#17 - Claire Lehmann

31:07But now, you know, Andrew Roberts wrote a follow-up piece and he's arguing that Trump is speeding up this phase. It's pretty clear now with the trade war that we're entering into the negotiation phase. What's the title of that one? That would probably be America's Grief Cycle. That was published a couple of weeks ago. Oh, the negotiation phase. Good follow-up. I mean, it's a metaphor. Maybe should I do a podcast with Andrew? Yeah, you should. I agree a lot. Yeah. It's a metaphor and it's a provocative one. but um you know i think i think it's i think when you get when you're getting these sort of irrational emotional responses from people you can understand it it helps to understand it through this context like there is a people agree you know there's this you have to come to terms with the fact that the american empire is dying at some point and it and and it will cause grief and how you deal with that grief is going, you know, you will go through phases.

32:11Like I've had to go through stages of grief myself about it. And I'm not even an American. Well, it's funny you say that because it's true. Like when I was writing the Network State book, there's actually a paragraph that I deleted because it brought a manly tear to my eye. And it was essentially about like the metaphor of uncle sam as a like a beloved you know elder who's passing away and you know he's passing away and he's not going to always be there and need to prepare for the next step and then a bunch of people are like why do you want grandpa to die like i don't want grandpa to die and you know but he's not going to be around forever and i can look at all these signs of incipient this and that and then they don't want to plan for it at all right they want to be in denial about it and they want to say that you saying it is like a bad omen and it's demoralizing It'll further and speed it up and so on and so forth.

33:04And I get that. I actually do get that. Sometimes I look at history through the lens of art and how much you can sort of see how confident a culture is by their output of art. And I've been thinking for a long time that the exhaustion of Hollywood, you know, with all of their remakes, they can't come up with anything original. There are no – there's very few new hero movies. that really truly depict a new sort of, you know, the hero journey in an original and new way. I mean, there's still good stuff being made and there's some great stuff being made for TV, but it's not like it was in the 90s where there was just dozens and dozens of classic films coming out from Hollywood.

33:53And so as an Australian, you grow up on American culture. You're sort of marinated in American culture and you develop a very strong sympathy and alliance with a nation that you've never even... Like I didn't visit the United States until I was in my 30s, but I had grown up on American culture, and that's soft power. So the American culture has had that impact globally for a couple of generations at least, but it's now receding. And the woke stuff has a lot to do with why it's receding because people look at the insane, you know, most people aren't woke and people are looking at the insanity and, you know, the trans stuff, the hyper, you know, the focus on racial politics, the erosion of meritocracy.

34:42And so there's the feeling of alliance or sympathy with American culture is sort of eroded and it erodes gradually over time. And then when you've got this lack of cultural confidence coming through with, you know, fewer great films being made, fewer, like less music coming out, that's, you know, getting kids excited. Like it all, it's like a tide going back out to sea, like you just, you feel less connected to this culture that you once grew up on. And, you know, and I think it does tie in with like the lack of confidence ties in with military defeat. So, you know, you've got the loss in Vietnam, Afghanistan.

35:27I'd say that's taking it back too far because a win in the Cold War felt like it. But go ahead. Yeah, I agree with the principle. Yeah, no, no, no, true, true, true. But, you know, the Vietnam War dragged on for a very long time. You know, you could argue it was the first salvo in an ongoing conflict between China and the United States. That's interesting. I would not – because I think there was such a discontinuity in 1978 in China due to like Deng Xiaoping taking over China. But I do agree that basically that was like the Nigeria for Vietnam and then they've rebooted and so on since then. I want to respond to something – actually, there's a few loops from here, right?

36:08So first is to add to your point on stuck Hollywood, right? You know, clothes have become relatively constant. Like you can't point – maybe somebody who's a real fashionista could do it. But to point to the styles of the zeros versus the 2010s versus the 2020s, the one thing that's really very obvious maybe is like the rise in tattoos, right? But otherwise, you wouldn't be able to – it wouldn't be like grunge of the 90s or like big hair of the 80s. It's not some standout kind of thing. And the reason I think is that fashion and other things, all of the innovation and culture has moved to the internet.

36:43because you can instantly tell a 90s website, 2000 website, 2010s, 2020s. You can tell AI art. That's genuinely new. Like whether you like it or not, it's genuinely a new thing in the 2020s that is the visually distinct characteristic of this. And it's literally when you think about what you're looking at, what's changing rapidly is what's on the screen. And America is becoming a museum. Like, for example, we don't – go ahead. No, no, no. that's just a fun that's a funny play on the description of europe that we often yes that's my point exactly you got it right because we don't think of like you know obviously there's french entrepreneurs and i'm not there's actually a lot of great things happening in europe i'm not beating up on europe but you don't think of like french culture is constantly dynamic and evolving and whatever there's like the baguette and there's like the eiffel tower and the louvre and and you know arc de triomphe and whatever right go ahead no no no no i get what you're saying yeah it's it's sort of stuck in a moment of time.

37:42Exactly. So like American culture got stuck because in my view, the version 3.0, there's Britain, then America, then the internet. Like the internet is to America what America was to Britain. And that's a deep thing. And there's a lot I can say about that. But that means that all of the, everything has gotten uploaded, right? So for example, how much of your communication do you do on the internet? All of it. A lot, yeah. Right? How about your transactions? Basically all of it, right? And how about your friends? Everything is – and so what is America minus the internet? Physical America by itself is like baseball and hot dogs and so on and so forth.

38:20Whenever anybody defends and says, oh, the U.S. is still doing great, they're always pointing to the tech companies. I think that's right. I think that's really interesting. And you can kind of see it. Like the public infrastructure is not up to date, obviously. you know if you ride the subway in new york it's like a hundred years old you know it's it is it is not just a museum it's in decay the reason for that i think is so so from some earlier threads um you know this is a graph that i think is very important related to the grief thing that we were talking about earlier right this is a graph that is super important for at least my mental model of the world okay right so essentially what What this is saying is basically that for thousands of years, the economic geocenter of the world was basically in Eurasia.

39:14And to be clear, that doesn't mean like the economic center was literally in Afghanistan or whatever or this is Iran. This is Pakistan, Afghanistan, I think. It's not saying it was literally here. What it's saying is if you took the average of Indian economic strength and Chinese economic strength, the Middle Eastern, European, and you weighted them, the centers, you'd get something around here, right? So it's basically Eurasian. And that makes sense because the Mongols were able to invade Europe and, you know, like Islam was able to invade Europe and vice versa. There's some degree of balance.

