God Mode: The Technological Battle for Global Domination | Bruno Maçães

22:31Demetri Kofinas:First of all, I think there is this, certainly in American politics today, a tendency to think that we can return to some more natural equilibrium, some more natural state where we can collect the peace dividend of the post-Cold War era without bearing the costs associated with order building. And I think it speaks to this longing. The other thing I really like about it is that it speaks to an observation that I made earlier, which is that I think the generative energies of American empire building seem to have reached either a cyclical or structural state of exhaustion. And I think we underestimate the extent to which the world as it exists today is a world that we have built.

23:17Demetri Kofinas:And that absent our participation, someone else, and this is the important point again, because there is no natural state, there is no equilibrium. Someone else will invariably have to build it. And that's where I think the word soft power is applicable in this framework, and that it has been a net positive force, not only for improving the American way of life, but for much of the world as well. Does that articulation, does anything in that articulation resonate with you? And what are the sort of important questions that you think emerge from this observation? Well, if I argue, we live increasingly, but this is a process that's been going on for centuries.

23:59It's inner structure of modernity of modern societies. If we live in virtual worlds, and modern societies are to a greater or lesser extent of virtual, then the task of building has to be permanent. These worlds have no subsistence or substance on their own. So this is an important lesson. I don't remember the context. Thankfully, I'm starting to forget the book, which took me a few months. I used to know every single passage and where it appears. So I don't remember the context, but that's the main point. And obviously, it has consequences. This idea of the end of history is absurd from this point of view, because you're never in a state of rest.

24:35You always have to be building, and these worlds simply desegregate. And I think you see today that the US has stopped building. It no longer has the mentality of a builder. China, on the other hand, and this is, I think, where I do suggest that China is in a better place right now. What is significant about China is this full focus and attention and investment in the task of building. You could think, for example, and this has happened many times before in history, that China would be focusing entirely on building a very powerful army. But I think they have doubts and very reasonable doubts about this kind of strategy.

25:12Because even if you build a very powerful army in a world with nuclear weapons, you'd essentially be preparing for a thermonuclear war with the United States to decide who rules the world. And a thermonuclear war between China and the United States is fundamentally inconceivable. And it's certainly not a good strategy to become an hegemonic power. So they invest more. Obviously, you have to be prepared. You have to have a strong army. But they're investing more in what I call world building, infrastructure, technology, influence, networks of influence, even new sources of energy that will replace the existing sources of energy.

25:49And you never see China waver from this path, even though it became a lot more difficult, let us say, around 2017, because the US started to try to block those efforts. They have tried to work around those difficulties and they have never deviated. I think this is what Xi Jinping believes in more than anything else, that it's through the technological task of world building that you become a leading power. I think he's fundamentally correct about that. I've even come to believe that scholars are wrong when they think that hegemonic transitions, transition from one hegemonic power to another, happen through war.

26:30I think they don't happen through war. They more likely than not happened through the inauguration of new energy systems. I think that's what happened with the United Kingdom in the 18th century and what happened with the US at the turn of the 20th century. And so China is trying to do the same, trying to replicate what the US and Britain did in the past. Okay.

26:51Demetri Kofinas:So there's another great quote that emerges in the book that speaks directly to what you just said. And you wrote, China conceives of its world building project as something assembled piece by piece. It will be finished when it is ready to be turned on and start operating at full power. I love that quote, by the way, that resonates with so much of what I've learned over the years, studying how China goes about methodically building its version of either a Chinese dominated sphere or an influenced sphere. How would you explain China's approach and vision for building this new sort of global technological future that is fundamentally different from the American or Western one that we have been living, at least in the West, under for the last three generations?

27:35So for China, if you ask a Chinese author or intellectual, they'll tell you the predominant value is harmony. And harmony doesn't mean what we think it means in the West. It doesn't mean this sort of peaceful existence. It means something closer to what we would call synergy or system. It's the idea that every part works better and magnifies its power if it's integrated into a global system. Then you have synergies at work. And this is what China is trying to do, to build a system where each part is for the sake of the whole and therefore is magnified in its efficiency and influence. They're doing this in different ways, but they're not that strange.

