These conversations aren't always easy, but nonetheless, they are important. So every single year, Professor Ian Brummer, who is one of the world's leading political scientists, produces this risk report, and it highlights the top 10 biggest risks that everybody should be thinking about. And today, he's going to talk to me about the three that matter the most. So he predicts that the US Political revolution is on its way.
The US has become the biggest driver of geopolitical uncertainty in the world. And in my view, Trump will fail. And he also says that the other thing everybody needs to be talking about and aware of is what's really playing out with AI behind the scenes. They created a model which is so powerful that they couldn't release it because it would have been an immediate systemic risk to the global economy in our security.
And artificial intelligence is eating its users. And we can talk about that. And lastly, I want to end on a point of optimism. Can we take this craziness and turn it into utopia with realistic solutions?
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Ian Brenner, what is this document that I have in front of me here? Let's. This is our progress report. We put it out at the beginning of every year, try to help people around the world understand the risk environment globally.
So for the last 30 years, your firm has been trying to understand the world to help make better decisions based on the big picture of what's happening geopolitically. Yeah. And every year, your firm releases this top risk report. The 2026 one page is pretty prophetic because one of the things that you list as the top risks are playing out before our eyes.
For anyone that hasn't read this report, what are the most important subjects? You wrote this in January, but now sat here in April. What are the most important subjects of the top 10 risks that you think should talk about today? I think that there are three that are really big.
The first is that the United States has become the biggest driver of risk. The Biggest driver of geopolitical uncertainty in the world. And we see that with the tariffs, we see that with Venezuela, we see with Greenland, we see it with Iran. I mean, if there was that level of uncertainty in a smaller political system, and that happens all the time, we wouldn't care as much because the global impact would not matter.
But everyone out there is affected by even small changes in the United States. Suddenly, big changes in the United States. The Americans are saying, we no longer want to play by the rules that we set up historically. We don't want the free trade system that we put together.
We don't want to be the global policeman that is paying for the collective security. We don't want the open borders that used to welcome so many people from around the world. We want a very different set of rules. The American system is not being challenged by the Chinese saying we don't want.
The Americans themselves and the leadership are saying we refuse to be the leader that it used to. Number one. Yeah, that is number one. This is a critical risk.
That is a critical risk, but that's not important. Let me find a question. And again, I say critical in terms of it is happening right now. It is overwhelmingly likely.
It's overdetermined and the impact is massive. So there's no way you could look at the geopolitical order today and not say this is the most important thing. It's not just driving headlines, but it's creating real movement in how the global economy works, how global politics works, global security. Everything is driven by this change.
And what's the second one? The second one is the big question of how the second most powerful country in the world is responding to all of that. Now, we in the Top risks piece talked about overpowered. Overpowered being the global energy dynamic.
How China has been working to build the most effective electric vehicles all over the world at scale, and the batteries all over the world at scale, and the critical minerals in railroads for decades now, not just having access so they can exploit them, but also so that they can reprocess them. Can you let us know what critical minerals are and how important they are to our everyday lives? Could you give some color? Sure.
We're talking about all of these things that you take out of the ground, whether it's lithium, Antony, which is all these devices in every device in your car battery. It's in your missile systems and your advanced weaponry that keeps you safe at home or allows you to go to war against somebody. I mean, you can't have an advanced economy without critical minerals. And rivers.
And the Chinese have been investing at scale globally in that capability for decades now, thinking long term. And a lot of the rest of us have not been thinking long term. We're like just in time, globalization. How do we make the most money now for our next quarterly return?
And that reality is making China not a better economy today, but it's setting them up for a much stronger long term trajectory. So as a risk you're going to ask me to do this, it is not as critical as the US political revolution, because this is focusing on 2026 and China is playing out over a longer period of time. But it is absolutely severe because the Chinese understand that long term, as countries are saying the Americans are less predictable and we're more vulnerable to their sudden changes in decisions, many more countries are saying, well, we want to hedge and do more with the Chinese. And those decisions really matter.
If this continues, if it's direction, control, what happens next in terms of global, in terms of the Middle east, in terms of all these things we talked about, Trump will fail. And I think that the level of policy incompetence and unwillingness to take on expertise is ensuring that it will fail. He's quite unpopular on so many issues right now. He's going to lose in a big way in the midterms coming up in November, and that will make him look like a lame duck.
And Republicans will start to think about their own futures as opposed to holding onto this 80 year old guy. Having said that, we will not have resolved these underlying challenges for average Americans. So there will still be a demand for a political revolution in the United States. The question will be, will the next person that comes and captures that cap, are they going to be focused on themselves or focused on the country?
Trump actually identified the symptoms and was able to benefit as a political entrepreneur twice from getting elected in free and fair elections. Right. Mostly the reality is a future person. We live in New York right now.
Zoramdani, a Democratic socialist, is the mayor of New York City, which is like the capital of global capitalism and finance in the world. What does that tell you? That tells you that there's still a demand for something very different. And we don't know is it going to come from the left or the right.
But we know that that level of uncertainty is growing. And it's not just growing in the United States, it's growing in the global order. Because if the Americans are no longer willing to act as the global leader, but no one else is capable of filling those shoes, you don't have a G7 or a G20 where governments come together and agree on the rules of the road. You have a G0.
