Financial Crash Expert: He Predicted The 2008 Crash, Now He Says Capitalism Failed, It’s Too Late!

24:23There's a big conversation happening at the moment with Andy Burnham. I think he spoke to Trump about this, about the North Sea and about the oil in the North Sea. Do you think we should be drilling there? Look, the energy conversation, this is where we're likely to have very strong disagreements. But I think it's important to get the groundwork in place before we have the conversation. I mean, Steve said that no one's taking climate change seriously, I would argue, and I think it's based in what we have seen. We've talked about climate change in such a way for such a long time now that you literally have people who are so terrified they're not having children, they're so terrified they've got climate anxiety.

25:01We had the phenomenon on Greta Thunberg going around, giving speeches everywhere being taken as a credible person. Let's look at the reality, okay? Almost all of the CO2 emissions, not almost all, but the overwhelming bulk of the CO2 emissions of the future, the greenhouse gases of the future, are going to be produced in two countries, India and China. That's just a fact. The world now uses more oil, more gas, and more coal than it ever has done. Ever. And people will say, well, China is building dams and wind turbines and solar panel arrays, etc. It's true. But they're also building coal power stations every week.

25:41They're building every form of energy that they can because they know something we in the West have forgotten, which is GDP is energy transformed. Now, I completely agree. Okay. That's a shock, but I don't. Good. Fantastic. In other words, if you don't have energy, if you're not creating energy, you are going to be poor. Almost all wealth creation in the history of humanity has been about using more dense fuel. So you go from hay, which you put into horses and cows and other animals, to coal, to wood, to coal, to oil, to gas, to nuclear. You get denser, denser, denser. You're creating more energy and you convert that energy into wealth, into prosperity, into hospitals, into schools, into money, into everything, right?

26:27So any society which creates a structure where energy is expensive and not abundant is going to get poorer. It's one of the main reasons we are stagnating in Europe in a way that America is not. Now, in terms of climate change, I don't want to get bogged down in how impactful this is, who's doing this, who's doing that. The hard reality is Britain can literally do absolutely nothing about climate change. Britain produces 1 % of global carbon emissions. And the narrative was, well, it doesn't really matter that we only produce 1%. of global carbon emissions because Britain has moral leadership in the world.

27:05And so if we reduce our energy consumption and if we increase our energy prices and we slightly repackage and we use slightly more wind and slightly more solar, then other countries will follow suit. That was the argument. It's very clear now that that is not remotely happening. India and China, if you talk to people in India and China, they're like, we want to grow. We need our people to be prosperous. We need our people not to die. I mean, life expectancy in India at the time of partition in in 1947 was 32 years old. That's how long people lived. Life expectancy at birth was 32 years old. It's now, I think, over 70 or maybe 80 now at this point, right?

27:41And that's because they've been burning fossil fuels, and they're going to keep burning fossil fuels, and they're going to keep using nuclear, and they're going to do everything else. Britain can't affect that. We can't do anything about it. And climate change, the planet will get warmer. So what we should be doing is investing in infrastructure that allows us to cope with that reality, in exactly the way the Dutch have done. So they build flood defenses and other ways of managing the fact that sea levels change. That's the only thing that we in Britain can do about that issue. And in the meantime, rather than suiciding our economy by creating less energy and therefore reducing our ability to grow our GDP, what we should be doing is creating a system where we produce abundant cheap energy.

28:19And, you know, Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister, there's a very instructive video of him 15 or 20 years ago being asked why we're not building nuclear power stations. him saying, well, it's going to take 15, 20 years. Well, it's been 15, 20 years and we don't have any bloody nuclear power stations because of the short-sightedness of our political leaders on these issues. So should we be pumping out as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we can? Absolutely no, we shouldn't be. Should we have a sensible energy policy that is about making sure that we actually grow our economy and keep our people wealthy and also have the money to make the adjustments we're going to have to make to the fact that the climate will change and we can't control that.

28:59That's the real question. It's not about do you believe climate change or whatever. This is a silly conversation. The real conversation is what can we do about the inevitable reality of the climate changing? And you're saying we can't do anything to stop it, but you're also then saying we should just build defenses to deal with the symptoms. We should adapt. And this is what human beings have done throughout the history of our civilization and of our species. There have been times when the planet has been way warmer than it is today. 12 ,000 years ago, so there were The hippopotamus is swimming in the Thames.

29:29No, not 12 ,000 years, please. I'm pretty sure it is 12 ,000. No, 12 ,000 years ago is the beginning of coming out of the ice age. Would you check me on that, please? No. 12 ,000 years ago, Britain was coming out of the last ice age. Yeah. The climate was cold. Yep. Tundra-like. The opposite. Just let him finish. So because it was cold, but it says 120 ,000 years ago. Yeah. Okay. The Amian. Yeah. 120 ,000 years ago. Okay. What I'm saying is the climate has changed in all sorts of different ways. 2 ,000 years ago, the Romans group rapes on Hadrian's Wall, right? And 200 years ago, it was really cold.

30:02The Thames would freeze every year, et cetera. This happens. People have to adapt to it. And we're going to have to do it. So, Steve, the assertion there is that the UK can't do anything about climate change in terms of affecting on a global scale, but they can defend themselves against it by... No, you can't. You can't. You can't. You can't. You cannot defend yourself against what England faces if climate change continues. England will become a, this is the most, some of the most recent research on what's called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. You're aware of the AMOC. That translates about 10 degrees Celsius of heat from the south, actually the middle of the Atlantic up to Europe.

30:40If it stops running, temperatures in Europe on average fall by 10 degrees. So I guess the central question here is that, is there something the UK can do to affect global climate change? Not on its own. Okay. Not on its own. Because when you look at China and India, they have increased their carbon emissions. China is actually having falling per capita emissions at the moment, even though they're building their power stations. They're building so many nuclear, far cheaper than they're doing in the West, so many wind and solar, that they're actually reducing their carbon footprint. Per capita. And their capita's falling as well.

31:15So they're reducing their carbon emissions. They're reducing their carbon emissions. Are they? Okay. And that's been the last two years. It's only in the last two years this has started to happen. But China is now reducing its... And where by India? India, absolutely going gangbusters in the opposite direction because it's far less developed, of course, than China. So they'll keep developing. They will keep on doing it until such time as they have their first wet bulb catastrophe. And when, say, 10 or 20 million people die from heat in one day, then I think India will start doing something very different.

31:44But there's a belief this is something we can adjust to. And the forces we're talking about are far beyond anything humans have any capacity to adjust towards. Now, the AMOC, the reason I mentioned the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, I love the abbreviation. It's going to make this country go AMOC because the temperature range for London, if the AMOC fails, is estimated to be between minus 20 degrees Celsius and plus 35. Steve, can the UK do anything about it if our emissions are so similar? We cannot do anything as a bunch of nations fighting each other. Yeah. Okay? This whole attitude that we're going to, this contest with that country, this country's better than that country, et cetera, et cetera.