28:21The more I studied China, the more I realized it's essentially what the United States did in those decades from 1870 to the Second World War. Create new energy sources, create new trade patterns, potentially create a new currency or a new currency system. Influence ideas, essentially try to build a world and try to invite everyone else to join your world. This invitation is not necessarily coercive. It can have some coercive elements. You can tell people that you either join or you don't get this, but there's an element of offering other countries more possibilities that they would have outside the Chinese system.

29:02That's happening as we speak, right? Particularly when it comes to energy. Let's look at Pakistan. China offered Pakistan two things that are very difficult to resist. When Pakistan started having trouble buying LNG because Europe was sucking in all the LNG that was available. Some LNG carriers actually had to turn around when they were docking in Karachi and go to Europe a couple of years ago. They asked China to provide them with solar panels. And now Pakistan is one of the eight leading countries when it comes to solar. And of course, these airplanes that were so important in the war against India a few months ago.

29:36So this is how China works. You offer possibilities to other countries that they won't have outside your system. And slowly you draw them in. But this is what the US did when it created the American world a century ago. Okay.

29:50Demetri Kofinas:So let's try to draw out a distinction between what America did a century ago and what the Chinese are doing today. Because I went into this book not really seeing a big difference. And still, it took a little bit of time for you to convince me while I was reading it that there is a difference. And that difference, it seems to me, is around technology. That while previous orders were focused much more on either acquiring land and resources, or in the case of the Americans, building a panoply of international institutions and normative standards, including the spread of our political economic model, the Chinese have an opportunity to oversee the build out of a new set of technological standards for a suite of technologies that threatened to subsume reality in a way that no previous ideologies or memetic superstructures were capable of.

30:40Demetri Kofinas:And that we go from a world where these systems of power operate in a manner that is covert to one where they become completely invisible. So it's not necessarily distinction in kind, but in degree, and the degree is significant. So how would you articulate this argument that you make in the book about how geopolitical power and competition have shifted from these traditional struggles over physical territories and natural resources and ideologies toward a contest to control these critical technologies of modernity and the virtual landscapes that derive from them? The more virtual the world you're building is, the greater your power.

31:22Because after all, reality is an obstacle to the power you want to exert. So the more you get rid of reality, the more power you have. In the book, I try to present what would be the final stage of this process. And I actually think it's AI. By the way, people think AI is about intelligence because it seems much more about a virtual world that what AI does is to build a virtual world. That's a couple of essays we can link if you do that that have emphasized this. I think we're seeing it more and more that AI essentially now creates a sort of bubble that you inhabit, which is extremely dangerous, by the way, because this is a bubble that is meant to explore and incentivize your narcissism that offers you your own version of reality.

32:09But at the geopolitical level, it's also extremely powerful because if we imagine that one of these language models becomes universal and starts to be implemented everywhere, from, for example, central banks to schools to advertising to public policy, then the biases that are introduced into this model, and it's always there, are going to determine how people think about reality, and they will take it as reality. I saw a couple of days ago, or yesterday, that the Swedish prime minister is now using one of these language models, probably chat GPT, to help him think about policy. Thankfully, he's not making policy alone.

32:47But if you were making policy alone, and in some countries that may be the case, you could say this AI model is already ruling Germany. Because if he asks, if I do this, will it create inflation? And the model says, yes, he won't do it. So this is essentially the point where reality has been replaced by a model.

33:06Demetri Kofinas:Okay. So this wasn't where I was going with this line of inquiry, but I do want to ask this question and then maybe we'll find our way back into the geopolitical aspect of the discussion. And the question has to do with how people use these models. So for example, I actually have started using ChatGPT to speak to ahead of an interview. This actually started, listeners know I talked about this. It started because I did an episode with the head of Millet's Doge department and there were no good books. I mean, there was one good book that I'd read years ago on the Argentine economy. It was focused very much on the bankruptcy in the early 2000s.

33:39Demetri Kofinas:But there was no good book in English that I could find on the Argentine economy and the history of Argentine politics. So I took a bunch of these books that were available. I asked ChatGPT, what books would you recommend that I read? He gave me a bunch of books that were in Spanish. I then fed those to ChatGPT and we talked about the books. And it was incredibly helpful. And I was able to draw on my own knowledge and my own ability to ask questions. And so I actually find it very useful. I don't find it useful as a source of canonical truth. So do you believe that what's going to end up happening is that like so many other technologies, just like Google Maps, for instance, or reviews on the internet, that we will eventually just come to default, take whatever answers this software provides us, and that we will cease to think critically ourselves?