39:46And Marco Polo, where did he seek out? He sought out China and Columbus risked his life to come to India, right? So clearly there was stuff happening east of the Caucasus, right? But then with the Industrial Revolution, Europe just got way ahead of everybody else, right? And the center of the global economy rocketed out to Europe and basically Europe was just the center of everything and nobody else mattered. And then they started beating the crap out of each other with World War I and World War II. and 1950 was basically peak westernization, peak centralization. And this is basically the time when everybody else was bombed to smithereens.

40:26China was communist. India was socialist. Russia was communist. Japan was atomic bombed. And this is also the moment that all these post-war institutions were set up. We literally called them post-war institutions. They were set up at the time of peak America ever, right? The only other time you can argue might be 1991, right, when there wasn't even a Soviet Union around. But this period is like peak America. And the problem is that people are calibrated on the all-time, all-human history high as being the normal. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And that's the issue. The issue is they think this is normal, that complete and total global American dominance is normal when it's incredibly historically abnormal.

41:09Even on a sociological level, it was an abnormal decade. Like people look at family formation in the 1950s, but people got married very young in the 1950s compared to the historical norm of Western society. So like in the 18th and 19th centuries in Western Europe in England, women wouldn't get married until their late 20s. they weren't getting married at the age of 21. It was quite an unusual late age of marriage for women. And birth rates were actually slowly but gradually coming down in the West as well. The baby boom generation was a massive outlier and there are various different reasons for that.

41:58But, you know, in Australia at least, and I'm pretty sure in America as well, Well, because of World War II, the governments thought, well, these young men are coming back from war. We've got to build a lot of housing. We've got to give them a house. And so there was this massive public investment into housing infrastructure, and it enabled couples to marry young and start having babies young. Women started having babies young, so we get the baby boom generation. But that was a historical anomaly. It wasn't, we haven't, like birth rates were trending down. We haven't, this idea that the 1950s was sort of, like it was a strange generation for many reasons, not just the fact that, you know, it was peak American empire.

42:54And also for like technological reasons, you've got the proliferation of household appliances, You've got washing machines, dryers, toasters, vacuum cleaners. Like we forget how much technology was invented in the late 19th century and then the first half of the 20th century and how it changed people's lives. So here is my thesis on this in a nutshell is if you look at the 20th century, technology favored centralization. And so every country – basically all kinds of geigastates arose, right? China, modern India, the Soviet Union, the USA, geigastates that just had the scale to beat the heck out of their rivals, right?

43:41This is something that Orwell also talked about, Eurasia and East Asia. He was observing the trend towards bigness, right? Because you had mass media and mass production and just extreme centralization technology drove that. And never argue with the man who buys ink by the barrel and you can't fight city hall. and so on and so forth, right? And the peak of that was basically like in many senses, you know, yeah, the Soviet Union had 100 % marginal taxation, but America had 90%, right? So you could not get rich mid-century in America. You could serve your country, and it was the most free in the world, but it was still 90 % marginal taxation, right?

44:18And so at the same time, by the way, in the Soviet Union, do you know they had childlessness tax? I didn't know that. I didn't. Yeah. So the Soviet Union was way more conservative than we think socially, right? Here, the bachelor tax. Because after World War II, they're like, you know, you need to have kids, right? I was just familiar with Lenin introducing... Abortion. Yeah. Yes. So this is when it started going reverse, right? Right. Stalin encouraged adult people to reproduce increasing because they had lost so many, they lost tens of millions of people in World War II. They're like, you have to...

44:55It was symbolic, but it was like a status thing. And most childless married women and essentially the point was – I mean in many ways in the Soviet Union, your money was more like your allowance. But it was like a social penalty for not doing that. What was my point? My point is that mid-century America was way more communist than we think of it. And mid-century Soviet Union was way more socially conservative than we think about it. Like those were actually not just – right? OK. OK, so so now we've moved totally in a different direction. And the problem is everybody is in America's anchored on 1950.

45:32And in fact, the world in a weird way is anchored on America in 1950. And they've because they haven't I mean, unless they're in China or in some other country, they haven't been told really that many stories of what their life was like at that time. India now has some stories about partition. right china has some stories about like you know the chinese civil war or at least the korean war where the chinese soldiers were you know like i mean they're fighting on the north korean side but you know they're portrayed as heroes in china but most of the world doesn't really have that many good movies about how horrible their 20th century was let me pause there go ahead yeah that's an interesting point i hadn't thought of that you know it speaks to the power the power of America's export culture, just how influential it has been.

46:16Yes. And actually, you know, it's funny is I'm going to share a graph here, which is kind of like that. Most countries in the world actually had like negative 100 % returns, not most, like many countries had negative 100 % returns in the 20th century. And Australia, Canada, and America are the only three that like escaped that. Australia is actually the real lucky country. can't u.s canada australia escaped but russia negative 100 china over this window negative 100 germany negative 100 japan it's not over the whole it's not over the whole century i was like what but i get over a 20 year window yeah yeah yeah yeah yes so the point is basically what people don't understand is like this was a rebuttal to so this guy had a reasonable post i wasn't attacking him but it was this post by like vanguard which basically said the stock market always goes up like persist right yeah and so this post by vanguard basically says the stock market always goes up and you know if you sell you lose money but the two problems that are right so a the reason it goes up is the fed prints and that can't can't do that forever and b it is like essentially betting on a trend to continue indefinitely which is the shortest way to lose your shirt yeah doesn't account for tail long tail events correct right so the reason i say this is the u.s is anchored on a story of the past which is an illusion and that story is something like oh what's the normal way of the world is supposed to be that a guy with a high school degree can have a house and two kids and you know but and that is neglecting the fact that somebody who's much smarter and harder working in poland or vietnam or something like that was like starving to death, right, or getting shot in war or under communism.

48:06And now that person is actually competing in the global economy. You know, it's kind of ironic because we can use the sort of the woke language here and describe that perspective as being privileged, you know. Yes, that's right. It's funny. I want to ask about what are the plans for Colette? What are you doing? You turned into like a subscription-only thing or something like that. Is that right? Well, our business model is based on subscription, so we're putting more stuff behind paywalls, but not everything's behind a paywall. So if you go to our front page now, everything should be open. We'll put stuff behind paywalls only after a few days.

48:45Okay, so the support is open again. Yeah, yeah. We've been open. We're always open. We will put up paywalls after a couple of days, and sometimes people will land on our page and discover a paywall, but it's not actually a paywall. It's just asking people to put in their email address so we can send them a newsletter, but it's free. And our YouTube channel is completely free and we're putting a lot of stuff up on YouTube, some stuff that doesn't go on the website. So I encourage any of your listeners to check out our YouTube. I'm finding that a lot of people actually like listening to narrated versions of our articles.

