How AI is Creating A New World Order with Ian Bremmer

25:27Ian Bremmer:Or will it continue to be about the most advanced LLMs and those who control the platforms? Just given the way power works, I'd probably make a bet on the ladder, but I don't think I'd make a confident bet on the ladder because the technology is changing every day. And so it might be that in five or 10 years time that this U.S.-China AI race becomes much, much less relevant. And then all these countries have a shot. But but let's be clear. that doesn't mean they should be investing in sovereign AI, because if that's the model, then they've just wasted a whole bunch of money and resource in something that's going to become completely commodified.

26:11Ian Bremmer:And if it's the US and China that ends up controlling everything because they're ahead and you can't catch up, then you're wasting a lot of money to just be farther and farther in second place. It's not relevant. So I think that the idea that these countries are going to develop a capability that truly competes with the top Chinese and American companies and platforms, that is a fool's errand. And geopolitically, that is a very hard message to deliver to the so-called middle powers right now, because the middle powers do not have an AI play for geopolitical hedging in this environment. They just don't have one.

26:56This is an extraordinarily complex technological and geopolitical environment, especially when you look at it from the perspective of an American ally or wherever they stand today. Because on the one hand, you have American tech companies that an ally would depend on more so probably than China. So in that scenario, you do want to make sure AI stays in somewhat under a liberal democracy. You would feel theoretically better. But that's not guaranteed. There is a very plausible scenario where the U.S. rips an AI technology from its ally if they don't get along with it. And we saw that with Anthropic.

27:30America didn't agree with its own AI company, and it put all sorts of problems in front of Anthropic. So on the one hand, you want to control where AI is coming out of so you can at least have a shot at controlling the technology. But there's also this strange other scenario that you've discussed where there is a world in which the most powerful entity is no longer even just a country, but a company, an AI company. And so the instinct may be, well, OK, well, we can't let that happen. We have to do everything in our power to stop it. And I, of course, would never want to live in some fake pseudo democracy where I'm reporting to some unelected tech leader.

28:08But it's also not as simple as saying, OK, stop AI in this moment. We can't let that world happen. Because as you said, we have to first understand what is the security we depend on when it comes to these tech companies? How much of our national security is deeply coupled with them? And then there's the also plausible scenario that the leading AI company isn't even one in America or in a liberal democracy. It's out of China or somewhere else. And if it is in China, it's inherently coupled with the Chinese government. government. So how do we navigate this scenario? Who navigates this scenario and with what moves?

28:42Ian Bremmer:There is a big difference, even though they feel somewhat similar, between the U.S. technological system where the companies have essentially captured the regulatory environment. So they're deciding, they're acting with functional sovereignty over the models they're deploying, what they do, what their priorities are. In a sense, it matters at this point less that they are in a democracy or not than what their business model is. That determines the product set and how you as a consumer, as opposed to a citizen, will interact with it, within it, be productized by it, etc., be surveilled by it, and so forth.

29:29Ian Bremmer:And the Chinese system where the state captures those corporations and determines who the national champions are, to what aim, what their algorithms are allowed to do and not. Now, it is certainly true that when Anthropic discovered that it had this model that was potentially existentially threatening to any infrastructure with software, they then decided, and some of this could be marketing, some of this could be overstated for their own investment purposes. I would not completely discount that. But even if it's not, that model is coming in six more months, even if it's not here now. So it's a real problem, right?

30:19Ian Bremmer:It's a real issue. They then decide that they're not going to release it publicly, which they had every capability in doing, though I'm a little less worried about that because if they really thought it was a threat and they had actually released it, the legal liability they would have had in response would have brought down the company. So, I mean, you need, if you have any capacity as an organization, you need to recognize that it's not just about regulation. It's also about legal liability. Those things, legal liability functions as a regulation when regulations don't work. So capturing regulation is not the only thing that matters.

30:53Ian Bremmer:But anyway, So they now are working with the U.S. government and they're saying, let's make sure that like the right companies have this capacity so that we're not releasing it irresponsibly. But what we know is that the American government is essentially being purchased, being coin operated by these companies that have lots of money and that can ensure that every senator, every member of the House is is lobbied by them with big checks to do to ensure that there's no regulatory environment that's problematic to them. So for the time being, unless and until there is an existential threat to the U.S.