34:25Demetri Kofinas:Is that sort of where you think this is all going? Yeah. Well, first thing you have to realize these models are virtual reality simulators. That's what they are. In a virtual reality simulator, you're flying an airplane and you hit the commands or you turn right or left and the model responds to your prompt in a simulator, right? A headset, a virtual reality headset. And with the model, it's the same thing. Your prompts are, what do you think Millie is going to do about inflation if this or that happens? That's equivalent to a prompt in a virtual reality headset. What's interesting about that.

34:57Demetri Kofinas:Just to add quickly to what you're saying is that it isn't just true for instances where the model is prompted to theorize about something that hasn't happened. It's also true in cases where the answer should be readily apparent. And it's the same reason why these models hallucinate, because when you prompt them with a question, what they're doing is providing you with an answer based on their understanding of the statistical structure of the corpus of data that they've been exposed to and the rules that they've intuited from that data. It isn't that they know what the answer is. It's that they're modeling in real time what they think makes sense statistically.

35:32They build a model, which is virtual, and it can approach very closely to the world we know, which by the way has been built by our brain, but it's never the same. And that's why you're always going to have hallucinations. It's not possible not to have hallucinations because this is a simulator. And a simulator always has possibilities that are not present in the physical world because the physical world is not a simulator. And in the book, I give the example of a Taylor Swift song about Shakespeare or a Shakespeare sonnet about Taylor Swift. It's very close to our world. You're just mixing a couple of things.

36:01People like this freedom that the model gives them. But again, this is not intelligence. This is simulation. And that's what people like, the ability to simulate. But obviously, I'm very worried that you take these things for reality. You take them for truth when in fact they are simulation. So that's, I think, the problem. And then there's a second problem. As we told at the beginning, I'm more concerned with the second than with the first. The first would be for a different book. Who built the model? And according to its specifications and according to its biases. I think this is going to be the fundamental question, of course, because the superpowers will be there sooner or later, if not there already.

36:39Okay, DeepSeq was not built by the Chinese Communist Party because it's still too early. By the way, first you want DeepSeq to become accepted worldwide and you make it open source without biases. I asked DeepSig, what's the most evil country in the world? Do you know the answer? May have changed now, but when I asked it -

36:56Demetri Kofinas:Not the United States? No, Russia. Yeah, because of course the data comes from mostly the internet as we develop it in the West. But one time in the future, this can be very easily tweaked and this will be the world we'll be inhabiting inside these models. I just wish, we've been talking about artificial general intelligence, that we'll be talking about an entirely virtual world. That's a different acronym, but that's what we're trying to do here. And it's very geopolitical in its nature. Okay. So this is probably a good opportunity to bring up the work of Walter Riston, who I wasn't familiar with until you mentioned him in your book, as well as a particular book that he wrote in 1991, which is an interesting day to reflect on in light of your earlier allusion to Francis Fukuyama's article, The End of History, that was published in 1989, also around that same time in anticipation of the collapse of communism.

37:46Demetri Kofinas:Is that your view that we stopped building after the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union? Was that when the United States really stopped engaging in world building in your view, or is that when the generative energies of American order building began to peter out towards the end of the 1990s? It could be. I think I have a kind of a different narrative that what did it was China's rise. China's rise convinced the US that the current model that was built by the US is not working. And so convinced, unfortunately, from an American perspective, it convinced pretty much everyone that it was better just to destroy it, to dismantle it, and to go back to a physical world of power, let us say, rather than rebuilding on different bases, for example, could be an alternative.

38:34Or, you know, keep playing in the same model. sooner or later, we'll come out on top. After all, we built it. That could also be an approach that I don't think would be deranged, make some sense. And this is what the American establishment argues all the time. Let's keep playing the same game. We'll win in the end. But most people, and Trump took advantage of this, just said, we're losing. If we keep playing this game, we're losing. So I don't think it came out of triumphalism. It actually came out of fear. Fukuyama, I don't like his book. By the way, he didn't write a blurb for me once saying that he only writes blood for close friends.