49:28Do you have a thesis on that? Well, I mean, I have a negative thesis, which is that we're moving into a post-literate society, which is not great. But there's just a bigger market for audio and video. People don't like to read. And the truth is I listen to a lot of audio myself when I'm doing housework, when I'm doing stuff. So if I'm commuting or I'm doing chores, I like to listen to interesting podcasts. And I think that's a reasonable substitute because you can't be reading all of the time. But I do think it's sad that people are reading less. And reading is sort of becoming a marker of elite status in a way.

50:14I mean, I guess it always was. I guess it always was, right? So there's a theory that the mass literacy of the 20th century, like why were the Soviets so into that? Because otherwise people couldn't read their propaganda. Yeah. Yeah, right. Interesting. Right. So it was almost like a port in their head that they could install Bolshevik propaganda or whatever into. So otherwise, why were they doing it? They were really into mass literacy. So now you could read Pravda, right? Know what the party line was, right? Yeah, yeah. But my theory is, A, there's technological drive, obviously, which is AirPods plus 5G plus good phones plus also the pandemic shock.

50:53You know, many people did this. B is what I don't know, and I made some data on this. Is it a compliment or is it a replacement, right? That say are people reading and then they're also listening while they're walking or on the treadmill or doing chores or driving or sleeping? Like, you know, they get someone to read them to sleep effectively. Or is it literally something where rather – because, I mean, just sitting and reading something is so much faster than listening to it, at least for you and me, right? That's why it took me a while to appreciate that people actually wanted this right to them.

51:26Go ahead. Exactly. Every podcast we do gets about 30 ,000 downloads. If we have a video that does well on YouTube, it will get over 100 ,000 views. Our top performing essays, we do get essays that get over 100 ,000 views, but they're rare. We'd only have a handful of those. We'd have many more videos that get that many views than we do essays. It's much easier for a video to get 100 ,000 views than it is to get an essay that many views. And so there's just a bigger audience for audio and video. and it took me years to figure this out because I have a very strong preference for text and reading because I can I am a fast reader but I find with listening to podcasts like you know people aren't precise with their language because everything is just spoken when you're writing an essay you have to be very careful with the words that you use and be careful about the facts that you're introducing into your essay so you go and check and it's a much more so when you're reading an essay it's a much more refined piece of work and you can, you know, your ability to absorb information that is correct or which has been edited and vetted is, you know, for me the return on investment is so much higher when it comes to reading that it took me a really long time to understand that audio and video is the way of the future and that we need to be leaning into those mediums.

52:57But now that we have, I'm really happy because we're reaching a bigger audience. YouTube is our fastest growing vertical. Well, okay. So now on Quillette itself, actually, a couple of things I wanted to ask you, since you're actually one of the very first, you know, really online media creators really doing an independent thing. There's a lot more folks who are doing sub stack like things and so on now, but you were one of the first. Do you do like, you know, how are you thinking about your mix of energy on Quillette meetups versus subscribers versus like digital versus physical? Because Is that something I think a lot about, obviously, is like bring digital communities into the physical world?

53:30Like would there be a Quilletteville or something in Claire's future, like the Quillette community, you know, with a Q in Queensland maybe? I don't know. Yeah, we've been hosting events in cities around the world over the years, and they are a lot of fun and we get a lot out of them.

53:51If I'm doing too many events, though, So I personally, I get quite exhausted because I get so many people coming up to me and trying to talk to me and it can be a bit overwhelming. But I think if we focus more on hosting events where people can just meet each other and, you know, I or my colleagues don't have to be active participants as much. You know, I have one of the things I was a little surprised by was the relatively less overlap than I thought between Colette and tech, given that a fair number of tech people did, especially in the early days, read Colette a lot. And and yet your community is more letters than numbers.

54:35Is that right? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And is it is it, you know, how Australia is it or is it just global Anglophone or how, you know. it's definitely global anglosphere so it's uh we're only four percent australian only four percent yeah the events that's probably above yeah the events that we have here are pretty big and are always sold out um you know we can easily just fill out a you know a big part of event space you know within a week or so so our biggest so 50 of our audience is in the united states about 12 12 % is in Canada, 14 % in the UK. So we're spread out over the Anglosphere.

55:18I'm actually a little surprised by that, that you have, because Canada is about the same size as Australia. Maybe what it is, is the political radicalism, maybe this is a diagnosis of what we were talking about earlier. The political radicalism that we were talking about is actually more of a problem outside Australia than within it. Australia is not a very polarized, we don't have a very polarized political environment. It's if anything, my piece is getting proven. Go ahead. If anything, our problem is the opposite of polarization that we have. We have broad scale apathy, political apathy. People do not care about politics.

55:54They don't want to know about politics. It's good, but it's also bad because then people just, you know, they're not familiar with policies they're voting for because we have compulsory voting. I sort of have a feeling, you know, sometimes there's like countries that are in an ideological superposition, then a rubber band snaps and they just go all the way in this direction. And I think what happened with the, before the tariffs, Australia was sort of caught between China and America. And there was like AUKUS, which is basically, in my view, fake. You know what I'm talking about, AUKUS? As soon as AUKUS was announced, I knew it was fake.

56:25Yeah, of course I know what it is. Yeah, give me your thoughts on AUKUS. I'll tell you why I think it's fake. I can understand why someone would think it is fake because we don't, we're meant to be giving over 300 billion dollars to the united states to build us some nuclear-powered submarines and i mean it'd be great it'd be absolutely great to have some nuclear-powered submarines i wish we already had them um but the you know the time frame is very stretched out uh we can't necessarily rely we i don't think australians feel confident anymore that the united states is going to be a reliable defence partner.

57:05I mean, we are historically incredibly intertwined with the United States when it comes to defence and we have a very important military base in the outback called Pine Gap, which is a very important signals directory connected to satellites and so on. So we have this long history, but given the extreme political dysfunction in the United States and how seemingly how domestic politics is now shaping foreign policy, which wasn't the case for generations. Foreign policy was sort of separate from domestic internal squabbles in the United States. But now that foreign policy is being dictated by domestic issues, we don't know what the United States is going to be doing in 20 years from now we can't tie our long-term strategic defense, you know.

58:03Yeah, exactly. Like, exactly. So when I saw the AUKUS, here's just my outsider perspective. As soon as I saw this thing announced, this is like during the Biden administration, I was like, okay, well, first of all, AUKUS is not the quad because you can argue maybe the quad, the quad at least has Australia, India, Japan, and the US, which are India and Japan have a legitimate real security interest because China borders them and they've had issues with China in the past. Australia is OK, maybe bringing the UK into it, which is all the other side of the world and hasn't been an Asian power since the handover of Hong Kong is just silly.