An absence of global leadership where people, the powerful, make the rules that are useful to them and the weak have to accept that, have to find a way to live under that. That's where we're headed. There was a Yale poll in April 2026 that said Kamala Harris is leading the overall Democratic field of 20%, narrowly edging out revenues at 19%. Keep judge at 14% with AOC at 13%.
Means literally nothing to me. You know, I think it was Jim Carville, the great Democratic political strategist, that was talking about November. You know, the Democrats need to do. You need to all get on a plane and go to Turks and Caicos until after the election.
Say nothing, be absent. Just do not be allow. It's like, you know, the Sun Tzu, like when your opponent is making mistakes, stay out of their way. The election during the midterm election.
Yeah. So for now, there's nothing happening except Trump and the reaction to Trump. Then after that, we have a two year long, God help us, election in the United States. Billions of dollars will be spent and people will have far too much information about far too many of these people.
Then we can have a conversation. It is too early to talk about Trump's behavior right now. I have to ask you, what on earth is going on? I wonder when we're going to get.
We've got this big map in front of us here. We haven't even touched the Middle East. We literally haven't touched it. What is going on?
Retake me back to the beginning. What did Trump think was going to happen? How is this link to Venezuela? Why would he do this after saying that he was the president that was going to stop all the wars?
What is the big picture here? And literally one of the eight wars that he said that he had stopped was with Iraq. This was not what he was voting in on. He was voted.
He ended the war in Afghanistan. I mean, he cut the deal with the Taliban. Was it a great deal? Yeah, for the Taliban, it was pretty good.
But it got the Americans out. 20 years, a trillion dollars fought on the backs of the Afghan people and of Americans. Not wealthy Americans, not people like Trump that could find a way out of service, but poor Americans and Europeans. Yeah, and Europeans who fought side by side with the Americans, with Americans, asked them to, almost all of them sending troops and many of them wounded and dying in the same numbers, the same percentages, just as Courageous as the Americans were.
So Americans wanted an end to that. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. What the hell are you guys doing? We're not benefiting that.
Stop it. Trump stopped it. So why did he do this? Why did he do this?
I think there are three reasons why he did it. I'll take you through first reason. You said, this way, not on this map. Shouldn't be relevant to this map.
Turned out it's relevant to this map. Trump had plans to take out Maduro. He's got a lot of people inside his administration that see this guy as a real problem. And by the way, a problem for the region.
8 million Venezuelan refugees destabilizing the region, Lots of drug export destabilizing the region. So he had been planning to do something, was also linked to oil. It was relevant. They had the world's largest oil reserves.
It is going to take far more years than Trump will be in office to make that meaningful. So it sounds good from a branding perspective. And you're going to see a few hundred thousand more barrels a day, but it's going to be years. If you saw that testimony, The CEO of ExxonMobil, who said, you know, Venezuela is not investable today, and Trump was angry at it, and all the other energy CEOs, like, thank you for saying that.
We're not saying anything. Look at him. Look at him. Not much courage among the CEOs publicly.
So the oil is a great headline for Trump. It doesn't matter much for Trump's presidency, as you know. It's not because they just have to build up infrastructure to attract it. Oh, yeah.
And because all their engineers are gone, Most of them in the oil patch up in Canada, which has similar geology to it, because they've destroyed so much of their infrastructure. It's broken down because the governance structure isn't there yet. There are people that are capable of actually ensuring there will be contracts that you would follow through on engagement, people that still have huge lawsuits that need to be resolved, all of this stuff. But to get to you, I don't want to lose sight of your.
Why did Trump do this in Iran? So the first point is, beginning of the year, Trump goes in to Venezuela, right? It is the most successful military operation you can possibly imagine. Not a single American serviceman or woman is killed.
They go in, they take Maduro out. They don't kill him. They don't injure him. They bring him to a jail in Brooklyn.
Right here in New York. Out of borough, but still counts. New York City, right? Extraordinary.
And he's Facing justice. And meanwhile, Delsey Rodriguez, right, suddenly vice president, becomes acting president. It's like, sir, we want to work with you guys. We don't want any of that.
Right? And so you've got a new government that has a different trajectory, but it's basically the same regime. And they say, whatever you want, we will work on you want. We'll open our oil sector, we'll open our mining sector, we'll have better regs, we'll try to improve the economy of the average Venezuela.
I mean, they're starting to become popular in another year. If they had elections in Venezuela, it is not inconceiv that she would win it. And the democratic election, which is what blows your mind, right? Hold what hundreds of political prisoners they've released.
I talked to leaders all over South America. They all think this was a success. This is enormously popular among the populations in those countries because they care about security. That's what they've been voting on.
Their elections have been about the economy and local security. And Venezuela has been a problem for them, right? And they're exporting people, causing crime. Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Chile, right?
This has been a serious issue. Trump, Trump's hugely feeling great, successful. Now he's like, I can do that in Iran. I can do it even bigger.
The first reason, that's the right three reasons. That's the first reason. Second reason. This is not Trump's first rodeo with the Iranians.
In his first presidency. The Iranians were engaging in strikes against the Americans directly in the proxies bases in Iraq. Other places also were taking on strikes against the biggest refinery in the world in Saudi Arabia. Those drone strikes, you may remember, the Saudis and the Emirates were telling the Americans, we need to do something, we need to take some action.
