Four Ex-Stratfor Analysts Reunite to Predict How the World Ends

Okay, very special. Peter, thank you for joining us.

Uh, I don't know if anybody else is getting like a weird sense of deja vu. Like, I don't remember the last time the four of us were around a table or talking to each other.

I think it was probably 2000, I'm going to say 2010.

Probably. Roughly. Yeah. That window.

Yeah. So, 16 years ago. 15, 16 years ago.

This is the reunion. Uh, Peter, Peter was my very first ever boss.

I'm so sorry.

In the private sector.

In the private sector.

Yeah. In fact, in fact, when Peter offered me the job and I said, "I don't know. You know, I've got this other." He said, "Well, what do you want to be when you grow up?"

I was like 24 years old.

Well, and Peter was an established entity at Strathor and you guys were already senior analysts when I came as an intern. My first job, I, I apologize, Peter, because for a while as an intern, my job was to come into your office and bang on the door and say, "Where is your piece? You haven't sent in your piece."

I remember. I'm very sorry. It was not my choice. Uh, I was just doing, I was following orders and you were thrusting around.

Were you following orders? Were you?

There's a deep joke in there that we're not going to explain.

We're not.

Yeah.

Um, all right. So, for this first session, we're going to talk, we're going to keep it mainly geopolitics. We'll wax philosophical and sentimental at the second. Uh, and we thought, what better way to get the band back together than to talk about how the world is going to end for the next 10 years. So, aggregators, we are not saying this is what is going to happen. We are not saying the end. Well, you, yeah, you might, but yeah, we're not saying the end of the world is nigh. These are suggestions, you know.

Well, everybody can caveat to their.

The book title, I believe, is "This is the Beginning of the End." The beginning of the end is the book title.

The end of the world is just the beginning.

Sorry. It's just the beginning. Yes. So, I mean, as far as Peter's concerned, he's already answered this question. We can move on.

That's true.

The world has already ended.

So, we can go through some very specific scenarios of how it's all going to happen. So, but for the next 60, 75 minutes, we're going to get dark and twisty. So, the first, and we're going to try and hit three questions. We're going to try and hit how does the world end in 10 years. We're going to ask each, everybody to say how will you be wrong in one of your core views over the next 10 years, and then the least expected, most likely thing that we think is going to occur over the next 10 years. So, that, that's our run of show here for this first part.

Um, I will start with Peter, obviously. Peter, how is the world going to end? In that, there's so many options. All right, short version. Um, I do deglobalization and demographics. So, very, very short version. The world as it exists today, global trade as we understand it, was a security paradigm the Americans built to fight the Cold War. We, we bought an alliance and then we did not invest our economy in it because then it wouldn't have been a bribe. So, every manufacturing supply chain, all of globalized agriculture with fertilizer coming from here, equipment from there, demand here, production here, all of that is possible because of the American security guarantee. And the United States is no longer capable politically and militarily to guarantee that any longer. And we have seen that. I think the first real exposure was with Yemen, of all places, which I loathe. Um, because you had every missile defense system that we have that is mobile, and they couldn't even protect shipping in the Red Sea, much less someplace that mattered to anyone. And we've certainly seen in the most recent war with Iran, we've now used half of our global supply of interceptors. We can't do another Iran fight at all. Um, that's piece one. Piece two. When globalization happened, people started taking manufacturing and services jobs because everyone could specialize for the first time. All those jobs are in town. And when you move from the farm into the city, you have fewer kids because they're no longer an economic asset. You play that forward 80 years, and it's not that we're running out of children on a global basis. That happened in the 80s. We're now running out of 50-year-olds. And if there's no one to purchase the product, there is no trade. So, it doesn't really matter now where you poke the system hard. You can do it in tech, you can do it in AI, you can do it in finance, you can do it in energy. We're now at a point where the system is so vulnerable and so overexposed and so interconnected and so fragile that you start a cascade of events. And there's a really real concern right now that we're going to hit global operating minimums for oil processing before the end of the summer, and that's more than enough to do it. So, we might not have to wait 10 years. And that's just, that's the approximate current event. There's plenty more out there.

What is, what does it look like when, when something like that happens? Like?

For, for energy specifically?

Yeah.

Mad Max canisters and cannibals. Um, oh, I wish it was going to be that nice because that assumes that there's a supply of it somewhere that you can put in a canister and on a bus.

In unused cars. Yeah, exactly. You suck out the gasoline from like the ones that were left over.

That would be brilliant.

You haven't seen zombie motivation.

No, it's, uh, if you're going to take the energy route specifically, uh, liquid fuel is what allows global transport to happen. It's what allows regional transport and local transport in most cases to happen. We can talk about why EVs aren't going to work at large. Separate topic. Um, you remove the mobility, uh, and there is no trade. There's really not even regional distribution even within a major country. Now, keep in mind, with everything you poke at, there's different highs and lows based on their country. So, the United States is now not just a net exporter of oil, but we export 5 million barrels per day of a refined product. So that gives the United States a lot of options that nobody else has. But what we would gain there, and maybe with agriculture, we would suffer immensely on the manufacturing side.

Tech.

Tech, for, well, tech requires everybody. No.

There is no tech without global trade at all, especially on the higher end. But on the energy question, um.

If you can move, that's great. But if you can't fix or replace anything, it's a different world for you too. You might, uh, not descend like other countries. Other countries, if the oil situation goes away, for many of them, that also means the agricultural system goes away, and you're now talking about de-industrialization. And every population on the planet uses industrialized agriculture to exist in its current form. So, we're talking about, for a lot of places, some sort of neo-dark age sort of situation where a 50% reduction in the population is probably one of the more positive cases.

But so, just to be clear, like the, the catalyst for us, let's leave out the oil, you know, the disruption core moves. Let's just say that's just.

That's just the one that's on my mind at the moment.

Yeah, that's right. Um, so you're saying the catalyst for this scenario is just, uh, like demand slowly falling off the cliff? Like, global final demand.

Just gets.

That is one of them. Yes.

Keep in mind that the deglobalization break and the demographic break, while they're related in cause, it doesn't matter which one happens to shatter the whole thing. It's just really unfortunate that it's, they're happening at the same time.

We're going to have.

They're correlated. I mean, in many ways, really.

Demand for deglobalization.

I, I'm just saying that one of them can completely break, and the other one hasn't broken yet, and we still end up in the same general place. On the demographic situation, um, we all know Japan is the oldest, fastest aging country in the world.

Yeah.

Right? Well, maybe not.

South Korea, too, right?

Yeah. Actually, the Japanese have improved a lot, but it's still pretty bad. Anyway, uh, 2025 to 2035 was always going to be the decade where the majority of the advanced world and a significant minority of the developing world ages past Japan. So, this was always the last 10-year period. It's just we're overachievers and we're doing it early.

Interesting. I would have thought more fireworks. You know, this is a very.

We can get that. But, you know, if you're going to go to war to get something, and interconnection is how you make it work.

What does the war achieve? So, Russia is one of those weird countries where if it actually wins everything it hopes to do in Ukraine and then repeats it in Poland and the Balts, it actually solves some of its geographic problems and demographic problems, even. But like China, you import everything and then you export to everywhere. What war can you possibly launch that will help that?

No, I mean, that's interesting. I mean, we can talk about ideology overcoming economic interest, though, right? So that's, but a little bit of that going on right here.

Right. But I, I think it's interesting because there is something that you're saying that I think resonates with me. One of the reasons that we got, you know, World War II in many ways was the Great Depression, and there was like massive disinflation.

And so I'm just thinking.

Disinflation. No, no, just deflation.

Deflation. Yeah, deflation. Like negative prices. And you're, you're basically explaining a world where there's two things that are happening at the same time. Deglobalization, but let's like double-click on exactly what that means. I think that we are rushing towards the 2030s where there's want on the deflation because part of deglobalization is rebuilding supply that's just in case, as everyone likes to talk about. It's not just in time inventory. So we're creating these redundancies of goods and like critical goods, not critical goods.

No, no, but, but like, it's funny you say that because your other side of the, we actually don't need that if demand, if global final demand is collapsing.

You know, like you don't actually need just in time inventory, right?

Um, yes and no. I, I buy your deflation thesis, but I think it's also a fairly inflation thesis at the same time.

Well, at the beginning it is, because while you're building.

No, no. Like in, in the, in the run-up, like everyone's trying to build a semiconductor fab now. So that's.

I hear you. Just keep in mind that if you go back to the 20s and the 30s, you're talking about a very different supply chain system that maybe had two countries in. Now, high-end semiconductors is 60.

Yep. No, for sure.

And if you pull one out.

But what I'm getting at, what I'm getting is we're trying to solve for that problem. Like that is a problem that everybody knows, right? Like, like you know it's in The Economist. Like the fact the supply chain.

Sorry, just the way you said that was.

I know. Well, um.

Yeah, I don't read more anymore either.

Since '21. You know what I mean? Like, but like, so, um, the, the point is, everybody knows this. We're all rushing. So, I'm trying to get like the way that this actually would happen. And I think the way it would happen is that right now we're trying to solve a problem, which is that interconnected supply chains are vulnerable. What we're not, what we're missing, and where you actually bring something new to the table is that, but demand is going to collapse too. So we're going to, we're going to happen to live in a world five, six years from now where we've built all this supply for some sort of an event that may not ever happen. We suddenly have all this unnecessary supply, but demand actually starts getting collapsed. So why is that bad? Deflation is bad.

Horrible. Just keep in mind that things aren't going to line up that cleanly. So you can have individual countries or, for lack of a better word, alliances of countries that have a self-contained supply system that you might get some deflationary events in there because of oversupply for that population. But in places where you've got the massive, uh, supply chains that span multiple continents, doesn't really matter what happens because an intermediate good is of no use unless you have access to all the other steps. So you can have massive deflation in particular steps and still inflation when it comes to finished goods.

Right. That's right.

We'll get the worst of all worlds.

I see that. But I'm even, I'm, I'm even saying, like, let's be optimistic about your p, about your pessimistic view. And.

I haven't even given you the downside yet.

But my.

This is my base case.

My downside is just deflation is, is politically unsustainable, right? For most societies.

Well, I wouldn't say unsustainable. Deflation causes a break in the political system.

Yes. Yeah. So, like, even if we don't get, you're saying, look, complexity, this is like, uh, what's, what was the name, uh, Homer Dixon wrote "The Ingenuity Gap"?

You know, and this is very similar to what you're saying, like, there's the world's become overcomplicated, we don't even know how it works, and supply chains became extremely over-professionalized, over-complicated. But I'm just saying, even if you don't get that one thread breaking, the fact that you're introducing the demographic component from a demand side leads us down a path that will make the 2030s kind of look like the 1930s. You know, too much deflation, too much political polarization.

I hope it's that good.

