The Collapse of Global Society ft. Dee Smith

33:15Then we've got the rise of, I don't know, two factions of Islam, which has a population larger than the Christian population of the world now. The world is really splintering in a different set of ideals. How does this all play out with the terms of the geopolitics? Or are we just, we just have to accept everything's splintered and everyone will drive a wedge into their part? Well, certainly the latter is very possible, even probable. But I think the way it plays out is that as people get more desperate for things, water, food, And this is another issue. We waste 30 to 40 percent of our food in the U.S.

33:5830 to 40 percent of our food is wasted. It doesn't go anywhere. You can easily pull up pictures on the Internet of mounds of things, eggs and turnips and all of it edible. And it's thrown out because of this or that reason, rule sets or whatever. And yet 800 million people go to bed hungry. And the price of food has doubled in many places, including a lot of it in the U.S. The last time that happened, by the way, in North Africa was called the Arab Spring. And that was the ultimate, maybe not ultimate, ultimate, but it was the fundamental cause of what happened because people simply couldn't. This guy just got so frustrated and he lit himself on fire and the fire spread across the Middle East.

34:45And that had to do with a lot of things. Again, it's interesting to peel that back and look at, for example, the change to cash export products in places like Syria instead of growing things people could eat. because and so you know you've got all these parts of the system reinforce each other because we went to a globalized system and not a localized system so suddenly you get fragilities you didn't imagine that's right and uh and and so you know as i said when people have nothing to eat you know try it i mean just you're going to do whatever you have to particularly if you have children. And so it becomes a situation which, as you said, if we have to drive a splinter between ourselves and everybody else, then we can grow just enough food for ourselves, so be it.

35:48But we now live in a world of hypermodern weapons. And as we've seen with these various old conflicts that are now popping up everywhere, the power of even relatively unsophisticated products with a certain kind of strategy of, you know, asymmetric warfare and that sort of thing, that that.

36:13essentially changes the nature of warfare because it means that large groups, nation state type groups, no longer have the ability to influence that they used to. It used to be the U.S. could just park an aircraft carrier off a country and everybody's like, okay, we'll behave. And now it doesn't matter because the asymmetrical advantage, people have learned to use it in terms of technique, in terms of weapons, cyber weapons, bioweapons, haven't seen yet in any major way. All these other things that when people get these grudges, that's the wrong word. When they become subject to the politics of grievance, then there's nothing to hold them back, particularly when they have nothing to lose.

37:09And so, you know, you're in a situation where they're going to do what they can. And that then becomes, you know, hell on earth. I mean, it's just, it's what's happening today in the Middle East. It's what's happening, you know, it's what's been happening in Ukraine. It's what's probably going to happen in Taiwan. And there are all these old conflicts that are now coming loose. And you have these major nation state armies, however good or militaries, however good or bad they actually are, like Russia, thinking, oh, well, we can swat those Ukrainians apart. No, it doesn't work anymore. And let aside the fact that most of the money that was supposed to modernize their army went into the Swiss bank accounts of politicians and military officers.

38:04But that's been the case all over the world, too. And that goes then back to this individualism and the kind of Margaret Thatcher. I don't think you can have, and I am, as you know, of a capitalist bent, but I don't think you can have a stable social situation in which you say there's no society. They're just individual interests. I don't think it's true. And I don't think it's feasible. And yet that's the raison d 'etre. That's the philosophy. Well, that's the Ayn Rand philosophy, right? It is. And yeah, the argument is, is that's unlikely to work because there's no societal cohesion. If you don't give a shit about your next door neighbor, why do you give a shit about your country?

38:54Or why do you give a shit about anybody's value system? Because it's all about me, me, me. That's right. Yeah. And that goes all the way up and all the way down. And, you know, I think we're going to have to, and this would get to sort of, I guess, the last point I would think of making right this second. I think we're going to have to find a different philosophy, a different way of approaching life. And I think it's just going to be very, it's going to have to be something very different. And one of the things that troubles me is that we're looking for love in the same old places. We're looking at all the old systems over and over.