58:40Number one, it's not a world. It's not even a domestic power. It's not even like arguably number one. Number two is like the whole point of like any military anything is you need like replenishment rate. If it takes you 20 years and 400, 300 and something billion dollars to build like three to five subs and they could get sunk in 10 minutes. That is like the dumbest thing I've ever heard, right? That's like so obviously dumb. And moreover, it's like obviously China has now the largest navy in the world, the fastest shipbuilding. So all Australia did was they spent hundreds of billions of dollars to piss off China.

59:13They didn't even buy the submarines. They basically like paid a political and economic cost kind of being in the middle here or what have you and i was just like this makes absolutely i mean you know there's gonna be a war with china in 2027 okay australia gets your first sub in 2039 what yeah it doesn't make any sense at all right so the whole thing just struck me as very dumb it was it was it was like paying huge amounts of money for like uh cavalry in 1912 and it's going to arrive in 1932 something like that right and of course world war ii is just world war one is just right if there was a world war i actually think, you know, can I tell you a feature of the tariffs rather than a bug?

59:56Sure. This, you know, look, nothing's 100%. It's a volatile world. All kinds of crazy things may happen. But I think there's a possibility that this was virtualized World War III and the US just lost. And it's just like, go ahead. Well, that, yeah, that would be, that would be a positive interpretation rather than it being the the start of world war three yeah and so so here is the argument on that right basically versus you know the whole thucydides trap argument yeah but it's re it's interpreted in so many different contexts that sometimes i'm not i'm not sure how it how it okay sort of applies but yeah fine sure so like the the there's this graham allison article we can put that on screen from like, uh, from I think mid decade, which said China and the U S are both rising.

1:00:46Are they destined for war? And so on and so forth. Right. And I actually think, uh, the, the city's trap has actually already happened. It was called Ukraine where Ukraine was a U S proxy and Russia was a China proxy effectively, even though most people don't think of it that way, but Russia is only on its feet because China like at least supplied it with stuff, right. It wouldn't sanctioned by the world. In fact, 80 % of the world did not sanction Russia by population. And Ukraine is only on its feet because the U.S. applied it with weapons. So those guys are duking it out, right? And the U.S.

1:01:17lost. Whether, like, exactly what terms, TBD, right? I'm not saying it was a, like, certainly it was a disastrous war. Putin shouldn't have done it. Millions of people were displaced, all kinds of people dead for a few miles in Ukraine. Disaster. But the U.S. probably, like, is just negotiating the terms of how it's going to surrender, right? Right. And that's a defeat for NATO. And that's like Putin will probably plant his flag and say Cold War avenged, you know, I win or whatever. And what it also shows is that all of NATO combined couldn't beat Russia with China supplying Russia just a little bit.

1:01:51So obviously they can't beat China. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Then B is like the Houthis and Iran is fighting the Houthis and China is allied with Iran. So China's proxy's proxy has just blockaded the Red Sea for 18 months. These military has gotten defeated there. C, you have Hegseth talking about how China's hypersonics that can sink every aircraft carrier. Our whole power projection platform is aircraft carriers and the ability to project power that way strategically around the globe. And yeah, we have a nuclear triad and all of that, but a big part of it. And if, you know, 15 hypersonic missiles can take out our 10 aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of a conflict.

1:02:26What does that look like? You have the Raytheon CEO saying you can't decouple from China. So while we talk about pulling supply chain out of China, resourcing out of China, I would tell you it's very impractical. We've been de-risking for a couple of years, making sure that we have second sources for critical componentry. But unlike Russia, where we pulled out two weeks after the invasion last year, we shut down our factories, we pulled our people out, and we completely cut off any contact with our Russian customers. You can't do that with China. Too big, too important, and too necessary. You have the Secretary of the Navy saying that one Chinese shipyard has more ships than all of our shipyards combined.

1:03:06They have 13 shipyards. In some cases, their shipyard has more capacity. One shipyard has more capacity than all of our shipyards combined. You have all this kind of stuff, which I mentioned it. You also have this graph which shows the U.S. military is made in China, right? So all this stuff, I repeat it, but do you know what I'm talking about? Have you seen that graph? No, no, it doesn't surprise me at all, but yeah. Yeah, like the Tomahawk missile, if you go to the vendor's vendor, it's made in China, like hundreds of Chinese vendors for everything, right? So you add all that up and the US military just doesn't exist in the same way, right?

1:03:35And so like what is Australia buying? I don't even get it. And, you know, it's something where I think people in Australia sort of – now it might be like a rubber band snap, right? Like Vietnam, Malaysia, and so on are all – go ahead. I think that's going to be bad in its own way and I'll come back to that. Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I think up until quite recently, people were feeling good about our alliance with the United States. But just since the escalation, I think since the meeting in the Oval Office with Zelensky and then followed by the tariffs, like if you turn on the local news, you'll have independent politicians, politicians on both sides of the aisle saying we need to sit down and think about our long-term defence strategy.

1:04:27We need to reassess. We need to I think there's just greater awareness that I think AUKUS is definitely going to be back on the table after the next election. I think what's called social licence won't be there. the population of Australia is going to be sceptical. You know, our economy is based on selling stuff to China. I think Australians just don't want to be bullied. Like we don't want to become a vassal state of China. We want to keep our way of life and our freedoms. At the same time, we've seen how Trump has tried to shake down Ukraine for their minerals and we're thinking, well, how is that not going to happen to us?

1:05:13Like, you know, our, our country is full of all of this, all of the, all of this valuable natural resources. Are we just going to end up being a protectorate? Or do we want to, I mean, China has, China has bullied us a little bit, but they haven't, you know, they're not completely shaking us down. So, yeah. So here's my view on what's going to happen. So first is I very much disagree with policy. Basically, I think people got more woke than they expected and now they're getting more MAGA than they expected and then they're going to get more China than they expected. Right, okay. You mean inside the United States?

1:05:51No, I mean like when the US... Yeah, exactly. China will probably play nice for a few years to scoop up the whole world into the greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere version 2.0 because they're doing all these trade deals with all these countries and it's all, they're recentralizing as a global logistics hub. They're saying lots of nice things. And the thing is, what the US did is they attacked every country at once. And they said, oh, it's about China. And that's like a gang member shooting into a crowd, wounding everybody and saying, I'm just trying to get that guy on the other side. Help me get him.

1:06:23Do you think they did that to pretend that it wasn't about China or just out of retail? it's and i i know where it comes from though it actually relates okay so here's here's what it boils down to for all their talk about the friend enemy distinction like the carl schmidt thing or as lenin puts it who whom right or as bush would put it with us or against us right for all their talk about that mag actually implements the friend enemy distinction wrong you know why i say that because they think it's like they think it's like american non-american and the problem is that there's many Americans who are not their friend, like Elizabeth Warren, and there's many non-Americans who are not their enemy, like Bukele or Pierre Poilivre or Nigel Farage, really not their enemy, right?