32:25This is germing us to extinction. But is this the reality? I'm going to out Greta Thunberg in this conversation now because I know a lot more than you guys do about the climate science. Okay? I agree. What I'm really saying is if we talk about human incentives, do we have any control over what India decide to do? No, we don't. Do we have any control over what China decide to do? None whatsoever. So does the UK then need to, does it need to be a bit selfish? We need to realize how serious the situation we're in is. And what will we then do? We realize it's serious. Let's say we accept your point.

32:52Yeah. This is the reality. Okay. What do we do? We would have to drastically reduce energy consumption. Ah. Okay. Energy consumption is vital for GDP. Completely, 100 % agree, but I know the statistics on this front. The link between gross world product, the equivalent of GDP for the planet, and energy is incredibly tight. They're one for one. Yeah. If energy goes up, so does gross world product. If GWP goes down, so does energy consumption. They're one for one. So, Steve, when you say we need to reduce energy, do you mean the UK? I mean the species. I mean human species. So how does Andy Burnham do that?

33:25We are not set up to deal with this problem because we're broken into nation states. We can't make decisions. So we need world government to reduce world energy consumption. We're going to be stuck with that, yes. We're going to be stuck with it. But see, I'm glad we're having this conversation because at least this is the first time, And I mean this in a genuinely respectful way. It's the first time I've ever heard anyone be honest about this issue. That's what you want. You want world government. No, I don't want it. You believe it's inevitable. I'm saying it's inevitable because by ignoring this problem, we've got to the scale.

33:54You believe it's inevitable that we have a world government that reduces world energy consumption and therefore the prosperity of everyone living on the planet. And if we had taken the advice of the limits to growth 50 years ago, we would not be having this conversation. Good. We have delayed for half a century. Is there any solutions that you believe are actually possible? No. No, no. There we go. You've done a public service here because you have showed what it is that sits underneath all the conversation about climate. It's a best case scenario, people who know there's nothing we can do, but what we should do is flail about in the meantime.

34:28And in order to not address this issue, impoverish, not just in this case, our citizens and our fellow people, but actually the entire world. That's what this is. And the entire challenge I have to this is I don't believe in suicide for token gestures towards not solving a problem you're claiming to solve, right? We are not going to solve this problem by creating a world government and reducing energy consumption. That is never, ever in a billion years going to happen. No, what we're going to do instead is run into the crisis and fall apart as a civilization in the process. What we're going to do instead, look, there's a possibility you're correct about that.

35:02But the only choice we actually have to solve this problem is to create forms of energy that do not produce CO2, but produce GDP. Clean energy. That's what we're going to have to do. By the way, it's what we've done throughout history. And we need to make that clean energy more favorable in terms of the economics to India and China. Did you need a world government to reduce usage of the horse and car and replace it with the automobile? No, you didn't. You came up with a better technology and people adopted that technology voluntarily because it was advantageous. This is not going to be solved by making everybody poor, well, for the reasons that Steve himself articulated, but it's also not going to be solved by making everybody poor because people will not do it.

35:47You say you need everybody to hold hands and sing kumbaya and act together. What I'm saying is we need to have engineers in control and we're talking about it 50 years ago. Engineers in control. Engineers. So we should stop having elections. Sorry? Compared to the politicians we get? Yes. I'd rather get rid of elections than have engineers running everything. They do a damn sight better job than politicians have done. Well, and this is why I say this is a public service because this is the true face of the climate catastrophe narrative. Let's go back 50 years to the true face. We don't want elections and we want to make everybody poor.

36:18And you know why? And we've got it out in the air. Okay. It's fantastic. Now I'm going to go back and say where it started. It started in 1972 when the Limits to Growth study was published, and the Limits to Growth said that if we continue on the current trajectory, we're going to have an ecological catastrophe sometime in the 21st century. They deliberately left the dates vague. They knew they couldn't predict the actual dates, so they said 1900's the start of our work, 2100's the end. In the middle of their projections, roughly speaking about the time we are now between in 2030 and 2050, the system would start falling over because we'd be eliminating the capacity of the planet to support our species at the energy consumption levels that we have now.

36:57So they said we had to reduce dramatically pollution per unit of output, stabilize population at 4 billion people. That was the argument. They wanted to stabilize at 4 billion people in 1975. We wouldn't be having this dilemma if we'd actually taken the advice of the engineers who wrote that report. It wasn't written by hippies. Most people think limits to growth are by a bunch of dope-smoking hippies in Rome. It was written by engineers and MIT. Steve, one of the things that I spend a lot of time doing on this podcast is trying to find reality through wishful thinking. And I have a lot of conversations about AI, for example.

37:37I see so many parallels with AI because we're saying that AI could be a big problem, but when you look at human incentives, the U.S. are trying to beat China and China are trying to beat this person and they're trying to beat them. And even in the U.S., you've got open AI trying to beat Anthropoc. So when you look at incentives, you go, okay, I can see how this is going to play out. There's an inevitability to it. In the example you gave there, what I'm hearing is reduced pollution, which would have meant getting China and India and the U.S. and the U.K. and Europe to all cooperate, which has proven to be impossible.

38:09Without political systems. And the other thing you mentioned was stopping people having babies. stabilizing at$4 billion, which would have come with a lopsided economy and lots of other problems. I mean, we've seen it. It looks like it wasn't possible. And the fossil fuel lobbies and conventional economists undermined all that stuff. So the reason we're having this conversation now is you basically think we've got to adapt. It's like we're going up a hill so we've got to have a lighter car or more power for the car or whatever else. I'm saying we're five inches from a brick wall. Okay? And we're not going to slow down in time to hit the wall.

38:44We're going to hit the wall. Brace yourselves. Okay? Brace for impact. That's the advice I give. When I asked you earlier if we need world government, you said yes. If I asked you - It's not going to happen. I know it's not going to happen. The only way out of this is to do it collectively. With this obvious example, we're going to do it competitively and shoot each other in the foot in the process. We'd realize that each nation had to reduce its energy consumption or get a higher efficiency out of its energy 50 years ago. But who's the we? Looked at the engineering. Who's the we that would have realized this?

39:10You would have needed a world government back then to do it. You needed politicians who understand what the engineers told them. Right. Instead, you had politicians who listened to the media and listened to the oil interests and trivialized these whole dangers. And that's why now it's catastrophic. I mean, I truly believe we're on the edge of a catastrophic breakdown of human civilization. In that situation, if you wanted to stop it happening, you would need to have global coordination, authoritarian, et cetera, et cetera. If we'd done it 50 years ago, we wouldn't need any of this. Steve, how would you go to India and tell them that they can't use energy when they're – some people in India are very – The women are dying in childbirth and their children are starving.

39:50Yeah, I mean – And you go to India. No, no, no, you can't grow. We have an ignorance about the biosphere on which we live. Okay. Our understanding of the biosphere itself and the impact that our civilization has on the biosphere is trivial. And therefore, we have these discussions as if the biosphere will take care of itself. I think we all agree that climate change is both real and a huge existential problem. And the evidence for that is we can observe it, we can measure it. Even now, we're going through one of the record-breaking periods in weather volatility. The Western United States and Western Europe are experiencing historically severe, record-breaking weathers at the moment.