I don't know if that's good. I mean, that's.

Well, it's again, it's the two supply chain steps versus 2000.

The degree that we have to fall back to get to a point of equalization is extreme compared to what it was then. Well, I mean, deflation, I think, is written. I, I expect it. So, I think after the initial inflation, I think we're getting, that's where we're headed.

Yeah. You're also assuming a degree of continuity that allows to build us that industrial plant, and, uh, industrial construction spending in the United States is at the lowest it's been for a while. Uh, we are currently de-industrializing at the fastest pace in my life right now.

So, we're, that specific concern isn't on the table at the moment. Are there.

I would love to have that concern.

Are there relative winners and losers in this?

Absolutely. So.

But then it's not the end of the world, though. Like, we need, like, you know, humanity ends.

Oh, is that, was that the scale we're after? You can go as dark as you want.

I mean, you. Yes, I'm going that way.

You're saying like the end of the current world system?

Yeah. The end of the world system that currently supports roughly 8 billion people.

So, yeah. And sad. Best case scenario, we lose a billion, a billion and a half. Best case scenario, three-quarters of the population of the world takes a step back technologically, and globalization breaks into a series of regional systems with regional powers that hopefully don't fight one another too much.

Yeah. So, your best case scenario is basically Thanos snaps his fingers and half of half of all.

I got worse than that. I'm just, I went darker.

You went really dark.

What is this? Again, this is my mid-case.

What, what, what is your worst case? Let's, let's plumb the depths in the Marco to give us even more darkness.

You guys know the Revolution of Military Affairs? You guys know that term? So, 80s, early 90s, we started applying digital technologies to military stuff. We got satellites and cruise missiles and GPS and all that. We're now going through the second generation, uh, where you can load a decision tree into a military platform at the moment, a drone, and you fly it off. You're in control of it until it gets to a certain point, and then you release it. And with the tech that we have today, and when I say we, I mean humans, um, it can then follow around, finds its target.

Because you know.

Yeah, just, this is the US doesn't have this, to be clear. This is what the Ukrainians have developed in just the last couple of months.

Um, the technology required to make that will survive this fall back. There's nothing about that. It needs global supply chains at all. And so you can see military force being democratized. At the same time, what supports the normal way of life goes away. And today, remember, these drones didn't exist four months ago at all.

Yeah.

Those drones have a range of about 700 miles. And the Iranians have already deployed a few of them. So any physical infrastructure within 700 miles of potential foe, you basically need to write off.

So that's where, like, I like that one. So now we're getting, like, you know.

Again, base case.

Like, who these.

Well, and, and you can apply it to other things too, like, it's one of the things that keeps me up at night, the democratization of all these technologies that suddenly a kid in their mom's basement can use because there's no responsibility on it. But you got to look at the supply chain that allows it to exist. And if that is durable in a de-globalized scenario, then you've got something you can really worry about.

Yeah, especially like when you start thinking about potential actors that start using this. You can't just say, like, well, they'll get it from Ukraine. No, no, they're, they're going to have to build this themselves.

This is tip, by the way.

Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, the chips though, that I don't understand the component there, because that is international, as you pointed out.

Sure. So, um, extreme ultraviolet technology developed by ASML. They're the only country in the world that makes the lithography machines. They're about the size of a bus. You use them to etch the chips. They're the only ones who make them.

And so, any chip that you have, little oversimplification, that is 7 nanometers or smaller in the etching has to use EUV. And anything that uses EUV has at least 100,000 supply chain steps, uh, of which there are 2,500 companies involved who only make one product. I'm sorry, 400 companies involved that only make one product for one end user.

So you remove a few of those, and the whole thing stops. And this is touching 60 countries. So we're going to lose all of that, uh, if we rebuild the supply chain in a more demographically stable, geopolitically stable area. That's a 30-year program because it took us 60 years to do it the first time around. Dumber chips that use direct ultraviolet, older technology. There are a number of companies that do it. The Chinese do it, and the Chinese suck at semiconductors. Um, that level of technology, uh, with plenty of exceptions, is pretty durable to a deglobalized scenario. Uh, and these new memory drones that I call them, all use that tier, and not even the advanced part of that tier.

Mhm.

So, we've got this new technology that is potentially very, very destructive, that is probably going to remove Russia as an energy exporter this year, and then God knows what it's going to do to the rest of the front once they turn the Ukrainians turn their mind at something else. That's going to go global easily. Easily. Best guess is that the hits on US, uh, military assets in the Gulf during the Gulf War, which the US has really been playing down, were all these memory drones because once they make, once the drone gets in the area, it looks around, it makes a decision, and then it goes. You can't jam that. Your only option is physical interception. And that's, that's here. That's now.

Well, I mean, but that does work though.

It works very well.

No, no. What I mean is like, physical interception does work.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You can still potentially shoot it down. You just need interceptors, which we don't have anymore.

Well, I mean, we do. They're too expensive, and we spent them. And like, there's ways to intercept them with like.

We have used half of our global supply.

Why not counter-drone?

The country that is leading in counter-drone is Ukraine, and the United States is not cooperating building up.

What I'm just saying is like, it is a solvable problem. Like.

I mean, but can the United States go and capture the people that we need in order to do that? Because I would imagine they could.

Well, we're actually very good at capturing people now. I don't know if you saw that. So the, the for an interceptor drone, it says, yeah, to make sense.

You're probably going to need five or six drones fired for everything you're trying to take down, and that makes it very easy for the attacker to just send concentrated against a single target. Uh, I don't want to say it can't work because it hasn't been invented at scale yet,

but that's seems to be the weakness to where we are that the Ukrainians have already identified. Uh, because they've brought some of their interceptors, which are about the size of a duffel bag. You can just tote them wherever you want, and their hit rate is maybe half of say, a PAC-3 out of a Patriot system, but they've only got a range of about 20 kilometers, and they're fairly slow. So, you only get one shot at everything coming in. You have to take lots of shots. I'm not saying it can't be improved, but the offensive curve is so much steeper right now.

But that's, that's what I actually think is, um, very interesting because on one hand, drones can't occupy territory.

Absolutely not.

Right.

But they're really good at de-occupying territory.

That's right. That's right. And I think, um, and also it basically means that you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. I.e., aircraft carriers, Arleigh Burke destroyers. Like, there's all sorts of like platforms that America has that are just very expensive. The war becomes like cheaper.

Yeah. Now, one thing we do have going for ourselves, ships specifically, ships move, and so you're never going to hit it with a Shahed because a Shahed, you give a program, you program a destination to, and it goes to it. The ship is moved by them. The only tankers that were hit during the Iran war were the ones that had been at anchor for three or four days and said, "Yeah, it's still there. Send one."

Um, how long that will last is unclear.

Well, your point is that they're memory drones. They can actually do a decision tree and choose.

But you have to get it to the general area first.

Okay. Yeah.

And when you're talking about a ship, you're talking about not having much of a detection radius because it's on water.

So, like, for example, the Ukrainian acoustic signature system on their border for picking up Shahads as they come in. That means that they get a warning of 10, 20, 30, 60 minutes, and they can concentrate their defense on the vector. You can't do that on water.

And so you just, because the ship moves. Now, that might change. And one of the things we're seeing in the Black Sea is they now have these, um, the babies, with a range of 1500 kilometers, so they can loiter.

Yeah.

And if they combine that with the memory drones, they haven't proven they can do it yet.

And the problem is just geography, because like a ship that's on the water, a drone that's on the water, just doesn't have much of a detection radius. You need to pair it with something else.

Yeah. What, what I was getting at is that in particular, when you start talking about sea drones, I mean, it, you know, makes things like blockades more effective. But interestingly, all this also makes offensive operations less effective, not more. I mean, you can destroy, well, you can destroy things.

You're correct about that, but like.

You know, you still have a problem, right? If you're fighting somebody else who has the same technology, occupying land becomes very, very.

Very difficult.

Which is, which is interesting, because it kind of freezes the world.

I wouldn't call that defensive, though. I would just call that, I, what's the old Roman term? The march. A zone where no one can effectively hold.

But what I'm getting at is that it's a world where the weak, like, shall inherit the meek inherit the world, because like, you can defend yourself from stronger powers, and it actually becomes very difficult to have these, you know, territorial ambitions in this world. That's kind of what.

Very difficult to hold it. Very easy to make it so that nobody else can.

Area denial, you know, that's what drones ultimately are. Basically, everything looks like Chechnya.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, can I ask you one thing, and then I'll, I'll start batting around. You said that the Chinese suck at semiconductors. I just, I want to ask you a little bit about that, because Huawei was left for dead. They're still around. They announced that thing to great fanfare. Ta's Law. We don't need Mo's Law anymore. We got Ta's Law. Um, can they be good enough to cover?

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's like the idea of stacking chips instead of getting smaller. That makes a lot. Well, and also, like your point is, 7 nanometer chip and below, like, whatever. This is a world of 20 to 40 nanometer chips, which Chinese.

Chinese, I would argue, can go up to 28 nanometers by themselves pretty well. Now, keep in mind that the purification required for the law of materials, they still can't do. So that's, that's not a blanket statement, but it's, they're pretty good at that level.

But this is what, what I think is really important to understand, and this goes back to our conversation earlier, you know, uh, while we were waiting for Peter. Um, I think that the amount of technology you need to effectively become relevant geopolitically is actually much lower than people think.

Sure.

Like, even AI systems, I mean, when you're talking about decision trees, this isn't like this, you know, it's more complicated for you to ask ChatGPT to do an interior design on your K, uh, kitchen remodel than for a memory drone used to chat GPT.

No, exactly. Well, and to your point, and so, you know, it's a world where, like, I think overemphasizing the, the tech stack that's at the top 5% is a mistake.

Without.

Sorry, you can keep emphasizing if you want. I'm not disagreeing.

But the middle matters. The middle matters. You know, this is my point. Like, everybody thought, you know, the Biden administration was obsessed about restricting Chinese access to 5-nanometer chips, and it's like, well, who cares? Wars are fought between 20 and 40, and then some three-star general that probably can't even fire up their Outlook will tell you, "Yeah, but future wars are actually won with five-nanometer chips." And then Peter Zion shows up, he's like, "No, actually future wars will be fought with spears and these drones." You know, that's the point.

This is how fast things have changed. But we're not fighting wars like we did even during the Biden administration when they were doing those things. At least from my point of.

But the level of technology you need is not like, you know, it's less than what you have in your smartphone.

That's kind of the point. I mean, well, keep in mind that the United States dominated military activity in the, let's call it, 30 nanometer to whatever the high-end is for 30 years. And so, we've become used to that being the norm. But that's not today's technology. That's yesterday's technology. So, of course, other countries are moving into that. And a lot of them are moving into it in a different way than we did it.