39:40And, you know, New Zealand just voted itself far to the right today or yesterday. And, you know, they don't even want to be. They're not right, but they just want change. But they see the metrics or the possibilities of change within this narrow band. And that band includes, you know, let's just say to put it simply, you know, communism and socialism and capitalism. And it may be that what we need is outside all of those things. And it certainly may be that what we need is outside these old religions that are predisposed to authoritarianism and autocracy. And that's the mentality they create. But how do we get from here to there?

40:31I mean, I don't know. Well, I mean, I know there are other alternatives, but they're not current. They're not in the mix of things people think about. And also, you know, talking about the kind of left and the right, you know, everybody's observing this. Obviously, the social media and everything accelerates it. But it kind of the bell curve of society used to be quite centrist in the middle. And then there was very few on the far left and far right wasn't kind of tolerated within societal construct. what we've done is massively flatten the bell curve. And there's huge tails in the very left and very right.

41:05And the more that happens, the more volatile culture and society is because there's so little agreement between the two, which makes everybody more angry and confused. It's, you know, I don't know what stops that. You know, a lot of people think that warfare stops it. Well, warfare will stop it if it's bad enough and it kills enough people, I suppose. But, you know, that is at such a level that the destructiveness of it is incomprehensible. I mean, we wouldn't survive it as a civilization. People would survive it and they'd rebuild something in a thousand years or whatever. But it's almost become what they call a power law distribution, which is the inverse of a bell curve.

41:54And that a great example of that is a sand pile. There's a scientist named Per Bach, I believe, who studied this quite interestingly. And, you know, you would think, OK, well, you drop a single grain of sand on a sand pile and then at a certain point a single grain drops off. No, you drop single grains and the thing grows and grows and goes and then collapses. And that kind of phenomenon is as much a part of nature as the bell curve. But, you know, we've been very fortunate in the last 50 to 70 years to live in a world that where the horror, the recoil from how World War II ended and how the results of it made everybody just, okay, we've got to do something else.

42:48And for a while at work, and we also lived in a world which was climatically stable and where we hadn't pushed up against the resource constraints of the planet. All those things are gone. And so, you know, we're now facing and I don't this is not our kids problem. It's our problem. It's going to it's happening. And I don't know if you've looked at any of these astonishing graphs of temperatures this year. but I mean they're there you know you've got this band you know winter uh summer winter kind of thing and and then they're up here there I mean they're it's just suddenly jumped and you know well we all know what the summer was like even the winter in the uh southern hemisphere and you know but we're just we've got our heads in the sand about it but it's not just that well because it's become politicized.

43:43So therefore, it's like bananas, but it's now become a politicized thing. Because if you do that, you're against fossil fuels, and that's against jobs in America, and that's against me driving my big car. It's like, it's not, you know, I don't know how that happened. And but that's also part of a larger phenomenon, because it would, if you had talked, we'd been talking as we were five years ago, if we've been talking on the subject of a pandemic, And by the way, there was a whole section on pandemics and world on the brain that got left on the floor. We just couldn't do it all. Even though we had five hours, we couldn't do it all.

44:21But if we'd been talking about that and I had told you or you had told me that a microorganism is going to become completely politicized to the point where people won't take a vaccine like they did in the days of polio and measles and all that, we would have laughed. But that's what happened. And again, I have to say from where I sit, those things have a lot to do with the power of technology, social technology, to isolate people from a larger group and bring them into smaller groups that reinforce their belief. You know, because people and I've seen this before on Real Vision, people just say, well, these are statists.

45:11I am not. I just said, I don't think the answer. Let me let me clarify. Allow me to clarify. I'm not a statist. I think that the nation state, it was invented in the 1640s because you'd had 131 years of warfare that had killed a third of the population of Europe. And it was based on everybody interfering with everybody else, including the church. And so they drew this thing out and said, this is the new concept. It's a nation state. The ruler of it can do whatever they want to do. They can persecute their people. They can kill their people. And nobody from the outside can interfere unless they come for them.

