← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
The AI War Ahead: The Next Global SuperPower Isn't Who You Think | Ian Bremmer PT 2
00:43:25
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- [00:00]
Grainger Advertiser
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- [01:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Welcome back to Part two with Ian Bremmer, the brilliant mind behind some of the most useful insights into the changing world order you are going to find anywhere. I've brought Ian on because I believe that we all have a responsibility to understand the world so well that we're not easily blown around by the winds of change. In any person's development, there are three phases and today's episode is pure phase three, Global Mastery. It's that don't be manipulated by the invisible power structures. Ish.
- [01:27]
Ian Bremmer
All right.
- [01:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Know what's going on and how to navigate it. That's what today is all about. In Part two today with Ian, we dive deep into the harsh realities of AI proliferation. You know I am a big believer in AI. I think it's going to make the world an absolutely incredible, mind bendingly amazing place. But the transition to AI is going to be rocky. Each of us needs a theory on how to navigate that transition well and Ian and I go into depth to on how to do that. In the context of China as the rising global superpower and the US being on shaky footing in terms of its path forward, today's episode is going to add another notch to your knowledge belt and when it does, be sure to rate and review the podcast. We are gunning for that top spot. With your help we'll be there in no time. I'm Tom Bilyeu and I bring you Part two with Ian Bremmer. So here's one thing that I've been thinking a lot about. Be very curious to get your feedback on this. So I am definitely somebody who is a big Believer in bitcoin and what's going on in cryptocurrency. But as I look at it, I'm like, ooh. Like this is definitely if we have it. The, the thing that makes me believe in bitcoin specifically is that it's the closest thing to a digital recreation of an exploding star. So for people that understand. For people that understand how gold has become across a bunch of cultures through time, the thing is, because doesn't mold, it doesn't rot, and it. It could only be generated from an exploding star. So there's no way to fake it. There's no way to make more. I see. And so, yeah, got it. So you, you have this thing that's very good about carrying wealth across time and space. It isn't that it is inherently like people say, oh, but you can make jewelry and stuff. Yeah, but if we don't care about jewelry, then that never becomes a thing. And there's no reason that we should care about gold jewelry.
- [03:22]
Ian Bremmer
Yeah. I mean, the industrial uses of gold are utterly margin its utility as a currency. I agree.
- [03:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Exactly. So along comes bitcoin, which, same idea. There is a finite amount of it. You can never make more. It's the sort of computer equivalent of the exploding star. And it's better about going across space. So maybe it's equal to gold in terms of across time, but it's certainly much easier in terms of going across space. So I'm like, okay, cool. I really believe in that. But as you create that, you now have alternatives to government fiat currencies, and that is this slight weakening of their power. They're gonna obviously push back on that. And so we'll see how that sort of plays out from a regulatory perspective, whether they just get in on it and start buying it or whether they're. They get very anti it. I think that yet to be determined. But when I think about the. The things that will weaken the government's hold on things, the next thing that comes into the picture is just the government's absolute inability to stay on top of AI and so now you've got, oh, we're already having to lean on these companies. And so if it becomes the most powerful tool, the most dangerous tool, and it's not controllable by governments in the way that nuclear weapons is, that's another weakening of the power. And so now you start getting into this, um, two paths before you, you get Balaji's, if. I don't know if you know who Balaji is, but you get his idea of the Network state, where it's a non geographically bound grouping. So going back to that idea of shared narratives, so people share narratives from all over the world. They come together, they have digital currency, they can sort of make their own rules and laws. And then the other one is the authoritarian version where it's like we just grab a hold of all of this, it is top down and you're, you're going to adhere or life is going to be brutal. Obviously that would be China's take, but both of those aren't ideal for me as a child of the 80s where it's just like, oh, this is so stable and wonderful. So one, do you think that are, are those the sort of two most likely polls or is there something in the middle that's more likely?