39:06So I guess I can also criticize him publicly. The book is very confusing because he argues that history is coming to an end. We've all agreed on this model. And then in the last page, he says, maybe not. Maybe everyone will be so bored that history will continue out of boredom. You create history to fight your boredom. Obviously, that's not what happening at all. If you look, it's not that people in America are bored. They, in my opinion, are full of fear, anxiety, and hatred. These are opposite passions. There's a sense that the world is not working anymore, that we're losing, someone else is winning.

39:42This is not boredom coming out of triumphalism. So I think, I guess I would disagree because this line of thinking would take us in the opposite direction from what I want. In the book, I talk a little bit about how we got to this point and I think it's China's rise. There are other factors, but China's rise is really quite important. Immigration, but immigration is the same dynamic. Suddenly, immigrants are coming in and rather than wanting to integrate, they have lost faith in our values, Western or American. And so they want to have a little more money than they can have in Pakistan or Egypt or Sudan, but they want to live according to their own values.

40:20But it's the same dynamic, makes people in the West very anxious, very doubtful, very afraid. And it's fear that is driving this. And then Trump just says, okay, let's destroy this whole thing, throw the chess board into the air. We have more power. We have a more powerful army. We're going to play the game on different terms now, not according to the rules that we built, but according to a sort of direct clash between the power we have and the power everyone else has. I think this is going to be extremely destructive. Although at first it works very well. In the first few months or years, it works very well because you do have an imbalance of power.

40:56But at the same time, you're completely undermining this imbalance of power, the sources of your own power, and soon enough, it will stop working. That's my firm belief, at least.

41:05Demetri Kofinas:That's interesting. I think I agree. I think I agree that China may be a good origin point for thinking about when we stopped building, but I'm not sure that 2016 is the date where I would choose to start the clock. But I do distinctly remember in the early 2000s that there was this operating assumption that people seemed to have that had entered the popular discourse. And you could even see it in films where people ran with this idea that the future was going to be Chinese, that China was the future. And there was a kind of broad acceptance of this assumption within certain circles in American society, specifically, I think, in the commanding heights of American financial and cultural power.

41:50Demetri Kofinas:Any areas really where people were making money as a result of the world that had come into being after the fall of the USSR. So I remember that there was this movie called Loopers. I don't remember exactly when it came out, like 2012, I think, or something like that. And by the way, there's just one example. I mean, there are many instances where I recall seeing things like this referenced in film, but Jeff Daniels' character in the film and one of the loopers, and I'm not going to get into what these loopers were, what they did. But this particular looper, the protagonist of the film, was studying French.

42:23Demetri Kofinas:And Jeff Daniels' character says to him, don't learn French, learn Mandarin. And the looper goes, yeah, I like French. I'm going to learn French. And Daniels then forcefully responds and says, trust me, I've been to the future, learn Mandarin. And this was the message that was being delivered, that I feel like we were being told, which was shut up and accept it. This is an inevitability. And so on that front, I do think that it was healthy to reject this, what was an entirely artificial framing about the inevitability of Chinese cultural and economic domination. What I would agree with is that the way Trump and his coalition have gone about rejecting it by simply destroying what it is and not offering to build something new is the wrong way of going about this.

43:14Yeah, because in the end, there's no natural world where the competition can take place. If you're destroying the world as it exists now, there will be a period of chaos where we live among ruins, and then someone else will build something else. So I think it's fundamentally mistaken. I have a slightly different reading of that process. By the way, the book took its inspiration from this sentence that I kept hearing in Washington. You're right about that part. that we're going to live in a Chinese world. It wasn't a Chinese century, which is a sort of a more intelligible expression. But when people said a Chinese world, I started thinking, well, it's an interesting expression, a Chinese world.

43:50And do we live in an American world? And let's try to take this literally, Chinese world and American world, where will that take us? And that's how the book started, in fact, in my mind. But I think, and I think I have a very personal experience of this because around 2017, 18, I was writing about China. I was going to a lot of think tank meetings in Washington to talk about this. People loved it when I said that, maybe I said it even more than now, that we're heading towards a Chinese world or Chinese century. But they liked this idea because they regarded it as a wake up call. And so they thought it was healthy.