1:07:11Maybe they don't agree with them on everything, but they're basically conservatives or libertarians or whatever abroad. And then, of course, there's billions of people who are basically neutrals, right? Who are essentially neither friend or enemy, but just neutral trade partners, citizens of other countries, like most Vietnamese basically don't really care that much or what have you. But they do care about the trade. They're making hats and suddenly that gets sent to zero. So what happened was the Trump admin and basically Americans in general think only America exists. So because they had been fighting, fighting, fighting the Democrats, see, they couldn't align around race, right?

1:07:44Because that's very taboo. So they couldn't say Trump is for white people or whatever you. And he's not because actually he's for Americans. But the problem is America, there's at least two Americas, there's red America and blue America. And so in the same way, the Democrats didn't want to say we're for Democrat rule. They said we're for democracy. The Republicans didn't say we're for red American rule. They said we're for America. So the Democrats would conflate democracy itself with Democrat rule. And the Republicans would conflate American with red American. And both would forget, Democrats were shocked that they would lose 50 % of a Democratic vote.

1:08:17And the Republicans are stunned that 50 % of Americans aren't real Americans. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? So that's one fundamental thing where they're in an identity crisis where the thing they think is one is actually two. And it's like their enemy is included in the set. The red Americans, Republicans are included in democracy and the blue Americans are included in the definition of American. So they're like messed up, number one. And that's actually very deep because since they can't draw the boundary and say who they are and who they are not, they, for example, they can't secure territory. Right?

1:08:48Why is the Luigi left shooting COs? why are Tesla things getting firebombed? Because those people actually consider Republicans enemies, right? Or CO's enemies or whatever. And normally you'd have like a North Korea, South Korea like boundary and friends would be on one side and there aren't just like random murders on that side. A murder would be considered a big deal, blowing up something. So the problem is red and blue are mixed up like this, but they consider themselves enemies like the Balkans, right? Now, okay, now you go one step further. Now what somebody, and again, I'm saying sympathetically from the red perspective.

1:09:20They're in like Maui or they're in North Carolina. There's some giant natural disaster. It tears through the town. They get like a$700 check and they're seeing a hundred billion for Ukraine. So now they think, oh, the foreigners are ripping us off. And I understand why they think that, right? But what actually happened was the people in charge of empire were arguably either ripping off or taxing the rest of the world. And they weren't giving it to red Americans in the cut that red Americans were used to, right? So the American see their cut falling correctly. And then they think the foreigners are ripping them off.

1:09:52But really, the blue Americans were arguably ripping off the foreigners too. So now we have this very short-sighted thing where, oh, you get like 10 % less on tariffs with some country. Great. They exported, what,$50 million a year. You save$5 million. But they destroyed$30 trillion in market cap and all the trade relationships of the US and the financial relationships of the US dollar. They gave up like a thousand X, a million X to make one X. It's like the most crazy numerical deal ever. Let me pause there. Go ahead. Well, I don't see a way out of this economic situation in the US unless, you know, I see someone like Bernie Sanders or AOC coming along and saying that we've got to tax everyone more.

1:10:34We've got to tax the upper quintile, you know, 50 % more or whatever it is like I just don't see any way out of the you know when you look at the the debt to GDP ratio how is that how is that going to be dealt with in any other way well it's so here's the issue is I do well first of all I don't think it will be dealt with I think there's going to be enormous inflation that just the US fundamentally hyperinflation is when like a government just finally defaults on everything every you know just like it's defaulted on its security contracts and, you know, its security treaties and its trade treaties.

1:11:10The last step is the dollar itself, right? And the dollar really is a medanum for the global financial system that the US used to run or still arguably runs, but not for long. Go ahead. Yeah. Well, I mean, what Trump seems to be doing is accelerating to that point, right? Yes. And part of the issue is also, you ever done any physics? Do you know force diagrams in physics? Not smart enough to have done physics. Okay. You're very smart. You're very smart, basically. So, okay. So in physics, like – let me try and give a good example. Like take, let's say, a helicopter or something like that. There's a force pointing down, which is a force of gravity.

1:11:44There's also clearly some force pointing up because otherwise it wouldn't be remaining in midair, right? That's like balance of forces. And you can calculate for many – and it's more than just those two. There's other kinds of forces like tail rotors and other stuff, okay? But for any kind of big object, you take the balance of forces on it and you figure out where it's going to go. And sometimes when you actually write out every force, it moves in a more complicated and surprising thing than you would have guessed by default. So let's say we apply that to the world, right? So what are the four forces?

1:12:16And this is what I realized in November, and it's playing out kind of how I expected. After November 2024, so Red America wanted to take down the deep state. But Blue America wants to oppose the Trump administration. And Tech America opposes the regulatory state. and China opposes the American state. So all four forces are pointed down on American empire, right? That is very unusual where basically the red, the blue, the gray, and the Chinese are all pointed down. Now, when all the forces are pointed down, there's nothing pointed up. The only thing that kind of maintains the system in its current position is it's like initial position and it can move much faster than you might think because at At best, Red Americans are conflicted about empire.

1:13:05And sometimes they like the power. Basically, they want to be – somebody said this, and I think this is good. They want to be the man of the house without the responsibility, right? They want to watch Top Gun but not pay for it. Yeah, or it's like they also have a kind of a misunderstanding of where power is. Like if it was adamantium under the Appalachians, if there's some mineral that was actually in physical America, that's what made them super MAGA, fine. But that's not what it is. It's that there's only 77 million Trump voters, and there's more than a billion people if you add up America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Europe, Japan, South Korea.

1:13:42That's what Putin calls like roughly the golden billion, right? Here's the problem. The problem is we're then going to get way more China than anybody wanted because think about how the USSR was bad and it fell, and the USA was basically the good guy up until 1991. and then when it was unopposed and it was a hyper power, it actually quickly became the bad guy, right? Yeah, yeah. So I have a few predictions as to what will happen. The first is China will act good for a while and then it's China. So, you know, like nothing can push back on it now, right? Like a truly unopposed China with its drone armada, with like the head of steam it's got, will be very, very, very, very powerful.

1:14:23And I think there's actually only one thing that, And people, it's both obvious and non-obvious. There's only one thing with the economic scale to oppose or balance, let's say. It doesn't have to be necessarily adversarial, but it should be balanced. There's only one thing with the economic scale to balance China. And do you know what I think that is? The internet. The internet, exactly. And everybody will say, oh, come on, biology. It doesn't have hard power. You don't understand hard power. The internet doesn't exist. It's just metaphysical or whatever. I'm like, okay. It's got cash flow. It's got cash flow.