Trump did. One, two. They'll get angry, right? Finally, the end of his presidency, he orders pretty bold move, the assassination of this incredibly charismatic military leader, Qasem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force, as it was called in Iran.
And Iran was so angry, and they were going to destroy the United States back to America, where they actually do nothing. And then last June, Iranians are developing their ballistic missiles, they're developing their nuclear enrichment in radiant enrichment. They're like stockpiling at higher levels, 60%. And the Israelis want to go in.
Trump's providing intelligence. He doesn't want to go. Kind of dangerous. The Israeli's going, it's enormously popular.
It's going well, succeeding. I want to fight it bad. That's successful. So he joins in Second time Israel took casualties, about 100 killed, I think in the course of that 12 day war.
United States, Iran talked big, did not hit the Americans. They threw some missiles at that Aladeh base in Qatar, the biggest US Base. They warned the Americans through Iraq before the missiles were launched. So it was very clear the Iranians didn't want any part of that fight.
So Trump is thinking to himself, this is going to be awesome because I'm going to go in, I'm going to pull Venezuela in Iran, I know they want to fight me. I killed the supreme leader. 86 years old and died anyway. He's not that popular among the Iranian, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, irgc, because they're the ones that really run the country.
I have this huge military force that shows what I'm capable of doing. Then the rest of the Iranian leadership, they don't want to work with me just like they did. That was reason number two. And then the most important reason, the most important reason is that unlike Trump's first term, where he had people around him that were patriotic first and foremost to the country, and when they had disagreements with Trump, they let him know and they leaked.
And they also were willing occasionally to do what they could to undermine an incompetent decision to go to the country. And we saw that whether it was with Mike Pompeo or Mad Dog Mattis, right, All of these people who were much more independent, strong actors this time around. Trump has some really good advisors, people like Marco Rubio and Scott Besson. He also has some staggeringly incompetent advisors, like Pete Hegseth, for example.
But what they all share is that they are first and foremost loyal to the President and they will not tell him, they won't push back. And what he hears from them is shaded towards how brilliant he is. And that makes him think that he will be more successful. Even when the military thinks this is a horrible idea.
And we just saw this with the reporting from the head of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Kaine, who clearly thinks that this is a really bad idea, understands that the military scenarios are super dangerous and that the Iranians will be able to shut down the strait. And every military in the US for the last 20, 30 years has gamed out how the Iranians could shut down the strait in a major conflict. And Trump hears very little of that. And he's taking away.
I'm incredible, I'm confident I'm gonna make this happen. Those are the reasons he wanted. And so he thought it would be take out the Supreme Leader, then They'll negotiate, we'll get a better deal. We'll have a political system there or political leader that is obedient to us.
Yeah. And it'll be, maybe it won't be a day, but it's not going to be a month. And what actually happened, that did not happen. What actually happened is the Americans took out, well, the Israelis took out the Supreme Leader and also took out a lot of the military leadership that the Americans had been speaking to, which is why Trump came out and he said, well, a lot of guys we're talking to are dead now, so we don't really know who to work with.
He said that even if it's true and it was, you don't want the president saying that. Right. He has no filter. So it's one of the more interesting things about this presidency.
What happened is the Iranian leadership was taken out. The response was immediately what they call this mosaic situation where they decentralized the, the military decision making to local commanders because they were worried that the high level commanders, if they were on cell phones, if they were engaging with other commanders, the Israelis would know where they were and they'd be able to assassinate them. So then suddenly the Iranians were taking shots at other Gulf states, at critical infrastructure and stopping transit from the strait. This is one of the questions I had is in several interviews that I understand.
He alludes to the fact that he thinks he's talking to the right people. Do you really be by There was a meeting recently in Pakistan where they sent J. Vance in to negotiate with Iran. Do you think anyone is running around at the moment?
Is there leadership in Iran? Is it possible to negotiate and control all of these dispersed forces? At the moment, the honest answer is it's impossible to know because this is right now. The internal decision making of Iran is extremely buttoned up and they ain't talking to anyone about that.
But it's very easy to assess two things. First, that their ability to make centralized decision plans and implement them is real. So when their biggest gas field is hit and they say we're going to be back in return, they are able to implement on that in short order. So we've seen a number of occasions in the last five weeks where Iran has gone from statement made by the Foreign Ministry and by spokespeople to action taken by local commander in Iran, which implies that there is a centralized structure.
We also see toll taking on the strait by individuals that are being ordered by the central Iranian government to do and operating by themselves. So in that regard, the fact that the Iranians showed up in Islamabad, in Pakistan, with significant leadership with the foreign minister, also the speaker of the Parliament, but also a team of experts who had briefs on negotiating on a number of different points on the strait and on ballistic missiles and on support of proxy actors and on the nuclear issue, which proved most divisive in those 21 hours of talks, shows that this regime is still very much functioning, despite all of the Israeli and the American efforts to say that, you know, they've done all this critical damage, this regime is still very much in place, and they couldn't get a deal. So Trump announced that he's going to block the straits or moves himself just hours ago. I think that that is also overstated.