- [05:45]
Ian Bremmer
Yeah. So I, I agree with you that, you know, bitcoin and crypto represent a similar kind of proliferated decentralized threat to governments as AI Having said that crypto, the amount of crypto, you know, in, in, in, in, in existence, compare and being used compared to fiat currencies is de minimis. And I do not think that there is any plausible threat of scale against fiat currencies in the next, say five years. And if it, I do believe that if it became a threat of scale, every government in the world that matters would do everything they could to ensure that, that they continue to have a regulatory environment that maintains fiat current currency as dominant. And they'll lean into stablecoins, they'll lean into the technology, but they will want to have control over it. China obvious. I mean you've got WeChat and lots of digital currencies that work, but you have to use a digital rmb. They refuse to have currency that they don't have control over because they want the information set, they want the political stability in the United States. It's also the importance of having the dominant reserve currency globally, which matters immensely to America's ability to project power, to maintain our level of indebtedness, all of these things. So to weaponize finance, to declare sanctions and tariffs, to get other countries to do what we want to align with us. So given that, I think the timeline for AI being fundamentally transformative in governance is minimum 2 to 3 years, maximum 5 to 10. I only see one thing here. Even climate change, which is huge and in front of us and trillions and trillions of dollars of impact and changing the way everybody thinks about spending money and governance and where they live and all of that, climate change in many ways is slower moving and slower impact than what we're going to see from AI. Like, I think AI is going to have much more geopolitical impact in the next five to 10 years than even climate will. And that was, you know, what was one of the things that, when I wrote the book, the Power of Crisis, and that was before AI really took off for me, each of the crises I was talking about were becoming larger and more existential. And I started with the pandemic because I was writing kind of in the middle of it. And then I moved to climate and, and then I moved to disruptive technologies and AI and people were saying, how could you not put climate, you know, as the big one? I'm like, well, because climate, like, is, first of all, it's not existential. Like we are actually on a path to responding to climate. It's just going to cause a lot of damage and we're going to end up at like 2.5 degrees, 2.7 degrees warming. And it's also going to happen like over the next 75 years and we'll probably be at peak carbon in the atmosphere at around 2045. And then a majority of the world's energy, you know, starts coming from, or pe. Peak carbon energy use. Excuse me. And then a majority of the world's energy starts coming from renewable sources. And that's a, that, that, that's an exciting place to be where with AI, like we don't have 50 years for AI, we don't have 30 years for AI. Like, you know, we have five, 10 years to figure out if we're going to be able to regulate this or not, and if it's going to look more techno utopian or if we're not here anymore. Like, I mean, I, I mean, honestly, I don't, I haven't really said this publicly, but we're having a broad enough discussion. Like I'm. How old are you?
- [09:39]
Tom Bilyeu
47.
- [09:40]
Ian Bremmer
Okay, I'm 53. I think that, knock on wood, I don't think that either of us are likely to die of natural causes. I think at our age, we are probably either going to blow ourselves up, you know, as, as humans, or we're going to have such extraordinary technological advances that we will be able to dramatically extend lifespans to, in, in ways that are, I mean, you know, dealing with, with cell death and, and molecular destruction and genetic engineering and I mean, just looking at what is ahead of us over the next 10, 20 years, this does not feel remotely sustainable. But that doesn't mean it's horrible. That means it's One of two tail risks and I just can't tell if it's the great one or the bad one. But to the extent that I have any role on this planet, I'd like to nudge us, as I know you would too, in the better direction. And that means getting a handle on this technology and working to help it work for humanity, with humanity as opposed to not against it, but you know, kind of irrelevant to it. We don't want technology that does not consider human beings as relevant on the planet.