1:14:51But actually, here's one way I'd put it. It's like Christianity, it's not a place, but there are Christian places. Yeah. Right? There's lots of countries with a cross on the flag. There's like Brazil, and it's got Christ the Redeemer. There's lots of Christian countries. So it's an idea, but it can also claim territory, right? Oh, yeah. And similarly, the internet is not a place. Just think about the monasteries in Ireland after the collapse of the Roman Empire, right? That's where literacy survived for I don't know how many generations, but, you know, the monks in Ireland kept producing their, you know, that kept producing their manuscripts of Christian texts for, you know, throughout the Dark Ages.

1:15:34That's right. And so like the monasteries, the cathedrals, the countries, right? Like a good, like an important enough idea does actually script things in the physical world, right? Yeah. Exactly as you're saying. And so the internet will – when American empire ends as it's ending, its two heirs are China and the internet. And China inherits the military and the manufacturing and all the – basically a lot of the treaties, the markets, right? And the internet inherits the people, the language of English and the values, I think. Because the constitution doesn't scale beyond America, but Bitcoin does.

1:16:11It's like common law. Common law was only among the British. The constitution is among the Americans, but the smart contract, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and what the internet represents, like a peer-to-peer network, you and I are equals on the internet. On the global internet, everybody's an equal. We have the same monetary policy, property rights, smart contract law. Basically, it's like the same rules-based order becomes a code-based order. So that's like the successor to what America was staring us in our face. We're going to need that because an unopposed, unbalanced China, it's actually bad even for the Chinese people, just like the hyperpower America after 1991 actually ended up, as many Americans will say, bad for Americans, right?

1:16:50Like they're now regretting that. A completely unbalanced China would be bad for even Chinese people. And actually, you know, it's funny. Chinese people, I don't think they respect American strength, but they do respect the internet because Chinese people hold Bitcoin. Chinese people want VPNs to access the global internet. Chinese people respect AI. Chinese people use Anglophone software, right? They wouldn't be able to manage without all of that. That would actually be something they're not autarkic on the digital world. They are autarkic. I mean, they're partially autarkic in the digital world.

1:17:17You can argue the Chinese internet exists, but at least they have significant gains from trade with the outside internet world. They don't really have it with the physical world to the same extent. They're much more autarkic in the physical world. Let me pause there and get your thoughts. No, I think it's a compelling thesis. I'm just wondering what happens during this process And what happens to us in the physical world in real life? Do we keep our standard of living or do we have to start stashing stuff away? Here's my view. And I may be wrong, but this is my view. My view is the more – if the successors to American empire are China and the internet, then the more leverage you are on either China or the internet or both, the better off you are.

1:17:58And if you're both extremely anti-China and extremely anti-internet, then you're screwed. So if you are, like, for example, a fair number of Americans are working themselves into like an anti-tech Luddite posture. And, of course, they're going to be very mad at China. Those people are in very big trouble because they're going to lose physical prosperity if China sanctions or trade wars them, right? And they're not going to have digital prosperity either. They're not going to have crypto. They're not going to have this and aren't going to have that. So they're going to be super angry, extremely, extremely angry.

1:18:27That's like those are people who I think are going to have the worst outcome. And one way of thinking about it is that history running in reverse, like the people who sort of had the worst fall from grace outcome in the 20th century, arguably the Chinese, which went from the Qing dynasty to the what they call the century of humiliation. And people don't understand what a degree of regression that was to go from like essentially a fairly civilized country to like backyard blast furnaces and like eating grass to survive under Mao and then dying. Like that was a terrible outcome, obviously, for them.

1:18:54But it was a regression. They weren't always primitive. That's what people don't get. The Russians weren't always primitive, right? Yeah, yeah.

1:19:28it's China, it'll go communist. And I can't tell what the outcome will be. It might be varied on the continent. But they at least do have better public infrastructure, arguably better demographics in some ways than the US. And so I think they'll be less badly off. I think Eastern Europe will be better off still than Western Europe. I think Russia will actually be better off, you know, because the winner of a war gets like a boost of energy and so on and so forth. And so a lot of people in Eastern Europe, if and when Russia wins, leadership will change and people will accept Russia as one. And it'll be a shift in attitude, I think.

1:20:04Not to say that's good. I'm just saying like just how the way the cookie crumbles. I'm actually very sympathetic to where the Estonians and the Balts are on this, you know, because they just got conquered by Russia and they just got free. But, you know, now the old boss is back. Maybe. Who knows? I actually think Dubai, Saudi Arabia have a potentially very good century ahead of them. I think Iran, let's see what happens. Maybe there's going to be a giant war. The world is volatile. Lots of this stuff is just, you know, as a now cast, it might look stupid in a few years. Maybe not. I don't know.

1:20:33Iran is like, if they're just allowed to trade with the world, that could be like the next Vietnam, because in the sense of they have a lot of really smart people, a lot of Persians in, you know, the US that did really well. Again, they're not like a primitive, you know, people or anything like that. They have a long history, the Zoroastrians, all this stuff going back. So I think like in a Chinese world, Iran might actually do way better, much better than we might think. I think China is going to have the best century, probably, because they're just, they're like Apple, right? Vertically integrated, you know, the Han Chinese nation, the CCP party state, and the Chinese network, the Great Firewall, the apps.

1:21:09In many ways, the Great Firewall, I think, will be seen for all its faults as actually, people frame it in terms of free speech, but generally I think they're going to frame it in terms of? Well, they're protecting protecting themselves from mind viruses and so on digital borders yeah yeah right so if it's if it's digital borders yeah well it's quarantine but it's also like stop a drone from being controlled within china right stop a robot once you have robots it's no longer speech that speech can probabilistically script a human to action but code can deterministically script it to action so it's less deniable, right?

1:21:46If malware crosses your digital border and it can open up a drone or a robot, it can do terrorism, right? So that alone will justify something like the Great Firewall around every large enough civilizational sphere. Like, have you heard the saying, the internet is an untrusted network? Well, basically, this is what it sounds like. It's like any packet, anybody, right? So I think what you get is almost the equivalent of civilizational intranets potentially. Well, it's walls. And that's like a very old school definition of civilization. You put up walls around your city. And you define what it is.

1:22:21Yeah. That's right. And maybe goods. Keep the barbarians out. Exactly. And it might turn out that physical goods move across borders more than ideas do. And like there's more of a digital, you know, digital borders than we might think. Digital borders correspond to civilizational borders. I think that's going to be more of a thing. I think India is actually going to do probably fairly well. And the reason I say that is it's just my sense of where civilization is. Like, for example, it's a distant number two, but India is number two on steel after China. It's just so much human capital. Yes. So the thing is, I don't want to feel like the way I usually say it is I'm moderately bullish on India, extremely bullish on Indians.