45:53And it did bring some measure of peace, cynically, but it did. But it's long, long past its shelf life. And I but here's a pet peeve of mine is that people and I see this all the time in reviews of books and some of them are good and some of them are not good books. But they'll say, well, he points out all these problems, but he doesn't give us any solutions. They're not any simple solutions. They're wicked problems. And so, no, I am not a statist. I believe the state is no longer relevant. It's in a posit. It's no longer fit for purpose. But I don't know. And this is not to say, well, we have to stick with it anyway, because we don't know what the alternative is.

46:37We have to think. We have to think about what the alternative might be and think way out of the box, out of the bowl, out of everything, because the answers are not in our grasp right now. and so with anyone who believes i'm a status i apologize for creating that impression but it is just not correct i i don't believe that's the answer but i don't know what the answer is that's what bothers no and that's i think that's it that's intellectually honest as well that we don't know what the answers are because we're going through a massive state of change and We need something entirely new. The other thing I'm thinking through as well is the nature of warfare is about to change beyond our understanding because of drones and robots.

47:29You basically don't need humans to fight wars. And I don't know what that means. Does that mean endless war because it doesn't have human casualty? Well, the interesting thing about endless war is that, and I say interesting, horrible, but interesting, is that you very quickly run out of materiel. And that's what happened with everybody. Yeah, good point. You can't keep it going. And, you know, I've seen projections of what would happen in a Taiwan conflict between China and the U.S. And both sides would lose an enormous number of their airframes, of their aircraft, of their ballistics, of their, you know, all of their weaponry within a few weeks.

48:17And what are you going to do, fight with sticks and clubs? I mean, it literally, even if the electronic systems that everybody's switching to, CENTCOM just did a deal where they're putting everything into an overarching system of control and command and instant, that's all fine. But nobody knows what cyber weapons are out there. And if they say they do, they're just bullshitting because those things aren't used until the conflict happens. True of a lot of other kinds of weapons, too. But so you don't have the capability to just keep going. You simply run through it. So what is China's game in this, then?

49:03So because China looked like it wanted to kind of exert its influence by might or otherwise, by trade or by might or by debt, whichever way it wanted to do it. But they don't have a growing population. They've got debt problems themselves. How does that happen? Or does it just not happen? Do we just end up with this kind of semi-conflict all the time without full conflict because full conflict nobody can afford? I think that people will, my concern is that they will convince themselves or one party will convince themselves that they can't afford full conflict for a while. And then that will be a very short period.

49:46And it will, as they get more and more desperate, they'll go to more and more powerful weapons, many of which are 70 years old, nuclear weapons, but they're still just as powerful. But I think that what that's going to end up with is, and this is just vision, it's just an idea, but I think you're going to end up with, yes, an ongoing low-level conflict of what people can afford and with massive destruction in front of it. And what's China's game? You know, a friend of mine was commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and had a lot of relations with, you know, meetings with his counterpart, Admiral of the Chinese.

50:39And at one point, this was more than 10 years ago, he said, you know, what is it that you're doing? Because you built up this middle class and you're doing well and you're putting it all at risk. And help me understand why. And this guy said, apparently, and I think I've got it. I think I can quote it more or less. He said, look, we were subject to 150 years of subjugation and brutal repression, and our time has come. What do you do? What do you say to that? What does the U.S. Department of Defense and other bodies, NATO and others, think about this? They obviously must see it. There's some very, very smart people there.

51:28They must look at this and think, well, this is a total shit show that's not solvable. They do. And I have to say, it's been one of the privileges of my life to work with as many people in the military as I have. And I have a huge admiration for them because they are highly objective. And this is another pet peeve, if you will, that people make decisions about what they think and they believe and what's true, and they stick to their guns despite other evidence. And the military doesn't do that. They really look at, okay, this situation, this, and these mean these things, and this is probably going to develop this way.

52:09It might be that way. And so they have a much more objective view of things, and they don't let themselves get into these polemics. I mean, some of them do. Obviously, there are all kinds of different people like there are everywhere. But they don't generally, the system is not predisposed like the political system in the U.S. is or in both countries. Entities, polemical, you know, we know what's right. We know what's true. We know. No, their attitude is we're going to have to deal with this shit. So we need to understand what's likely to happen. Leave the politics out. You know, a lot of general officers don't vote because they don't want any.