You have 21 hours of talks led by the Vice President of the United States. I assure you, if these talks were a disaster, they don't last 21 hours. Two or three, and then they're out. 21 hours means very substantive conversations on the entire range of topics that were of importance to the Americans.
In the Iranians, Trump did not get the outcome he wanted. Ultimately, I'm not super surprised, because the Iranians feel like they have more leverage right now than the United States thinks they do. And this frustrates Trump immensely. And so at the end, remember, he keeps calling and talking with vance more than 10 times over the course of this entire conversation.
They're in regular contact. At that point. Trump says, okay, I'm blockading the straight. But just before markets open on Monday, you also see reporting that, well, these talks that were a disaster, we're going to engage in further talks.
So maybe it wasn't such a disaster. Maybe what's really going on here is Trump wants to show that he still has more leverage to use against the Iranians because he's lost a lot of his leverage. He gave a speech to the American people, one speech so far in Iraq, primetime speech. In that speech, he said, war's almost over, two to three weeks max.
We're done. If I'm the Iranians, and I hear that, I'm like, great, the Americans can't take this pain anymore. They can't take it. He keeps saying, straight, not my problem.
Straight, let them take care of it. I hear that I'm the Iranians, great. He can't take this economic pain. He knows he doesn't have a military solution.
So it's not that the Iranians are only hearing for Trump, I'm going to destroy your civilization. They're seeing what he's actually doing, and he seems to Change his mind a lot or not follow through on some of the threats that he makes. And they also will be aware that he's becoming increasingly unpopular on this issues. On this issue specifically, he is underwater, just like he was on Greenland, where he eventually completely did a 180.
He was going to put tariffs on all the Europeans that supported Denmark. He had to take Greenland. Those things went away. So you sat there.
You're wrong. You're doing. Trump's own people are pressurizing him to get the hell out of here. He's unpopular day by day.
It's hurting his economy. His midterms elections are coming up. He's going to be severely hurt. He's going to lose power in that regard.
So actually, the Iranian leaders, I mean, they might be incentivized just to wait it out. That's right, because they don't think they have to wait it out for months. They saw China, China did this right, last year, Liberation Day, as Trump called it, where he puts tariffs on all these countries, he puts these high tariffs on China. They hit back.
He does it again. They hit back again. He's like, I'll do export controls and say, we're going to shut down your criminal minerals. Some of the CEOs are going to mar a lago.
They said, you got to deal with the Iranians or we're going to shut down our factory lines in red states. Trump has it back down. Right. So we've already seen that when a country has leverage over Trump and they can hit him, he has the most strong military in the world, but he also has a glass job.
He can't take a hit the way that unelected non democracies can the Chinese and now the Iranians over the strait. So what Trump is doing with announcing the blockade, by the way, he hasn't broken ceasefire. So even though blockade is an act of war, he still hasn't said, okay, you guys have to start hitting Iranians again right now. So this is still de escalated compared to a week ago.
A week ago, this looked much more dangerous than it looks today. He's saying to the Iranians, hey, I'm willing to cut off your source of funds. I'm willing to stop you from exporting oil and making money off of it. Same Trump that suspended those sanctions on Iran because he wants to keep the prices down.
So that's what's happening right now. Iran also, again, I'm trying to put myself in the mind of the incentive structure of the Iranian leaders. They can't let it be seen or known that dropping bombs on us made us pander to you. Because if they set that precedence, then for the next couple of decades, every American leader is going to know, okay, if you want to run a table, all you do is take out their leadership, you drop load bombs on everything they have, and then they come and negotiate with you and give up their nuclear weapons and everything else.
So I imagine there's an element of Iranians now going, if we buckle here, then for the rest of time, America are going to repeat this playbook. I hear what you're saying. I would put it slightly differently. I think that after the 12 Day War last June, the Iranians understood that their deterrent capacity had failed.
They were incapable of preventing the Americans and the Israelis from hitting them and their proxies whenever they wanted. We've talked a lot about Iran. We haven't talked at all about Lebanon. There's another war going on in Lebanon right now.
The Israelis are hitting the Lebanese very hard. There's over a million displaced people in the last several weeks. Why? What is this war?
Well, Hezbollah, which is a terrorist organization as recognized by Israel in the United States, though not everybody, continues to have the ability to engage in strikes against Israel. Nowhere close to the strength of the Israeli military. But the Lebanese government promised to disarm that. They have not done that.
And so Hezbollah has been able to continue to engage in missile strikes, relatively small numbers of missile strikes into the north of Israel where Israeli citizens live. There was a period of time after the October 7 attacks by Hamas where over 100,000 Israelis had to evacuate from their homes and their schools and the rest for like a year because Hezbollah was making their lives hell. Right. So what Israel is now doing is they're going to take territory about 5-7 km of Lebanese land.
They're going to occupy it as a buffer zone to protect those Israeli civilians from Hezbollah being able to hit them with their weapons. That is the intention here. And so what Iran understands is that their ability to deter Israel from hitting Hezbollah. Hezbollah.
At the beginning of October 7, Hezbollah was the most powerful non state military in the world. No one else was close. And today Hezbollah has shown that their leadership gets targeted and destroyed, assassinated across the board by the Israelis, that their military is incapable, their critical infrastructure can be disrupted and that isra, the capital of Lebanon and no one can do anything with charge Israel. There's lots of chaos going on in the world right now.
