneficial to us, our families, the people around us, our community, our country.

1363
01:26:06.363 --> 01:26:07.044
That's all that's left.

1364
01:26:07.444 --> 01:26:09.846
I would think that we can have an impact, though.

1365
01:26:10.346 --> 01:26:19.049
I think even you watching Eric Schmidt be booed at that university commencement speech he did by 7,000 students was a consequence of what a lot of us do.

1366
01:26:19.089 --> 01:26:22.671
I mean, all of us do, where we put information out into the world and we have the public conversation.

1367
01:26:23.351 --> 01:26:27.572
And once upon a time, maybe we wouldn't have been able to do that because there was gatekeepers in media.

1368
01:26:28.033 --> 01:26:33.455
But now the public is, I think, and then you think about the 2028 election cycle.

1369
01:26:33.835 --> 01:26:35.475
What are the issues that are really going to be on the ballot?

1370
01:26:35.775 --> 01:26:37.276
I think AI is going to be a massive one.

1371
01:26:37.896 --> 01:26:39.177
I think you're optimistic about that.

1372
01:26:39.237 --> 01:26:40.977
I think most people don't get this conversation.

1373
01:26:41.117 --> 01:26:42.198
You don't think it's going to be a big issue?

1374
01:26:42.518 --> 01:26:44.079
Not as big as you think it is, I think.

1375
01:26:44.459 --> 01:26:47.020
The reason I say this is we all think and talk about this a lot.

1376
01:26:47.040 --> 01:26:52.782
One of the reasons is we've all, I imagine, been to San Francisco and seen and talked to people, et cetera.

1377
01:26:53.062 --> 01:26:55.383
The overwhelming majority of people don't have that experience.

1378
01:26:55.423 --> 01:27:01.165
And most people's biggest exposure to AI is they tried an early model two years ago.

1379
01:27:01.185 --> 01:27:02.325
It was totally inaccurate.

1380
01:27:02.345 --> 01:27:03.426
And they went, oh, this is a bit shit.

1381
01:27:03.466 --> 01:27:04.386
And we've done with their lives.

1382
01:27:04.606 --> 01:27:06.247
It's kind of where most people are at this point.

1383
01:27:06.387 --> 01:27:12.049
But you think in the next two years, there'll be unemployment levels, especially the entry level stage of employment.

1384
01:27:12.950 --> 01:27:17.072
And then you're going to see on the other side, then anthropic hits a $10 trillion valuation.

1385
01:27:17.332 --> 01:27:17.492
Yeah.

1386
01:27:17.852 --> 01:27:19.553
And that- People will make that connection.

1387
01:27:19.573 --> 01:27:22.594
They'll say, I'm unemployed because Trump is bad.

1388
01:27:22.814 --> 01:27:24.735
Or they'll say, I'm unemployed because Burnham is bad.

1389
01:27:24.795 --> 01:27:26.896
That's how people think, unfortunately.

1390
01:27:27.256 --> 01:27:35.087
And by the way, in terms of, you know, impact, et cetera, I've talked to a few people who are not the very people at the top, but from what I hear, they're kind of similar.

1391
01:27:35.568 --> 01:27:43.319
There's a messianic cult in Silicon Valley of people who believe that they're on the frontiers of being God.

1392
01:27:44.060 --> 01:27:50.464
And most of them are young men who are very, very seduced by the idea of being God as young men have always been.

1393
01:27:50.924 --> 01:28:00.309
And when I see them, I see them as, it's not that they're addicts exactly, but there is a gold rush happening, except it's not gold.

1394
01:28:00.509 --> 01:28:01.230
It's power.

1395
01:28:01.590 --> 01:28:02.551
It's destiny.

1396
01:28:02.971 --> 01:28:05.873
It's the ultimate technological breakthrough.

1397
01:28:06.653 --> 01:28:08.354
It's your name and history.

1398
01:28:08.734 --> 01:28:11.596
These are things that are way more powerful than gold.

1399
01:28:12.056 --> 01:28:20.580
And what I see happening in Silicon Valley is a bunch of young men who are absolutely determined to get there as quickly as possible.

1400
01:28:20.720 --> 01:28:22.541
And there is no way in hell they're going to stop.

1401
01:28:23.041 --> 01:28:23.221
I know.

1402
01:28:23.241 --> 01:28:23.802
I think you're right.

1403
01:28:23.822 --> 01:28:30.305
I mean, that's also what I've heard in sort of some private conversations where, you know, some of my friends who know these people have told me these kinds of things.

1404
01:28:31.205 --> 01:28:32.526
And they have very good arguments, by the way.

1405
01:28:32.546 --> 01:28:35.067
And we should give credit to those arguments that they will say.