52:52They want to be able to objectively look at things. And they do. And they've got very good techniques to do that. And I use a lot of them in my business because they're the best we've got to really get into a peel the onion kind of understanding. of things. But I think when they look at China, I think it scares the hell out of them. And because you've got, there are several views on this, but more and more people are coming around to the view that it's Xi Jinping. Now, there is a view that the guy was cast, but the the socio-economic military situation in China was already going in that direction.

53:42And Xi came in and filled the spot.

53:48But he definitely did that. And you'll get into all kinds of arguments about what he was facing when he came in. He cleared the field of all of his enemies under the name of corruption, anti-corruption mostly. and he has asserted control despite the fact that he's failing and his system is failing and everybody knows that. But the problem with these countries, this goes back to this thing about authoritarian systems and dictatorial systems, and Putin's a perfect example, is that if you do it right, you get into a situation where you've got everybody by the balls and you've got their families. And so they can't move against you easily because their children will pay the consequences.

54:44And that's the oldest playbook in the world. And it is playing out in places like China and Russia and many others. And what happens when leadership changes? So let's talk about Putin. You know, there's been a lot of rumors that Putin's been quite ill. What happens when he goes? Does that end up being another shitshow of a power vacuum? Or I mean, you think so? I think so. He doesn't have any heir apparent. And of course, this is why these people hang on. I mean, it's very well known in a number of these cases that they have two alternatives. Hang on no matter what it takes, however brutal or what, or go to jail or be killed.

55:27killed. Who would want to be in that position? I don't get it. But when they are, they're highly, highly incentivized to hang on, iron grip, and kick everybody around them so that there's this kind of force field that keeps them safe and their families. And I think that it's the oldest, as I say, it's the oldest play in the book. It is going to end because first of all, nobody lives forever. But at a certain point, your luck can't hold. No system's watertight. You can't prevent assassination forever. And it's just, you know, things are tried all the time. They are tried all the time. And then they mostly don't work.

56:18And then one of them does. And then, depending on the situation, yes, it's another horrible shit show. It could be worse than Putin or Xi. You could have an even more egregious leader who is willing to just use nuclear weapons and has gotten people by the balls that will let him do it or her. So, you know, this is why, as I said at the beginning, we're in this horrible dilemma because rule of people, rule of man, rule of men, rule of men and women doesn't work for all these exact reasons. And yet we're now finding that rule of law or rule of rules doesn't work because we can't agree on the rules.

57:08And that, to me, is the central dilemma that we're facing right now. And just to finish off on the geopolitics, the Middle East, it looked like Saudi was playing a bigger role. Iran and Saudi were possibly going to make friends and Israel and Saudi have made friends. And it felt like there was a possibility for stability. Has that all just been destroyed again now? or do you think they all stay out of this conflict it remains a hamas versus israel and they keep it contained well you know how family squabbles are it's very difficult for all the family members to stay out in the end um but uh but i i would say that i think that a lot of what's happened that there's a very strong possibility now you know i will never say that anything's absolute because I don't think that I have any absolute knowledge, and I don't think anybody else does either.

58:11But I will say that a lot of what is going on with today's struggles has to do with the fact that there are many parties who don't want there to be a rapprochement, who don't want there to be peace in the Middle East, and particularly between Saudi Arabia and Israel, but also between Saudi Arabia and Iran. They want the conflict because it gives their lives meaning and they're angry. It's just like the Chinese. We've been subjugated, now somebody's going to pay. And if things calm down, they lose their ability to make somebody pay. It's a very simple-minded analysis, but I'm not sure it's not correct.

58:57You know, that's the same with US politics. The American dream was never delivered. And people are fucking angry. And they've split between left and right. And they hate each other, because they want what they were promised, and they never got it. It's the same everywhere. They never will. That ship has sailed. And of course, one of the problems with this is that people selling things, whatever they're selling, but particularly politicians selling ideas, oversell them. Oh, it's going to be great. It's going to, everybody's going to get, it's all just, just, you won't believe how great it is. Because otherwise they can't get people to come on board enough to actually make them happen, to try them.