Yes. Well, that's where incumbency hurts, you know.

Well, that, and we were always fighting from the other side of the planet. With us, it was always about range and precision. For people in the Eastern Hemisphere, it's not.

Okay, Marco, how is the world going to end? And.

Well, you know, I'm, I'm going to end the world. Like, I'm not going for this like Dark Ages thing, you know, like, whatever. Dark Ages was so fun, you know, the Cameron. Like, read that if you want to see how fun it was. Um, so look, um, where do I want to go? I want to go to Nuclear War. Like, I mean, I'm, I'm just going to work with what's, what's in front of me. Like Peter is like the fancy, like Japanese fusion Mexican chef who's bringing all these new ingredients. I'm just going to stick.

Stick with the basics.

Yeah, I'm going to go with pasta and meatballs, baby. And I, I need a lot of nukes to blow up. So that's what I need, right? So how do I get that to happen? Where I'm going to, I'm going to say history rhymes, right? And so I need, uh, a global power to, um, be on the brink of collapse, and I need it to incentivize, uh, a scramble. So I need a sick man of Eurasia.

And I know I'm going to, I'm getting a lot of nodding heads here. Can't imagine you're talking like I do.

Well, I mean, like you were my first boss, Peter. So like this is going exactly where you know it's going. So look, what caused World War I, right? It took like 80 years to happen, but it was the sick man of Europe. It was the Ottoman Empire, uh, basically creating a power vacuum, right? Or when you create power vacuums, it, like, you know, sucks other countries in. And, uh, I think the.

I probably disagree with that assessment, but continue.

But like the biggest power vacuum out there, territorial vacuum, is Russia.

Yeah.

Um.

The heartland.

Yeah, exactly. Mckinder.

Hate that.

I know. I do too. But it's, it's hard to.

It is. It is.

It is not hard. Anyway.

Look, the thing is, the thing is, Russia's got, um, a lot of problems on its hands. First of all, I mean, Peter just basically, um, articulated why they are legitimately losing the war in Ukraine.

At this moment.

At this moment. I mean, things could change, but I find it very fascinating, by the way, I'll bring this up later, too, that Vladimir Putin could only mobilize once in December of 2022. That was the only time he attempted it. That tells you everything you need to know about the social, uh, stability and the political acumen and the political support for the regime, quite frankly. Um, if that political support was based on a quid pro quo, like, I get to conquer half of Ukraine or more, but nothing happens to you domestically, like, you will, your life will be just the same. Well, you can go to the same grocery stores that Tucker Carlson loved, you know, and, and, uh, eat the same crumbly.

Such a [ __ ] I will never forget him going through the grocery store and pointing at the brown bread and be like, "Oh my god, it's amazing." Like, "Dude, come over. I'll bake you a sourdough loaf." Like, this is not hard.

Um, by the way, you could do, you guys could do that in his barn.

I would love to, Tucker. I'm, I'm here, man. You want some bread? I'm here.

But listen, listen. My point is all of this is collapsing. And if you study history of Russia, you know, people think Russians are very good at war. They're not. They're good. They're very good at tolerating pain,

suffering.

And they're very good at when they get invaded, right?

You got huge, uh, supply lines.

Mean.

You got supply lines, you know, so you can.

No, you have winter and you have space.

On offense. I mean, like, I struggle to remember an epic offensive war that Russia, Soviet Union, or Russian Empire won. It's, it's a struggle. You got to go back in time. So.

Well, it's.

And it happens after every single time they're on.

I disagree with a lot of your founding points, but I think we're going to get to the same conclusion.

Look, every time that I can remember that Russia went on offense, Crimean War, the original one, Alexander II came in because Nicholas I might or might not have committed suicide.

Yeah, but that was a tech gap. The other side was industrialized. The Russians weren't. Of course, that doesn't matter why they lost. My point is what comes after the losses. Yeah, this is where I'm landing. Also, to very important here is that there was a reform movement in the wake of the Crimean War.

That's what I'm getting. If you don't have a leadership that is reform-oriented, then that decision-making might not even touch.

Alexander the II emancipates the serfs, right? The second one that I can think of is 1905 with the Japanese. That was the beginning of the Duma.

Industrialized versus non-industrialized.

But again, like.

The beginning of communism, right?

Exactly. 1916, 1917 was seen as a war of imperialism, offensive war. They didn't have to fight that war. That was a war of choice. Boom. Communism. You go fast forward to Afghanistan. What happens? Fall of the Soviet Union. Chechnya, fall of Yemen, Ukraine, fall of Putin. After every single failed offensive operation, domestically, they they suffer. So, I think that the part of my forecast that's easy to kind of make is that I think that there is disruption coming to Russia. You know, that's, that's where I'm like that. Now, why does it go nuclear? Well, first of all, you need a lot of nukes to end the world. And Russia has a lot of, like, I know it's kind of like obvious.

You're looking at the candidates. Okay.

Yeah. And I mean, like, Russia's in a state of disarray.

Very. How many hydrogen bombs would you actually need to destroy the entire world?

Define destroy. Like, make city, make every city with over two million people uninhabitable.

I don't know.

Probably a lot. If you're going to use city flatteners, you'd need at least 10,000.

10,000. Okay. So, the Russians are like, what, halfway there?

Yeah. Well, more than halfway, but.

I'd still call that the end.

Yeah. I was going to say, I think.

Like, I'm willing to give him wiggle room on that detail.

I think the Strategic Air Command, when they did this with Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson, every single time the conclusion was that the radiological disasters, awful,

associated with it would kill upwards of 500 million, 700 million people.

Yeah. You take out 10 spots with city flatteners in just the United States, you throw us back 30.

And by the way, by the way, you can feel free to stack our doom scenarios. So like Peter's point is like, look, we're, we're, we got no operating margin here in global supply chains. Give me one nuke. You know what I mean? Like, there you go.

Oh, let, let me, let me stack on your problem with some additional problems. Um, the countries that normally, uh, develop nuclear arsenals are the ones who don't think they can win a conventional fight.

That's right. And with the United States going all woohoo on strategic issues, we now have Finland, Sweden, Germany, Poland, and Romania openly debating not whether, how to get a nuclear arsenal.

That's right.

So, when we do get to the point that the Russians get a little twitchy, there will be some other people twitchy there with them. Um, if I was to put a, a stab in the map, uh, there is no version of Ukraine that can ever be secure so long as the Russian cities above Bogorod and Rostov-on-Don continue to be physically connected to the rest of the Russian Federation. Those are the two, uh, transport hubs that are being used for the entire military operation. So, if, if Ukraine does manage to push forward and push through this, they will continue pushing until those two cities are no longer a problem.

Plus Belarus on the north as well, I mean, might as well.

Belarus is different. Um, it's much more roundabout. I'm not suggesting that it couldn't fall in it, but these two cities have to go, uh, one way or the other. And now you're talking about a physical invasion of the motherland. And that's a very different political conversation for Moscow.

And by the way, I don't even, like, that's one scenario. The other scenario is just that the countries around Russia, you know, once, once this chlorotic political system starts to erode, there's plenty of countries around Russia that may want to participate in its dissolution.

Finland.

The Europeans, the Europeans are on one side, China, Turkey, you know, like, and so anyways, I, I fear that over the next 10 years, the biggest geopolitical issue is actually going to be this weakness of Russia. I can even see a world where us in the West were actually propping a regime in Moscow, in which happened with the Ottoman Empire, by the way, in order to ensure that it's an operating, um, you know, vacuum filler so as not to allow others to come in.

I find that unlikely, primarily because the Trump administration has gutted all the people who are capable of thinking that way.

Well, I mean, like, you know, things come and go.

Those people. Yeah, those are replaceable. That's just notation of personality.

I mean, like five years, in five years, you don't know what, what goes on. But what you can say is that, like, if a vacuum is a problem, right? If it's a problem, and by the way, what's great about your thesis is like, you're setting up a stage for the rest of the world, for the rest of us, like the supply chains are at risk.

Sorry, I got, I got to open up this a little bit more.

For this next statement, just.

Makes my comment sexier, but also the mic. It's the mic. It's the mic. My point is, look, we're already, we got no, no real, like slack when it comes to supply chains. If you suddenly lose like 20% of world's nickel production, and by the way, you don't need collapse of regime in Russia for this to happen. Look at the output of oil or nickel or any other commodity out of Russia in the '90s. It's not like Russia completely collapsed. It still had the Duma. It still had the president. It was still, you know, Yeltsin was running around, and they had elections, you know, and yet look at what production of all the things the world needs Russia to do. Look at what happened to it. It didn't do well. Halved. Halved. All of it.

I'm going to inject my joke here for a little levity. These two heard it earlier. So, Peter, you're going to really be my guinea pig here. So, Vladimir Putin dies, and he goes to hell.

Um, and he's, sorry, Vladimir. And, and he's in hell. He, he gets released for good behavior for for a night.

Because the bar is low.

Exactly. So, so they let him go to Moscow and do whatever he wants for a night. So, he goes to a bar in Moscow and orders a vodka, and he starts asking the bartender questions. The first question is, "So, is Crimea still, still ours?" And the bartender says, "Yes, Crimea is ours." He says, "Is the Donbas still, still ours?" I say, "Yes, the Donbas is ours." And then he works up courage. "Is Kyiv still ours?" It says, "Yes, yes, we have Kyiv. That'll be eight, please."

Sorry. Actually, but there, but there's something important about that, which is that, and I think this complements what you're saying, but you, I don't know that you would take this approach, but the EU as a concept needs to expand. It needs to take border territories that could be a problem, and it needs to absorb them. And Ukraine has been sort of an example of that, but obviously they ultimately did want to take Belarus and others. And in a period where Russia is receding, there's probably going to be a continued impetus for Europe to expand. And the reason for that is to absorb those dangerous territories. In other words, rather than dangle out the this no man's land as an enticement to Russia to be aggressive because they're they're weak and crumbling and lashing out, it would be better to absorb them and continue this sort of forward march of the European project.

The digestion of the unstable territories.

And that's the thing. So, but the, but conventionally, the industrial capacity of Europe is so much more superior to Russia's that conventionally they're weaker, and then that pushes them into a sort of like, like a Muscovy or like a, a core, uh, nuclear-armed but very, uh, you know, very weakened state that's losing its strategic depth to an entity that actually could succeed, ultimately, maybe not in bringing Malorossiya into the EU, but effectively neutralizing and setting up a public.

I'm going to say this tongue in cheek, but you, you can hear German geopolitical theorists from the 1930s saying the answer to the Russian question is Lebensraum. We need, we need aggressive European expansion.