Yes. Was there a way to have avoided all of this? Was there something that someone could have done further Upstream to avoid all this chaos that we're seeing now in the Middle East. What was the first moment that fell in Iran?
You do have an enormously repressive regime that has the ability to take action against their own people in an incredibly brutal way, as we saw it play out in January. And it's also a regime does not respect the right of Israel to exist. It's also a regime that has been sending weapons and money and military advice to other revolutionary actors around the region, undermining security in Yemen, undermining security in Iraq, undermining security in Syria. So the fact that at the core of the Middle east, you have a revolutionary regime that was exporting instability and violence is a serious problem.
That's number one. Number two, Israel, America's top ally in the region. America first. But Trump still gives billions of dollars every year.
Israel and is cut off military aid in support for almost everyone, including for Ukraine. Right. This country is very capable of now attacking all of its enemies and creating outcomes that it wants, whether or not it creates instability in those countries. We've seen that in Gaza and the West Bank.
Right. I mean, reality is Israel is continuing to take more territory in the west bank, and no one can do anything about it. They hit Lebanon really hard. No one can respond to that.
So that is creating a reality where Israel is able to determine outcomes and even attack Iran directly with. With the United States. They felt very confident about taking that on and that there would not be backlash that would undermine Israel's own political survival. It wasn't an existential risk to Israel.
And even Iran developed nukes, which is everyone wants to prevent from happening. But Israel has their own nukes. Right? And they have like 100 plus.
So those are two fundamental drivers of conflict and instability in the region. One aligned with the United States, one revolutionary theocracy. There have been very positive developments in this region, very positive developments. First of all, Syria, Assad was a brutal dictator that was overthrown by his own people, and his own military would not support and fight for him.
And the Russians proved that they couldn't support him in a significant way. And so now you have an opportunity for Syria to become a representative government that can engage with others around the region. And more broadly, that's a positive. You've got Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Qatar that are engaging in transformative domestic policies to attract investment from all over the world, to build experiences that everyone would want to travel and engage in, to create work opportunities that are far better remunerated than anything that foreign labor could get in their own home countries, allowing them to bring money home.
And in the case of Saudi Arabia specifically, they're taking 35 million people. Half of that economy used to be close to women, and now they're bringing women into the economy. They're actually not just educating them, but they're giving them opportunities in every area of employment. That is one of the most extraordinary stories in the world today in terms of change in governance.
And that continues then. Final point here is that in the context of this Iran war, in the context of the United States, which is doing less global leadership, there are questions of how these countries that are aligned with the US Want to ensure their own futures. And so we see increasingly two different blocs that are starting to form. You've got the United Arab Emirates together with Israel.
You remember the Abraham Accords, which was Trump's big foreign policy success in his first term, where he got these countries, the UAE and others, to recognize Israel and start doing a lot more tourism and business, technology transfers and the rest. So uae, Israel, the United States and India are increasingly aligning on national security and technology, and they're becoming more of a international bloc based on this region. At the same time, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, long worked together on defense, are now much more public about an alliance. Pakistan is nuclear, Saudi Arabia is not.
But Pakistan would provide them nuclear weapons if they really wanted. That's absolutely something to think about. They are increasingly becoming a regional defense quad for countries together with Turkey and Egypt, big countries, big populations, aligning more diplomatically and on defense, calling for a regional security architecture in the region. But that would not be easily aligned with the uae, America, Israel and with India.
So that is also a significant tension. And in the context of all of that 95 million people in Iran whose military has been substantially degraded, whose economy and industry have been substantially degraded, and who were already running their economy into the ground before the war happened. These guys aren't winners, they're survivors. Right.
They have influence over the strait, but they're not winning. And this is dangerous longer. Your firm makes a lot of predictions. So I wanted to ask you to help me try and look forward as to how this conflict might end.
We're in a position now where it seems that the US Aren't going to give up the demand to Iran that they cease to develop and pursue nuclear enrichment. It appears that Iran have said that they want the rights and they believe they have the right to the fully conflict started to enrich uranium and to have nuclear power plant all these kinds of things. So how does this end? Like Trump's now.
He's blockaded the straight for the noose. We're in another standoff. He cease fires and flies the ceasefires and places. I think he said it was 14 days, Jimmy.
Now probably what about nine, 10 days left of Iran. He's thinking about his legacy. He can't be reelected. He talks sometimes about, you know, winning the peace prize and wanting to be on a Mount Rushmore of president's office.
So he can't just leave. If he just leaves, then Iran carrying on their enriching program, it goes down in history almost like a Bush failure, geopolitical failure. He can't just leave. He has to be seen to win.
But also Iran can't let him be seen to win. So how what happens? I think unlike almost anybody else you can imagine, if he decided that he wanted to end this, he could end this. He could just leave and he would say, I won.
He's already said this in different ways. I don't even care about the nukes because we've already entombed them. They're under all this rubble. We've got satellite coverage.
If the Iranians try to get them, we can get them back. He's already said that. There's already a regime change. It's already new people.
We can work, we can talk with these people. The arts in the strait isn't his problem. We're right. But of course, he also said different things sometimes in the same tweet.