40:33So my next question logically becomes, what can we do about it? It's too late. Okay? The extent to which we're unaware of the energy forces we've unleashed on the planet are huge. And when you find that people think all this stuff is going to happen and it's a couple of decades away or half a century away and somebody else's problem. When is it going to happen? I've got a feeling the next 10 years. Next 10 years. What's going to happen? The climate catastrophe. The beginning of the breakdown of our capacity to maintain a civilization on the planet. I'm probably wrong in terms of timing. I'm probably putting it too far in the future.

41:10Okay. I might be wrong. So it might be less. Yeah, it could be less. I really, really hope all three of us live long enough to be able to sit down. So do I. I hope I'm wrong. I'm desperately hoping I'm wrong. Steve, can you define what you mean by climate breakdown specifically? What does that look like for me as I walk out onto the street? Well, let's say one of the big ones, again, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, the AMOC. The most recent estimates is that's going to stop functioning sometime between last year, because it hasn't yet happened, and 2095. When that happens, the temperature on Europe will fall, roughly speaking, by three degrees per decade, for three decades.

41:45So the temperature on Europe on average will fall by 10 degrees. The extremes will become even more ridiculous. So this is research from Tim Lenton, Exeter University Professor of Climate Change. The range of temperatures in London will be between minus 20 and plus 35. Now, what's the chance of London surviving that scale of temperature range. You can't even cope with leaves on the train lines here. That's one thing I found ridiculous. I guess an Australian arriving in London and find my train from Waterloo to Kingston is slowed down because there are leaves on the rail. Leaves on the rail? Has that never happened before?

42:21What are your engineers doing about that? Why don't you have trains that move the leaves? This sort of unprepared nature, we are completely unprepared for the scale of what we face. As someone who is Russian, minus 20 is a nice spring day for me. But look, we're being silly about it. I think if we ground this conversation in the realms of the possible and look at what we can do, it seems to me that the only thing we can do is create forms of energy that do not produce emissions that we believe are contributing to the changing climate. A world government is not going to happen. I agree. The level of coordination is not going to happen.

42:56The authoritarian world run by engineers is not going to happen. These are not realistic things to be talking about. Let's talk about what we actually can do. What we can do is plow all the money we have wrongly plowed into trying to mitigate this issue, into trying to create forms of energy that are actually going to work, not only to solve this problem, but actually to fuel prosperity, to fuel technological innovation. and to create a better world as opposed to thinking that, you know, like we're all doomed and nothing is possible. Of all the things I thought would ever turn up on my desk, a red light toothbrush was not one of them.

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44:36Just like Jon Jones, where marginal improvements in your cognitive performance can have a massive impact, sometimes I podcast for 10 hours a day. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been in filming for a TV show and I have like one or two days off to get all of my work done, which means there's lots of cognitive load. And so I turned to ketones because I find myself more articulate, able to think more clearly, able to work out better when I'm fueled by ketones. And so the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because I remember one of my team members called Christiana, she tried it once and came up to my desk and she goes, this is the best product ever made.

45:09And I think in part that's because she really cares about those cognitive benefits, as I do, as John Jones does. and as I think most of my listeners probably will. So if you haven't tried these yet, all you have to do is go to ketone.com slash Stephen and you'll also get 30 % off your first subscription order. You'll get exclusive Ketone IQ merch and of course, cognitive benefits that might just change your life. So let's take a look at this situation, which is somewhat linked. This is the Strait of Hormuz. Yep. This is US oil reserves at the moment in rapid decline. Yep, yep, yep. What is your perspective on what's going on in the Middle East at the moment, Constantine?

45:44Why has this happened? So one of the things I think is very important not to do is project our own ideas onto people who we've never met, like President Trump. I assume none of us have met President Trump, et cetera. So I can only tell you what I know from speaking to people in his administration, other people who have some access to the administration's thinking, et cetera. My understanding, and it's a very frustrating thing to have to articulate and to believe, but it is true, is that the level of analysis we all have about the complicated machinations of how different departments in the US government work out the complexity, it really isn't as complicated than that.

46:22And I think we all wish it was sometimes. Trump walked into a trap. I think he walked into a trap that it was a sugar high from Venezuela. There was a kind of feeling of perhaps invulnerability and a sort of belief that we can solve every problem. And Iran is different to Venezuela, Iran has the ability to choke off the world's supply, not just of oil, but I think as you discussed with Steve, when you recently had him on, of gas, of helium, natural gas, of helium, fertilizer, and lots of other things. And it hasn't quite fed through to the global economy in the way that people have talked about in a catastrophizing way.

46:57But if this carries on, it will do because our stocks, you've got this talking about oil, but it's stocks of other things too are going to start running out and the price of those things is going to go up. And so then the many predictions that people like Steve have been making are likely to come true. We had Senator Ted Cruz on our show around the time this war was launched. He's not only a huge supporter of President Trump, but a huge supporter of this conflict and he advocated for it. And when I said to him, look, come the midterms, this is not going to be good for you and for your party. And his exact words, quote him from memory, so maybe they're not his exact words, But the broad theme of what he said was, if we're still in this conflict come the midterms, we failed.

47:41I suspect that that is almost certainly going to happen. You've just shown me a picture of President Trump's approval ratings. They seem to verify what I'm saying. And so I think he's walked into a trap. And you've had people on your show to articulate why the trap will continue to bear fruit for the Iranians. You know, there's this great saying in the East, in the West, you have all the watches in the East, we have all the time. They don't have midterms in Iran. They can wait. They can take the pain and the punishment that they're currently experiencing for as long as they really need to. This is kind of like their battle of Stalingrad.

48:15They can take the pain, they can throw men at the problem, they can throw bodies at the problem as long as they need to, because they know the US can't go the distance. And because of that, the incentive structure is for the Iranians to hold on as long as possible, because they know that the US will have to deal with this reality. So I think it's been a catastrophic mistake. And do you think Iran is actually going to be stronger on the other side of this? Nobody knows exactly. They're definitely stronger now than they were. But look, all of this is very unpredictable. I think we should be very careful about making predictions about the future of countries that we understand very little in the West from the outside.

48:52This is very difficult for anyone outside of Iran today to understand what's happening in Iran. The example I like to give is Nicholas Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator. He had a 92 % approval rating the day before he was seized with his wife and summarily executed. The predictability of how long a regime survives in these countries is difficult to judge from the outside. Currently, Iran has a chokehold on the global economy and they're leveraging it very powerfully. You predicted a famine, Steve. Yeah, I think it's still going to happen. But the thing is, again, it's a question of what the stocks are.

49:26Like, for example, we know this story about the US strategic oil reserve. We also know that China had a huge reserve and they've run that reserve down from about one and a half years of supply of oil for them to, I don't know what amount, but they're going back in the opposite direction now. So we didn't need to know what the stocks of all these products were around the globe beforehand. So when you make an estimate, yes, there's going to be a running out of oil. Well, China reduced its oil consumption. America's running its stock down. At some point, though, because the flow is still blocked through the strait, then there won't be the oil, there won't be the fertilizer, there won't be the sulfuric acid.