Well, no, and it's the thing that no one would think about also, and let me just say for those who are saying, well, yeah, but Europe is old and they're not aggressive, but look, Charles XII, Napoleon, Hitler. I mean, you have plenty of examples of this. Like, you would say a revealed preference that Europe wants to invade Russia. They do. They always try. But, you know what? I, I don't even think it doesn't have to. No, the West had to pull Poland back in like 1921. Like, that's a, the post-World War I conflict between Poland and the Soviet Union is like.

Unbelievable. But what all, all I would say is like, we don't have to go that far. I just think, you know.

Like you said, it's a power vacuum.

Well, let, let me, yeah, nudge yours a little bit. The EU in its current form has no future primarily because of globalization and demographics.

They're an export union now. They've aged out from being a consumption-based system. But everything else you said, I agree with completely, which just means that the evolution of the EU is not a financial, monetary, economic trade union. It's a military political union, and that's a different beast.

I would argue it's been that for like the last 10 years. I mean, that's why.

They've been moving in that direction.

And we know that they've made, mentally or psychologically, the mil, the shift to wanting strategic autonomy and military.

The question is how do you get from here? But what's interesting is that it points in a direction that could be reminiscent of Stalin's Red Army. I mean, because you ultimately, you, you want the Caucasus as well.

Yeah.

And Russia's always willing to fight over that.

It also points in the direction of imperialism.

Yeah.

In sub-Saharan Africa. Yeah. I mean, that's, but, you know, how.

No, but that would actually be a good thing in this situation because rather than Europe exploiting the collapse of Russia, we'd have Europe exploiting North Africa. And nobody.

I think what he's saying is there equal opportunity.

And if you look at the European empires.

Yeah.

So, really, the only question is, in this specific scenario, whether the Brits come along or not.

Yeah. Yeah.

My, my point is also, I think that we're staring at a world not far off into the future. I think the next five years where, you know, stability, Russia becomes really critical to the West. Agreed.

And, you know, like, I always joke with some of my clients and so on, when, when I say something, they say, "Well, I don't see that happening." Nonlinearity is like built into geopolitics. I mean, we have a guy who was a member of Al Qaeda on Cristiano Mor in CNN giving an interview in a tie. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, this is.

Not just a tie, $300,000 watch.

And great taste.

He's made it. He's made it. I mean, so, you know, if you said to somebody in 2002, like, "Hey.

"a former al Qaeda militant will be running a country in the Middle East and we will welcome him." You would have said, "Come on, bro. Like, you can't go that far." I literally think that, you know, whatever comes after Putin in Russia, it will be disarray and that disarray will be the greatest risk to humanity.

"Yeah," "that's kind of what I'm getting at. I I I think it's a valid theory because if you look at where Hitler came from, the belief was that if Hitler had had access to nuclear weapons that he would have ordered their use and I think that's a legitimate theory that's coming from Churchill. But like his behavior aligns with that constantly offensive response to negative information on the field."

"Go ahead." "Well, no. I'm just saying that if you look at where Hitler came from and then psychologically, I mean, you're talking about this the darkest corner of the German Empire produces an essentially fanatical ideology that actually winds up in the height of power with access to the m the the military, the the medal."

"I love that you just called Austria the darkest part of the of the German Empire."

"Well, no, but specifically" "No," "I thought you meant time." "No, but specifically," "I'm very offended, by the way. Any Austrian who's watching is not happy. Every Austrian who's watching knows that there's a little figure of Austria that juts out near" "three out of four of them are Serbians. But go ahead."

"But it's also but it's also social class, right? He was from the lower middle class and they were getting like they perceived that they were declining in their social status. And what I'm saying is for sure in a world where like many of the Russian elites who are saying that we should co-opt or collaborate with Europe, we should reverse Putinism, we should collaborate with Europe and just, you know, backtrack and abandon everything that Putin was doing. But you're going to have this virulent faction of uh holdouts who believed in the war and believed in everything that Putin told them and actually are still technically in power too because because they"

"Yeah, I'm going to break with you on that part. I agree with the rest. So, um, Putin built the current elite" "based on whether or not he believed they believed what he believed in." "Uh, and whether or not he could completely manipulate anything that he said and did."

"Yeah." "Um, the last time someone was admitted into that elite was before I met you two." "Yeah." "So, the youngest of them are in their mid-50s now." "Yeah." "And they're now just dying because they're old and the total elite now is barely over 100 people. Blown up. But but the point is we're not going to be able to predict who this individual is. The point is is that the individual who emerges as the strong man order."

"So what we're talking about is if Putin were just to vanish tomorrow, they'd all kill Igor Set because he's the only one of the hundred that has any ambition." "And then they would argue among themselves who was going to be in charge and they' probably run it by committee. It would be inefficient and then we'll have some backstabbing and that number gets widowed down pretty quick. Uh but these are the people who hold all the lovers of power."

"That doesn't sound stable to me." "It's not. It's not for your scenario to happen, which I think is the right way to think about it is this group is incapable of running an aggressive policy. They can do a carbon, but that's it. But here's which means we get somebody from the outside from a regional point of view and then grows out and we're all of a sudden in 1921."

"But here's the thing, okay? It's all but we can we can broaden the discussion though because we're not going to know the individuals. But what we know is that there will be a deal with Europe and the West and it will be a betrayal of Russia in the way that Germany felt that Ger the Nazis felt that Germany had been betrayed at Versail."

"So that's that's the key." "So but I think" "but with nukes" "exactly back to yours which means the nukes will be used but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be used against Ukraine or Britain first." "No internally going to be used internally."

"Yeah. But that's what I'm getting at what Peter just referenced." "But why would you want the radiological disaster in your" "You'd rather have that in the Chetchins running to Moscow." "Exactly. Well, I mean, you're talking about people who are not from the powers. They're talking about people with a regional outlook. And I'm not saying that they won't nuke anyone else." "I'm just saying if you start going back to the red versus white and the civil wars of Russia, the degree of barbarity they've always been willing to bring on one another has always been on the outside."

"Yeah, let's double click on this nukes." "But but what you would Okay. Okay." "That's key. like you know like this by the way this happened in the '90s just in a very like" "civilized way you know like various parts of like Russia were not for all intents and purposes" "under Moscow's control" "yeah like and then we're not talking Chachchna we're not talking Dagistan we're talking like Tatarstan yes we're talking like you know parts of Russia where just Russians living" "and so uh and then okay so the '9s weren't really barbarous but the red versus white was that was that 1920s early 1920s period where if you superimpose that kind of conflict, I think in today's context that starts looking very bad."

"I but I think if if Russia's collapsing internally and they're embroiled internally and even if they're using nukes in in a civil war, which I find hard to believe, but let's say, right, but I still don't think that gets us to the end of the world. I think what you need is you need Europe to expand" "and Russia to be conventually being defeated by Europe and facing the the eternal Russian nightmare which was to be absorbed by Europe."

"I would just argue it can be both." "Yeah, it can it can be both." "Russia is perfectly capable of an internal" "I just need nukes to be used guys. Can't we just agree nukes were used?" "I have high confidence. But but what I'm getting at is that you will have you you do have a clear pathway that we can all identify which is for a ideologically perverted leadership to restore order. It" "doesn't even have to be ideologically perverted. It can be doing what is logical for I don't know" "Minsk. No, no, no. Because use" "this dog is dead. I think we've killed it."

"Okay, I'll" "we both agree there's many ways to get there that are mutually reinforcing and really bad" "and and we're doing great. So Matt, how does the world end in the next 10 years?"

"All right. Look, well, first of all, I was going to go down a similar route and I have to say something about linearity." "Well, no, no, I've got I've got something more." "Okay, good." "Linearity because it is true and I think those of us who have actually like been embroiled in geopolitics for a long time, we know that you don't want to fall into that trap of just projecting things forward. But we have a 10ear time horizon in this discussion." "Oh, that's true." "Which does force a certain amount of linearity. And that's why I think you were right to point to Russia because" "it's like" "on a 10-year time frame actually things probably will be somewhat linear. It's going to be nonlinearities within a a general trajectory that we can we can sort of observe. Okay. But what I would say about going back to World War I and World War II is it's not just the power vacuum, the emergence of a power vacuum at the same time as the emergence of an expressive power which was Germany attempting to unify and create a continental empire."

"So they wanted to exploit the vacuum. And the only power that can fill that role is China. Now so that now everyone's going to think, "Oh, okay. Well, now we're going to start China hate hour, right?" But that's not what I'm doing. I'm not I'm not saying that. So, for example, I wouldn't say that Chinese leadership shows the characteristics that Russian leadership where they could become ideologically fanatical within the next year. Maybe" "they could, but what I don't defend it, don't" "what I would say more of is just the enormity of the capability. We've talked somewhat uh in previous sessions about this, but like" "industrially manpower and there's all kinds of imbalances going to poke at it. You don't have to go."

"Yeah. Yeah. Exactly." "There's different ways to hate on China and I think Matt and Peter like disagree." "Yeah." "Certain flavor." "But let me say let me say what we can observe is that this China the Communist Party China has been absorbing the buffer states gradually piece by piece and it was you know it was Tibet in 2008, it was Sing Jong in 2011, it was Hong Kong in 2019. There is a methodical recreation of a Chinese empire. Taiwan is obviously the missing piece, etc. But I'm not saying Taiwan causes world war. What I actually think is more likely is simply that Russia is going through this."

"China is attempting to absorb Russia as effectively some kind of satellite state and solve its resource problem. But what interestingly what this creates is a dynamic that when China takes Taiwan and however they do it, the problem is that Japan and South Korea panic and they go nuclear. And so then what we have is a world where you're reviving all the ancient animosities between China and Japan. And then the final ingredient is the decay of deterrence. So this connects with either your scenario or my scenario is that we always talk about the postw World War II environment as one where like trade is expanding, globalization, and so nobody has any wars."

"But there was also the belief that there was a revolution caused by nuclear weapons that created strategic stability so that nobody was going to actually use them. Mutually assured destruction. And what we're seeing with the advance of technology, first of all, countries are willing to fight wars, including by attacking nuclear powers. But second of all, they might innovate new technologies that enable them to attack the second strike response. So all I'm saying is that if you create a powder keg in Asia with knowing that there's a battle over influence in Russia, knowing that that there's going to be a battle between the US and China over Taiwan. You know, you you create an overall context of a powder keg, but you're simultaneously losing strategic or nuclear deterrence. That to me is like a it's a World War II scenario. I don't know if it's an end of the world scenario. World War II would be bad enough for me."

"I mean, I'm glad you brought it up. Fair." "Yeah," "I'm glad you brought it up, Matt, because I was I was afraid we were all going to go like super sexy and super weird and then no one was going to like point out that like China and the US don't like each other, you know, like the obvious. And we should spend some time talking about that as well. I mean, I think uh" "yeah, I mean uh we do have a 10-year time horizon. This isn't a hundred, right? So, like it's interesting to me though, that you're trying to fit what's happened over the last 10 years into the paradigm of Chinese expansionism."