59:43And the problem with that is, of course, none of it ever works for very long. And so then you end up with people who are truly pissed off because they were made promises and it didn't happen. It couldn't happen and it won't happen. So then you end up with an autocrat because it's the only way of quelling all of that. So you have one strong lead. And we've seen that all over the world right now. And the autocrat rules with an iron fist. And that's the way of stamping that out. And off we go again. The centralization, decentralization, centralization, decentralization endlessly happens. And the autocrat does one other thing in many cases is that he tries to fulfill those anger.

1:00:30He tries to, you know, give that anger a voice and a reality. And he fights the war because that's what people want. And that's what keeps people in power with the populace. And a lot of this, you know, is a box populace kind of thing. A lot of this anger in the U.S. and other places comes from the more base level socioeconomic strata. And they feel like they've been completely shat upon. And they have. And so, you know, you've got a situation where people are so angry. And then this autocrat comes in and says, I'm your revenge. I will make it, you know, I will give you what you were denied and all that.

1:01:27And they're so upset and they're so angry and they're so threatened and scared. Fear is one of the maybe the biggest of these motivators that they accept it. And, you know, I have good information. I'm not involved in politics, international politics, but not domestic politics in the U.S. or anywhere. But I have very good information that even people on the far right are very well informed about what's actually going on and they understand it. But they will not. And it's true of the left, too. They will not act on it because they want to get reelected. And that's a problem with the system. Yeah.

1:02:06If the system is about me getting reelected, that's not viable, as we're seeing right now. that's we go back to the point i made before about warfare because you need a common enemy because if not the enemy's within and you rip society apart and you end up in civil war right and if not so you need a another enemy and that usually leads to warfare you know this is this is why it's so disconcerting what's happening right now yet we can't afford a warfare because nobody's got enough weapons to do it nobody can do it on the ground. So then it's endless cyber war. It's, you know, it's just, it's really, really messy.

1:02:46It's really messy. And not only that, but even if they could afford to do it, the destruction would be so unbelievable that you would just not be left with the same world at all. I'm in an all out war, you know, and with stuff that hasn't been tried, you know, the bioweapons are one of the things that scared me the most, but cyber weapons, directed energy weapons, all these things, let alone the old style nuclear weapons. What happens if we just go through a few hundred years of the devolvement of power into these smaller groups? Everybody's got frictions around the edges, but it kind of just maintains the balance because the apocalyptical story is too much for everybody.

1:03:34So we just stay in this. it's kind of stable but unstable if you know what I mean you know I hate to say this but that's almost one of the better case scenarios yeah I know and but I just don't think that I think that the production and maintenance of the complexity of society that we have and that certainly includes the complexity of of military capabilities and weapons and so forth, couldn't survive that long of hundreds, even decades. It would be too degraded because you'd have, you'd have internal asymmetric warfare, i.e. guerrilla warfare, people blowing up things. It's happening in Russia now, you know, that, that just, just degrades, degrades, degrades, degrades, degrades the system.

1:04:27And in, in, and at a certain point, Then the problem with the balance of power, and I know people like the sound of that. It sounds, well, it's balanced, but it isn't. And that's what led to war in the 19th and 20th centuries, is that people think that they have a slight advantage in this balance, and then they go for it. And so a balance of power or sphere of influence, and they're very closely related, those kinds of situations are highly, highly destabilized and highly, highly prone to increased conflict. And anybody who says that that's not true is not studied history, in my opinion. Here's another thing, Dee.

1:05:22You know, if we're talking about stuff that we don't yet know, does sovereign territory matter? Is that the wrong battle? Do we even care? Do we even care anymore? Or is the territory that matters to us our digital territory? And because we can live wherever we want, are we thinking of the entire battle wrong? It's a really, really interesting question. And what I would have to say is that it does matter because, you know, the world of the cyber world is not divorced from. It exists in the physical world. You have to have servers. You have to have power sources. You have to have all these things.

