Transcription
The current direction of travel. Where does the UK end up?
We're already there. We're irrelevant. We are irrelevant. When these, like you said, Venezuela happens, no one cares about us. When Iran gets bombed, no one cares about us. All the future big decisions about geopolitics are going to be made without Britain even being considered because it's going to be made by the major powers of which Britain is no longer one.
You choose to live in the UK despite your views that the UK is a bit of a sinking ship.
I guess because of my views actually.
Because of your views.
Yeah. Like look, you've moved to the United States, which I'm grateful for, 'cause it's made us the biggest UK podcast in our space. I appreciate that. But as you can imagine, we get offers to do the same in all sorts of different ways and we could have done the same. I love this country. I'm very grateful to and I feel to stay and fight for it and to articulate my views and try and persuade people to my point of view so that we can have a British renaissance, so that we can have a British recovery is my duty for as long as I can do that and if at some point, you know, I feel it's completely futile, which I do not.
Um, so you're hopeful?
I'm not despondent to the point of giving up is where I am.
Are you hopeful?
No, no, but but I'm also not at the point where I feel it's futile. I think there is there is an opportunity to turn things around if if everything comes together and we're very fortunate. Uh, and that's what I'm hopefully trying to contribute to.
Through history, when companies pursue the strategy that the UK is currently pursuing.
Where, where does it end up economically?
Well, Stephen, you're the business guy. You tell me.
No, but I don't I'm not I don't have the greatest view of history. So I'm wondering if there's, 'cause, you know, in the UK, I I was born 33 years ago in Botswana and I moved to the UK when I was young and, um, I've always known the UK to be important and consequential and the the economy to be, you know, much better than where I'm from in Botswana.
So it's, it's almost inconceivable for a British person of my age to to think that the UK could ever not be that.
Yes.
'Cause it's always been in my lifetime.
Yes. But that is in many ways, I'm not pinning the blame on you obviously, but that is in many ways how we got here. Because what we thought collectively was, well, look, no matter what we do, we're always going to be Great Britain. We're going to have a great economy. We're going to have a strong military. We're going to have a this. We're going to have influence in the world. And then we started doing lots of stupid things. And that's how we've ended up in the place that we've ended up. So this country has every potential to be great. The people are incredible. The level of education, uh, the scientific and technological advances that this country has produced, the cultural, look at the greatest bands in human history, like half of them are British. Comedians. I mean, stand-up comedy is not a a British invention. It was actually invented in America, but look at some of the greatest comedians in human history. Again, lots and lots of British people. So, culturally, scientifically, technologically, economically, we have the potential. We have to have the correct leadership and the right strategy and those two things have been lacking for a long time. That's how we've ended up here. Can we turn it around? It's going to be very, very, very difficult. But I but we've got to try.
Why would these issues impact us on an individual level? So I'm thinking about the average person listening now, whether they are in the United States or here in Britain.
You know, this stuff happens kind of up above us and we get on with our lives. But what are the symptoms we'll begin to see in this multipolar world or the the fall of Britain?
You are already poorer today than you were 20 years ago per capita in the UK.
In the UK?
Yeah.
That seems to me quite important. And in fact, many of our conversations about domestic issues, whether it's mass immigration and all of these other things, they're really proxies for that conversation 'cause if we, if the economy was growing and people felt richer, all of the stuff would become less important, right?
Well, I think we'd agree with that. So, that's one aspect of it. The other aspect of it is, as I talked about the multipolar world being by necessity more violent and unstable. We are going, you know, you we I don't know when this will go out, but we're recording this in the middle of January. It's been like two weeks since the year started and we've already seen crazy amounts of instability geopolitically already. Is that fair to say? So this will continue and that will bleed through to domestic politics because if you have to spend more of your resources worrying about things abroad, it means you can do less at home and so on and so on and so on. So the the ramifications of this will be very impactful on everybody around the world, more on non-western countries because they, a lot of them are going to be in the front line of this in in the way that I doubt we will be. Uh, but still the consequences for us will be very significant.
And we're seeing adjacent to this, this rise in socialism.
Yeah.
The conversation around socialism. Obviously, Manni has been elected mayor. But do you think this is at all linked to the bigger picture, this rise in socialism?