"You know, like I struggle to agree with that necessarily. Like I don't really see it like you know, Shinjiang and Tibet were part of China. Like" "they suppressed, you know, domestic sort of angst. Like I don't" "I don't see that as qualifying." "Hong Kong and even Hong Kong honestly like I mean I was in Hong Kong like March, you know, whatever. like it's it's fine, you know. So, I don't I don't see that as rising to the level of like the way Japan's progressively went, you know, Korea, Manuria, you know," "but the but the point I would make to this is that we often if if we there's the World War II paradigm where you have a madman or a fanatic." "Well, that's the World War I paradigm is actually perfectly rational people." "I agree with you." "Perfectly rational countries all whose interests happen to be colliding."

"Well, what I was getting at," "yeah," "is that um it's interesting. I mean, 10 years is both short. So, I understand you're like you want some linearity." "Yeah." "Uh but I also think it's long enough that like the current regime in China may evolve. You may have somebody who counters what's going on in the United States of America with President Trump. Maybe China's ready for a little bit more of that kind of European style nationalism, you know, like and that's where you kind of add a little bit of like hot cayenne pepper into your brew that gives some spice to it."

"Yeah. And and actually I can I can be a little bit more specific like if we want to like first of all I think the US is more likely to be led by a democratic and internationalist administration that actually does want to defend Taiwan." "Second of all I think yeah you know I have no idea." "Yeah we don't know." "The other thing is parties are gone." "The other thing is Taiwan itself I think they'll probably have a leadership change in 2028 and I think they'll actually engage in a 4-year negotiation with China that will look like a very positive environment where they're negotiating a trade deal. It looks like it's going that way. Yeah. But here's the thing. When it comes to giving over their service sector, they won't do it. Even the Gument. So, what that means is they're not going to let China run their telecommunications or their banking or their tech or any of these domestic or legal services. You name it. They're not they don't want China to actually run Taiwan. So in around 2032 when you have the Taiwanese election, the whole question will be do do the people of Taiwan want to um approve effectively referendum on this new big trade deal with China. And I think Gument Tong might win or might lose. But I think the point is is that when we get to 2033, we're going to find out that the Gument Tong is not going to give the crown jewels. And at that point, I think China could turn in a much more aggressive direction because they will have seen that even when the Gulman tongue is back, even when they negotiate a trade deal, even when they do all the things that they're supposed to be doing politically, they still don't actually control Taiwan. And that's where it goes in a more militaristic direction. Now, if the Americans are simultaneously reasserting their security architecture, then I think we have a problem in the 2030s. Go for it, cuz I know you're going to shred."

"Yeah, let's start with the military equation because I think that's the simplest." "Um, the South Koreans have developed a new drone uh just two months ago called the Zaden that basically uses their version of DRAM instead of the cheap NAND. And it is has a decision tree with 10,000 steps. So, it's the closest thing to a fully autonomous system we're probably ever going to get. And to think that the South Koreans and the Taiwanese are not comparing notes with the Ukrainians every single day."

"Yeah. So if if you're talking about five years plus from here, uh the Taiwanese military will be able to easily defeat anything that the Chinese throw at them without any help from us." "Well, they just nuke them." "I mean, that is the solution. That is the solution."

"But also, like, wait a minute. Let me push back on that. Like, you know, I I've been hearing people say like China's on the brink of collapse and then suddenly their EVs are running around and they're they're good. Like you made a point earlier that the the drones that are really good like the bar is really low. Yeah. Like the Ukrainians are making these like as they go from like a van on the next to the the trench." "Yep." "So like China seem like" "if there's anything China's good at, it's like making consumer electronics. You know what I mean? Like so" "but the South Koreans as tech friendly as they are of sharing the high-end RAM they won't." "Oh no. 100% I agree with you. But like can't you overwhelm? Okay. So fine. So like the the super" "just remember any version of Taiwan falling requires a sea invasion and there's just no way." "Yeah," "there's just no way if those drones are powerful enough and they will be within" "I'm guessing like" "but remember why the US didn't invade Japan? It was the same dynamic. They nuked them instead and and the idea that" "also if the idea that China can mobilize and Taiwan will not have enough time to build a couple of dozen nukes is silly." "Yeah, that's true." "If the Chinese are going to get to that point, not only does a sea invasion Japan fail, they lose Beijing and Shanghai."

"I'm going to put my neck out here and I know I'm going to get negative comments for this, but I feel I I feel like the question is is actually like um I agree with you on the capacity. It's about whether there's Taiwanese will to do so. The thing about the Ukrainian" "Taiwanese the only way the Chinese can mobilize is to basically send a call out to everybody. They can't miss that. They will know with weeks of advanced notice. They probably need four days to make a move." "No, I I agree with you on the capacity. The question is whether if and when China makes that mistake because I think it would be a strategic mistake. Is there a Zalinsky who was out on the streets of Taipei being like we're ready come on down or is it going to be you know what we don't want to go through all this death and destruction?"

"Yeah, there's a thousand ways that that can go but when it becomes clear that troops are getting on ships and starting to sail" "it doesn't matter. We get to the nuclear war. But I'm going to but I'm going to step back one more time though because the nature of the question like what I'm saying that we need to be more humble about our ability to forecast and just say that you know in 1910 or if you're Norman Angel and you're writing about you know how" "there will never be a war again." "There will never be a war again and then it so happens World War I happens right what you would want to do is not identify specifically that the Arch Duke of Ferdinand is going to get assassinated. What you would want to do is just observe the complex. No, no, but but Matt, Matt, actually, actually," "you're 100% right. But bad example. You know why?" "What?" "Uh cuz number one, don't [ __ ] with the Serbs." "Yeah." "Well, that was that was in the decaying That was in the decaying." "What am I getting? No, I that was a joke." "I think you don't just have TDSDS. I think you have post-traumatic Serbian disorder. I think every single" "post actually if you had asked someone in Europe in 1878" "what would start the war" "they would have said Bosnia and Herzugamia" "like this was a problem right like this was constant problem" "and so so you're absolutely right like we're all sitting here trying to figure out the way the war starts and it might be like the obvious one it's Taiwan like to your point" "or in other words it's the absorption of a territory" "well it's absorion but it's it's also the the most obvious territory everyone was obsessing about. So like since 1878 they were holding congresses in Europe trying to figure out how the Ottoman Empire who's going to have this piece of territory Austrahungary, Russia, this Serbia, you know, and then it ended up being like, "Oh [ __ ] World War I started in Sievo." Like, who knew? Like no, everybody knew. Everybody knew for 30 freaking years. We knew that's what was going to happen."

"Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No," "that's that's to your point." "Yeah, I think that's fair. And and and again, the issue is that Taiwan, like I always try to tell people that Taiwan is Cuba. If the Confederate army had relocated to Cuba and then taken the nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union, you know what I mean? Like that's what Taiwan is like. If it has to be this war is very likely to happen with nukes." "Yeah. You see a gentleman about it, you know."

"So what but what I'm saying is that this perspective this is not an arbitrary the reason why it's an obvious conflict is because it's a territory that needs to be" "No, I don't think you have to sell it. I think we're we're sold." "No, you're not sold. No, I've never thought of the" "You think they'll just be able to defend themselves?" "Well, no. I mean, that's what I think now. I didn't think this two months ago because the technology was not going in that direction. Now I'm just like, "Holy [ __ ] this is so easy." Um, no. But before this, I was definitely didn't think there was going to be a war. Uh,"

"China is the most dependent upon the globalized system of any country on the planet." "And Australia now has the offensive firepower to end China's connection to the world. So does Singapore and Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, the United States, India, Iran, Pakistan."

"But that's where Russia actually becomes really critical for China." "It does, but it's not enough." "Some of their resources." "It may not It may not be enough. But what I would always just say to that though is that" "wars have always started because a nation is pursuing an objective, not because they did a rational holistic like assessment of what" "and so I'll I'll get to that in a minute. I'm getting there. So 80% of their energy is imported." "80% of is from the Persian Gulf. And we're seeing some wobble this year, but I mean that's that's a lot." "Uh 80% of what they use to grow their own food is imported." "Yeah." "Yeah." "The base% of their national income comes from exports." "Well, if they" "20% of their income comes from" "Let me rephrase that. Their hard currency earnings." "Yeah. Okay. Okay." "Which is not as important as GDP. Anyway, bottom line is all of this is dependent upon the the world being permanently accessible. Any conflict with Taiwan ends that."

"But hold on a second, Peter. Wait, wait." "You're revealing like vulnerabilities of China that I think um you know" "would speak to insecurity." "Exactly. And that like reduced" "doesn't solve any of it." "Doesn't matter. Neither did Bosnia for Austria Hungary. you know, like" "they could they could bully either their way and it would just go" "to the to the point of nonlinearity and just like, you know, if if this goes sideways domestically, like the what we're really getting at is that let me let me go to 30,000 ft. A lot of these scenarios require almost like an absence, not a rationality, but absence of like, you know, reasoned thought because like if you sit down and reasonably say, well, there's this new technology that now the Taiwanese have. Well, we don't want to mess with that. Like what what ends up happening is you need the reason that I start my scenario with Russian, you know, sort of post Ukraine political disaster is that you you need to introduce a level of like nationalism of passion of non, you know, and that's to your point."

"So here's my thing." "That's eight almost nine years ago now," "this was part of the regular briefings to Xi." "He realized deeply at every level why a war with Taiwan would be the end of M China. Yes." "Eight years ago is when he got rid of his last adviser." "Yeah. So, it's entirely possible that after eight years of embibing nothing but rancid propaganda that he wrote himself because he's now written more than 300,000 pages of it." "That's impressive. Literally." "I I know. It's like I've got four books done, two on the way, and I can't even imagine 300,000 pages in 15 years." "Deep Seek was probably invented." "Exactly. Anyway, the point being that this guy is has been operating in a Trump style information vacuum for a decade," "but you don't even need that. You you can have changes in leadership, you know, like I mean there's all sorts of like" "No, no, no, no, no. You cannot because he has done with to the CCP what Trump is currently doing to the rep Republican party. There's no recruitment" "acts of do God acts of acts of if something to happens to Xi, they have to start over. But that's that's that's the point. I think that" "I actually if we want to be realistic about it, I would say that 10 years is pushing my argument. I I do think it's that the series of negative events that have to happen um makes it hard for me to see this happening in 10 years. But 2036 is sort of like the earliest that I could put this sort of a conflration because I can imagine debt deflation, social unrest, um the the Taiwanese like the point I made about Taiwan not giving up its technology or social uh sector and then ultimately you know um erosion of nuclear deterrence and the acquisition of Russian resources. All those things combined can create this toxic brew."