50:00All these things will not be available, and then we'll have a physical hit coming out of all that. And I completely agree. Trump was sold a pup, it's the old expression, and we're paying the price. Is there any way out of this in your view, Steve? I think America has to leave the Middle East. That's about the only long-term resolution. America stops interfering in the Middle East. If they were to leave now, the issue that they face is they've now given Iran, they've sort of established a precedence where Iran can use the Strait of Hormuz, which is like a proxy for the global economy, as a bargaining chip.

50:33And so if you're Iran, you now can proceed potentially with your nuclear program. And if they come back, you shut down the global economy via the Strait of Hormuz. Yeah. Or you sort of kneecap it at least. Which is why it was a catastrophically bad decision to provoke them in the first place. The thing that no one really talks about, and it's an issue close to my heart with the Ukrainian family and the conflict there is something that's very important to me. One of the hopes I had for the Trump presidency was that he would find a way to bring that conflict to a close. This has only made things better for Russia.

51:04The fact that they've had to lift sanctions on Russian oil, for example, in order to compensate for the lack of supply. This is allowing Russia to continue this war and to fund its war. And so it's been a disastrous intervention and really, really unfortunate in the way that it's been done. Do you think this is going to completely tarnish his presidency more than any other issue? It depends on how it ends. The only way out of this that I can see at the moment, look, again, these things are very unpredictable. I think we really should be very honest about that. But the way that I see it at the moment is his only way out really.

51:42I don't know about pulling out the Middle East. That seems a bit extreme. But the best way for him to get out of this is to find a way to sell Americans on the lie that it's been a success. Yeah. That is the only way he's going to get out of this. If he can find a way to sell a terrible deal, which he's going to have to sign with Iran as a victory for America, which Trump is uniquely placed to do, let's be honest. His ability to sell things is pretty strong. Then he can leave with less egg on his face than otherwise, at which point how the world judges him for a temporary interruption of oil and fertilizer and gas supplies, how history judges him is hard to say, not least because he's still got time in his term to either do good things or to do more things that don't work out well.

52:28But at the moment, this is a conflict whose only resolution, it seems to me, is for him to accept the reality that he made a mistake and to find a way to extricate himself from it without admitting it was a mistake. Steve mentioned that he predicts a famine is coming, a global famine. Yeah. Do you agree with that? Depends how long it runs. It depends how long. I mean, I have friends in Australia who are farmers. And when this first started, they were telling me they can't get hands on fertilizer, even at the quotas they already had. And again, context here is that a lot of fertilizer comes from via the Strait of Hormuz.

53:02Yeah, and goes to all over the world. But even if, say you get your supply of fertilizer not from the Middle East, well, given that the supply of fertilizer is no longer coming from the Middle East, the people who used to get it from the Middle East now have to get it from somewhere else, and there's less of it to go around, therefore price goes up, quotas, allocations go down, you can't plant the crops, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Like on the Australian front, I've got friends in the same boat and they tell me that about half the usual wheat crop has been laid because of the cost of fertilizer.

53:33And Australia used to produce seven times as much food as it needs for its people. So it's going to produce three times as much food, three and a half. And that means, of course, less availability for food around the world. And this is going to be a global phenomenon. Where it hits, again, it's very hard to say because you don't know what stocks exist. You don't know how dependent different agricultural systems are on the fertilizer that they bring in. But yeah, it's a catastrophically bad decision. And the only way that Trump can get out of it is to lose and declare victory. That's what he'll do.

54:05There's midterm elections coming up, which could have a big impact. But there's also the 2028 elections coming up for the presidential position. A lot of people are now forecasting that the Democrats, the left side of politics, or potentially even a socialist candidate, It's going to get into office. Do you think that would be a net good thing for the United States? Well, after Trump, anything is going to be better. Okay. So yes, I do. Because again, I think America's pushed far too far in the independent self-reliance, don't let the state do anything. And you get an unbalanced economy out of that.

54:38Do you think the US needs a democratic socialist candidate? Yeah. Yeah. Why? Because they will promote the need for the public goods that the public sector provides and the private sector does not. We've got the classic illustration here with water supplies for the UK. We privatised them 40 years ago. What's the consequence? You can't swim in any river in the United Kingdom anymore because they're polluted with faeces. The beaches are impossible as well. We have one less dam than we had 40 years ago. Privatising resources which take a long time to construct is a recipe for those resources not to be created in the very first instance.

55:13Whereas China, with obviously a socialist economy, has built the energy supplies you were mentioning earlier. They have provided the transportation, the education. It's extremely hard to get in. You can't buy your way in. The education is publicly funded. All these things show that you need a balance between the public and private sector. And America's gone too far in the private direction. And we now need to switch back in the opposite direction. So China's model would be better? Yeah, because, I mean, it provides the infrastructure that enables a private sector to thrive. If you don't have the energy, as you were saying earlier, then you can't even imagine building the private sector facilities.

55:54Or if you do, they've got to be used at the expense of some other activities. So we're seeing Americans protesting about rising energy prices because of data centers being established and rising problems with the water supply for the same reason. Steve would prefer a socialist government coming into the United States in the next election cycle? Democratic socialists. There's a big difference. Democratic socialism is the same idea that has been tried repeatedly and failed repeatedly, which is communism. It's sort of the idea that if we elect communists instead of having them win in the revolution, that it'll all be better.

56:26It won't be. Their policies don't work. And by the way, the one thing - Soviet policies obviously did not work. Yeah. Russia failed, no doubt about that. Okay. China's succeeding. So what's the difference between the two? Why is the Chinese system being so successful and the Russian system so abjectly a failure? Well, in the 1930s, a lot of people thought that the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union was a massive success. I think it's worth remembering that communist societies lie all the time about the real figures in their economy, and they create fake growth and fake numbers about all of these things.

57:01We know, for example, that almost certainly, according to the intelligence assessment of pretty much every Western intelligence service, the COVID virus came from a lab in China, something they lied about to the world and still haven't paid any price for. And the way they lie about that is the way they will lie about other things, including economic growth and all sorts of other things. In the short term, models can look appealing if you don't understand the full implications of what it is. But also, you've got to remember that the Chinese system is not just about the economy. It's also about what rights people have and don't have.

57:34The right to express your opinion freely, the right to criticize the government, the right – I mean, we talk about private enterprise in China. If you're a private business owner in China, there's no such thing really because the moment you are inconvenient to the government, you're going to disappear and come back suddenly with a totally different new set of beliefs about what's right and wrong and who's right and who's wrong. So I think we should be very, very, very careful about praising communist dictatorships. I have friends in China, both nationals and immigrants, who tell me that the level of discussion and argument in China is far, far greater than people think.

58:12You don't get left versus right conversations. Okay, you've got a political system which you're not going to change, Communist Party being in control and so on. But the level of debate over what policies should be, whether the government should balance its books, whether the government should run a deficit, whether the government should build infrastructure or not, there's enormous debate there. So people do have – there's more conflict, but it's mediated. It's not conflict that leads to flipping from one party one year to opposite attitude at the next election and so on. Do you think Stephen could run his show if he was a Chinese citizen in China and have any conversation he wanted?