44:25And so even conservative think tanks would love to hear about this. But they never took it seriously as an actual prediction about the future. Again, it had the functional role of waking people up. But there was always the confidence that once we wake up, and inevitably we will, the question was always about whether to wake up in 2017 or are we only going to wake up in 2024 and we want to wake up early. But there was always the full confidence that once we wake up, China won't stand a chance. I think the really traumatizing moment happens, and it may be quite recent. For some people, it may even be the last six months, when the US starts to realize that its levers are not working well anymore, and there aren't that many levers left in the cupboard, and maybe we can't stop this.

45:10This is the real trauma. It's very different from the moment you were describing a decade ago or 15 years ago, where it was just a wake-up call. But when Trump kind of goes full steam ahead in this economic war against China, and then has to backtrack, I think the consequences of this, I've said on some podcasts or interviews already that I think 20, 30 years from now, that moment is going to be regarded as extremely important.

45:33Demetri Kofinas:Which moment specifically? The moment when Trump, we could even give it a specific day if we go and look. The moment when Trump realized that he can't do that and he had to take back the tariffs and start negotiating with China and bring those tariffs down because of two things. First, people start telling him that the supermarket shelves are going to be empty, that Christmas is going to be over, that inflation is going to go through the roof. That's number one. Number two, the rare earths and the impact on the auto industry and perhaps military industry and so on. And so he has to, of course, Trump is very good at this and sort of hiding his backtracking, but it was very clear.

46:10And I think not only will historians talk about it a lot, but also I think people around the world noticed. And it was a real moment of affirmation for China. And I think Xi Jinping actually this time around, I'm not a big fan of Xi Jinping's strategic genius, but I think this time around he played these cards very well. He knew that he was waiting for the moment where, it's very dangerous for a superpower to bluff. And the US had been bluffing for many years. And this is the moment when China decided to call the bluff. And I think the call was heard around the world, China's call of America's bluff.

46:43So it was a really important moment, more important than anything else that's happened in the past six months than an Israeli-Iran war or so on, in my opinion. I do this a lot. I try to project myself 20 years from now and see how people would look back. I think it was a really important moment. Because running out of levers, running out of tools, it's a moment of real anxiety or even panic, if you want to call it.

47:03Demetri Kofinas:So maybe we'll have a chance in the second hour, Bruno, to sort of explore more of what you think the world will look like 20 to 30 years from now. That'd be an interesting conversation. But let's go back to Walter Riston, who I mentioned earlier that got us detracted into a conversation about Francis Fukuyama and the end of history in the 1990s, when did we stop building? And Walter wrote this book called The Twilight of Sovereignty, which he published in 1991, in which he argued that, quote, no one is in control of the new technologies that were coming to force during that time, and that the new system that was coming into being was not one built by states, but by the technology itself.

47:41Demetri Kofinas:What do you think he meant by that? And how does that view differ from what you're proposing about the present moment. So what's odd about these books, like this one, but others that were published in the 80s, and I'm now old enough to kind of remember a little bit of the late 80s. You know, a book like this back then would have been regarded as so obvious that maybe people would criticize. The book is very smart, clever, well-written, so it would always not be that criticized. There were worse books, but criticized for saying the obvious. And now, 30 years later, you actually have to make an effort because the idea sounds so odd that you have to make a real effort to try to understand them.

48:19What is the idea? Can you enunciate that, please? The idea is that power is disappearing. For example, sovereign power, the power of states. And so this was obvious back then. I remember it. And now it's just so odd, so weird that someone would say this, that you have to make an effort about what exactly is he saying? And as far as I can tell, what he's saying is, when you have a knowledge economy and sort of not the cliched knowledge economy, but a real knowledge economy where everything is knowledge because of microships. Microships are knowledge and microships are everywhere. That's his argument.

48:50Once you have this kind of knowledge economy in a very literal sense, states can no longer control it. Knowledge flows. There are these virtual worlds being built. He talks a lot about that. And virtual worlds have no connection to territory. And that means two things. First, states can't control these worlds anymore because they exist above territorial borders. And second, because territorial borders don't matter anymore, and this was the source of conflict and state power, there won't be any conflict or state power anymore. States will want to be open to knowledge and so on and so forth. This is kind of the constellation of ideas, which now has to be reconstructed because we no longer have intuitive, natural access to this way of thinking.