"Fair. But I think your Russia scenario is far more appropriate for China in that time frame than the opposite." "By the way, by the way, just to be clear, this is not necessarily like, you know, you don't have to the whole point of this exercise is like less than 50% probability." "Yeah." "But let's go." "Yeah. But it probable enough that it's worth talking about, but you just were implying that China would collapse."

"Shanghai Academy of Sciences is now internally saying that they're missing over 100 million people under age 45. They're debating whether the missing millions is now between 300 and 500 million. We're not going to have a worker base within 10 years." "That's okay. Robots, drones, AI," "that only works if there's consumption on the other side." "But here's the thing, though. They need globalization." "But you know better than anybody though, Peter, the male female ratio is going to be" "awful. Awful." "So, I mean, it could be that even though you're losing I I don't like I I can see where you're about to say my" "I'm like rearing to go after." "I know. I don't I don't like demographics or destiny either. However, I would just say that" "aside from the fact that they are" "well anyway insecurity" "there's a lot of color and texture that can be debated but they are" "I think the point we can draw" "our hands are going to come up. I can feel it." "But no, the the point we can draw from this though is that China's insecurities your view is that China's insecurities will prevent them from being aggressive. I would be more with what Marco said where I think it's their insecurities that could push them to be" "fair. Fair. And if they go that path," "we're looking at not just a strategic feat, but a depopulation event that is unprecedented in human history." "Which is awful." "Yeah. But" "I'm sure it's awful, though." "Well, it's certainly awful if you're Chinese." "No, I don't think so. Like" "what?" "Cuz you mean cuz the economy is collapsing as well." "Well, it's like they're not going to be able to have food." "I don't know. They'll do that." "Well, actually, they have enough rice. They just they just can't have meat if" "No, but like if you if you depopulate" "the soybeans, they import so they can grow." "If you take their fertilizer plus the impus for their fertilizer, you're buy with 20%." "But why would they go away?" "And this is the most fertilized land on the planet after Brazil." "I thought they were so sufficient in grains." "No, no, listen. They do import more food than everyone else, but like if you depopulate, you need less import. So it's actually easier to feed your population. Second of all, like it look at look at Japan. Like when was the last time you were in Japan?" "It's been a hot minute. And were you worried about anything while you were there? It's awesome. There's nothing wrong with Japan. We've been hearing" "Yeah, because you're in the cities." "No, but it's not just that. Even even even in the rural areas, there's there's nothing like depopulation is a problem actually. I think in a non-globalized world, in a globalized world, the problem that you were describing would have the ability to export the imbalances. Sure." "Yes. And I agree with you like what you're defining is this is global," "right? It's it's like" "it's a global demographic issue. So we can" "and China now by their admission is furthest along, further than Japan." "I just think that that's maybe the best thing that's happened to China," "you know." "Yeah, it becomes easier because it becomes"

"jump ahead to the next question real quick. The potential error in my argument is that we have never been here before." "I agree. I've said this and so when you're looking at the specifics of how the democratics play out" "with the technology making let me let me double click on that. Like one of the greatest things that happened to Western civilization was the black plague. Now I'm not saying that I would love to see millions of people die. However, however, what it what the black plague did to Europe is it created a power vacuum from the perspective of feudal lords and surfs. Suddenly you could say like well maybe you shouldn't have the right to tell me who to marry or how many kids to have on my plot of land because you kind of need me to grow food for you and your knights." "And it set off the expansion or the the demand for skilled labor. That's right. for increases" "urbanizational stuff." "And by the way, that's when the damarind was written during that period. Just to be clear," "what what did I say?" "Well, no, I'm just saying it wasn't talking. Sorry." "The middle class is emerging. Wages are go real wages are going up" "and they needed some entertainment, baby. Like super super subtle humor here. But look, um, what I'm getting at is" "slowb burn." "What I'm saying is there's also that there's technologies we haven't had in the past that could replace output of humans. And well, I'll let you I'm sure you've been told that before. And the second one is exactly what you said, which is that everyone who points to the problem of depopulation points to N equals 1, which is Japan. Like to your point, like we don't know what this looks like because the one time it's happened is Japan. And quite frankly, I got to tell you, not that many things are going wrong in Japan."

"No, but but but let me add to it though. Japan is a post getting nuked by the United States. Japan which is allied with the United States and has a strategic security at the moment." "Yeah. Yeah. What I mean is we we can't believe that depopulation or deflation will always lead to the same effects in different countries. And what I would say with China may fit a more aggressive or extra" "I know but you can't like we can't give Peter both sides of the argument." "No, but I" "Peter can't get both. Drones are a really big deal and they're huge and depopulation is a problem. Like clearly what drones point out is that you don't need to mobilize people to go fight a war." "Well, you need to mobilize people to hold territory." "Okay, fine. But like they they have shown that they don't really want like other than Taiwan like you know like look all I'm saying is" "like" "drones are clearly an example of what I'm saying which is technologies we're inventing right now and that you got AI robotics are kind of like allowing you to depopulate peacefully and gracefully if you will." "Yeah. And and if that's true, by the way, then China probably won't be aggressive and they won't go and do a lot of the crazy things that" "because they'll need all the imports that Peter has identified as a critical strategic constraint on them, right?" "Unless you can build the silons and then like this is all sort of moved. But I I'm glad you said that because it relates to the scenario that I wanted to to bring up because I think we haven't been here before and I wouldn't take it back to the the black plague. I would take it to modernity because modernity has always been about more. We need to produce more for more people, for more consumption. And for the first time in modernity, we need to figure out how to keep a standard of living while producing less for smaller numbers of people. And this literally hasn't happened for centuries," "ever at least not since 1500." "And and certainly not in the sort of modern context. So when I start thinking about how the world ends in the next 10 years, the thing that I would pose to you, and I'm actually surfing on some of what you're talking about, which is I my you know, this is my aggregators. This is not my base case. It's the death of the nation state. the nation state was built out of the combination of nationalism and industrialization."

"I can build on that" "and and everything else and it's going to go away and instead you know right now the periphery doesn't look like nation states. It looks we were talking about this earlier looks like South Africa where you have elites and gated communities and governments that don't actually function and basically slave labor classes who don't have the promise of stability or employment or anything else like that and we have this pleasant fiction. Now, that's all on the periphery. And us in the West, we like to comfortably import our cobalt and our resources and have everything that we want from all this and pretend that the core is fine. I already talked about the silence. This is where it's it's sort of like I'm riffing now off of Foundation. That the empire, the center of everything goes away. And instead of a state that controls things, you have a hollowedout state which doesn't have power. To the extent it does have power, it's to pro protect the oligarchy, the oligarchy or the igopies. You have elites and gated communities who don't care about society anymore. You have young people who have no attachment or meaning to that state anymore because they're not in factories rubbing shoulders with their their counterparts, meeting new people and going to the bar and having beers. They're in their basements talking to Chat GPT or Claude or whoever else."

"And when you get that sort, this is I think is why kids don't have irony these days. We can't we can't do satire anymore because our politicians are beyond what we could satarize. Like it's impossible for comedians to do anything with with what we have. And this is where I do get spooky because I don't think it's World War II and nuclear weapons. I'm thinking so what happens in this hollowedout sort of state of being where the nation state is no longer there and no longer organized."

"We can have both." "We can have both. Do" "you mean my nukes?" "It'll happen because the elites will just start firing things at each other." "Land of plate. Yeah." "Yeah. But just the last point of it is" "how do we" "So so what happens when you get a coronal mass ejection that knocks out all the utilities in the United States that have no function" "no he's he's got that was the rule space is part of the what happens when we get a a pandemic and we can't mount an operation warp" "no he had an excuse he had an exception but I'm starting this geopolitics I'm saying it's not like it's any one it's a rising sea level all these things are going to keep happening to us and our capacity to respond because I've I've actually come to the conclusion like it's not going to be a pandemic if we're organized because we can figure out how to solve a pandemic. We can solve climate change. We could solve all this stuff. What we can't solve is if the state has no ability to function and nobody gives a crap be so much worse."

"Well, that's so um every economic system every economic system we have capitalism, European style socialism, command communism, corporate fascism, all of them are based on what you just identified. Nepi gets bigger. the idea that there's more, more people, more interaction, more trade, more technology, more finance, back to more people. That loop has defined the last 500 years. Now, it took us 250 of those years to figure out those four models. And I wouldn't say that we perfected them until the 20th century."

"That loop's broken. We're no longer in a world of more." "No. And last time it took us 250 years plus a couple world wars to figure out what the four models were going to be." "Yeah," "that's all gonna be going on at the same time as everything else that we've discussed today."

"Wait, but there's still something I'm missing cuz like Marco made the point about the knowhow, the productivity enhancements persist." "Yeah. So, you got to" "you're saying the population the people are shrinking. I get that. But then why wouldn't the remaining people use the surplus productivity?" "Because we've moved past that. The whole idea of the information revolution is that information isn't something that exists in a book or on a thumb drive or in one person's hand. It's a living thing that requires thousands if not tens of thousands of people to make it work. And when you break those connections, that knowledge stops" "because that's how knowledge works now. And so when we break the globalized system, whether it's because we have one country that is throwing a fit or one country that is disintegrating or changing the economic model, we're all going to take a big step back because it really does take almost all of us now and then you start messing with ideology on top of that."

"Well, yeah, because we will have it." "I I look one question I have just one. No, I I mean I like I like you know this was an exercise to end the world. So like you know" "we're on topic." "We're we're on topic. Uh I I just think that um one I think problem with your argument. There's there's two I would say. One is you know" "if it was more than one." "Well there's two. There's really two. Just population growth like you know flat lines demographic." "Don't start doing what George where he would do three things and then he would only get to two and never never" "I I do that all the time." "Actually a lot of people do that. You know there's points here. Well, I had three great points and then somebody interrupted like this and I forgot." "I'm I'm here. The world is ending. I'm trying to throw in some jokes so people don't like light themselves on fire."