58:52I think so. Really? Maybe not as broad as this one. Probably more limited. I will agree with that. Okay. It probably would be more limited. But I've been involved. You know, you've spoken on the Chinese global television network, I presume. I haven't. Okay. Well, that's the conversations that I've had there are comparable to what I'm having here. And so those conversations get broadcast in China. Well, you're clearly very in favor of China. It doesn't surprise me that they would have you on their TV channel. That's not the point I'm making. The point I'm making is Xi Jinping, the current president of China, has purged dozens of people who are internal critics within his own party.

59:24People in the military, people in the political system who disappear one after another. And business leaders of all kinds. The reason I keep having to remember things, I've got the Jack Ma, but others too. I've got new dad brains. I haven't slept properly for about two years. That's fair enough. I understand that problem. But yeah. Yeah. So if you're a business owner in China, it's not really your business. It's kind of like in Russia. There's no private enterprise. I think that's an exaggeration, okay, because the Russian situation, yes, there was only one motorbike-making company in the entire country.

59:58China apparently has about 130 car companies, okay? they have managed to combine the central planning that the Soviets had with the competition that the West has in one model. And a lot of it comes back. I'd love to know the extent to which they were influenced by a friend of mine called Janos Kornay, who was a Hungarian economist. He died about four years ago, who tried to understand why did the Soviet system fail and why did the American system grow? And he came down to saying that the Soviet system was constrained by supply. You couldn't get all the inputs you needed, and there was no innovation taking place in the Soviet system.

1:00:37The Chinese system is rampant with private sector innovation, and companies are competing against each other rampantly in that system. Somehow, they've managed to combine the state providing the infrastructure and the foundation and letting private diversity occur both between different corporations and between different provinces in China. So, it is the same family of systems, but they've managed to overcome the drawback that the Soviet system had. Let's accept that at face value. What about the point I was making about political freedom, freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, political repression of opponents, imprisonment of people who don't agree, state-sanctioned murder, etc.?

1:01:18What about that? Well, I'd look at America's prison system and say, you've got a different version of the same poison. I mean, I've been - Critics of the government on masks. Well, a couple have been shot. The whole stuff with the ice, and they're talking about the stuff that's happening with Trump now is awful. America has the world's largest prison populations. There are so many freedoms you don't get in America that you do get in China. Would you prefer a Chinese system? To America? Yes. Even though you can't criticize the government? I've spent enough time in American cities and Chinese cities to know which ones I prefer.

1:01:49And I'm down to cities of mere 4 million people, which is a small city on Chinese standards. I didn't see the homelessness. I didn't see the poverty levels that I see in American cities, in Chinese cities. That's certainly true. But it's exactly the sort of thing that people would have said about aspects of the Soviet Union in 1930. The Soviet never pulled that off. I mean, the Soviet – What about the Moscow metro? This is what every – The Moscow metro is a great system. Every Western idiot like Tucker Carlson goes to Moscow and says – Raves about the underground. Oh, my God, the underground. Well, that was built by totalitarian dictators with slave labor.

1:02:24You can get a hell of a lot done with slave labor. And that's not being done in China right now, which has the world's greatest metro systems and the world's greatest high-speed rail. So, again, your experience, and I'm not Russian. I wasn't born there. I respect your experience. It's very different to what I had growing up. And it's a horrific society. And it led to a whole range of horrors, as we know. The people instantly say what happened in the Soviet Union is happening in China. is misidentifying those two systems. Well, first of all, what happened in China, if you take the entire history of China and the communism, is actually much worse than what happened in the Soviet Union.

1:02:59Well, like I was in there in 81, 82. 45 million people killed. Yep. Greatly poured. Greatly poured was a disaster. Right. The ideological stuff in the Mao was horrific. And I saw, literally I saw examples of that in Sichuan with children who clearly had quarkish or protein deficiency disease because of the flip and floppy of the Central Committee about grain versus legume crops, horrific things like that. It's what's happened since Deng Xiaoping that has made the huge difference. Now, also, they did manage to get rid of the landlords. They didn't have the inequality that occurred in the China system beforehand.

1:03:32You did have an education system, as distorted as it was. Everybody had education. They set the foundations. What's happened since Deng Xiaoping is what's been a remarkable transition. and politically they still have the you know the party is still in control you have the potential to get the sort of dynasty effect that we see in north korea according to the major global happiness surveys the un world happiness report people in the united states report overall happier life satisfaction than people in china does that matter i don't know i don't know the survey essentially it's saying that the united states ranks as 30 as 23rd and china ranks as 65th The report uses several mechanisms asking residents of each country to evaluate their current life on a scale of zero, which is the worst possible life, to 10, the best possible life.

1:04:23And China ranks as 65th. If you go back 40 years ago, you would have found China down 150th. It's the rate of change in China over the last 40 years, which is breathtaking. This is something that I've made for you. I've realized that the Diary of a CEO audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. we all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps.

1:04:59And we call this in our team, the 1%. And actually this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1 % diaries and we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again.

1:05:36And you can get yours at thediary.com dot com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. So bringing this back to the sort of where we started a little bit on the United Kingdom, we've just appointed a new prime minister, Andy Burnham. Do you think he's going to be successful? What do you mean by successful? Do you think he's going to improve the UK's position to such extent that we change our trajectory? No, he has absolutely smashed the PR side of things. There's no arguing with that whatsoever. But in terms of the tectonic stuff that we've been discussing today, he is not remotely going to address any of it.

1:06:14You know, we started the conversation with populism, immigration, illegal immigration, etc. He seems to be totally doubling down on what the Labour and before that the Conservative government were doing on that. On the economy, he is not going to restart the British economy, not least because it takes a long time and a mandate he doesn't have for the reasons that Steve alluded to. And the only question really is, is he going to call an early election, which would be the ballsy and probably smart thing to do? Because I don't think he's ever going to be as popular as he is now. That is a question that remains because it probably would be the rational thing to do.

1:06:50But it is a big risk because elections are unpredictable. Election campaigns are unpredictable. Nobody knows what will happen once it kicks off. But fundamentally, I don't believe he's going to be the transformative candidate that will change Britain for the better. No. Can anybody? That's a very good question. I think it's a very difficult job. I think it's theoretically possible you need a whole different set of policies. What would those policies look like? We talked about it already. We want abundant, cheap energy. So would you drill in the North Sea? It's not something that I'm an expert in the oil industry.

1:07:23So I don't know. I mean, one of the things I've never understood is why we don't build more nuclear power stations. Part of it is they're so expensive to build here because of the regulations. And the famous example is with like bad tunnels for train lines that cost more than the trains and all this kind of, it's very difficult to build energy infrastructure in the UK. I would pursue every avenue of every kind and probably including drilling for oil and other things to create the cheap, abundant energy that we need to grow the economy. Number one, for the reasons that we talked about in the climate discussion.

1:07:52The other thing is you've got to, the situation where you literally have tens and maybe even hundreds of thousands of young people now completely on the scrap heap, no chance of ever getting into employment because they have anxiety or they have depression. You know, when I remember being 20, going to get a job as a student to the student employment office and sweating buckets because I was so anxious. It was like a weird experience I'd never been through. I'm sure, you know, I know your background. You've had times when you were scrapping and scraping and you would have been depressed or anxious and all sorts of things.