So he's picking and choosing. But what I'm suggesting to you is that Trump has already moved towards de escalation. You're your spot on when you say he set the stage to back out. To back out.
We won, regime changed. My problem, we have a rainbow, blah, blah, blah. But then if you don't know who blash, which didn't seem to fit. It seemed like he was setting the stage to back out.
And suddenly the civilization between Bronnie bridges unique PowerPoints, which suddenly doesn't care and was impossible, by the way. Yeah, there was no chance he was actually going to do all that that evening because why did he just back out? Well, I do not want to be Trump's psychologist. It is very clear that he is impulsive and that he does not have much impulse control, nor does he create around him mechanisms that create impulse control, that enforce impulse control.
He's on his phone all the time. He watches the media relentlessly. People engage with him from all over the world on his cel. And he has recency, buys the thing he heard in saw last, he frequently focuses on.
But he also watches the markets. Yeah, he seems obsessed with stock market. That's why so many of the announcements he makes right before or right after the market opens. And obviously there's been a lot of insider trading concerns around that, too.
And people he's concerned about personal enrichment and people around him making billions of dollars. That plays in, too. I wish it didn't. It's horrible to talk about it, but you can't avoid that topic.
What happens? You want to know what happens? I don't have it, first of all. No one does.
But where I think this could be going on the basis of that, the most likely outcome is that the ceasefire is eventually extended, that we have those talks that were 21 hours, that were substantive. There'll be more talks. Maybe not with the vice President, but there'll be more talks, they'll become more substantive. And that eventually, I expect that the Iranians are more likely to give on the nuclear issue and on enrichment if they're able to maintain a privileged position on transit through the strait, because that will help provide them with money and with security.
They get a level of deterrence. If everybody knows these guys could shut down the strait in the future, that helps them. They never had nukes. They were going to get nukes.
If they got nukes, they were going to get blown up like everyone knew that they were two weeks away. If they had access to the material and they reprocessed the nuclear grade and they weren't stopped by the Americans. These really. That's a lot of if ads.
Right. So. But here they've got influence over the strait. They have it, they've used it, they're using it, they're making money.
Trump is not having a military plan to get them back. So I think that is the most likely outcome. If that is the case, then over time, the Iranians will cut more deals with more countries to get more oil out. And meanwhile there will be.
After the ceasefire is in place and strong, then the Europeans and other countries, the Indians, other countries will come in and they will start escorting ships to create a more secure environment in the strait itself. That is the good scenario or the less bad scenario, because all this should have been avoided. I want to make sure I'm clear on this scenario. You're saying that they will conceal the nuclear point ground?
Potentially, at least somewhat. At least they will compromise on the nuclear point, but in turn they'll get more control over the straits. And what does that mean? That they'll be able to decide to go through there.
They'll get charged. And by the way, you could define them charging the toll as part of the reconstruction money that they're going to need for the word. They just reparations, they'll call it reparations. No one else will call it reparations.
That's fine. I think that is the good scenario. Again, the less bad scenario, and I would say it is more likely than not. There is another scenario.
Right. And the other scenario is that everything that Trump has been saying is because he doesn't get a military plan. Over the last days with all the cease fire, there's still this new aircraft strike group that is motoring its way over to the Gulf. You have thousands more American troops.
They're heading into position. Ground troops. Right. They have almost 15,000 total that will be deployed by Trump since this war started.
They're going to be there in the next two weeks. Once Trump has them there, he can use them. And there are lots of things he might use. He keeps saying.
I keep seeing him go back before, I was talking about all the ways he was saying we don't need to defend the Strait, we don't need the nuclear. We can hit them. But he also has been saying we should take the oil. I've heard him say this on a number of occasions.
I've also seen him say if just the American people were a little more patient, we could take the oil. What does he mean by taking the oil? That's not. Quaqi isn't taking the oil block.
He is stopping the Iranians from getting the oil out. Take the oil. Is control the export facility on Carg Island. Right.
And explain this isn't the significance of an oil, just as this is a comparatively small island about half the size of Manhattan, it's not incredibly fortified or defended, and it's very close to the Iranian shore. And it is responsible for 90% of the export of Iranian oil. CENTCOM Central Command say that you can take Kharg island with 12 to 15,000 men, relatively comfortably. So where is Kharg Island?
So Kharg island is right about here. It's not in the Strait itself, but it is. This is right off of the Iranian coast. And we're talking about 90% of Iranian oil export comes out through there.
So if the Americans take it obviously very easy for Iranians to be engaged in strikes against them, but the Iranians will not be able to get any oil out. So suddenly the Americans have far more leverage over the Iranian economy. Right. In A very direct way in a very targeted way.
And that is the way that you take the oil. Could Trump take the oil? Actually take it out of this region somehow? Is that like another passage through the level of.
Okay, so. No, no, he can just stop the oil. He can stop the oil. But again, if he has control of Karg, the oil coming out of Kharg, if you want to have bring it to market, the only ones that could do it would then be the Americans.
Now, the Iranians at that point could still disrupt the strait. And there are other conversations, other military plans about how you might be able to take coastal regions, raids on the territory that would take out more ballistic missile sites, go after the drones. All of this takes more troops, all this takes more casualties, but would also give you more capacity to eventually enforce a navigable strait with escorts, which right now you can't do. Right now, the Iranians can prevent you from getting any ships out if they wish to.