Yeah. In fact, I I think, you know, I wrote an article a long time ago called "Why I Fear the Future" and I did a video based on it in which I talked about something. It's interesting. I did a live show, um, here in London just before Christmas and I did a book signing and one of the guys came up to me and he said, "I've got two kids. They're both teenagers, daughter and the son, and I'm trying to pull the daughter in from the far left and I'm trying to pull the son in from the far right." That's going to be the big challenge going forward because, um, the amount of chaos and instability and cultural kind of cultural upheaval that we've seen has produced a craving for order. And on the social, that's the right side, you know, we must, you know, get this. And on the other side, it's produced a sense of injustice and the pursuit of inequality. That's why you hear people talk so much about the rich, the rich, the rich, the rich and, you know, "eat the rich," "we got to redistribute all of this stuff" because, particularly in the big cities, young people rightly feel that they can't really get on the housing ladder, they can't establish a family, life is more difficult. So they reach for these very, um, dis disproven, discredited, and completely unworkable solutions of the kind Manni, uh, will of course deliver. But it's because their sense is that the future's been taken away from them. And in many ways, they're correct because, as I said earlier, we have been borrowing from our children and our grandchildren. We've been saddling with crippling debts our entire economy. That will come to an end and it's going to be them that is left to foot the bill and it's going to be very painful. And partly they see that and already they see that they just can't afford the life that they want. I do think in the United States, it's a much more contained phenomenon. I think Manni and if you look at sort of the American socialists, they all tend to cluster around New York and one or two other big cities. It's not like the entirety of America is going socialist. But I think housing unaffordability is one. Another explanation, which I think is also powerful, is what's called elite overproduction. Which is if you have, as Tony Blair did, this idea that 50% of the public should should go to university. Well, they do and then it turns out there's not enough jobs for them. Particularly in the age of AI, where they are the jobs that are being eliminated very rapidly. You then get a lot of people whose entitlement is up here and whose prospects are down here. That produces a tremendous amount of social disease as well. I think this is a really important connected point on the subject of socialism and the rise of socialism that we will see is this point of AI. And when I listen to very, very smart people who are considered to be the godfathers of AI or CEOs who are building these technology companies, there seems to be a consensus that socialism will only increase because the job losses associated with AI are going to be pretty quick and pretty extreme. And, um, I mean, one of them that most Brits won't understand is something we understand now living in America, which is my car drives itself.
Yes.
And I I've said this a few times because I'm really trying to it's like the first moment Eureka moment I think you have is in America when I get in my car, I don't touch the steering wheel or the pedals and it can drive me to Joshua Tree, which is like two and a half, three hours away, uninterrupted. And I say this because driving is like one of the biggest employees in the world. I think it is the biggest profession in the world. And London just announced that Waymos are here. And soon surely Teslas will be allowed to do full self-driving here as well. And in such a world, delivery drivers, taxi drivers, Uber drivers are going to be without jobs. And we're seeing this, um, huge rise in autonomous humanoid robots as well.
And Elon's pay packet says that he he will make a million of these autonomous robots and get them out into the world. And Jason Kakanakis, who just visited Elon's factory, said there'll be a billion of these and he thinks that we won't even even remember Tesla for making cars, will only remember them for the robots they've made because these Optimus robots, which are coming, are going to be so consequential. And the last point here is a very good friend of mine who runs this big sort of innovation accelerator in San Francisco. I visited the the accelerator a couple of weeks back and, um, he, I said to him, why, why is everybody here, all these young founders, these 40, 50 young founders in your building called effing all working on robotics? And he goes, "Well, you know, we've had all the parts for like 20, 30 years, but the expensive part was the intelligence."
The brain.
Yeah, the brain. He goes, "Now we have the brain." He said, "It used to," he showed me this arm, this robotic arm that had a frying pan on it that would cook for you in a box. It just cooks whatever you want in a box. And he goes, "We've had all these parts for the last 30 years that they were cheap." He goes, "The the intelligence part of the brain would cost $20 or $30,000 just for this little robot arm." He goes, "Now it's like 2 cents."
Yeah.
And he says, "So you're seeing this huge explosion in robotics." I don't think people understand what's coming.
No. And going to San Francisco is eye-opening on two levels. Number one is like a quarter to a third of the cars on the road don't have drivers.
Yeah.
And just visually seeing that is so striking. Um, but the other thing is talking to some of the people involved. There is a, there are some people who are fairly sensible about it, fairly responsible among the founders, although they will still say, and I think they're right, that like, if we don't do this, China will, and so we've got to do this.
But there's also a lot, and I I'm sure you've encountered, there's the kind of, you know, that famous Facebook mantra of "move fast and break things." There's a lot of that going on in the AI space.