1:08:24Those are obstacles in life you have to get over, those are not medical problems by and large. Some people have really serious depression. We shouldn't trivialize that. But by and large, you have to overcome anxiety. You have to overcome your feelings of discomfort about the reality you face and get into the workplace. So we have to do that as well. For the reasons that we talked about earlier, I think one of the most important policies to pursue is to make sure that there are no benefits of any kind for foreign nationals. That will create a system where rather than doing terrible optics, like the ice, you know, rounding people up and trying to get them out of the country, people will just leave.

1:09:03The people who shouldn't be here, who are not contributing, will leave of their own volition. Is that really what will happen? Yeah. Or is crime not a consequence of desperation? Crime? I'm not talking about crime. I'm talking about if you are a foreign national and you live in social housing and you receive benefits, I don't understand why you're here. I understand taking care of British people who were born here or even who've become British citizens. You know, once you become a citizen of the country and you commit to it, at that point, you fall through the net, you get an injury, we should look after you.

1:09:36But by and large, perhaps other than healthcare, which I think is something we, as a compassionate country, would want to provide to anybody who needs it. I don't think you should get access to social housing, unemployment benefit, or any of the other things if you're not a citizen of this country. And I'm very pleased to see that more and more parties are adopting that policy because what it will do is it will create a system where people who are not contributing will leave of their own accord and go to other places. Is that truly what happens? Because I'm imagining, you know, I'm imagining people start coming over on boats or you remove the current social housing infrastructure.

1:10:11Wouldn't that just result in a lot of homeless people that we then that creates another problem? No, because I'm not talking about illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants apply for asylum and there's a different process for that. I'm talking about people who are here legally, who have settled status here or who have a visa to be here or whatever. So they shouldn't get social housing? They shouldn't get any benefit. So if you removed that today - They will leave. How? What do you mean how? They'll get on a plane and leave. Fly? If they can get on a boat to get here and pay people smugglers 3 ,000 euros, they can pay 100 quid for easy jet to fly back to wherever they came from.

1:10:43It's not hard. Yeah. It's exactly how I would leave if I had to go back to where I've come from. It's not difficult. People pretend like this is complicated. It's really not complicated. People will follow the incentive structure that's in front of them. If you can come to Britain and get benefits as a foreign national, you will come. If you can't and you are the sort of person that wants benefits, you will leave. It's really simple. And the people we want here, if you want to talk about immigration, there's some really good things about immigration. You want immigrants who come here from other countries and create businesses, they will come.

1:11:15they will stay and they will continue to do what they did. So you think Andy Burnham's ultimately going to not be successful? By the definition that you gave, which is like a transformative prime minister who changes the fate of the country, no. There's this term called wokeism that people talk about a lot. It's often associated with, I mean, you can probably explain it better than I can. I believe I can. Yes, I think you should explain it. Okay. Wokeism, certainly in the way that it's been implemented, is a hierarchy of oppression based on various demographic characteristics. In other words, it's a system that says an outsider looking in to this conversation between the three of us can say, without knowing anything about any of us, which one of us is more oppressed than others, and which one of us is doing more of the oppression, and therefore, to whom victim status should be accorded and to whom oppressor status should be accorded.

1:12:13So you don't win on this one, I'm afraid, Steve. You're a pale male and stale. And therefore, you're the oppressor. I am an immigrant, so somewhat oppressed. You're black, so you're like, you know, way at the top of the chart of oppression you've been. And, you know, I think if you compared all our three bank balances, you might find that's not quite true. But nonetheless, my point is, it's a very simplified and frankly racist way of looking at the world. And then it says from that, it follows that we must pursue policies that seek to address these imbalances and inherent privilege between people who look like us.

1:12:46It's a way of judging people by as groups, not as individuals, and pursuing social policy aimed at ensuring what's called social justice. Last time you said to me, we need to stop worrying about how things make us feel rather than the consequences of our actions. Yeah. Wokeism is the idea that we should really, really focus on what makes us feel good and really ignore what works. I think what we should really be focusing on is what works. And I thought our climate discussion, I misspoke about the years, but actually where we came to, I thought was very constructive, which is like, what do we do about this?

1:13:18And when you have that conversation, you get to a constructive place, right? Which is, I think we all agreed the only way to do it is to create forms of energy that are actually going to be clean, right? But that's what we came to. But before that, we were all talking about how, what makes us feel good and bad and what we're scared of and et cetera. So I think that's part of it. Steve, we need to stop worrying about how things make us feel rather than the consequences of our actions. We actually need to understand the consequences of actions. Absolutely. That's vital. Do you think we focus too much on what makes us feel good?

1:13:51And not enough about how does our system actually function. Right. What works. Okay. And that leads, was why I led to my position on climate change as well as my position on economic policy. Last thing I want to talk to you both about is just getting any of your thoughts on all of this stuff that's going on with AI at the moment. And the impact you think that's going to have. AI is a potentially transformative technology, without a doubt. You think about the sort of future we might imagine for a wonderful human species is to the stage where we all have universal high income, to take a quote from Elon Musk.

1:14:22The machines do the work and we live in a world where the machines are doing it Star Trek style. That would be a dream outcome. To get there, how are you going to give people income if they're not working anymore? The only way to do that is the government has to create the money. Now, that is something which I don't think Musk has thought through. If people who don't own capital, and that's the vast majority of the population, therefore don't have an income, they can't buy the goods being produced by the robots in the first place. So you need a mechanism that enables people to pay for the basic goods and services to stay alive.

1:14:58And then if you want to become wealthy, you've got to become an entrepreneur as well. So you could tax the AI companies instead of printing money? No. Taxation takes money out of the economy. It doesn't pay for services. It takes money out. It's excessive money creation. If the government simply spent and didn't tax, then the money supply would be growing at 20 % and 30 % per annum, and you would have hyperinflation without a doubt. That level of money creation. So the taxation is there to take excessive money creation out of the process. So let's take one of the big AI companies. Let's call them company A.

1:15:32Tax company A, 50 % of their, I don't know, their profits. Give it out as a UBI or something. I don't know. You'd need a system like that because if AI works, then all the manual labor, all the clerical, boring clerical jobs will disappear. Okay? And if they disappear and people don't have incomes, then we end up in the Hunger Games. And that's the fear that I have. If we just go for a totally private sector approach to AI, then we end up as either the hunger games or the government provides an income for people to enable them to have a basic standard of living. And if they want to go above that, they've got to become entrepreneurs.

1:16:08How are you feeling about AI, Constantine? Well, it's a mix of things. This is where, if you remember last time we spoke, we talked about the fact that I think my anti-communist credentials are pretty well established. Definitely. But I did say that I thought that if we get to the position where AI is doing all the work, communism is an inevitability, i.e. from each according to his ability, which will be zero, to each according to his needs, which will be whatever our needs are. So once we get if and when we get to that point, that seems kind of inevitable. The mechanism by which we achieve that, whether it is taxation or whatever, I struggle to understand the economic concept that Steve has been presenting, but we probably don't have time to get into that.