- [10:56]
Tom Bilyeu
No, I agree with that. The thing that I think that we're going to have to contend with though is what is a governmental response going to be to the potential of their weakened power. So we know how China is, is dealing with it. So it was really amazing to watch China open up the capital markets and really just explode. And in your book you talk about this, I, and I found it a really interesting insight that, that forced me to reorient my thinking about what China did. And so, you know, if you've read Mao the Untold Story, it's like, it's just devastating to see how much death and destruction came out of an authoritarian government. And then at the same time you're like, I don't know. America's approach is always the right, the most optimal answer. I forget the exact words you used to every problem. And what you pointed out with China when they opened up like just the growth rate was pure insanity. I mean it's really pretty breathtaking. But they learned from the collapse of Russia exactly what not to do and now they're clamping back down. Now as somebody that grew up in the U.S. man, I look at that and I'm just like, dude, that I don't like that. That freaks me out. The thought of always being on that razor's edge of like the individ doesn't matter and we can just completely obliterate you. But then I watch not even the government necessarily in the US but the people in the US giving up on free speech, which as I think about what, what's like the one thing that you just can't let go of if you want the individual to matter. And I think if you want to get to the quote unquote right answer, you have to have free speech. Like even in my own company where it would be very tempting to run my in an authoritarian way, I just know I have too many blind spots. So I'm constantly like trying to get the team to be like, hey, say whatever you need, whatever you believe to be True. If what you believe to be true is that I'm an asshole and I do not know what I'm doing, you need to be able to say that. Now, I'm going to push you to articulate why. I don't want some emotional statement. I want, like, give me going back to truth.
- [13:10]
Ian Bremmer
Right?
- [13:11]
Tom Bilyeu
What is our goal? What's the metric by which we determine whether we're getting towards our goal? What can you show me in the math that shows that I'm doing this the wrong way? And then, you know, what's your take? And why do you think it's going to work better?
- [13:24]
Ian Bremmer
But
- [13:26]
Tom Bilyeu
when I look at just the instability of that on both sides. So you have authoritarian rule where we just obliterate it. As soon as we don't feel like the government's in control, we kidnap those. My words. Jack Ma, reeducate him and then put him back forward. Terrifying. Or on our side where it's like, no, if you say something I don't like you 100% should be canceled. Going back to what you said about Trump. So how do we, as two people that want to nudge this in the right direction? What's the right pressure point? Is it. Is it the government? Is it the individual? Is it the algorithms? Is it making sure that AI has the right biases? Like, what. What's the. The right pressure point?
- [14:12]
Ian Bremmer
I don't. I don't know that the right biases are. I mean, you know, again, there's a lot of whack, a mole going on, tweaking these models as you roll them out. I think it is more in trying to ensure that you have clarity and transparency in what these models are doing. And then the data that's being collected, as it's being collected, that has to be shared. These are experiments that are being run real time on human beings. And we wouldn't do that with a vaccine. Even in an emergency, we would have a lot more testing. We wouldn't do that on a new GMO food because we'd be concerned about sort of disease, cancer, you name it. But we're doing that with these algorithms. It's very interesting to me and a little chilling that the Chinese, who have done everything they can in the last 20 years to catch up and surpass in some areas to the Americans in new technology areas. They look at AI in large language models and they've said, okay, we're going to have control over these. We're going to have full censorship over these. We're not going to give them data sets that they can run on in the public because they think it's too dangerous. And that means that the LLMs that the Chinese are running right now are crap. They're nowhere near as good as what the Americans presently have. And that's because the Chinese are willing to accept the economic disadvantage to ensure they have the political stability. And I think that the United States, again, we're not going to be able to simply stop this progress. The progress is going to happen. There's too much money, it's too fast. We don't know what we're doing as a government in response. And also, there are too many things we're focused on. Yes, you're focused on proliferation, but what I say is fake news, and what I see is disinformation. Someone else is saying you're trying to politicize it, right? And then you'll have a whole bunch of people saying, we can't slow down our companies because we need to beat the Chinese, who are going to be the largest economy in the world, just like Zuckerberg did with Facebook 10 years ago. And so, for all of those reasons, I don't think you can slow this. I don't think you can stop it. I think what we need is a partnership between the technology companies and the governments. And that is going to have to be regulated at the national level. That's going to have to be regulated at the global level. By the way, the financial marketplace is not so radically different from this. Like, you have algorithms, trading algorithms that run, and they need to be regulated because you want to know that certain types of trading is not allowed, other types of trading is. And you know, the 2008 financial crisis, when it hit, even though it started in a small part of the economy, we were all worried, oh, my God, this could explode the whole economy. What happened? All the banking CEOs and the Fed head, the chairman of the Fed, the Secretary of treasury, they got together and said, okay, what are we going to do to ensure the system can stay stable and in place? And that happened in real time. And one of the reasons it works relatively well in the financial space is because the central bank governors are technocratic and somewhat independent from government. Like, they know that you want to avoid a bad depression, a market collapse. They know that you have monetary and fiscal tools that you can use to respond. We're going to need to create something like that in the technology space. We're going to have to create regulators who are in government but are working directly with the tech companies as partners to avoid contagion to respond immediately to crises when they occur. And they won't just lead to market collapse. They could lead to national security destruction that could lead to lots of people getting killed. But it's going to be the same basic kind of model and we got to start working that now.