And so it's going to be hugely impactful. I don't claim to know the the all the little details of how that will play out other than to say it's going to be very disruptive. Uh, and disruptiveness has happened throughout human history. It's always produced a backlash. It's always caused a lot of disease. But then humanity has managed to recover. This is different level and we will see how it plays out. But yeah, of course it's going to be, and yeah, a world in which millions of people, in which millions of people no longer have jobs, and most of them are disproportionately young people who are more prone to extremism anyway. Yeah, that's not a pretty picture.
And one would assume that the wealth will accrue to a few.
Yes.
In such a scenario.
And what's funny is I have said really only half jokingly. I mean, I wrote a whole book about my opposition to communism and socialism based on experience. In a world in which no one has a job, I'm like 100% on board with communism.
Do you think that's the world we're heading towards?
Possibly.
Yeah. But it makes sense. I mean, like you, if you think about it from the perspective of 50 people in the world have all the money in the world, and everyone else has no job. I think a little bit of wealth redistribution is going to be unavoidable in that situation. And it can either happen voluntarily or it's going to happen at the end of bayonets. That's the choice.
When you say communism would be the only choice in such a scenario, what, what does that mean?
Uh, it means everybody gets paid for existing, right? Well, I mean, what else is there? You're going to create fake jobs for people. That's not going to work, right? So if if all the wealth in the world is going to be created by robots, a world in which the products of their labor only accrue to 50 people who had the idea or did the work 20 years ago, that's not going to sustain itself. And so, uh, it would be very, very unwise of those people to attempt to hold on to all that wealth and it would not end well for them in my opinion.
On a personal level, you know, this disruption is going to happen in your lifetime.
Yeah.
Are you thinking much about it or planning for it at all? Did, has it changed any of the decisions you make on a day-to-day basis or month-to-month basis?
Well, I'm very fortunate that I am probably a little harder to replace with a robot just because people don't really want to hear robots' opinions. I would imagine we might get to that point, but I think it's unlikely. So on my my own level, I'm probably, you know, the time scale I'm working to in the next 10 years, I imagine I'll I'll get myself to a point where I'm going to be reasonably comfortable no matter what happens. For my children,
That was us cutting forward 10 years and watching.
Yeah. Yeah. Just totally me just unemployed. Long. I can't believe what happened. For my children, it's a very different conversation. Uh, so a lot of people are like, well, you know, what should I teach my children? And people are, "Oh yeah, this should be a plumber." I don't think you're going to need plumbers 15, 20 years from now either. So I I honestly don't know what that future looks like. And in many ways, that's always been the reality of life for most people. We are living through one of those great transitions in human history in which all you can do is equip your children with the basic skill sets of life as opposed to what might have been done 20, 30 years ago where, like, you you get you go to school to develop a skill, to go to university to build a career. Now you're going to have to show a lot of flex in this modern world. You're going to have to be personable. You're going to have to be resourceful. You're going to have to be creative. You're going to have to go have a a positive go-getter mindset. You're going to have to have those basics nailed down as opposed to, "Here's the career that you've been predetermined to have." Unless, of course, you go into AI and robotics, in which case you probably won't be replaced for at least five years.
I think there's something to the fact that there's an angst with AI. And when you know people listen to podcasts all the time.
Yeah.
They, everyone who has a job in a big corporate environment now is being told by their CEO that you better learn AI or it's going to replace you. So we're living in this moment of,
There's like aliens coming over the horizon and we've spotted them.
They're not quite here yet.
But it's, it's like saying to the general public, look, there's aliens coming and they're coming for your job and everything you value. That angst in and of itself, I think, can drive people towards ideas like socialism understandably.
Yeah.
Because you, you know, it's a, it's a deep existential angst. And also a lot of the AI people, not all of them, a lot of them are being, but a lot of them are being deeply irresponsible and very unwise with their messaging. What? Last time I was in New York, I was walking through Times Square. There was this giant billboard which said, it was the name of the company, which I don't remember, "Stop hiring humans. The age of the AI employees here." I'm going, "Have you really thought about this? Have you thought about putting your company's name on this poster? Do you understand the impact this is going to have on a normal person looking at that?" Um, but they are. So, the thing is with AI, the the positive upsides of it are limitless. Literally limitless. And so a lot of the people who are in that space, that's what they focus on. And they're like, "We can solve cancer. We can solve medical problems. We can have AI that's better than any physicist that can ever that's ever lived that can give us the, you know, the eternal engine or or or whatever. We don't need energy anymore." Like there are all sorts of crazy things that come out of AI that are potentially beneficial. And that is exciting. But the angst that you talk about, I think, is there. And I think it's also quite rational. You just reminded me of a video that came out this week from Elon where he says this. I'll play it for you. I think it's this one.
So, he's talking about, Elon's talking about the robots that are about to be released from Tesla, which are called Optimus. And someone's asking him.