1:06:13And you can't just it's not a platonic realm. I mean, maybe everything's a platonic realm. That's a totally different question. But it's not something that can just exist. and one key element of that that's become very evident in the last decade or less than a decade is resources rare earths, critical minerals things that we're now over the barrel because China's captured so much of it it's here, it's here in the US, it's here in Latin America in the Americas it's all around but we have let them again Again, it's this homo economicus argument, you know, that everything is economic and, well, it should just be produced in the cheapest place and the Chinese can do it cheaper, so we'll just buy it from them.

1:07:09It's fine until they decide to start a war and then we can't get it. And so you've got a necessity to have a resource base of those sorts of things that can allow you to run your computers and so forth. so I think that territory is still important I think it's still you know it's still the quotidian world it's still that you know knock on your head and it's still I just don't know if it matters as much to the individual than it did right if we go back to the white picket fencing and the church on Sunday right nobody cares anymore because their church group is now global because they're right and i agree with that but how are they going to connect to the church group if they don't have the you know resources that they need the the various rare earth metals and so forth to um to run the computers and they don't have the power that they need so that's still the game of nation states the battle of resources is the game of nation states Well, it's the game of some kind of territorial imperative.

1:08:19I mean, we don't know. The thing, I mean, it's so important to realize that the nation state as a concept did not exist until the 60s. So what was it before then? So people understand. Well, it was imperial, for one thing. And it was, you know, people had, the empire sort of interpenetrated. and there were lots of little divisions within big divisions, kingdoms and things. And there was a complex series of production. A lot of it was very small scale kinds of production. It doesn't work now, but it's not clear what would replace it. Again, we're dealing with imponderables from our point of view.

1:09:06We don't know how you could do it, but we do know that you can't rely on, you know, getting your rare earths from China in a situation where they may start a war any day. So the other thing that I'm thinking through within all this equation is I think we're about to go through an even bigger change than the Internet. It's the extension of it, which is. We're going to replace humans at a physical level with robots. you know that's all a tesla car is you and i've talked about this in the past so we're replacing so drones are essentially replacements for troops and whatever it may be right okay we understand that but there was always this thing like you could be a doctor you could be a lawyer you could be an accountant and you were paid for your knowledge and ai is just now scaled knowledge infinitely that it matters not to anybody so now we're going to create, I think, the largest wave of immigration the world has ever seen, which is the immigration of AI and robots into our society.

1:10:11And it's not 8 billion people and a couple of hundred million AIs. We're talking about a total pandemic-like proliferation of AI across every single aspect of humanity in a period of time that we have no comprehension. So I think of these as productive economic units like population, but it's a fucking alien coming in. How the hell are we going to deal with that? It is a huge and almost insuperable. It looks like an insuperable problem from our point of view. The thing I would say is yet again that it is going to require that the systems remain stable because, you know, one of the things about computers is they require content.

1:10:58maintenance and adjustment by humans. And if you have all these systems, food and energy and water and all this that support the humans that then support the resources to support the computers and the AIs and all that, if that starts to break, if you have, again, general systems failure, then they won't survive any more easily than we will. Well, I don't know, because if you've created AGI, its job is to survive. It will make better decisions than humanity can about how it should survive, which is the terrifying idea behind AGI is, well, the first answer is to get rid of humans. Well, exactly.

1:11:47But we don't know. I mean, there's a lot out now, if you look for it, in interesting stuff. We have no idea what AI or AGI actually is. And we have no idea how it works. We really don't. And we have no idea what it's doing. And we have no idea what kinds of decisions it will make. and it's highly anthropomorphic to say, okay, well, it's going to make the same kind of decisions humans make. It isn't. And we don't know what the decisions are going to be. I mean, it was amazing listening to the founder of Anthropic, one of the big AI companies. And he's like, we have no understanding how it makes decisions and how it thinks.