49:30Things have changed so dramatically in 30 years, this has almost become a foreign way of thinking. I'm like trying to interpret the Aztec language and the Aztec way of life. I mean, it is striking. But that's, I think, what it means. And this turned out to be completely wrong. And it turned out to be completely wrong because of the problem of world building. Because he's correct that these virtual worlds exist, but he forgot, unfortunately, you know, it was not the time to realize this. He forgot that the worlds have to be built. And they are built by someone. And once they are built by someone, that someone has enormous powers over the worlds that were built.

50:05And so I think I say in the book that my book follows very naturally from Walter Riston's book. It's almost like a second part, if you regard it as an evolution in time. This is where we were, but now look, there's an element that wasn't talked about, and this will take us in a different direction.

50:21Demetri Kofinas:So before I move us to the second hour, Bruno, let's try and tie off one loose thread and directly address the contest between these two competing visions that we've been talking about the Chinese vision of the future and the American vision, which isn't entirely clear anymore like what that even is. And I think part of the problem that we have is that we don't even know who we are anymore. It feels like America is in this place right now where we're grappling with trying to answer that more fundamental question. And until we do that, we can't really put forward a larger vision of how we want the world to look or what type of world we want to build.

51:00Demetri Kofinas:And I don't think that we're even aware that there is an ideological competition underway. I mean, we were very conscious and attuned to the contours of the ideological competition between the US and the Soviet Union during the period of the Cold War. We understood that both sides were proponents of a radically different political and economic model, and that we were both trying to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the world and build an order around those values and beliefs, but there isn't anything similar happening today in the public discourse. And in fact, I feel like if anything, America is becoming more like China, not in terms of its economic model, but in terms of its totalitarian tendencies.

51:40Demetri Kofinas:I mean, anyone arriving from an overseas flight who has to pass through American immigration can attest to this. And it's not something that just happened in the last few years. This move toward trampling on civil liberties and becoming more of a surveillance state has transpired over the course of several decades, since I think at least 9-11. So are these competing visions to the extent again that we can put a temporary placeholder on the American vision that leans on what we would have traditionally called a liberal order? Are these visions inherently conflictual or are they actually in fact potentially complementary at this point?

52:18They are rival models. I don't believe in the clash of civilization. I believe in kind of the growth of civilizations. One grows, the other declines or shrinks and so on. This is my model. I think they represent different civilizations. We can try to look at the differences. What I think is true is that the US, as you said, doesn't know very well what it represents anymore. I think this is what reduces the ideological or the civilizational conflict because if you don't know very clearly what you stand for, that conflict will be reduced, but not for the good reasons, simply because you actually don't know what you're representing.

52:50Allow me a little diatribe against the US. It won't take long, but along the lines of what you're saying, I'd like someone to try to use software to have like a word count used by American officials. It seems to me that all the verbs are negative. It's like contain, stop, reduce, and so on. Applied to China, but not only to China. But you have almost no positive verbs of build, construct, create, develop. They don't appear in any speech. It's almost now become normal that you're going to have a speech about containing, stopping, reducing, slowing. It's asphyxiating. And second, the amount of fear you see in America.

53:25Last time I went to the US a couple of months ago, yes, the immigration is a little different from what it used to be. I said at one point, I'm a writer and I immediately regretted it because now I'm going to explain what I write about. But anyway, when I was studying in the US 20 years ago, I once crossed with a bag full of Spinoza books and that also created a problem. So that is not a recent thing. What is a recent thing though? And they wanted to know who Spinoza was. So I gave a 20 minute talk about Spinoza. But what is very recent is this. I was at a dinner at an embassy, a European country in the US.

53:57We're talking about Exet, the defense secretary and a former Pentagon official that is already retired. And so I guess he felt free. He insulted Exet, like many people do in Washington. Everyone around the table, mostly concurrent Trump officials, think tankers, started looking at their shoes. And I could sense these people, they don't want to agree or disagree. They don't want to be here because they don't want this conversation to be reported and to be reported that they were there. Because whether it's going to be reported that they defended Exet is very contingent, might be or might not be.