"But let's let's take the US economy right now. Like let's take the US economy right now. I mean 20% of Americans are consuming 50%. You know, so like what" "that was more than that, but anyway, please continue." "More than that. Sure." "So like if population starts declining, it doesn't necessarily mean that demand goes down as well. Yeah, but you're describing a different economic model. That's fine." "I mean, it's it's one that like a lot of us have called. I don't know." "Yeah." "Well, I mean it's called affluence case shift economy. You know what I mean? Like" "I thought it was affluence. Each household gets more and more stuff, right? Because if the productive means" "or it's called feudalism, I mean," "well, it depends if" "to extreme. Yeah. Like I mean, sure, but the point is all I'm saying is that the demand does not have to egregiously collapse. demand demand collapses in the feudalistic scenario because the middle class gets hauled out and doesn't have any spending power because of inequality." "Again, we've been living through this in six eight years and growth in the US consu consumer uh, you know, consumer spending is like" "but what economists have argued is that if real wages had kept up with productivity GDP would be even a lot" "even larger. I agree but that's a different" "yeah, a different thing but I'm just saying you could see the" "but there's a way before I forget the second so the first point I'm saying is like even if population growth and demographics declines you can still have the affluent continuing to to demand goods" "exactly yeah" "that keeps globalization going or or like, you know, not a 10 out of 10 I agree with you that those days are gone the second thing is you said you had a counter to the technologies right because what I see right now is like idiosyncratically not really connected We have robotics getting better, the drone technologies, stuff like that. And then you have AI as well, all coming in at the same time. You have to have a pretty negative view of those technologies, like almost a ludite view to say that they will not." "It's a question of timing." "But those technologies had been developed during the period in which the demographic trends you're already start. But I don't think it was on purpose. We" "No, no, but" "we did it." "Well, okay. So maybe large language models didn't exist in any meaningful way just eight years ago and then all of a sudden it's the thing." "They're not the only type of AI. There's machine learning, there's video and audio creation." "Every type of AI that's kind of in the top 20 categories with the exception of machine learning is dependent on those high-end chips. So all of that stalls or goes back. Now it doesn't happen like that from the point that the system breaks and it'll be pretty obvious because it's an input throughput thing from the because from the point that you design a chip to the fact to the point that you can actually have an intermediate chip that can then be incorporated into a product three to four years." "Um, and so you're going to have the throughput that's going through the system for at least 12 months to produce the last batch of chips and those will get tested and incorporated into systems over the next six to 12 months."

"No, I get that. But what I'm getting at is that your system that you built does require a shock. And the reason I say that is because demand itself flailing is not enough of a catalyst." "I think it undermined the entire economic existence of trade." "I know. But well, not necessarily. Again, like we've had a very strange economic reality in the last six years where like the 20% are continuing to consume more and more and more and more and like without" "Fair and and we're entering a period where the state is going to consume more and more and more" "in order and you know like in tax maybe the proceeds like what I'm saying is like you're saying like yes Marco but the technologies you're relying on to replace humans are brittle" "and I'm saying you're correct but then you do require a shock to expose that brittleless you know" "but you guys got to help me out with this and I think some who are watching might want because if the number if the supply of workers is declining working age population then the value of each of those workers increases right so real wage should increase" "should now they should then be able to consume and acquire more things as the affluence" "but that has to replace the decline in labor itself you"

know what I mean? Yeah, but which, but that isn't that just shuff? Isn't that just sorting to different industries? So that if healthcare is a booming industry because we're taking care of a declining baby boom generation, but after that healthcare, there's less of a growing. But then now more and more people are going into these supply chain and logistical type of jobs you're talking about in order to, in theory, assuming the shock doesn't happen or is in the future, in theory, this will be very, very good for blue-collar workers.

That's what I mean. Industrial expansion that has to happen. Those the jobs. And well, in the logistical, the supply chain, uh, it'll look very different. I, I'm just not clear on what if there's a shrinking population, why that working-age population, whatever a given size, would not fill the role necessary for the supply chain that's necessary to feed that aggregate.

I know, I know it depends on your scenario not coming true. But isn't the answer to that that all the technologies Marco is talking about is making it so those people will not be more affluent? Because robots and everything else are going to replace all those things. You're not going to need those people.

Well, and okay, so yeah, so you're, so in other words, we are back at a political question. Because if, if it's feudalistic and there's no redistribution, then you're correct. Then they won't have more spending power. If you can, but if there's redistribution, they will have more spending power. And and and the demographics should help them with spending power because there's fewer workers. So they should, if you should have technologically magic away the need for workers in production, then you've also technologically magicked away the the existence of consumption. Everybody forgets about that half of the equation.

Again, like the last six years though, like what I just can't get over is like we've had kind of the hollowing out of some of the things you're saying. And yet consumption's held up because. Yeah. I think at the moment that we're in right now, like subprime in 2005, 2006. Yeah. We're seeing. Yeah. So you're saying it's not real? We're struggling. I know it's very, it's very real. But we're, you know, if you want to use the term late-stage capitalism, that might apply here.

Yeah. Yeah. But but that to me is very convincing. But the the part I'm not understanding is how you get from, let's say, you get through this cycle and you get through now on the other side of it, you have a new demographic makeup, but the knowledge of how to produce the amount of goods required for the amount of people is still existent. The knowledge persists.

Yeah. I was just enrolled. Yeah. And one of the many, many, many, many things I found fascinating is when the population dropped from a million people where they were half slaves to 50,000 people where none of them were slaves. Everyone forgot how to do everything.

Yeah. No, that's why. And and yeah. They weren't doing EUV. But the the market should, the market, let me be clear, that the market should calibrate this. The wage should go up for people to do those jobs you're talking about.

It depends. I mean, Peter's Peter's example is a good one. I mean, there was that didn't happen. Market didn't clear in when Rome collapsed. Um, I do think that there's something of like that we're all landing on almost, which is that there is no linearity in geopolitics. Things reverse.

It would be so much easier if there was. Yeah. But our jobs. Yeah. We would have jobs. Yeah. Um, it would be a STEM discipline if there was. But I also just think that, you know, things do go in reverse. And I would really recommend this was like a bestseller, I think, in the '90s or early 2000s. Um, um, it's Homer Dixon's Ingenuity. And it's this idea that like, it's the world's really so complicated that you pull on one thread, as Peter said, we could kind of go in reverse on some of these things. And I think that's, uh, yeah, that's a really interesting concept to think of because most of our viewers, even if they're kind of sad about the state of the world, I mean, most of them have seen nothing but better life, you know, over the course of the last 10, 20 years.

Oh, and if you want to have a real fun thing, the second most complicated supply chains in the world after high-end semiconductors is green tech. Yeah. Okay. Get ready for coal and wood. Yeah. Right. But wait a second though, like, is it correct then to say that the, what we should be paying attention to, like monitoring this, would then be the like the educ, I guess it would be the combination of education and free markets, right? Because in the past, there's been all kinds of challenges. Why were they solved? It was just cuz people were hungry. They were working hard. They were coming up with ideas. Now, if you take away their ability, the ingenuity gap or whatever, I mean, if you take away their ability to innovate, to solve problems so that they can feed and buy things, then you have that's when you have massive failures. But as long as people are still free enough to pursue their interests, then you usually tend to evolve out of.

We're getting a little philosophical here, but I would argue that most of the solutions we've come up to most of our problems in the last 35 years is by been by making the system overall more complex to bring out more efficiencies. Um, that that's not going to be an option, I would argue.

Yeah. All right. I think we should start to land the plane. And if anything, it's going to complicate and deepen the frequent. I see. I see. Let's start landing the plane on on session one. Um, maybe rapid fire. So how will you be wrong on one of your core views? This that can relate to the take or anything else. You do that one and then also least expected most likely thing to occur. So maybe we do a little rapid fire. We'll start Marco and go this way down.

Um, and each do it and then we'll. So like we're right now we're talking about like core view, how is it wrong? Yeah. Put one of your core views. How's how is it wrong? And what is the least expected most likely thing to occur? Well, um, something that you have high conviction. Do you want me to do both at the same time? Yeah, I think we should both. Let's all do rapid fire at the same time and then we'll pick it up.

We just spent like an hour and a half talking about this before Peter was here. And uh, so my least expected thing that will happen that I believe will happen is your how the world ends. Which seems like a problem. It does to me. Yeah. So I think that the nation state is going to erode massively philosophically, ideologically, structurally, secularly. Um, you know, like this rear guard action by states to ban kids on social media, like good luck with that. You know, they'll find. It's a fascinating experience. It's it's fas experiment, excuse me. You know, like, uh, so I think the nation state is going to, um, weaken. How are we going to measure that? I think it's going to be difficult to do that. But I think, you know, rise of like sclerotic policymaking, legislative activity, just like, you know, basically inability to really control the institutions that mattered, like these institutions. Everybody thinks nation state collapses because it just doesn't exist anymore or like it's a, it's an orgy of violence. It can also just happen where like the nobody cares that the Holy Roman Empire has been here for a thousand years, you know, like, well, sure the emperor, like, let me write back to him. So that's the first. Um, the second thing, uh, was.

How to be wrong on whether what is a core view of yours that could be wrong? So core view of mine, which, you know, like I use to kind of like forecast what's going on in the world, is that the world is multipolar. It doesn't mean that there's one country. It doesn't mean that all countries are equally powerful. Actually, we have one country that is still the most powerful country in the world, which is the US. Um, but that power doesn't go as far as it used to, you know, to effectuate like reality. Um, so I think for for that view to be wrong, I think, um, something has to reverse that. Either China and the US rise up and create the bipolar system, which most people love because it's very mathematical. It's easy to theorize. Game theory is easy to do. Uh, the National Security Establishment of the United States of America loves this because they can pull the playbook, you know, and it's like, oh, we know how to win this thing, you know. Um, so I actually don't think that that's likely largely because of a lot of problems, uh, with China that Peter has laid out in all his research. Um, so it would really have to be America reasserts dominance, you know, and I think that, um, I think you can point to all the technological things that America is really good at and you can make an argument that, uh, the US exploits AI and those technologies better than the rest of the world for whatever reason.

There's a number of reasons to expect that's already happening. Exactly. And I think you have to kind of hang your hat on technological dominance, which both seems like a cop-out, but it's like reality. I mean, America has been technologically dominant for the past, you know, I would say, well, since the 1930s. And so, um, there's also like 100 years of history where that's been the case and it kind of starts scaling up into technologies that we haven't really talked about. Quantum, you know, fusion, all that stuff. And just. Yeah, that's right, Derek. I know I know you talked about quantum before yourself and and I mean fusion, other things like just that we don't see coming down the pipeline. Um, and then. Yeah. Yeah. And then the world is not actually multipolar. It's a unipolar world. And there you go. I'll be wrong.

Okay. To Peter, I think we've actually both hit both of mine already. Okay. Uh, most of my work is taking the things that most people think will never happen because they've never even thought about it. It's like, yeah, this is actually the majority likelihood. Um, if I wanted to make it just a little bit worse. Please turn up the dial. Combining ours. There is no example in world history of a country going through a rapid shift in economic paradigm peacefully with one exception, South Korea, because that's they're weird. Um, and but they were living under the threat of war the whole time. Everyone else who has done it, it's there's either been severe internal disruption, often ending in a civil war, or some sort of external conflict. If you look at all of the major wars from the last 200 years, there is a very, very strong economic angle that involves one of the isms. And if all four of our currently understood isms are under threat and are not applicable to what we're going to be at in just a few years, there's no way we go through that transition peacefully.