1:12:31So we've had to create like an MRI machine for the AI just to try and look inside it to see if we can figure out because it's so complex. And I've talked about this in the past is when AlphaGo was playing the best Go player in the world, when this whole LLM revolution happened from out of DeepMind out of the UK, what happened was it played four games and you watch the documentary and there's commentators like, oh, yeah, he's playing this classical move, blah, blah, blah. Much like the chess machine learning tools were before. It lost a game and I don't think it's ever lost a game since. And what was the shocking one is after it lost a game, the professional commentators are like, this move makes no sense.

1:13:14Why would it ever do that? And it never lost again because it never played a human game ever again. And that, to me, puts my hair on end. It's like we have no understanding. We have no understanding. I agree. And the other thing that we have no understanding of is the extent to which the logic or whatever you would call it that's going on inside there has any reference to human logic except superficially. You look at the outputs and say, but, you know, we honestly, and go talk to some brain scientists, we have no idea how we think. And we have no idea how animals think, except that it's really sophisticated.

1:14:03And so, you know, we're playing God with stuff that, you know, it's as you say, we just have no idea. And, you know, we are not a good judge as a species of being able to say, okay, wait a minute, let's put this on hold and sit back and think about it. We won't do it. because of individual economic interest, to your point from before. It's survival of the fittest right now as a society. Well, and everybody wants to make the money. Same, same, same, same, same. And also, you know, the other way I look at it on the more positive side is, okay, we can probably dramatically increase productivity per capita and therefore GDP per capita.

1:14:46And so I get the economic incentive is to let it run and see whether that can massively improve humanity because we're ladled with debt. We've got low productivity. We've got aging populations. What other outcome do we have? Yeah, I agree. But the thing is that, and I wouldn't say this definitively any more than I say anything else definitively, but we also can't, it isn't going to increase whatever it does is unlikely to increase the resource base of the planet. And so, yeah, you're going to increase productivity, but what are the inputs for that? What are the resources? Where are they going to come from?

1:15:32Is it going to magically make gold out of lead? Well, you know, if you switch to the... But if you apply AGI to looking at the most optimal way of producing nuclear power... Right. We can have localized nuclear power grids. The technology is there. So I think a lot of this is solvable. Yes, the rare earths. But, you know, before you know it, we're asteroid mining. You know, there was an amazing person that Mark Hart introduced me to has been on Real Vision called Leon Alkali, who came out of Jet Propulsion Labs. And he's now got a VC fund that just invests in space. And he's like, that's all happening.

1:16:15So kind of what you do is get rid of the constraints of Earth. And you get the constraints of the universe, which are clearly a lot less. Well, exactly. And I wouldn't I wouldn't counter that. I wouldn't say that that's not true. But on the other hand, I would say that it requires the systems remaining in place. And and I just I think it's not a slam dunk. and you know I think that people this is this idea well we'll innovate our way out of anything yeah and maybe we will but maybe we won't you know all nothing goes on forever and I'm not pessimistic I'm just trying to be realist yeah but your realism is by nature quite apocalyptic so how how well it is right because you're like saying and rightly so I have no idea how this get solved, which is a very honest and genuine statement.

1:17:14But I can see that there are lots and lots of scenarios, all of which are not good. And there's very few scenarios that are good. The best we could come up with was like a unstable stability. That was about the best we could come up with. Mine would be, well, maybe we can solve the economic pressures via breakthroughs of AI and have an economic miracle that can solve it, which was what we solved after World War II, which kind of saved the world for another period of time. That's possible too. But if people are watching this, they're going to think, what's it all worth? That's beyond my ken. I can't address that.

1:17:56I mean, what is life worth? Life is worth living. I mean, life is worth the day, you know, the cocktail at the end of the day. I mean, it depends on how you define it. But I do think that, you know, in the end, it's a lot of you used a really interesting word just a second ago, which was miracle. And I think that a lot of this is like prayer. It's like, OK, who do we pray to? Let's pray to the gods of AGI and hope that they can do something. And I just think that's what it is. Now, people pray. and I'm certainly not going to say prayer is ineffective because I have no idea what reality is but um but I I I just think it's like prayer so that leads us into the final part is talk to me about cocktails because we're going to need a cocktail after watching this why did you get involved in making cocktails how did you go into cocktail competitions and I want to know your best cocktail I got involved just slowly because I like to have an end of the day, a marker for the end of the day.