31:41Ian Bremmer:government perceived from these companies, it is likely that they will be writing their own rules, writing their own regulations. And that means that they're going to have different priorities because they have different business models, different funding models, different funding needs, different competitiveness. And sometimes your business model changes when you think you're running out of money. You have to do different things. Google cannot be evil, but then they have to be a little evil because their business model changes, right? Because they don't have as much cash. All of that kind of stuff.

32:10Ian Bremmer:When those things happen, then suddenly you need to think about which company do I align myself with, right? Because we all have views. When we talk about geopolitics, talk about the world order, we all have views of what we think about China, what we think about the United States. We like one. We don't like the other. Maybe we like the European model more. Some countries are richer. Some are poorer. Some are more open. Some are more closed. But we don't have those conversations when we talk about companies. We basically think, well, they all just want to make money. Yeah, but they make money with different business models doing different things.

32:43Ian Bremmer:Some are B2B. Some are B2C. Some are more short term. Some are privately owned. What about the people that run them? I mean, Twitter was very different under Dorsey than it is under Elon Musk with different priorities, with different political sensibilities, with different demands and outcomes. So if you are a foreign government and you believe that the future of AI is likely to be more driven by companies in the U.S. than by the government, then you should be making a bet on one, two, three of those companies that you believe are aligned most with what you, your own government, your own people stand for.

33:29Ian Bremmer:for with your own national priorities, or you believe that by buying a piece of them or by giving them benefits that you do not afford to other companies, that you can align their models more with you. So there, if you're the Europeans, right, the interest should be less in how you create your own national champion or how you change your regulatory structure to make it tougher for these companies to operate. It should be how do we make one of the American companies also act as a national champion for the Europeans? Do we buy a piece of them? Do we take a minority share? Do we give them some kind of preferencing and try to get them to establish a headquarters that will do X, Y and Z within our own domicile?

34:15Ian Bremmer:Because they are a geopolitical actor and they will act with sovereignty no matter where they are, if they have that capability. and so you need to align yourself with them. You need an alliance with that company the way you would have an alliance with the United States and NATO, but not with another company. I do not yet see governments acting that way, but in a technopolar world, they will need to insofar as we are talking about American companies. Chinese companies, different story, right? And if your bet is that the Chinese are ultimately going to win because they have the scale, they have the long-term model, they'll have the cheaper energy at scale, then all this goes away because then the Chinese government and the companies are going to be together, aligned, and they're going to win.

35:05Ian Bremmer:And by the way, that's plausible. I wouldn't yet make that bet, but certainly the trajectory, the momentum is moving more towards them, even though the Americans have had very, very significant ex-ante leads in so many of these areas. So I want to make note of what you said about there's a very plausible world in which China leads in AI and technology. And I want to come back to that to hear your take on what that would actually mean for people living under that world so people can have some context around it. But what you're also saying is there's actually a better case scenario in the event that an American tech company gets so big and so powerful.

35:45If you're Europe or if you're Canada, that's actually a better scenario for you because then you can in some ways benefit from that global structure of that company because it isn't so beholden to the U.S. because it is so powerful. And every country is going to need AI in some way for economic security and national security. So there's a world in which you want an American company to get really big for your own security. But then there's also this strange scenario where we don't want it to get too big that we all inherently have a de facto Wall Street optimizing leader running our world. So how would you frame it for someone that's thinking, I don't want these AI companies to get too big, but then how do I make sense of the role they're playing in economic and national security?

36:29And how does that differ if I'm an American or if I'm a European and Canadian?

36:32Ian Bremmer:Well, the first thing you want to recognize is what you want may have very little to do with what is happening. You know, it's like it's like Trotsky used to say you sometime you may not want war, but war wants you. Right. I mean, I as an analyst, so much of what I do is try to recognize when my personal interests and preferences have nothing to do with where the world is going. I don't like the GZERO. The world doesn't care if Ian Bremmer doesn't like the GZERO. The GZERO is coming, right? And that's been true, that's been clear for over 10 years. So you may not like or want a world where technology companies become sovereign in determining outcomes for AI.