- [18:06]
Tom Bilyeu
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- [18:08]
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- [18:09]
Tom Bilyeu
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- [18:20]
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- [18:51]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, so let's talk about then, the central thesis of your book. So using my words, the book kind of wants for a crisis, hence the title, the Power of Crisis. You call it the Goldilocks Crisis. Something that is devastating enough that people stop and pay attention, but not so devastating that we can't respond well to it. Is that the only way to get people to act, to cooperate in the way that we would need to cooperate? And does it like when you think about the ideal state of the world, is it globalized or sensibly de. Globalized?
- [19:42]
Ian Bremmer
First of all, it's a great question. And it's not like you can never make progress outside of crisis. Progress happens all the time outside of crisis. We see new legislation that gets passed. We see, you know, new companies that are started. We see all sorts of. We see good works by people of other people on the street, you know, but. But, you know, it's one thing to say, can't we get. Can't we get the progress we need? In a family, you can. In a community, you can. When you're working together well within an alliance, you frequently can. In what I call a gzero world where there's not a level of functional global leadership, where countries aren't working together well, they don't trust each other. They don't have the institutions that align with the balance of powers today. So it's not a G7 or a G20. It's really an absence of global leadership. I think in an environment like that, by far the most likely way to get an effective response, just like with the Soviets versus the Americans. Reagan versus Gorbachev in the opening of my book is if you have a crisis, if the aliens come down. And it turned out that the pandemic wasn't a big enough crisis, didn't kill young people. It wasn't. I mean, look at what happened. The Americans pull out of the World Health Organization. The Chinese lie to everybody about not. About not being transferred human to human. The relationship got worse between the two countries. The Americans, we didn't provide vaccines to the poor countries around the world, even though we had people in the United States that didn't need them and were waiting on, that already took them and were waiting on boosters. It was a complete clusterfuck, pardon my French. And it's because it didn't feel like an existential crisis. It wasn't big enough to force us to cooperate to a greater degree. January 6th in the United States. I mean, maybe if Pence had been hung, maybe if some. I mean, God forbid, maybe if members of the House or Senate had been killed or injured or kidnapped for a period of time. But as it stood that evening, a majority of Republicans in the House voted not to certify the outcome. Why not? Because they're focused on the jobs. Because they knew it wasn't a constitutional crisis. They knew it wasn't a couple. So I do think that in this environment, in a dysfunctional governance environment, where people don't trust each other at the highest levels that are in power, where we don't have the institutions that can work, are proven to work to respond to the crises in front of us. Yeah, we need a crisis. And the good news is that climate is clearly not only a big enough crisis, but also one that humanity, I think, is up for. And so that is forcing us every year, we actually are exceeding, radically exceeding in renewable energy production and reduced cost from what the International Energy Agency is predicting every year for decades now, we've been exceeding that. And that's because this crisis has been big enough and it's affecting everyone to mobilize our asses into action. And the question is, is AI a crisis that we can actually effectively respond to? There's no question the size is suitably great, that it should motivate us. And when I talk to government leaders around the world today, they are focused. They are focused on it. They're focused on it because of the size of the crisis, but also it's very interesting. So the US Government, it's not just because they're suddenly all experts in AI. It's also because the three things that they are most concerned about is national security priorities, which is confrontation with China, war between Russia and Ukraine, and proxy war with the Russians and threat to the US democracy. They think, and they're right, that all of these are dramatically transformed by AI developments. So not only is AI coming as a big new thing, but also all the things they're already worried about spending a lot of time and money on and blood are things that are, they better figure this out or they're in trouble. So I do think the motivation to get this right is going to be there. I hope we're up for it. And again, I'm an optimist. I'm hopeful. At the end of the day, the fact that we're here and we're talking about it means that we're capable of doing something.