I think that the likelihood that Trump is ultimately going to make that order is well below 50%. I think that the worst scenario is not the more likely one because he understands how unpopular it will be. But it does mean that he's going to have to sell a pretty ugly pig with lipstick on. It means that because this was the problem Trump has is he can't blame anyone else for this.
Yeah, he's the decider, but he did it. I mean, he's got his secretaries in cabinet. They're all saying all the war is up to Trump. He's got the war goals will be over.
When he says it's all about Trump, he can blame NATO for not wanting to join him. They're joining him was his war of choice. And he's never been responsible directly for an economic downturn. The pandemic wasn't his fault.
Right. This is an economic downturn with oil prices shooting up. Gas is over 4 bucks a gallon, diesel's over 5. Inflation's ticking up, food prices are going up.
He's wildly underwater on affordability, and he is completely responsible for it. No one else is responsible. And zooming out even further when we think about this on global scale. You've got Russia, who are at war with Ukraine.
That seems to just completely vanish from any cycle, by the way. It has. Not in Europe, I promise you, but in the United States, they're talking a lot less about it. It's true.
In Poland, this is a very big issue. In the Baltics, it is a very big issue. China, who must be laughing because it looks like the United States are just sort of self harming themselves. And then you've got Europe, which is the last power, who seems to now just be concluding with themselves and getting together and saying, we're not going to help you us anymore.
I mean, I grew up through all these little conflicts and wars and the UK always seems to come to the US at all. And for the first time ever, I'm watching the UK Actually. No, you do this very self Conan France, we're going to huddle and go it alone. What is that big picture and what part of that big picture does China talk about?
Yeah, China's the most pertinent because it's most powerful. Russia is the easiest to deal with, which is that for the Russians, they don't have much that they produce that's manufactured. They don't have very good technology. Right.
They're relying more on the Chinese people. Oil, everything that they manufacture, they've got oil, they've got gas, they've got fertilizer. Right. All the things where the prices have just spiked through the roof.
That's what the Russians have. That's where the power is. And so they are making so much more money. Their economy was really getting squeezed with all the sanctions.
Now they're getting so much more for everything they actually sell. And the Americans have reduced sanctions like they did on Iran against Russia, because Trump shares above markets, as you say. So Russia's in a better position for that reason. And they're in a better position because all the weapons the Americans have been selling to the Europeans to get to Ukraine, America now needs to get to the Middle East.
So the Ukrainians are going to have a harder time defending their cities against Russian ballistic missiles against Russian drones. So this clearly means that Putin will be much, much less interested in a ceasefire, which, let's face it, he wasn't really very interested in to begin with. Trump, at the beginning of this term promised he would end this war. He was hugely frustrated.
He goes to Israel to announce the Gaza ceasefire. It's a big win. The Knesset, the Israeli parliament, they're standing obation. He's like, you know, I thought I was going to get the Russia war done and I failed it.
I haven't been able to do that. I got this one instead. Like, Trump never brings up his own failures, but this really bothers him. So here you've got yet more ability for the Russians to say we're going to persist.
And it makes it more likely that Trump will eventually do a deal with the Russians over the heads of the Europeans. So that's the Russia issue kind of in a little box. Now, Europe. We already talked about how Europe is having its problems economically.
It doesn't have the productivity, doesn't have the growth. What did Europe do wrong in your view? I'm a European. I guess I was born boss.
Born in Africa. I moved to UK when I was younger, so I guess I'm British. What did the country do wrong? Because the country was so strong and powerful and respected when I was younger and I love Britain, but it appears on a global stage that that perception has changed.
The US Talking to us on the laptop at Davos, I saw the talks. They're like, you need to get your shit together and be stronger and stop being so. Well, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, well, first the Americans talking to the Europeans that way has a lot more to do with change in administration.
I don't think any other Democratic or Republican president would do what Trump is doing to his closest allies. That's more unique. But it is certainly true that over the last 30 years there have been two really big geopolitical shifts, right? The United States has shifted its orientation, but not just geopolitical power, but in terms of power shift, you've got the rise of China and the global South, India in particular after China, but China's biggest piece of that.
And then you have a decline of American allies. Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea. These are countries most of which are contracting demographically, right? The countries most of which have much flatter growth and much more reduced productivity than the United States.
They've not been investing in their own defense, they've not been investing in our technology. So what you see is an asymmetry at the same time that the Americans are saying, we're not interested in the rest of the world. We don't want to do all this stuff. We don't want to fight the war, they don't want to free trade.
You're also seeing a reality where those countries don't bring as much to the table in a conversation with the United States. So the so called Draghi plan, the 800 page plan by the former central bank head in Europe, the ecb, Mario Draghi, they called him Super Mario. He had this competitiveness report that all of these things that the Europeans needed to do, and he would say the Brits as well, to address that, to build entrepreneurship, to spend in ways that would actually bring a return long term, to invest in new technologies, to reduce red tape. The plan is there.
But unlike the United States, unlike China, Europe is not a country. Europe is 27 countries in the EU and the United Kingdom, which decided for Brexit. It's a lot harder when you don't have scale, it's just harder. And when you have elections every, you know, a couple, every few years, it's just more challenging.