54:31So they just don't want their name to appear in a conversation of this kind. This is exactly my experience in China when I lived there. Also, people are very uncomfortable with these things, and they start to look at their shoes. I don't think this is convergence of models. This is just a kind of disaggregation of American liberalism that I think comes out of fear, anxiety about losing the global competition. You feel that rules and laws are too soft. They don't work anymore. We need strong power, executive power. And I think that's where it's coming from, honestly. I think there's a turn towards authoritarianism that, in my view, comes out of a sense that in order to fight China and all the other threats that we need these strong tools.

55:11Demetri Kofinas:That's interesting. I don't know. I mean, some of that definitely resonates with me, but we've seen a growth in executive power and a trampling of the constitution going back to, well, I mean, I feel like we've gone through cycles of executive power waxing and waning since the founding of the Republic, going at least all the way back to the Alien and Seditions Acts. but executive power has certainly been on a supercharged growth trajectory since at least FDR's administration. And I think the overall trend has been one of growing executive power. I mean, I remember, this is a bit of a sort of segue, but I remember when George W.

55:51Demetri Kofinas:Bush made a comment early in his first term about how he wished that he were a dictator because everything would be a lot easier. And of course he laughed when he said it because it wasn't something that even he could seriously contemplate. And I feel like we've gone from presidents wishing that they could do something like that to now giving into those desires and dispensing with any sort of constitutional processes and cultural conventions that have traditionally constrained the office in favor of just getting things done, expediency and the growth of personal power. So, a kind of unrestrained wish fantasy of executive primacy.

56:35Demetri Kofinas:And what's especially concerning is that no one seems willing or prepared to stop it. How wide executive power is was always an open question in the American tradition, and it varied as you said. But there were limits, there were borders. The area could be very wide, but it was ultimately constrained, and so you could decide what the area is. Now it's a completely different situation. A couple of days ago, there was this insane moment connected to this in an interview with Trump, where the interviewer asked him whether Diddy is going to be, I said, Diddy, they're going to be pardoned or not. And yeah, whatever it's called.

57:11Demetri Kofinas:And you know what Trump answered? I mean, it's one of those moments. He said, I don't think so, because he said really nasty things about me. And, you know, he discusses it with the interviewer. And there's absolutely no awareness from either one that this is not an argument that what has happened between Trump and this individual is completely irrelevant to the question of whether he should be pardoned. But the interviewer actually goes along with it. So this is personal power. This is in fact the disappearance of the state. This is the replacement of the state with a personal will, with its idiosyncrasies and personal desires.

57:51This is what a monarch would answer. But what is incredible is not that he said that, but that around him, there's an environment of people who seem to think, I could imagine the viewers, this was Fox News, I could imagine the viewers at home nodding their heads and saying, yeah, yeah. Well, if he really said some nasty things, then maybe he shouldn't be pardoned. What? This is absolutely insane. And I'm surprised that people don't realize how insane and dangerous the moment is. this is an understanding of power that hasn't been around in Western societies for centuries.

58:22Demetri Kofinas:Yeah, that's very well said. Just to add to that before I move us to the second hour, Bruno, not only is it an understanding of power that hasn't been around for a very long time, but I would also say that people's understanding of power in general or their ability to visualize it, to see it, to name it, is something that's missing in the public discourse. I mean, we talk about power on this show quite a bit, but I don't feel like it's adequately discussed. Who has power, how is it being wielded, and to whose benefit? So I'm going to move us to our conversation in the second hour, Bruno. Let's continue this conversation about power and governance, and let's tack onto that an exploration of what governance looks like in a virtual world.

59:02Demetri Kofinas:And then I'd like to explore how the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and climate change, as well as the physical environment factor into your thinking because you devote an entire chapter to each of these topics in your book. And then let's take a look at all of these lessons and all the insights that derive from the book and from this conversation and construct some thought experiments about what the world is going to look like 20 or 30 years from now, things remain on their current trajectory. And if the United States does in fact either recede from the world, it has built, or perhaps even worse, decides to destroy it entirely.

59:37Demetri Kofinas:For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Bruno, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Bruno, stick around. We're going to move the rest of our conversation onto the premium feed.

1:00:17Demetri Kofinas:If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.