1:22:59Yeah. Yeah. Because China is a state. India is a network. Yeah. Right. But India has managed to do a lot well over the last 20 years. And whenever I go there, I'm like stunned by how good it is and how much it's improved. So I think India is like – they're saying India disappoints both the optimists and the pessimists. Okay. So I think on balance just being a big stable, quote, democracy, I think it's – just like sort of – it's a funny way to put it. But you know how China was like the second-rate communism to Russia or to the Soviet Union for a long time and then it became – right? I think India is like the second version of democracy.

1:23:35And then after all the Western European countries and the US face plant in terms of this, it'll be like the world's leading democracy because lots of things will kind of say, oh, communism was right, or they'll go all the way to Bitcoin maximalism. So my basic view is the more physically, socially, financially, militarily, culturally dependent you are on the USA, the worse off you'll be. Okay. And the more you're into China, the more your economy and your people and so on have some connection to China or the internet. It's kind of like the US and the USSR were the big two survivors of like, you know, right?

1:24:11So China and the internet, I think, are the big two. Now, I want to ask, okay, so in our last few minutes, I want to discuss network school and what we're doing here, right? Okay, so your school is not, is it in Singapore or close to Singapore? Good question. It is right next door to Singapore. It's in the Singapore Johor Special Economic Zone, which is in Malaysia. But, you know, the vast majority of people, like, basically will fly in through Singapore and they'll travel across a bridge there because they know Singapore on a global map. Yeah. And you're offering, I say kids, but you're offering people a grant to come and study with you, a scholarship.

1:24:54That's correct. Yes, that's right. So we have$100 ,000 fellowship for creators, for founders. So anybody from Colette who's watching this who thinks they could be an AI first filmmaker or a comic book creator or something like that, some kind of creative who's AI first. And when I say AI first, by the way, I don't mean AI slop, right? I mean like, yeah, it's very important. It's like, go ahead. We have some fantastic people who work for us from countries around the world. So we've got this fantastic video editor based in Vietnam. We've got an amazing audio editor in Argentina. So, you know, the people who I hire for Quillette who aren't my core editors who have to edit the text are dispersed all over the globe.

1:25:48And what I find as an employer is that the talent is so – you get such a depth of talent in – How did you hire for them? Upwork. Upwork, really? Yeah. Interesting. So you basically had bounties and they did them and then you hired them full-time from that? Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I do that too. I call it the market is greater. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. No, it's just you can find so much talent outside. I find so much talent outside of Australia, outside of the US, outside of the UK. I mean, you need people locally to do some things, but when it comes to creation, whether it's video or audio, there's an amazing pool of talented people out there who are very willing to work and who are very reliable.

1:26:38So you're recruiting people who aren't just like STEM people but who are sort of, you know, creative as well. Absolutely. In the arts. That's right. And I'll tell you why. It's because prompting is programming. Yeah. And if you have a vocabulary which like art history is now an applied science. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. Right, because if you know your Cezanne and your Picasso and your, you know, your Monet and Rembrandt and so on, you can actually summon that style on demand, right? If you know architecture and you can distinguish, I don't know, modernism from, you know, Jane Jacobs and all this stuff.

1:27:19You know, I'm certainly no architect or art historian. I know like just like the slice. So somebody who has that vocabulary, like, you know, for example, there's a whole filmmaker's vocabulary. There's a whole – that kind of person can direct the AI to do the right thing. And so we're definitely I mean, one of the things I really want to do is I think you and I share this interest, but there's many stories of the 20th century that have not been told, like the story of communism or, you know, the story like what happened in Poland, like even the story of Australia or something. Right. Yeah. I'd love it for people from various cultures to be creators, screenwriters for their culture and then to sort of market that in their native tongue.

1:27:57and it's like completely fresh. Like, you know, Hollywood's in a rut because it's told 5 ,000 stories where America's at the center of the universe. What about one where Vietnamese people are at the center of the universe? What about one where Australian people are or something like that, right? So I'd love to see creators apply to Network School Fellowship for that. That's awesome. And do people go and live at the Network School? Yes. So here's my, one of my goals with this was we wanted to radically reduce the cost of living for at least how I lived in San Francisco. I was there because of tech and I'd wake up and I'd work out and I'd work and that was it.

1:28:35And it costs like some ridiculous sum of money per month. And I was like, what am I, it's like insanely expensive and it's like unsafe and there's syringes and like the gym was really far and, you know, like coffee was super expensive. And I was like, why is this so expensive for what I'm doing, right? I've just, all I needed was like a small community and like a daily loop that was optimized. And so now I've built that product. And so essentially lots of startups, basically for like 18 ,000 per person per year, you can live in network school and you get everything. You have room, you have breakfast, lunch, dinner, you have gym, 24 seven gym, you have fitness classes, co-working, office pods, blah, blah, blah, blah, everything.

1:29:14Right. And so basically that takes your, like now your burn is 18K a year. That's with roommates, 36K solo. But that's still way cheaper than West Coast tech. We'll want to bring it down further over time, but I think that's already pretty good. And if you have a decent remote work job, you're just now banking money because you're just leveling up, right? And I think most people don't even really understand what their expenses are. They only know their rent. But the way to do it is take your bank account statement over the last year or two years and ask if it is more than$1 ,500 a month out. And it probably is.

1:29:49And if so, you'll probably save money at Everett School. I mean, that's not the only reason to do it. You should come for the kind of pro-tech community. But I think that's one of the principles. You just mentioned that you worked in tech in San Francisco, but you're not from San Francisco originally. Yes, that's right. I'm from, you know, parents are from India, grew up on Long Island. That's what we say back there. And moved out to Stanford for my undergrad. And that's why basically tech for a while sort of forced you to work in SF. And now I almost want, I actually think the alpha is being outside SF, outside Silicon Valley.

1:30:22It's like so expensive there. It's like so consensus there. I'm not saying there aren't good things that happen there, but that's why part of why I'm doing it for school. And you're a very prolific angel investor. you've invested in lots of fledgling companies including um orchid and so you've been a huge supporter of founders for a long time yes that's right i have and uh and and you know what's funny is i do that basically as a hobby uh like because it's just nice to frankly i like talking to those folks to to the founders and you know entrepreneurs and what have you because you always get a bounce you always learn something.

1:31:03And then, you know, I have, I have a little money riding on them. So if they win, then I feel like, you know, it, it, it, it makes it a little more interesting. Right. And, uh, it's almost like a form of socialization in a sense. Right. And, uh, so I've got north of 500, probably closing on a thousand, you know, angel investments around the world. And it's like, it's a lot. You're like Y Combinator, but as a person. I guess. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I just try to fund people who are classically liberal or pro-freedom in a balanced way. I don't know, my own vision of the good. Just one last question.