37:20Ian Bremmer:You will probably have virtually nothing to say about whether that will happen or not. So given that, the question is, what are you going to do about it? Because I recognize that when you start talking about companies as exerting sovereignty, these are very different governance models. Companies are not set up to take care of citizens. They don't I mean, they frequently treat citizens as customers, as clients. Sometimes they treat citizens as products. So that that's already problematic. And some of these companies are actually largely owned by or have special shares for an individual. One guy.

38:01Ian Bremmer:It's almost always a guy. Right. Who knows what they want and they can change. And we see that, you know, the wealthiest in the United States right now, these are the wealthiest people in the world and how little they seem to care about the well-being of people as a whole, how little they donate of their money to humanitarian causes. like 1 % if you're Elon Musk or you're Jeff Bezos or you're Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, it's a rounding error. Obviously, these are not people that we think of as global citizens, right? They're global capitalists. But how do you align them with the interests of your government?

38:38Ian Bremmer:I mean, we already see it's hard to do that with the United States when a new president comes in. Okay, Trump's only there for another four years. And then, you know, the Europeans, the Canadians are hoping that, well, a lot of the institutional connections will still be there. How much do you believe that's true with the leader, with the owner of an individual company? So, but the questions are, what are the incentives that you can put in place? What are the structural controls you can put in place with a company through an equity investment, through your own government's regulations, through tax preferences, through product alignment, right?

39:16Ian Bremmer:I mean, you want to, essentially, you want to look at the leadership, the business model, what it is that the AI does. Again, these companies are not the same. It's obvious, like if you're the Europeans, there's a reason why you would do a deal, you would do an alliance with the United States and not with China. That's less obvious today than it was 50 years ago, but it's still pretty obvious. Well, similar things are true for how one would go about creating, you don't have to call it an alliance, we can call it a strategic partnership, but if technology companies are becoming geopolitical actors, we're talking about alliances.

39:53How do you create collective security between a government, a non-U.S.

39:59Ian Bremmer:government and an American functionally sovereign technology company? And those are really interesting questions that governments should start thinking about. And that, you know, frankly, also the billionaires and capitalists in those countries should be aligned with their governments in thinking about, in facilitating. devastating. The EU, in principle, is in the best position to do this because they are the ones that at scale have some level of economic governance. But on technology, there still is a lack of alignment. And a lot of these countries are doing these things individually as opposed to collectively where they have the market weight, they have the leverage to be able to matter more to a big American platform.

40:47And I think you and I both know that there is no institution, no political leader that is preparing for, or at least acknowledging the possibility of a world in which an ally or an adversary isn't just a country. It could also be a company. And even if that's not the end state that we want, and I of course don't want to live in that type of a world, by acknowledging it, not acknowledging it, you could be inadvertently sleepwalking towards it. But could you briefly just say, so for anyone that's listening and thinking, well, why is AI even that important? So why do we need to make this type of bargain in the first place?

41:20If I'm Europe, if I'm even American, if I'm Canadian, why is this the biggest deal? Why even need to go down this path?

41:27Ian Bremmer:I mean, we should at some point get back to this whole idea that none of the governance that we have right now is remotely suitable for 8 billion people on the planet, all of whom are increasingly interconnected, right? So the idea that we're split into all these little countries and that there's nothing supranational that works to help ensure that people are taken care of, that is, like anyone that looked at this planet from outside would say, this is really dysfunctional. Right. So let's let's recognize that we're not we're not thinking about optimized governance for eight billion people. And my ex ante assumption is those those eight billion people all have worth.

42:05Ian Bremmer:You know, it's not just the people that happen to be born with the right passport that have worth. Yeah. And and we're not going to last as a society for very long when destructive technologies are in the hands of people that don't have effective governance and are left out by people with power, the whole thing is going to blow up if we don't fix this faster than that. But leaving that aside, I think it's almost certain that within five years and maybe within one or two, almost anyone that uses AI regularly will end up having the most important relationship in their life will be with AI. It will, that AI, LLM, bot, virtual thing, whatever you want to call it, will have more knowledge of us, more capacity to engage with us, be more connected to us real time, surveil us, preempt our needs, do work for us than any other relationship we have.