How good they will be at surgery.
What do you think Optimus will be a better surgeon than the best surgeons? How long for that?
Three years.
Three years. Okay. Yeah. And by the way, I say three years at scale.
Yes.
And there will be more probably more Optimus robots that are great surgeons than there are all surgeons on Earth. And the cost of that, but that's an important statement in three years' time.
Yeah.
Um, because medicine, I mean,
Absolutely. If it's four or five years, who cares? It's still an extreme precision.
Yes.
Years.
Um,
Yes, better than any, any probably, I'd say if you like, put a little margin on it, better than any human in four years.
Who's in plastic surgery by five years is not even close.
I think your point was medicine is going to be effectively free. The best medicine in the world.
Everyone will have access to medical care that is better than what the president receives right now.
So don't go to medical school.
Yes. Pointless.
Yeah. Pointless going to medical school.
Look, he knows way more about this than I do. I would also say that I think both the incentive structure and his personal temperament lean towards a kind of optimism and there's a sales dimension to this as well, obviously, 'cause he's one of the people producing the stuff. So, his optimism may be a product of the incentive structure that he's subject to. But even if it's not three years, I I don't think it's more than 10 years. So, that's the time frame. And given how long it takes to train to become a doctor.
Yeah.
I want to talk about the situation in Iran.
We're seeing what one might call an uprising at the moment where protesters are are on the street in a country where it is very, very dangerous, um, and also very brave to protest against the leadership there. Where does this fit in the broader context? What, what the hell is going on?
I am not an expert on Iran, but effectively what's happening in Iran is an attempted counter-revolution. So they had a revolution in 1979. They overthrew the ruler, the Shah, and they replaced him with an Islamic dictatorship, which is what you've had since 1979. And the people of Iran have attempted to overthrow this Islamic dictatorship repeatedly. They've always been brutally suppressed. And that's basically what's happening now again.
And is does this fit somewhere into the broader conflict of geopolitics in the US, the multipolar?
Well, only in the sense that you can see that even President Trump, who's talked quite brashly about what he might do if this sort of gets out of hand, is still not, as we speak, doing anything about it on a on a kind of kinetic level. And that's partly for the reasons that we talked about earlier, which is the United States, the public are deeply, deeply skeptical about foreign interventions. And so the idea that we, that we the West would support a regime change in Iran is not something that you can sell to the American people right now. And so he has to be, he has to be much more careful about what he might otherwise have done in Iran. And so because of that, the leaders of Iran probably feel like they're in a better position to crack down and survive versus what might have happened in the past. I mean, Trump's been quite vocal in what he might do in his threats. He said that the US would come to the protesters' rescue, that we are locked, loaded, and ready to go. He announced that countries doing business with Iran faced a 25% tariff on their trade with the US, ramping up pressure.
And he called for Iranians to keep protesting. Um, and then more recently, he said, "I've canceled all meetings with Iranian officials until the senseless killing of protesters stops. Help is on the way. Mag me mga, make Iran great." Well, Iran, you know, I mean, one thing that should be said is the Persian Empire and the Persian people are a great people with a very rich history. And what's interesting is in attempting to over, I don't know if you've ever seen pictures from Tehran from before 1979, it's like women walking around in miniskirts and and all the rest of it. So, they have a very long history of freedom in a way that we don't tend to think of the Middle East as having today. Uh, and that's that's that's an example of how it's perhaps different from other parts of the Middle East. But you can see the reluctance to actually do anything about it because the question is, well, let's say you do remove the current leadership. Let's say you bring back the son of the former Shah, Reza, he oversees a transition to some kind of democratic thing. Who is there protecting that process from being disrupted by the remnants of the old regime? Who's going to do that? Is there American boots on the ground? 'Cause there's literally zero appetite for that in America. That's the challenge that I think he faces, which is probably why he hasn't done anything.
And how do you think the story plays out?
No idea, mate. No idea. I I have no idea what what's going to happen here. I fear unfortunately that what the regime will do, I'm not saying this is what will happen, but my fear is, and it's one of the reasons that I am I sympathize so deeply with the Iranian people that are rising up against the oppression, but I am wary of encouraging encouraging them unless we are willing to back them fully. This is exactly, in in a way, what happened with Ukraine. There was a lot of rah rah rah and there was not nearly enough support to actually help them defend their country. My fear is there will be a lot of, "rah, we support the Ukrainian people. We stand with them," blah, blah, you know, blah, blah, blah. But ultimately, the regime will kill more of them and it will kill enough of them for this to go away. That's my worry.
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