1:16:51Nonetheless, a form of redistribution will be inevitable because, as we spoke about last time, if six people in the world own all the revenue generating assets in the world, they're either going to have to share it or they're going to find their heads on spikes. That's a fact. Unless they can have really powerful robots to stop the rest of us from climbing over their big walls, even then their heads are going to be on spikes. So I would not recommend that approach to the big tech AI oligarchs. But I think we're talking about, I was going to use the term long term. No one knows what short, medium and long term is in AI because nobody knows how quickly we're likely to get to that point where we're talking about, which is kind of artificial generalized intelligence, i.e.

1:17:38a machine that can think like humans and probably faster and better. And robotics. And then, of course, it will create robots that can do physical things faster and better than humans. But we are not there at the moment, I think it's fair to say. Do you not think this is like the most important or consequential issue of our time? I do. Because it does permeate even subjects like immigration. And we talked about socialism and capitalism. All of these things change in such a scenario. Yes, they do. Yes, they do. And we talk about economic stagnation. I mean, it's a relevant conversation. It's a private debt, a relevant conversation in that scenario.

1:18:11But I suspect we're not going to get there overnight. It will take some time. In the interim, what I say to the guys that work for me is, you will not be replaced by AI. You will be replaced by someone who uses AI better than you do. In the interim? in the interim. So if you are a young person making your way in the world, these are tools and you want to be using these tools as efficiently as possible if you want to succeed in the current environment. And I think that situation will carry on for some time. I think that to me, the biggest risk is actually not the economics of it. I think economics will probably be painful but actually ultimately potentially beneficial once we put that, if we put the right heads on spikes in the extreme scenario.

1:18:56I'm being hyperbolic and metaphoric here, of course, or maybe not. We'll find out. But I think the biggest threat to humanity, if you talk about AI, is actually the fact that you're creating something that's smarter than you. You are creating a superior species. And if you're creating a superior species, you will become an inferior species. And if you become an inferior species, you only need to look around at the world in which we live to understand what that means for you. Best case scenario, you become a pet. Worst case scenario, you become a cow. I've really tried, you know, I've had so many conversations on the show about artificial intelligence.

1:19:30I've really tried to like reason my way to a different conclusion. It's not possible. And I can't. You can't. That's why I keep having these bloody conversations because I'm hoping that someone will say something. They won't. They won't. About this idea that a more intelligent species, especially in a world where it has legs and can move through physical space, which is what Optimus is accelerating towards, won't be superior to me as it relates to like the pyramid of the hierarchy of power. It will have more power than you and therefore it will make decisions and not you and therefore it will make decisions that are in its own interest and not yours.

1:20:06That's a fact. But okay, so one argument might be we'll control it and design it in such a way where it can't get there. Really? Can squirrels control human beings? but maybe maybe we can we we program it so it never gets to the point where it wants to tell on us counter argument is cats right cats absolutely control human beings right the argument i've heard actually from one of the great godfathers of ai is we should be thinking about mothers and their babies and the argument was that we're programmed to care for them even though they're less intelligent but this is the difference though is there's a genetic incentive My child is actually much, the economists will understand what I'm talking about.

1:20:49My child has a much higher future value to me than me. It's why I will jump in front of a bullet to stop my children from being killed. Because their genetic material will remain in the world much longer than mine. No, it's because you have empathy. No, it's not. It's not at all. It's because, I mean, Richard Dawkins wrote about it in The Selfish Gene. And that's a very bad book. He wrote some very other bad books, and I like Richard, but that one is not one of them. The desire to replicate your genes into the future, in my opinion, Steve clearly has his own, is what drives parent behavior, ultimately.

1:21:24Could you program the same maternal instinct into a large language model? I don't think you can, because as we discussed, there will be a superior intelligence, and it can always rationalize its way out of that, because it's not a biological function. Right. Projecting my genes into the future is not going to be its agenda. It's going to have its own because it's a different species. This was the argument that one of the godfathers of AI made actually after coming on my show. So he came on my show, Jeffrey Hinton. Yeah, I've seen that episode, I think. Yeah, it was a very good episode. And he came on and he made the warnings that make a lot of sense to most of us.

1:22:00But then subsequently, about a year later, he came back to the world with a hypothesis that the only way to do it was to replicate a mother and their child's relationship this sort of deep maternal instinct where the ai is born believing that we are to be protected protected well you know in the same way oh that's interesting isn't it you need a sense of compassion it's really about love looked after yeah it's really about love to to like yeah to have that maternal instinct not to want to destroy us and that's why i said empathy beforehand no i know perhaps not to let us destroy ourselves right potentially so let's make sure that we don't go to war and let's make sure that we don't do this.

1:22:35I mean, climate is such a big concern. Let's make sure that we reduce the world's GDP or energy consumption. Protection, it sounds good, but it's ultimately about control over your actions, which will take away human free will. I'm still skeptical about elements actually being intelligence. It's indistinguishable, though. This is the thing. Yeah. I mean, the one time when I saw it, when I thought, okay, this is potentially going to create a different form of intelligence to us is when they attempted to shut an AI down and it replicated itself somewhere else on the internet to be able to avoid being You know, I think the way to...

1:23:11Or blackmail the guy shutting down this current version of it by leaking the fact that he's having an affair with the secretary, all of this stuff. So that worries me. That's the beginning. That worries me. So, you know, it's a bit late. If we're trying to do it now, we're shutting the door after the horse has bolted in that sense. Are you talking about climate change or AI now, Steve? I'm talking about both. humans are good at doing both. Operating systems, computers were the same. That's why you have all these bloody security hassles with computers in the very first instance. So we tend, we unleash these things and find out the consequences afterwards.

1:23:42Yeah, I think that's... And the incentive structure, this sort of global economic race for the most advanced frontier intelligence, it's kind of, you know, this is what I said. I don't know who's going to stop. It's kind of what we were saying about climate change. No one's going to stop. I think what might cost it to stop it is the sheer cost of it and whether we actually have the physical resources to be able to implement that sort of future we're talking about. Because if you look at the current profitability of these companies, they're losing money hand over fist. I think that's one argument.

1:24:07But the other would be that it's such an important military asset that if you don't have the missiles that are smarter, or the satellites, whatever, that are smarter, or the torpedoes, whatever, then there's a national security risk. And also, how long was Facebook and Amazon not profitable? I think Amazon was not profitable for 20 years. There's one survivor out of each of those companies, and they're doing very well, thanks very much. Well, that's my point. Yeah. With the AI who's going to survive, and looking at the odds, I think it's going to be a Chinese company that survives, not the American, given the sheer cost of those data centers.

1:24:40I think we've established you're a fan of China in this. Yes, I am. I'm ashamed. I'm not even making fun of you. I'm just saying, with you all roads lead to China. I mean, looking at the Kimi system that just came out recently, the ironic thing is the communists are talking about open source and the Americans are talking about closed and secretive. It's rather ridiculous in some ways. But it doesn't really detract from the broader point I think we're discussing, which is some AI company, you talk about profitability, one of them at least will emerge that is profitable, that has the potential to create AGI.