1:31:38You said that you think it's beneficial to be outside of Silicon Valley or outside of San Francisco. Do you think that being outside of the US has given you a more detached meta perspective on the political situation? And do you think that, you know, because there's this whole thing of the tech right sort of aligning with MAGA, do you think that being geographically away, like not in the United States has sort of allowed you to be a bit more circumspect? Yes, I think there's some to that. I would even dispute the term tech right because I think it's the tech center. It's to the right of the left and it's to the left of the right because tech is fundamentally internationalist and capitalist.

1:32:25It wasn't as woke as it had memed itself into in the 2010s, and it's certainly not as MAGA as it memed itself into because – right? And so the problem is that I think we're going to see the third configuration. Like the 2010s was blue plus tech against red, and the 2020s was tech plus red against blue i think the 2030s is going to be blue plus red against tech and it's going to be just like that it will be the premise of it will be an anti-tech movement and it'll be potentially violent especially because do you know amy chu's thing about the market dominant minority concept um no but i i i'm watching i'm watching um steve bannon and sort of agitating against elon musk and I see him sort of like parroting some of the same ideas and talking points as AOC.

1:33:12And I just see this socialist backlash. Nationalist socialist. Yes, exactly. That's right. And I think that's very predictable. And in fact, I actually saw this coming 10 years ago, more than 10 years, 12 years ago. So this is really this key paragraph. Okay. Do you see this bit with Chua outlines, right? So first, what is a market-dominant minority? Okay, market dominant minority, like she talks about in terms of ethnic groups like the Jews of Europe, the Indians of Uganda, right? Whites in South Africa and so on and so forth, right? Overseas Chinese. So basically if you have democracy and capitalism and one group is winning at capitalism and another group is much larger in democracy, there's a conflict.

1:33:56And the market dominant minority is somebody or group that is winning in the market but losing the vote. so the backlash if they become too public and too wealthy the first is a backlash against markets targeting them right the the second is a backlash against democracy by force favorable to mark the third is violence sometimes genocidal directly against the market dominant minority itself so now her whole book is about race racial groups that are marked dominant minorities but most of violence in the 20th century was not on the base of race it was on the base of class yeah yeah so tech is a class yeah and as any sociologist will tell you this is one of the few things they're right about race and class co-vary right and so tech has a lot of jewish people chinese people indian people migrants and migrants immigrants and there's various groups that say there's too many white people there's too many jewish people too many indian people too many chinese people too many immigrants and they're different groups but they're overlapping into like a resentful brew right yeah yeah yeah and and so the first backlash is the one we already saw, this was the tech clash starting around 2013, where the journalists, the media were mad at tech, right?

1:35:01And that then the second, I would not actually call it an anti-democratic backlash because it was winning an election. But it is how some people would call it like the Elon Trump tech alliance is this second kind of thing, right? Which is basically wealth, right? Pushing back. And we're about to see, in my view, the third. Yeah. Yeah. That's this is red and blue against tech that is that is that is basically presage by people setting self-driving cars on fire yeah um in san francisco hammer attacks tesla fire bombings shooting ceos they're just getting mad like there's crazy memes that are like calling for like an army of luigis and so on so forth that is just yeah i just can't understand the the sense of having bezos zuckerberg Sundar Pichol standing at Trump's inauguration.

1:35:54They don't have a choice. Like in a line. Okay. But that image, that picture will be used by the socialists for years and years and years to come. Well, here's the problem. The flip side was used basically, remember, all of these guys were with Obama and they were donating to Biden, right? So the problem is that literally these are people who just want, I know many of these guys, right? They're really not ideological radicals at the core. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fundamentally, what they slash we want to do is have a lab where we can advance robotics and DNA sequencing and aviation and so on and so forth.

1:36:32And, you know, they're too white for some people and they're too non-white for other people and what have you. But it's actually like a generally pretty good group of people that is kind of building a lot of wealth, right? Yeah, yeah. and now they're just going to be hated because nobody wants people like the narrative will be AI takes all the jobs crypto takes all the money and tech takes all the blame so and scapegoated for the mess caused by printing too much correct that's right and so the fact that we'll have Bitcoin Bitcoin will moon and it'll be like those tech guys they've got all the money get them and I wouldn't be surprised to see some BLM Hamas uh j6th griper antifa luigi kind of fusion blocking roads ideologically hard to classify just kind of anarchic right american anarchy as i think about it and just like anti-tech guys so that's i know that sounds bad but actually that's why i think it's important for people to if like in a sense what's happening now is a good warning it's like don't go to the u.s like leave if you're there you know go back home where you came from the signals are being sent don't trade with the u.s don't set up a business in the u.s don't invest in the u.s like it's almost as if they're doing everybody a favor by saying back away we're out of money stop trading with us we're out of guns don't rely on our military back away it's almost like jumping on the grenade before it blows up yeah and the full force of it go ahead no i think i think that's that's a interesting way of describing what's going on and it's one of the less pessimistic you know it's it's an you're at the acceptance stage i'm at the acceptance stage and you know one thing i will say is i think that at least for a few years it's possible that the rest of the world actually doesn't do that badly and the reason is there's all kinds of crazy quantities of goods that are going to be exported from china they're going to drop prices all around the world so consumers will actually have now they'll have other problems producers will go bust or whatever maybe there might be you know quote anti-dumping laws trying to limit how much market share they get in a given country or something like that but i think actually a lot of prices around the world may go down you might have cheap evs you might have cheap evs there's there's there's potentially like it's really a question of how much in the way of u.s assets you have and if you have i think Bitcoin, if you have like maybe physical gold, if you have your currency in local bank accounts rather than US bank accounts, if you don't have US stocks, right?

1:39:12I think, and if you're not located in the US, I think you'll probably be okay. The larger the percentage of that is non-US, which is totally, again, the opposite of the 20th century. But that's my view. Now, of course, I hope I'm wrong. I hope there's a miracle that happens. But I think I'm right. and we, and we can hedge, we can sort of, you know, hedge a little bit. Yes. You could read domicile also. We'd have to figure out how to do that. I think what happens is eventually it's all on China, in China or on chain. So it's either Hong Kong soccer change or it's on the internet and so on and so forth.

1:39:47Okay. I have to jump. I got to let you get to your other interview. Yeah. And if there's anything, any closing, closing words. Well, thanks for having me on the pod. And, um, It's lovely to chat with you, very stimulating as always. And I'm really in admiration of the work you're doing with the school. I think it's a really positive thing for humanity. So well done. I love Quillette. It's great. And thank you for doing that. You've got to come to Sydney and hang out. You know what? We should do that. We should do a meetup and we'll see who comes by. All right. The Quillette community with a Q.

1:40:25Okay. See you. Thank you. Bye-bye.