43:09Ian Bremmer:not a doctor, not a lawyer, not a teacher, not a family member. And that, when you think politics, describes how society has relations with each other, not just about governance. Politics is about individual human beings engaging with each other. That is about to be intermediated by AI. It is about to be subsumed by AI. So all politics will become AI infused, engaged, adjacent, impacted. Again, certainly within five years, but maybe faster than that. So it's almost impossible to consider governance in the next iteration of what comes after this GZERO world without understanding how AI is going to impact it.

44:12Ian Bremmer:And if you control those algorithms, if you're the one that's programming them, even though you might not be aware that you have the power to determine those outcomes, you do. Right? You may not know what that power will do. You may not be even thinking about the second and third order implications of it. You may only be thinking about the money you want to make because that's your business model. You just want to productize it, just want to ensure that people are engaged with it, addicted to it, giving you more data, things that you can sell or spending more money on compute and intelligence.

44:47Ian Bremmer:But it doesn't matter what you're doing with the power is of second order importance to the fact that you have it. Right. An understanding of geopolitics must first start with who has power, who has power. And then you look at of those that have power, what are they doing with it? What are their intentions? Are they short term or long term? How do they prioritize those things? Are they effective, right? Or are they kind of incompetent? Then you do those things. But first you look at who has power. And when I look at the next five years, who has power are the people that control these AI. That's it.

45:27Ian Bremmer:But that's where we're going. Some of that will be governments. Some of that will be countries. I hope a lot of that will be people, right? I hope, but I don't know. people, you and I, I think, would like it more living in a place where people had a lot more access to AI, but we wouldn't like it if there was no governance around that, because some of those people are really dysfunctional and angry, right? And it doesn't, as we've just found out from the Strait of Hormuz, it takes a relatively small number of angry people without even much resource to seriously cripple a$110 trillion global economy, right?

46:09Ian Bremmer:Now put AI into that mix. We are not going to make it if we don't figure this stuff out. And I think the only way to put some context on it for someone that's listening and still not grappling with the role AI will play in our life, what if a single person or company owned electricity, the internet and your laptop, and you did or didn't get access to all of that as a package. That is the significance, I think, and maybe even more that AI is going to play in our world. It's more because right now, even if you don't have electricity, people still think of you as a fellow human being, sometimes not very empathetically, but they still do.

46:52Ian Bremmer:If you don't have AI in five or 10 years time, you won't even be engaging with other human beings on the planet. I mean, people were heading towards this hybrid intelligence capacity where we're going to start dehumanizing those that don't have it. So in other words, then the people that control AI, whether it's company or government, decide if you're off of it, are effectively dehumanizing you. I don't know how to describe it more clearly than that. The stakes are truly existential. So when I look at current governance models, whether it's a global governance model, whether it's from a country, none of them are sufficient for this moment.

47:34Doesn't it mean we have to pave an entirely new path here? And it actually can't and shouldn't come down to any one person. It really is an 8 billion people initiative if we want to make sure this works out for everyone. So it's not even just what is democracy 2.0. It is what is this net new structure that we want to build? What is a step we can take? I mean, in your hypotheses, what could that look like and who should be taking it?

47:58Ian Bremmer:So I've spent a lot of time with the UN Secretary General over the last almost decade talking specifically about these issues. I think that there are three different types of governance that are required. It makes it a lot easier when we talk about the specific pieces that we really need, and we need them now. The first should be super obvious, is right now there are two countries that are dominating the opportunities, but also the threats that come from advanced AI, US and China. And Trump is about to meet with Xi Jinping. And there is really no part of that conversation that is about arms control of AI between the two countries.

48:48Ian Bremmer:We had a smaller version of this between the Americans and the Soviets in the nuclear days. And there was an arms race. It was unconstrained until we almost blew each other up in 1962 in the Cuban Missile Crisis. And then after that, we said, oh, we need a hotline. Now we need arms control. Now we need to talk to each other. No, no, no. We cannot wait until that kind of a crisis on AI. So the first kind of governance we need, we desperately need, we need it like yesterday, is we need a US-China AI arms control dialogue to lead to agreements. What are the things that we must engage with together to ensure we do not blow each other up with AI?