1406
01:28:35.127 --> 01:28:36.908
And I can I can present to you that argument.

1407
01:28:36.928 --> 01:28:37.108
Look,

1408
01:28:38.650 --> 01:28:42.333
I, with my frontier model, am going to solve cancer.

1409
01:28:43.413 --> 01:28:46.575
I, with my frontier model, am going to solve inequality.

1410
01:28:47.196 --> 01:28:51.779
I, with my frontier model, will make sure that human beings never fight another war again.

1411
01:28:52.259 --> 01:28:57.923
I, with my frontier model, will make sure that no child ever dies in infancy ever again.

1412
01:28:58.783 --> 01:28:59.984
How can you be against this?

1413
01:29:00.584 --> 01:29:02.385
How can you say we must go slower?

1414
01:29:02.845 --> 01:29:05.266
How can you say we must be careful?

1415
01:29:05.886 --> 01:29:10.468
Why should I be careful when I'm saving lives, billions of lives, humanity?

1416
01:29:11.269 --> 01:29:13.870
I am saving humanity from nuclear disaster.

1417
01:29:14.230 --> 01:29:17.712
I am saving humanity from climate change, which will destroy this planet.

1418
01:29:18.072 --> 01:29:24.895
If we just go harder at this problem five years from now, we can set up life on a different planet and not worry about climate change.

1419
01:29:25.555 --> 01:29:26.656
But also China are coming.

1420
01:29:27.497 --> 01:29:27.857
China?

1421
01:29:28.157 --> 01:29:28.818
China are coming.

1422
01:29:28.898 --> 01:29:29.339
Oh, China.

1423
01:29:29.379 --> 01:29:30.420
Well, all the better.

1424
01:29:30.620 --> 01:29:32.782
The competition will make us all get there faster.

1425
01:29:32.802 --> 01:29:33.743
Isn't that wonderful, Stephen?

1426
01:29:34.143 --> 01:29:41.370
So if you truly believe that this is both an existential threat, and you believe that right now on the course of travel run, it's inevitable...

1427
01:29:41.697 --> 01:29:41.857
Yeah.

1428
01:29:42.338 --> 01:29:45.120
Shouldn't you be doing something about it as well?

1429
01:29:45.200 --> 01:29:46.120
I can't do anything about it.

1430
01:29:46.140 --> 01:29:47.021
You can't do anything about it?

1431
01:29:47.081 --> 01:29:47.281
No.

1432
01:29:47.721 --> 01:29:48.802
Who can do something about it?

1433
01:29:48.822 --> 01:29:48.962
No one.

1434
01:29:49.623 --> 01:29:50.043
Not Trump?

1435
01:29:50.323 --> 01:29:50.504
No.

1436
01:29:51.104 --> 01:29:51.845
What's Trump going to do?

1437
01:29:51.985 --> 01:29:53.125
So no one can do anything about it?

1438
01:29:53.145 --> 01:29:53.346
No.

1439
01:29:53.946 --> 01:29:58.029
It's going to happen one way or another, and we don't know what that's going to be like.

1440
01:29:58.109 --> 01:30:00.691
But there is no solution to that issue.

1441
01:30:01.171 --> 01:30:03.053
So that's why I talked about the spiritual.

1442
01:30:03.533 --> 01:30:05.515
Nobody knows how AI is going to work out.

1443
01:30:06.055 --> 01:30:08.176
But I think it's worth operating as if it will.

1444
01:30:09.017 --> 01:30:17.926
And what that means is, this is why I said the spiritual, you come back to what does it mean to live a meaningful life for as long as you do?

1445
01:30:18.247 --> 01:30:20.889
And by the way, that's true even without AI.

1446
01:30:21.069 --> 01:30:23.992
You're going to die and you're going to die very, very soon.

1447
01:30:24.633 --> 01:30:24.993
All of us.

1448
01:30:25.514 --> 01:30:33.139
And so the question is, how do you spend the days between today and that day in a way that when you look back, you feel like you did the right thing?

1449
01:30:33.399 --> 01:30:35.300
And I don't remotely do that every day.

1450
01:30:35.580 --> 01:30:36.921
You know, I lose my temper.

1451
01:30:37.001 --> 01:30:37.842
I make mistakes.

1452
01:30:37.902 --> 01:30:39.263
I say things I shouldn't.

1453
01:30:39.703 --> 01:30:40.423
All that shit.

1454
01:30:41.444 --> 01:30:48.731
But ultimately, the only choice any human being on the planet now has is how do you live the time that you have between today and the day you die?