- [24:14]
Tom Bilyeu
My only fear is that with global warming, you can't win global warming and get a leg up over China or Russia, but you can win AI and get a leg up and be better. And I think that that one thing that people aren't talking about enough for sure is that AI is going to be an adversarial system, meaning bad guys are going to have AI and they're going to try to do things to hurt me with that AI and then others are going to build AI that is protective and try to stop the bad guys. And so you will have, just like with normal hacking, you'll have an ever escalating arms race of AI. And so even if only with the bad, the best of intentions, we will end up getting to AI super intelligence because we're trying to stop somebody from doing a bad thing. And it's. This is. Go ahead.
- [25:07]
Ian Bremmer
I was gonna say that's a really good point and I've given a lot of thought to that because look, we don't trust the Chinese at all. They don't trust us. They've invested billions and tens of billions of dollars into next generation nuclear, wind, solar, electric vehicles and the supply chains for all of that. Now, there are a lot of people around the country that are not particularly focused on climate, but they're focused on China. And they're saying, hey, we cannot let those guys become the energy superpower post carbon. We've got to invest in it so that we're going to be the energy superpower. But the good thing about that is, hey, that's virtuous competition. Like, if we end up investing more so that we're the dominant superpower, that just means cheaper post carbon energy Faster for everybody. But in the AI space, it is absolutely unclear that there is a virtuous cycle of competition. If we are not working together, the proliferation risk is much, much greater. I couldn't agree with you more on that point.
- [26:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So now the question becomes, when you look at what we get on the other side of the crisis, the cooperation, the banding together to focus on one problem, does that lead us back to globalization? So we opened this up with globalization. Amazing. We were lifting some ungodly 160,000 people out of poverty every day for like nine years. I mean, it's absolutely crazy the number of people that we pulled out of Povert. But you get the rust belt pushback, rise of populism. It's not good for everybody. And so needing to really be honest about that. But in this world, let's say that we get the right crisis, what are we steering towards? Is it reglobalization or is it what I'm calling thoughtful de globalization?
- [27:08]
Ian Bremmer
I think we are trying to move back towards globalization, but thoughtful globalization, where you are using the resources you have to more effectively take care of the people that are left behind, that you are constantly retooling your institutions and reforming them because the technologies are changing that fast and that's something governments by themselves won't be able to do again. They'll have to do in concert with these new technology companies or governments will have to change what they are. They'll have to integrate technology companies into them. And that's. That scares you. That's more of an authoritarian model, frankly. But I. I do think that one of the reasons you've steered me a couple times now in a direction that historically I'd be very easily steered, which is to talk about US versus China. And I've resisted it. And the reason I've resisted it, even though US China is in a horrible place right now and the relationship is getting worse, it's not getting better. But I think it is more likely within 3, 5 years that AI companies cutting edge in all sorts of fields will actually be all over the world. I think this is going to be a proliferating technology for good and for bad. So I'm more concerned about individuals, rogue states, terrorist organizations doing crazy things, as opposed to the US versus China that ultimately want stability in the system. Right. But I'm also hopeful that it's not going to be a small number of dominant companies in the United States and China that control all of the next generation AI. Actually, if you're at a position where you can run A near cutting edge AI on your own laptop or on your smartphone and millions and millions of people have access to that intelligence and they can do things with it. I don't think that a small number of mega tech corporations are going to control it. I mean, they may have platforms that they'll be able to charge taxes on, basically tariffs on. But I think so much of both the value, the upside and the danger will be distributed all over the world. And that's again very different than the way we think about geopolitics today. So I don't think the U. S, I don't. On the AI front, I don't think the US China fight is the principal concern to worry about in the next five to ten years.