Mhm. Well, by the way, um, I 100% agree with you. I'm a little disappointed none of us talked about isms at all. That's usually where Matt Burkin comes in. No, I'm going. Oh, you're going. Okay, sorry. I can take it. But but okay, I'll save the. But what were you going to say? Well, I was hoping to Jacob, given that he really likes pandemics. Like this is his thing. I don't really like pandemics. I just like they're so not easily prevent. We can just prevent them and we're doing absolutely nothing to do it. It just grates on me that we could make this much less worse and we're choosing. I thought I thought where you were going to go, uh, with the end of the world was combining that with combining a lot of things we're talking about in terms of technology becoming cheaper, more accessible. Um, one of the things that's becoming really accessible is lab-engineered pathogens, you know, that are like super engineered to particularly target specific ethnic groups, things like that.

No, I I sat with it. I think the rejoinder is that, yeah, but the technology works the other way. So you can find the cure for it relative, not relatively easily. I mean, we had a vaccine for COVID within two, three weeks. Now, we had a whole regulatory process and everything else. I don't want to get into the vaccine politics, but Moderna had. The vaccine design in three weeks. Yeah, that's true. Like we have this. The batch it was creating the batch. We have this, you have to do the batch with mRNA. You hit a button, you're done. No, no, but you got to make it and like give it to people. Oh, the the manufacturing process, but it's not like the flu shot with the egg. No. You don't have to grow anything. No, you don't have to. Or even with Ebola, it's going to be a terrible worry about this. Well, I mean, different locations will have to, but look at this Ebola outbreak. It's going to kill, you know, tens of thousands of people. It's absolutely terrible. And the WHO has said within six to nine months, they'll probably have a vaccine. Cool. Like that's awesome. Like that a pandemic is not going to wipe us out if in six months we can have a vaccine to this thing, you know? So, so that's why I went a different direction and and why I went on capacity because you need state capacity in order to do this. If it's just if it's just Sorry, Peter Thiel. If it's just Peter Thiel in his new estate in Argentina being like, we're not going to have the vaccine for you. He's a freak show. I have not met him like, but I'll also bake you sourdough bread if you are Peter. Anyway, to Matt.

So, actually, you know, maybe we can come back to ideology. It is something I like to talk about because I do think ideas matter. Even though I'm also probably more on the structural side, like as a geopolitical type, you know, following from all you guys, I do have a tendency to go for structural explanations, but I think that at critical junctures, individuals have enormous impact. Like right now. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, but leaving all that aside and what I would say is the United States is the center of the global system still. It's preponderant, even if it's a multipolar system. And if the US succumbs to the civil war, maybe because of economic change or maybe for other reasons, it could be ideological, but like huge tensions, extreme polarization in the US. If that happens, it's going to have massive ramifications globally. So, I think it is important, but I just don't think it will. I don't think the US is facing a civil war. And there's some m there's some easy things you can say like for example, just as long as you have real GDP growth of 2% and people are generally doing pretty well. Yeah. You know, it's a good ball. Anyway, so there's ways in which the US just constantly has political dysfunction, but it never really detracts from the overall economy, and so we don't end up fighting over it. We don't end up fighting for food, for example. But the one thing I would say is, so my explanation for this has been there's a generational change. Um, once that generational change is done, which I really think will be sort of impli em implatized by the 2028 election, not because the change will entirely be completed, but just because the candidates in that election will both be younger than the baby boom generation. So what? Younger than 80. Okay. Young. Yeah. Young. Hopefully. Hopefully. Like I think they will. And the thing is hopefully. But that's just an emblem. And what you enter into is a period in the 2030s where there's, you know, a new consensus forming with these. Now, I don't think these younger generations, Gen X, millennials, whatever, I don't think they're any better or smarter. But they are younger, so they might be better at problem-solving. They also might be better at compromising depending on what happened.

There's also time horizons. I think you would say like they might have longer time horizons. Yeah. So where I would so but I'm just giving this all this is background is like in other words, I tend to write and tell people that the 2030s, the US is actually going to be declining from extreme polarization. It's going to be entering into a generational change that's actually somewhat optimistic in the sense that we won't be ruled by octogenarians who are like ideologically or just nonsensically the mind. Yeah. No. It it'll be millennials trying to bring the '90s back. Right. And and and the specific. There are worse things that could happen. Well, and the spec exactly because the specific point is that they will, uh, listen to their advisors on trying to build a bigger tent for voters or trying to create faster economic growth. So anyway, wild concept. So where I would be wrong is if that's completely bologna. If, in other words, that the MAGA, the Make America Great Again, or a backlash, maybe a left-wing backlash that's populist, but if the polarization is broken by one ideological extreme triumphing so that the 2030s is an ascendancy of an of an extreme ideology which then could actually infect the economic capacity of the country. You know, like if MAGA had some great triumph, maybe they really could shut down immigration substantially enough that we'd have a really significant slowdown in economic growth and then that would breed further political problems. Or if the left wing came, maybe they would overly redistribute wealth and they would disincentivize investment and we would backtrack. So what I'm saying is for me, I think we're actually entering an era of depolarization and probably continued prosperity generally speaking.

I give that an 83.67% chance of being correct. Ah, nice. Right. Well, there you go. Because this is not the first time we've done this. But then to answer the the way it would be wrong would be if in fact we are at some kind of like Roman interval. This is our this is the sixth time our political system is reshuffled. Usually what happens is a new force, whether it's one of the old ones changing or merger with third force, emergence of a third force takes over for a decade and you at a minimum get 10 decades or you get 10 years of more or less political stability. Yeah. But that one other time was civil war. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'll I'll close this out. My my highest conviction view that could be wrong is I assume energy will be deflationary by the 2030s. And there's a whole lot of ways that could be wrong. Maybe I'm underestimating demand from AI and all these technologies. Maybe green technologies is just not there and renewables is going to cap. Maybe we'll have a small modular reactor disaster in China and nobody's going to touch nuclear again. Uh, maybe climate change does something. Maybe maybe we not we get a huge hurricane that knocks off, you know, American production or something like that. But I have generally assumed one of the reasons I'm more optimistic about the 2030s is I think energy is going to be cheap and I think it's going to be a race between countries to see who can have it cheapest. Um, and if you have cheap energy, maybe that blunts the edge of some of the negative forces that we've talked about, but there's all sorts of ways that could be wrong.

And then I for the thing that's most likely to happen, I I wanted to go off the wall like Korean unification or something, but the whole prompt is that it's likely to happen, right? And so I'll just close on I think in I think on the battle between states and AI companies and tech companies, the state wins. Oh, I think I think the nation state probably does die, but I think in its ashes comes and maybe it'll be something sinister, maybe it'll be something better. I don't know. Uh, but the state is not going to relinquish its its claw. So these ideas that, you know, AI is going to be out there, the individual is going to do everything in their basement. It does scare me. Uh, but I think the state will will control the men with guns and will eventually like. They will be recognized at some point. Yeah.

Okay. Now, wait a second though. I I want to pick on that. So, in other words, you're saying that the 19th century model of the nation state is dying, but the state itself will prevail. There'll be a new form of state. Yeah. It will have to transform itself in order to exert control because it's old ideological. Yeah. And that'll look different in case and is in your model, a medieval model or like a feudalistic model? To Peter Sp. That's an option. Case by case basis. Or we'll invent something new for the circumstances of the time because we've demographically we've never been here before. We're in we're in unprecedented. And is the state in that case, is it personal like it used to be with kings and dynasties or is do you think that there's Well, no, is there impersonal solution to the thing that you're? I think I think the tech bros, to grossly oversimplify it, are going to make their bid. This is book three. They're going to make their bid for control and there will be counter-move by the state and that fight is going to wreck so much [ __ ]. Yeah. That's book four. Yeah.

Well, no, and and to a point that you made earlier about sports, like and Trump sort of began this, like we we talked about this on a podcast months ago now, like TMZ now moving to Washington for an office to cover politics. Trump as the first celebrity reality TV show president. Who are we going to put our faith in? It's going to be a celebrity or it's going to be some sports star, somebody who actually unites everyone without having any doubt. It's kind of the plot of a deiocracy, but. And and the good version of this is Ronald Reagan. The good version of this is somebody who uses his celebrity to surround himself with. Uses his power. And the bad version of this is we we know. Look, if I had to pick between the state and any emerging technology, you got to pick the state. I mean, that's been the case throughout history. There were few moments when it was like touching out and the state always won. I mean, the. Going to love book three. The by the way, the the most obvious one is like the, you know, what is it? The East India Company trying to run India. Yeah, but the state did not win in the age of revolution in many places. Like the American Revolution, the French Revolution, we tore down. No, but we rebuilt. We got new things. But but it wasn't like a it wasn't a corporate entity or technology that came and by the way, like we think of AI and, you know, Magnificent 7 as these incredible corporates, but like think about like East India Company or Hudson Bay Company, like owning land and and armies, right? And they always succumb succumbed to the state, you know, and I think. But on the way out, wow, was there a show. Yeah. For sure. Yes. Yeah. But it's going to be a show. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, if they have means like, but again, it's something you said earlier I thought was really interesting was like that some of these companies might actually have drone armies or robot armies or something. Let me give you something that's very real. Yeah. Well, there you go. 80% of the satellites in orbit right now are owned by one company controlled by one person. Do we really think that's not a strategic question? Yeah. Right. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm very much on the state side about this, too. But I think we should recognize that they're states and some of them may be dissolved, but mandate as an organizational principle is going to be very hard to get rid. Well, and maybe maybe today's cartels become tomorrow's states or. Well, maybe other paramilitary. As all four of us have now said, not all places are the same. Yeah. So this. Corporate event can have a very different impact in a place like Saudi Arabia versus the United States. Yeah. And to Peter's point, I think that what's interesting is the showdown is going to come, you know, because I think that's that's clear. The showdown always comes. That's what like there will be blood is about. There's a lot of like. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of literature and stories. I mean, whether it's energy barons, railroad barons, like you just go back, there's always a showdown. It always comes. Yeah. And you know, like like again going back to the Kevin Spacey quote from House of Cards, you may have all the money, Raymond, but I have all the men with guns. I think that's always like been the critical difference. And that's why Trump was escorted out of the White House the first round. The uh Secret Service actually had a poll going. Wait, this is new to me, is it? Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know, it's like the concern was that even though he lost the election, he was going to leave the White House that the the Secret Service guys that were, you know, assigned to take bullets for him hated him so much that they had a pool going to see who got to drag his fat ass down the front steps of the White House if he decided to do that. And when and when news of the pool made it to him, that's when he left. Interesting.

All right. I think we put a pin in it here and we'll come back for session two if we've got the stamina for it. But. 100%. Yeah, let's let's blow through it. We got to go pee. I got to pee. I got to pee. Are we going to do the second one sober? What's the plan? We We can. We have.