49:26Ian Bremmer:That's number one. Number two thing we need, and this is clear from Mythos, and anthropic is that we need to see AI in some ways as a more holistic version of the financial markets. We all need the financial markets. We all know that we need it. And we all know that any market participant can potentially pose a systemic threat to the viability of the financial markets, right? Through misinformation, through a market run, through a collapse, you name it. And when that happens, you have a financial stability board that identifies threats, communicates them to actors that can all have the capacity and the responsibility to ensure the stability of the global markets.

50:15Ian Bremmer:And that's true, by the way. You feel that way if you're the head of the PBOC in China, if you're the Bank of England, the ECB, the Fed doesn't matter, right? You need an AI stability board. You need a group of actors, public and private sector, that have the ability to identify a mythos type threat from whatever corner, as soon as it occurs, inside a company, acting in a rogue way from an individual, you name it. communicates that to the actors globally that matter and then have the ability to react to ensure the sanctity and stability of the system. That's the second kind of governance you need, AI stability board.

50:57Ian Bremmer:And the third kind of governance you need is you need to ensure that AI is available to people around the world. You need some kind of AI fund, right that and and that doesn't just mean everybody gets like a smartphone with ai on it means like africa needs electricity if half of africans don't have electricity they're not going to have ai and and it is utterly urgent because it's not just a digital divide again a digital divide led to big gaps in globalization led to you you know you know the danny roderick globalization elephant that showed like the the extraordinary hump of the top 0.1 percent the the big emerging middle class, but then a whole bunch of people that were still left behind.

51:41Ian Bremmer:We can't afford that with AI. So you have to be able to take the profits of these capabilities to ensure that human beings around the world have access to the most extraordinary ability to improve their human capital and to do it without even having all of the infrastructure built around it. The leapfrogging capabilities of people with AI can be extraordinary in a way that is much harder to do with advanced medicine today, with advanced education today, because you can do it virtually with these tools, but you've got to get them access. And we don't have the money for that right now. We don't have a system for that.

52:21Ian Bremmer:I think that if you were to start with those three capabilities, that would be a really significant move to create the kind of governance that ultimately we're going to need to make it through what should be the most positive transformative moment that humans have ever seen. And is there anyone, any government, any group of people that can be taking that step? Can anybody be voting in a certain way, petitioning in a certain way? Who is best in position outside of just the tech leaders to mobilize some of this? Well, I mean, what you saw with the anthropic U.S. response initially was a component of that because of a threat.

53:04Ian Bremmer:And so I do think that a lot of this will be developed, induced by threats. And I hope the threats will be small enough that we can use them constructively, right, and take advantage of them as opposed to, you know, be debilitated by them. And, you know, so the U.S. private sector, some of them can be a component of this. influencers that are out there. I mean, I wouldn't bother with any of this if I thought it didn't matter. But I've had these conversations, not just with Antonio. I've had them with Christine Lagarde at the ECB. I've had them with a number of heads of state, all of the Nordic leaders, for example, every single one of them.

53:47Ian Bremmer:I've had it with a number of Europeans, the Japanese, the South Koreans. So it's not and a lot of American political leaders, probably 20 senators. So, I mean, you know, individuals that have access to these people or that have big platforms can make a difference. Right. I mean, I think Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, former executive chair of Google, he's worth tens of billions of dollars. He's been driving a lot of the U.S.-China component, was doing it with Kissinger until Kissinger was 100 years old, brought him over to China and was facilitating that conversation. Kissinger's gone now.

54:23Ian Bremmer:Eric doesn't have that access himself to the Chinese leadership. No one does, frankly, the way that Kissinger did. But you can continue to pursue that. So there's all sorts of things that can happen here. But I don't think that it is, there's not one leader that you would say, oh, this is the person that's going to make this happen. I think Pope Leo is inclined on on these issues. And I have not yet met the pope. And I hope I will be able to specifically on AI, because I think that he what I've seen from his writings and his early interventions on this imply that he really is thinking about this in a constructive way.