- [29:38]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, well, so this is very interesting. One of the things that you talked about in the book is that when Russia invaded the Ukraine, one of the things that they did to try to appease the west and keep them calm was like, hey, we know you're really worried about hackers. We're going to go round them up, arrest them. And what happens to the ability to use political means to get these bad actors in line if they are proliferated everywhere and we have varying degrees of ability to influence.
- [30:17]
Ian Bremmer
Yeah, it, it's one of the reasons why I think you don't have an Interpol motto or an IAEA model. It's why I think it's going to be, it's going to have to be much more inclusive with the technology companies. I keep coming back to this. I don't think that the US Government by itself or the Russian government would be able to make that kind of a promise as easily. Russians are a little bit different here. Right. If you're a authoritarian state and you have real control of the information space, maybe the vast majority of people working on hacking are under your authority. Maybe. But if AI really becomes as explosive and as decentralized as I believe it will, then the governments by themselves are going to have a hard time even maintaining control of the AI space. I'm not sure the Chinese model on this is going to work in 5 and 10 years time. Remember, they gave up on the great Chinese firewall and instead because it was too porous. And instead what they did was they used the surveillance mechanisms and they had a whole bunch of people that were online that were basically nudging Chinese citizens towards better behavior and towards certain things that they should say and certain things against certain things they didn't say and that turned out to be more effective. AI I think, is going to become. If it becomes a much more decentralized space, it's going to be much, much harder for an authoritarian state to do that, but certainly it'll be impossible for a democratic state to do it. Now, the question you haven't asked me is, does that mean that democracy is sustainable? I mean, if the US government feels immediate national security threat from all these tech companies and they can't regulate it, you know, might the Americans start finding the Chinese model on AI much more attractive? I don't think so. And I don't think so because I think our system, because our system is so entrenched, it's so slow moving, it's so receptive to money, the companies are so wealthy, they have the ability to capture the regulatory environment like, again. I mean, never say never. It can happen here. If things are incredibly dangerous. Yes. I mean, you know, you can take desperate measures, but short of the worst scenarios, I think that the United States is closer to kleptocracy than it is to authoritarian regime. If there's a way that the Americans are going to move away from democracy, it's probably not a Chinese model.
- [32:47]
Grainger Hospital Procurement Advertiser
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- [33:17]
Ian Bremmer
right.
- [33:17]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, that's horrifying. My hope. It's funny, my brain tried to fill in what you were going to say and your answer is probably more true than what I was hoping you were going to say. But what I was hoping you were going to say was that we have such a strong shared narrative around freedom that we wouldn't make those. HE LAUGHS Ladies and gentlemen. HE LAUGHS yeah.
- [33:39]
Ian Bremmer
Oh, my God. That used to be true when my dad was alive and after World War II. I just don't see it anymore. I mean, not unless everyone's lying to the pollsters all the time. I. It just doesn't feel that way.
- [33:52]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
- [33:52]
Ian Bremmer
I don't think we agree in the United States what our country stands for. I don't think we do. I don't think we know what our country stands for. There's such incredible cynicism among young people that they're just being lied to, that it's Performative from their governments, from their corporations, from everybody, from the media. And some of it is very understandable. It's painful. But our economy is doing so well. Our technology is doing so well. We have the reserve currency. It's not being threatened. We are in a great geography. It's very safe, it's very stable. There are so many things that are great. I saw that Jamie Dimon, a few minutes that everyone was talking about standing up for America, but he didn't talk about our political system. And our political system is deteriorating and people don't believe in it the way they used to. And there are no there. I've not seen any pushback against that in the last 20 years. It got worse under Obama, it got worse under Trump. It's gotten worse under Biden. It's clearly not just about those people. It's structural. There are a lot of things driving it and that, that I don't see a, I mean, God forbid we had a 911 right now. I mean, I was here, I was in New York at 9 11. I saw the second tower go down. I saw the way that New York City rallied. I saw the way the country rallied. There was 92% approval for Bush. For Bush a month.