1:19:05And the marker for the end of the day is a cocktail. And so as I did that, I'm a foodie, a taste person. And it's also interesting. There are all these old things and some of them have been revived and there's an alchemy to it because you put two or three or four ingredients together and you create something entirely different and it's instant and you've got instant gratification. And I can't think of a nicer way to end the day. And I don't drink that much, but I do like to have just a flavor of it. It just pulls you away from it. It's like, okay, the day's over. Now, maybe I have some kind of client emergency or something and I have to get back on it at 9.30 or 10 p.m., but still, I've ended the day.

1:19:55And so I really I only have ever competed in one competition, which I won, which was one held here. I don't know if you know what the Van Klyver Piano Competition is, but it's a worldwide worldwide known one of the three major classical piano competitions in the world. And so they had a cocktail competition and they gave out a little gold medal. And there were about 30 people who entered and I won. and in terms of what my best cocktail is it really depends on the mood depends on the day i have three or four favorites and you should come back and i'll they they change from time absolutely i had your it was like a mezcal margarita but wasn't quite a margarita last time i was at your house which was you did and that that's one of the best ones yeah it's uh what is that called yeah and it has it has it has about six ingredients which is unusual really have to carefully balance it um but yeah that that's a great drink some of the oldies are the goodies you know a sidecar is a great drink uh a um uh a uh uh corpse reviver number two is a great corpse reviver number two what a great not number one don't fool number one number two um but uh so what is a corpse reviver number two then that's that feels like that's the right cocktail for the end of this conversation we need to revive the global corpse what is it so it is uh and i have sadly to say that used up a lot of memory and and in in memorizing i think i know that when it's it's fresh lemon juice um cointreau gin and um and a thing called kina lilay which you can't really get anymore but you can get something very much like it, which is called Cokie Americano.

1:21:50And you can also use Lille Blanc. Either one works. And it's just, it's got a flavor profile that's unique. And it's just one of those things you just sniff it and, you know, you're transported. You're revived again. And all the world's problems have gone away. Yeah, exactly. Dee, thank you, my friend, as ever, a fantastic, enjoyable, slightly concerning conversation. And let's see how this goes. As you said, we don't know, but we need to have our eyes open and just see how this all develops. But, yeah, thank you as ever for being our guide in this. Always, always a pleasure, Raul. And I look forward to the next one.

1:22:29Absolutely. I'm seeing you in Lisbon. That's right. Looking forward to that, too. Yeah. OK. All right. See you soon. Well, even though Dee is one of my favorite people in the world to speak to, him and I spend hours talking about many, many things. to try and allow me to get a better understanding of the world. I walked away from this one needing that corpse reviver too.

1:22:58Because DC's so few opportunities for this to go well. And I know many of you will reflect this too. You all see this. And you see the fact that it feels a bit hopeless. And I think for the sake of humanity, the sake of the planet itself, that somehow we find hope. And I think there is possibilities of hope. But as Dee said, and I think Neil Howe would agree from the fourth turning, is we just don't know what system that is going to morph into and how that's going to look and that journey there. I think Neil Howe thinks that by the mid-2030s, we'll have morphed into something different. And Dee is open to that difference.

1:23:44and D intellectually honestly says, I don't know what that is. I think it's something to do with technology and how we use it. And can we create a new golden age or do we not? Or do we exist in a combination of a golden age and a dark age? I simply don't know. But we're on this journey. There's literally nothing that can stop it. The competition for individual interest means that there is no society. So if there's no society, then it's each man for himself. And that's when you end up with a lot of unintended consequences. Anyway, sorry for the depressing conversation. Go and find yourself a corpse revolver.

1:24:27Revolver? No, we don't need a revolver. We need a reviver. Reviver too. Fix yourself a drink. And let's hope that the world is more optimistic than Dee is concerned about. See you next time.

1:24:46What's up, revolutionaries? Thanks for tuning in. For more content like this, head over to realvision.com and get unfiltered access to the very best, brightest, and biggest names in finance.