55:08Ian Bremmer:And, you know, we've got what some 20 plus percent of America that's Catholic like that. A big statement on that from him when he comes to the United States could really matter. But there's no it. You look around the world. It's not like you could just say, oh, if I could only get this person to do this, then we resolve it. We're not there. It's going to have to be built from scratch because the existing this is the problem. We don't have the existing institutions that people believe in and see as legitimate. Most of the people that voted for Trump were more focused on how democracy was broken and someone needed to fix it than people that voted for Kamala Harris, believe it or not.

55:51Ian Bremmer:You know, because they were so angry that they thought that the the uniparty Democrats and Republicans had had just no longer cared about the average American. They were willing to vote for someone that they thought was going to blow the thing. up. So that's the environment we're in globally right now. And is there a difference at all in this being led predominantly by China or a world in which it is Chinese companies that kind of take the reins and that is the rollout? Of course. I mean, there's a difference in part because the Chinese are longer term in the investments they're making and appear to be more risk averse as a consequence.

56:34Ian Bremmer:That's that's useful. Of course, that also means you're making a very big bet on eventual stable succession because we have no idea what comes after Xi Jinping. And we don't know as she gets older and has all that power, will he start losing capacity but not losing willingness to control, which is super dangerous. When you have someone that has that much control of a system, but no longer has the capability to make smart decisions. And at some point, Xi is going to have to either significantly loosen his grasp on power to facilitate that transition, or we're going to be in a very vulnerable position globally.

57:21Ian Bremmer:So I worry a lot about the uncertainty of that in an authoritarian system that's consolidated like China. You have the reality that in the Chinese system, AI is going to be driven much more for national security and for industrial purposes. And they're not going to trust the people as much because they don't want individuals with that level of control over bots that might hallucinate or even worse, might get them information on things that the Chinese government finds unacceptable. So you're less likely to have a decentralized AI revolution in a Chinese model than you would in a U.S. model, where a U.S.

58:03Ian Bremmer:model, as long as it makes a lot of money for a company, they don't mind if individuals are becoming like much more capable. Right. Right. So that that's different. And then then you have the values of the government itself and what that would mean geopolitically for what countries are preferenced and not. If it turns out that the Chinese end up with the best AI, then the companies and the governments that are aligned with the Chinese system are going to be more productive and have more wealth and more opportunities than those that are aligned with American corporates. And that is wholly plausible as we look ahead, say, 10 years.

58:38And how does what we're talking about here today and everything we discussed connect to the state of conflicts we see in this moment and where those could lead?

58:48Ian Bremmer:The state of conflicts, I mean, again, the thing that I think we said that was most relevant here is how the Iranians are much, much smaller than the Chinese, but were able to essentially hit back against the Americans in ways that forced the Americans to back down from escalatory threats militarily. The Americans now saying, OK, well, you know, ceasefire. We're not even though the Iranians aren't engaging in productive negotiations, we're not going back to war. This is the same president said he was going to end their civilization. What happened? Well, it turns out the Iranians have the ability to hit back.

59:25Ian Bremmer:Why? Asymmetric ability to cause pain. And when I think about AI, AI has the capacity to either empower only a small number of individuals in governments and in corporations that control that technology, or it could super decentralize and lead to a whole bunch of actors that have more capacity to disrupt. I mean, we've already seen with drone technology that you've got unmanned drones that have the ability to give the Ukrainians a fair fight against a much bigger, much wealthier Russia with far more people. Right. And now, I mean, the Russians can barely put people on the front lines because they'll get picked off by Ukrainian drones.

1:00:15Ian Bremmer:And increasingly, Europeans need Ukraine more than Ukraine needs Europeans. is. That's new. That's technology. That's not directly the AI revolution. Some of it is targeting and data. But in the next few years, AI will be essential there. And so if AI becomes something that relatively small, not super wealthy actors can deploy in ways that has deterrent value that can cause massive damage, then they're going to be able to defend themselves. And some of them will be able to act like rogues to influence and ensure their stability the way that heretofore really only nuclear powers could, say the North Koreans, right?