- [35:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Young people will not understand how crazy that is.
- [35:17]
Ian Bremmer
And, and I don't think that could happen today. I don't think. I, I don't think it could happen even with someone who is as much of a unifier as Biden has been historically. And it certainly couldn't happen under Trump. And, and that's, that's really sad. That's really sad.
- [35:32]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you have a sense of how we unwind that? This is the one thing my thesis is, has been on this, that until there is enough pain and suffering, which unfortunately historically means war, you don't get the, the country won't come back together. Right. So we've obviously been more divided than we are now because we've been in open civil war in the past. But who. I don't see how you unwind these increasingly divergent narratives of left and right without real suffering.
- [36:05]
Ian Bremmer
Well, I mean, there was this great book that was written by a Princeton historian about the three great levelers. And it talked about how in societies, whatever the governance mechanism, historically, they tend to get more unequal and people with access to power get closer to access to power over time unless one of three big things happen, famine, revolution or war. And you know, that's, that's a little depressing because that implies that you have to have that kind of great Kind of serious crackdown crash before you, before you, you know, come out and, and create more opportunities for people. But I, I also are, am seeing, I mean, coming out of the pandemic, there was an enormous amount of money that was spent on poor people. It wasn't just like after 2008 when you bailed out AIG and Lehman Brothers and the bankers this time around. I mean, you bailed out everybody. You bailed out working mothers, you bailed out small and medium enterprises. And it made a difference. And inflation has hit hard, but now finally working class wages are actually growing faster than, you know, than inflation and then the average wage. And that wasn't true for decades. So maybe there is a bit of a lesson in that. Maybe there is a bit of a lesson when people are seeing that it's the wealthiest with their legacy capabilities that are getting accepted to the major universities, the best universities, and not others. And there's a backlash against that. And maybe that forces greater transparency. Maybe it turns out that AI becomes, with all the wealth it can generate, becomes more of a leveler for people in the United States that will have access to opportunities they hadn't had before. Maybe it allows globalization to pick up again. And not everybody's boat will rise at the same speed, but at least everyone's boat will be rising for a while. Look, coming out of the pandemic, we had 50 years. If we look at humanity as this little ball of 8 billion people, we had 50 years where overall we had extraordinary growth. And if you watched Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling and all of these pro globalization folks, it is true we created not just very, very wealthy people, but also a global middle class. And anyone looking at the globe, you know, without a national, without a nationality, just like you're an average person, you don't know where you're going to be born. You don't know what family would you want to be born in the last 50 years? Yes, yes you would. And hopefully you win the lottery and you're in the United States like you and me. But you know, anywhere, if you, that's the time you'd pick. But the last three years you wouldn't. Because the last three years, suddenly human development indicators have gone down. More people are forced migrants, more people are born into extreme poverty. And people are getting angrier as a consequence of that. Well, I think there's a good chance that with AI we will have a new globalization that will create far more opportunities. But we need to be very careful about those negative externalities. And so far it's very early days, but we're not addressing them yet.
- [39:13]
Tom Bilyeu
So given all of that, paint a picture for me of the near term, let's call it the next 10 years. The. The world is shifting and changing. What does the world order look like as we look out into the future? And I'll contextualize that with you've got things we've talked about here. You've got the war in Ukraine, you've got a dynamic between the US and China being radically upended by the proliferation of AI creating potentially powerful, least destructive entities anywhere, which make it harder for us to yank levers of political persuasion. With all of the unique cocktail that's brewing now, how does one begin to conceptualize where the world is heading over the next 10 years?