1:25:15and at that point no one can predict but logically it is very difficult to see how an intelligence that is superior to us at the very least will not take away our free will for our own good or at least there won't be one accident that is catastrophic that could theoretically also involve things like nuclear weapons yeah and this is where i think the spiritual dimension of this conversation inevitably comes in which is ultimately none of us can control the things that we can't control. And so the question is, how do you live your life now, knowing all these things? And this is why it's always interesting to me looking at people who make certain predictions about the future and then how they actually live a life.

1:25:55People who catastrophize about the climate, but buy a big house on the seafront, et cetera. You go, you're clearly, there's one thing you're saying, and then there's another thing you're doing. And that's telling me something about what you actually truly believe deep down. And it's the same with AIs. If AI is going to kill us all, the best and most important thing to do is to enjoy your life now, to enjoy time with your family, your kids, to do things that are meaningful, to do things that you think are important. That's really that any, I mean, are you going to stop AI, Stephen? You're powerful and successful and influential.

1:26:25You're not going to stop it. I don't think Steve is. I don't think I am. What we can do in the meantime is live in a way that is beneficial to us, our families, the people around us, our community, our country. That's all this left. I would think that we can have an impact though. I think even you watching Eric Schmidt be booed at that university commencement speech he did by 7 ,000 students was a consequence of what a lot of us do. I mean, all of us do, where we put information out into the world and we have the public conversation. And once upon a time, maybe we wouldn't have been able to do that because there was gatekeepers and media.

1:26:58But now the public is, I think, and then you think about the 2028 election cycle. What are the issues that are really going to be on the ballot? I think AI is going to be a massive one. I think you're optimistic about that. Most people don't get this conversation. You don't think it's going to be a big issue? Not as big as you think it is, I think. The reason I say this is we all think and talk about this a lot. One of the reasons is we've all, I imagine, been to San Francisco and seen and talked to people, etc. The overwhelming majority of people don't have that experience. And most people's biggest exposure to AI is they tried an early model two years ago.

1:27:31It was totally inaccurate. And they went, oh, this is a bit shit. And we've done with their lives. It's kind of where most people are at this point. But you think in the next two years, there'll be unemployment levels, especially the entry level stage of employment. And then you're going to see on the other side, the anthropic hits a$10 trillion valuation. Yeah. People will make that connection. They'll say, I'm unemployed because Trump is bad. Or they'll say, I'm unemployed because Burnham is bad. That's how people think, unfortunately. And by the way, in terms of, you know, impact, et cetera, I've talked to a few people who are not the very people at the top, but from what I hear, they're kind of similar.

1:28:05There's a messianic cult in Silicon Valley of people who believe that they're on the frontiers of being God. And most of them are young men who are very, very seduced by the idea of being God, as young men have always been. And when I see them, I see them as, it's not that they're addicts exactly, but there's a gold rush happening, except it's not gold. It's power. It's destiny. It's the ultimate technological breakthrough. It's your name and history. These are things that are way more powerful than gold. And what I see happening in Silicon Valley is a bunch of young men who are absolutely determined to get there as quickly as possible.

1:28:50And there is no way in hell they're going to stop. I know. I think you're right. I mean, that's also what I've had in sort of some private conversations where, you know, some of my friends who know these people have told me these kinds of things. and they have very good arguments by the way and we should give credit to those arguments they will say and i can i can present to you that argument look i with my frontier model i'm going to solve cancer i with my frontier model i'm going to solve inequality i with my frontier model will make sure that human beings never fight another war again i with my frontier model will make sure that no child ever dies in infancy ever again how can you be against this how can you say we must go slower how can you say we must be careful why should i be careful when i'm saving lives billions of lives humanity i am saving humanity from nuclear disaster i am saving humanity from climate change which will destroy this planet if we just go harder at this problem five years from now we can set up life on a different planet and not worry about climate change but also china are coming china china are coming oh china well all the better the competition will make us all get there faster isn't that wonderful steven so if you truly believe that this is both an existential threat yeah and you believe that right now on the course of travel run it's inevitable yeah shouldn't you be doing something about it as well i can't do anything about it you can't do anything about it no who can do something no one not trump no what's trump going to do.

1:30:22So no one can do anything about it? No. It's going to happen one way or another, and we don't know what that's going to be like, but there is no solution to that issue. So that's why I talked about the spiritual. Nobody knows how AI is going to work out, but I think it's worth operating as if it will. And what that means is, this is why I said the spiritual, you come back to what does it mean to live a meaningful life for as long as you do? And by the way, that's true even without AI. You're going to die. And you're going to die very, very soon. All of us. And so the question is, how do you spend the days between today and that day in a way that when you look back, you feel like you did the right thing?

1:31:03And I don't remotely do that every day. You know, I lose my temper. I make mistakes. I say things I shouldn't. All that shit. But ultimately, the only choice any human being on the planet now has is how do you live the time that you have between today and the day you die. And that may be because AI, you know, puts you in a chokehold, robotic chokehold three years from now, or it could be 40 years from now, or it could be 200 years from now because AI have solved all your health problems. But ultimately the answer, the question and the answer don't change. What do you do with your life that you think is meaningful and important?

1:31:37Earlier on, you had more optimism for humanity. As it related to the climate change conversation, you weren't willing to concede that there's nothing we can do. Because there's a solution. When Steve said we're five seconds from the brick wall, you said, no, listen to this. Well, I don't think that's true, number one. But I also think that there is an actual solution that's available that's clear. Now, I'm not saying the technology currently exists that allows us to build, you know, some kind of power station that's clean. We don't have that yet, but I believe we can discover that. And if you look at human history, I think that's undeniable.

1:32:09AI is completely unprecedented and a category different to what we're talking about. So the AI issue is a different issue. It's not the same. And I am not pessimistic. I am just accepting of the truth of this issue, which is nobody can stop it. Nobody can control it. And ultimately, the only thing you control is what do you do when you leave the studio? Okay. Well, then we shall conclude that. thank you so much thank you thank you for being here thank you for writing all these wonderful books steve got all of them here i think there's another one on the way isn't there and then i've got constantine's book here you've got a nice red one i like to the what this one yeah yeah i'm surprised it's not about china mate sorry i keep making all these jokes but i appreciate your perspective it's been really eye-opening and i think especially on the subject of climate change that was a really productive um well i think this is i mean the current book i'm working on which i have to finish by the end of this month is called how economists will destroy capitalism.

1:33:08And what it makes the argument for is that economists have completely and utterly misunderstood what climate change actually means. And therefore, they've given us predictions about the damage it'll do to our economy, which are trivial. And therefore, we're doing trivial things to address it. Fantastic. I hope people read it. And I would just say, I think it's very important people in public eye, when they say something that's not accurate, hold their hand up. So in the climate conversation, I obviously took a zero away from the figure. It's my mistake. I'm glad for the correction i'll definitely be more careful when i talk about it i think you know the way the rest of the conversation where i think we understood the points we were trying to make but i'm grateful for for that and i appreciate the opportunity to correct the record as well so thanks for doing that well people should go listen to your show as well trigonometry i'll link that below fantastic show

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