1:01:08Ian Bremmer:I mean, this suddenly creates a very different club of countries that have and non-country actors that have deterrent capability. And I'd be remiss if I had you on the line and didn't ask what everybody who's listening right now is thinking. Could we be headed for a much more globally involved conflict in the near future? And if we are, what would we be fighting for? I think the answer to that in the near future is no, because the reaction to the United States acting more unilaterally and mostly focused on its own backyard. And Iran is a big exception, but also a big mistake. And Trump, even though he won't publicly admit it, understands that is that this this is not a U.S.

1:01:59Ian Bremmer:that is itching for World War Three. And as I said, the responses to the U.S. acting unilaterally in a bullying fashion is that other countries don't want to blow this up. So the Chinese are not looking to escalate against the U.S. The Chinese have ability to hit back against the Americans. And so now Trump is deferring more to Xi Jinping and trying to ensure that there's stability and detente between the two countries. Look, I think that if the Ukrainians are able to use their technology to hit the Russians back hard, especially as Putin is not getting any younger and is making some decisions that are very bad for his country, you could see the Russians use a nuclear weapon against Ukraine in the worst case scenario.

1:02:50Ian Bremmer:And that would be utterly horrible, even worse than all of the war crimes we've seen perpetrated against the Ukrainian people. And yet it is hard to see that leading to World War Three. Right. And so, yeah, I think that the worries I have have more to do with the fact that we're unleashing these new technologies that we don't have governance around and they can potentially collapse a market. They can potentially undermine security, lead to an assassination of a major leader, that kind of thing precipitates something much more dangerous. I see that as a bigger concern than the structural regional conflicts that exist today around Ukraine, around Iran, around Taiwan.

1:03:39Ian Bremmer:I don't see any of those emerging into global conflicts, but I do see new technology actors having the potential to precipitate something much greater, much more painful. And in the event that we want to look for examples of leadership in this moment with the leadership we do have that show we are at least some people trying to take the right steps. What are those signals that we can see that we could be steering off towards a road that we actually do want to walk down and one where democracy is at least preserved? I think the fact that Trump is failing in his political revolution because he has decided that he matters more than the American people.

1:04:21Ian Bremmer:So his focus so much more on the kleptocracy, for example, and on decisions that are at odds with the outsider anti-establishment view that he took when he first came in, the drain the swamp reality, that is going to lead to an outcome in the midterms that will be a decisive repudiation of Trumpism, of putting himself over the country, Trump first as opposed to America first. I think that is a positive sign that the American people are angry for good reason, but they ultimately want a political revolution that's constructive, not destructive. They want them one that benefits them. I think the tech lash that we're seeing in the United States is an understandable response to a winner take all model.

1:05:09Ian Bremmer:And people don't like data centers because they don't believe that they're going to have opportunities. As they start believing they'll have opportunities, they're going to feel more like the global south who see AI as a constructive force, see AI as an opportunity for them to do better, even as they don't control it. Even as they have fewer opportunities than Americans, they think their trajectory has more potential. So you need people that believe in the American dream. Ultimately, the last time America went through this was the Gilded Age. And the Gilded Age ended with a depression, but also with a political revolution.

1:05:44Ian Bremmer:with FDR. And FDR tried to do some illegal stuff. He tried to pack the court. He failed. He tried to purge his own Democratic Party illegally. He failed. But he did do some things that were revolutionary that mattered for the country. This was the New Deal. This was the creation of a professionalized administrative state with rule of law that built infrastructure in the country that allowed a middle class to emerge and made the Americans stronger for generations. And that form of political revolution Americans want. And frankly, so do a lot of Europeans. Frankly, so do the Canadians. So the South Koreans, so the Japanese.

1:06:23Ian Bremmer:So, I mean, that I think that ultimately the hope comes from the people, comes from the reaction of the people. And those people do have the ability to drive market forces. OK, in a K-shaped economy, so much of the market forces are being driven by a very small percentage of really wealthy people. But ultimately, companies will not succeed if they're only benefiting a small number of really wealthy people. You need the actual human capital of societies to coalesce for these companies to do well. And even if Elon and Bezos today do not recognize that, their successors will. So that, That to me is where the hope comes from.

1:07:11Yeah, yeah. There's a world in which it's a breakdown, but there's also a world in which this is the breakthrough. And we hope it's the latter.