- [40:01]
Ian Bremmer
Well, I can't imagine wanting to be alive at any other time. I mean, we talk about the Anthropocene, where human beings, first time in history, we have the ability to actually shape the future of humanity. And our role on the planet that we're on, that's pretty extraordinary. And what does that mean? I think that means that governments and governance will look radically different than anything that we have lived with. We've lived for all of our lives for 50 years, you and I, on average. Now we've lived in a fairly stable system. The Soviet Union collapsed, US was in charge. China's had an extraordinary rise. But generally speaking, the global order today still looks more or less like the global order you had 50 years ago. Henry Kissinger recognizes it, right? He was 50, now he's 100. But it feels like geopolitics still function the way they used to. You've got heads of state, you got governance. You still have the un, you've got the imf, you know, you've got the World Trade Organization, you've got these big things that, that more or less. I mean, I was just at the Security Council. Security Council's kind of the same Security Council we had before, from the 70s. But you know, whatever. It's not, it's the rules, the UN Charter, it's all there. We, you know, it's, it's. You could have, you could have been born a long time ago. In 10 years time, I think we'll still recognize the tectonics on the planet. I think the demographics we can talk about, we can talk about how Japan will be smaller and how China's peaked out and how India's growing and that we pretty good sense in that climate. We've got a pretty good sense of what climate's going to look like and extreme storms and the rest. But government, how government works, how the geopolitics work, how the world is ordered, ruled. I think it's going to look radically different in 10 years. I really do. Certainly in 20, but probably in 10. I think that a big piece of the power that determines who we are and how we interact with people will be driven by a very small number of human beings that control these tech companies that may or may not know what they're doing and they may or may not be with intentionality. And we don't really know what their goals are. And those goals can change. Right? I mean, I talked a little bit in my TED talk, which I haven't really talked much about, which is kind of good is I talked a little bit about how, you know, when you and I were raised, it was nature and nurture and that determined who we were and that now for the first time in humanity, we are being raised by algorithm and that we have a whole generation of kids whose principal understanding of how to interact with society will be intermediated by programmed algorithms that have no interest in the education of that child. That is a subsidiary impact of what they are trying to do. Those algorithms it, what it is trying to do. And a lot of the interactions that will take place with those kids will be AI interactions, not just intermediated, but the actual relationship will be with AI, which by the way, if I could wave a magic wand and do one regulation in the world today, I would say anyone under 16 cannot interact with an AI directly as if it were a human being unless it's under human, super direct human supervision. Because I just don't want people to be raised by anything other than people until we understand what that means.
- [43:44]
Tom Bilyeu
The level of education again into.
- [43:47]
Ian Bremmer
I want that to be directly controlled by, supervised by a person. So yes, I think education, I think a doctor. I'd love to have AI being used, you know, for medical, you know, on medical apps for kids. But I'm saying if you're having a relationship with something, including with a teacher, I don't want kids to have a relationship with an AI educator unless it's, unless it's overseen by an adult. Until we know what it does to the kids, you know, we just don't know. We just don't know. And I, I worry about that a lot. I wouldn't want, I mean, I don't have kids. If I had them, I'd, I'd worry about that. I know my mom wouldn't have allowed that. And thank God for it. So, yeah, I, I think that, I think that we're going to be different as human beings. I mean, you know, you talked about Yuval, no, Harari recently, who I, I find very inspirational as a thinker and you know, this Homo deus concept that he comes up with, I think that young people today are already something a little different from Homo sapiens. And I don't know exactly what that is. None of us do because we're running the experiments on them now. I'm not comfortable with that.
- [44:57]
Tom Bilyeu
It's a good summary, Ian. This has been incredible. Where can people follow you?
- [45:02]
Ian Bremmer
They can follow me on Twitter at ian Bremmer or LinkedIn at Ian Bremmer or even Threads, you know, the, the few people that are on that. But it's kind of fun. Ian Bremmer, what else? I mean, you know, g0media.com, g0all1word media.com where we have a little digital media company that we reach out to people all over the world and they can get our stuff for free, which, you know, hopefully it's, it's engaging and useful. Just like I really enjoyed this last hour. So this was, this was a lot of fun.
- [45:34]
Tom Bilyeu
Same man. All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
- [45:42]
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