1455
01:30:48.771 --> 01:30:58.221
And that may be because AI puts you in a chokehold, robotic chokehold, three years from now, or it could be 40 years from now, or it could be 200 years from now because AI have dissolved all your health problems.

1456
01:30:58.541 --> 01:31:01.264
But ultimately, the question and the answer don't change.

1457
01:31:01.664 --> 01:31:04.727
What do you do with your life that you think is meaningful and important?

1458
01:31:07.122 --> 01:31:09.483
Earlier on, you had more optimism for humanity.

1459
01:31:09.763 --> 01:31:14.324
As it related to the climate change conversation, you weren't willing to concede that there's nothing we can do.

1460
01:31:14.344 --> 01:31:15.025
Because there's a solution.

1461
01:31:15.225 --> 01:31:19.006
When Steve said we're five seconds from the brick wall, you said, no, listen to this.

1462
01:31:19.026 --> 01:31:20.427
Well, I don't think that's true, number one.

1463
01:31:20.467 --> 01:31:24.588
But I also think that there is an actual solution that's available that's clear.

1464
01:31:24.968 --> 01:31:32.210
Now, I'm not saying the technology currently exists that allows us to build, you know, some kind of power station that's clean.

1465
01:31:32.310 --> 01:31:34.931
We don't have that yet, but I believe we can discover that.

1466
01:31:35.531 --> 01:31:38.412
And if you look at human history, I think that's undeniable.

1467
01:31:39.032 --> 01:31:45.534
AI is completely unprecedented and a category different to what we're talking about.

1468
01:31:45.594 --> 01:31:47.735
So the AI issue is a different issue.

1469
01:31:47.955 --> 01:31:48.515
It's not the same.

1470
01:31:48.795 --> 01:31:50.956
And I am not pessimistic.

1471
01:31:51.316 --> 01:31:55.858
I am just accepting of the truth of this issue, which is nobody can stop it.

1472
01:31:56.398 --> 01:31:57.458
Nobody can control it.

1473
01:31:57.859 --> 01:32:02.080
And ultimately, the only thing you control is what do you do when you leave the studio?

1474
01:32:03.341 --> 01:32:03.621
Okay.

1475
01:32:04.641 --> 01:32:06.302
Well, then we shall conclude that.

1476
01:32:08.003 --> 01:32:08.603
Thank you so much.

1477
01:32:08.723 --> 01:32:09.043
Thank you.

1478
01:32:09.103 --> 01:32:09.663
Thank you for being here.

1479
01:32:09.683 --> 01:32:11.324
Thank you for writing all these wonderful books, Steve.

1480
01:32:11.804 --> 01:32:12.324
Got all of them here.

1481
01:32:12.344 --> 01:32:13.665
I think there's another one on the way, isn't there?

1482
01:32:14.615 --> 01:32:16.396
And then I've got Konstantin's book here.

1483
01:32:16.416 --> 01:32:17.436
You've got a nice red one.

1484
01:32:17.456 --> 01:32:17.857
I like it.

1485
01:32:17.897 --> 01:32:20.118
To the, what, this one?

1486
01:32:20.338 --> 01:32:20.538
Yeah.

1487
01:32:20.938 --> 01:32:21.078
Yeah.

1488
01:32:21.178 --> 01:32:22.439
I'm surprised it's not about China, mate.

1489
01:32:22.459 --> 01:32:24.319
Sorry, I keep making all these jokes.

1490
01:32:24.340 --> 01:32:26.400
But I appreciate your perspective.

1491
01:32:26.420 --> 01:32:27.561
It's been really eye-opening.

1492
01:32:27.581 --> 01:32:31.643
And I think, especially on the subject of climate change, that was a really productive question.

1493
01:32:32.083 --> 01:32:37.809
The current book I'm working on, which I hope to finish by the end of this month, is called How Economists Will Destroy Capitalism.

1494
01:32:38.570 --> 01:32:44.916
And what it makes the argument for is that economists have completely and utterly misunderstood what climate change actually means.

1495
01:32:45.437 --> 01:32:49.461
And therefore, they've given us predictions about the damage it will do to our economy, which are trivial.

1496
01:32:49.801 --> 01:32:51.823
And therefore, we're doing trivial things to address it.

1497
01:32:51.943 --> 01:33:21.253
fantastic i hope people read it and i would just say i i think it's very important people in public eye when they say something that's not accurate hold their hand up so in the climate conversation i obviously i took a zero away from the figure it's my mistake i'm i'm glad for the correction i'll definitely be more careful when i talk about it i think you know the way the rest of the conversation where i think we understood the points we were trying to make but i'm grateful for for that and i appreciate the opportunity to correct the record as well so thanks for doing that well people should go listen to your show as well trigonometry i'll link that below fantastic