You can't do the sort of stuff that the UAE or the Saudis or the Singaporeans or the Chinese can do at scale long term. So as a consequence here, Durang, your focus. Europe believed that the world after the wall came down in 1989, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, they believed the world was just going to be peaceful, that everyone was going to have a system like the Europeans did. So they didn't need to invest in fence and it was okay if they didn't invest in lots of technology because they had friends that they could work with and maybe their growth wouldn't be as big, but their quality of life would be so high.
And they were completely wrong. China did not. They got wealthier, but they didn't suddenly align with the United States. China didn't become a free market economy.
China didn't become a democracy. China is a consolidated dictatorship under Xi Jinping with no term limits and with control of the economy, state controlled economy. And that's an easy environment for the Europeans to be comfortable being non competitive. A lot of this comes down to energy and productivity, cost of energy, the cost of energy.
So a lot of these countries decided to carry on drilling oil and pursuing nuclear. A lot of European countries decided to go for net zero where they tried to focus more on sort of sustainability sources, whereas China didn't seem to care, quite frankly, the US didn't really seem to care much. And then also on this point of entrepreneurship, innovation, the US and China have both really aggressively pushed on commercial innovation and new technologies. Whereas one can make the case that the European environment has been less friendly to new technologies and innovation.
So the Chinese use the Chinese, they don't give a fuck. Not true. The Chinese have invested in everything. So the Chinese know that they still need lots of dirty coal in order to power their industry.
But they also have invested like nobody else in green technologies at scale, solar and things like that, solar and wind and their car companies are the electric people, leaders in the world. And batteries that are the best batteries, most efficient batteries at scale in the world. And all of the materials, the raw materials that go into producing those Chinese have invested in this for decades now. And nuclear, right?
Well, the Europeans, except for France, France has heavy nuclear and it's helped them in this Crisis. Most Europeans have turned away from nuclear. The Europeans have not done an all for all approach. The Europeans have done a let's lean into green, but let's make other technologies more challenging, including nuclear, which should be seen as a green technology.
So yeah, there's no question that that has inhibited growth in Europe. The United States has been on again, off again. You've got one administration that's leaning into green, the next one. That's not what America should be doing.
America today is the world's leading oil producer by a long margin. And fracking natural gas as well, by a long margin. Incredible work there. Yet the United States is actively undermining the ability to also produce clean technologies for energy.
Texas produces more sustainable energy than any other state in the United States. Red Texas. So I mean it's not like this is these energy technologies are not Republican or Democrat. They are at scale becoming cheaper.
You need all of them. And so the Europeans made a mistake in not recognizing that you need everything. Everybody says that the United States is the world Union superpower and has been the case, you know, hard to argue against that for a long time. Is that set to change?
Is China set to become the world's leading superpower? Not soon. But the present trajectory, if it continues clearly would challenge America's dominant position. Clearly.
I mean the US has the dollar is the global reserve currency right now. Nothing else is close. And transacting in the dollar is a huge advantage for the Americans who can continue to print money with reckless abandon and run massive deficits and have lower interest rates as a consequence. China does not have convertible currency.
They don't have rule of law. If they opened their currency become convertible, there'd be massive capital flight and political instability. That's what they worry about. So they don't compete with the US there.
China's military is still a fraction of of the capabilities of the US they're watching what's happening in Venezuela, in Iran. They don't have that capacity. They're not close. They're building a nuclear weapons out.
They're building their conventional weapons out. They've never fought a naval war. They have. It's decades since they fought a ground war.
They're not capable of doing these things. So is there any concern to China? Yes. What is that concern?
The concern with China is that the most the world changing new technologies out there, the Chinese are investing at scale and the Chinese are now either a parity or ahead of the Americans and everyone else by a long margin in many of the core technologies that matter most in the world. And what does that potentially mean that is worth paying attention to? Why does that matter? It means that they can set the rules, they can set the standards, they can sell the products that you need them.
If they determine that they're going to shut you off, you're dead. I mean, think about what happened. The Europeans were so dependent on Russia for gas and for oil, and the Russians invade Ukraine, they want to shut it down, it destroys the European economy. The Americans are doing just fine.
The Americans are building and get so many of their semiconductors from TSMC in Taiwan. I'm sure you've talked about that before on your show, but what happens if China decides that they want to cut that off, if they have that capacity? The Americans are really screwed. So you don't want to be in a position where one country, an adversarial country that you don't trust, have a good relationship with, suddenly produces all the stuff that you desperately need or your economy will fall apart.
And yet that is the trajectory of presidentiality. If China, if China had elections coming up in November, I'd be bored, right? Because you know, you can just imagine a situation where the Chinese being more short term would say, well, look, the Americans are distracted with Iran and the Europeans are distracted with Ukraine. Now is our time for Taiwan because we really want to get like all that support so much.
Chinese aren't doing short term at all, they're doing long term. The Chinese are thinking for 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road, and they're investing that way. They're taking very little risk. They're making no regret moves to set themselves up long term while the Americans are doing all this short term stuff, all this electrical cycle stuff.
That's the worry. If the Americans, the biggest danger to the United States, China, it's America, it's America getting its own way and not investing in having the best products, the most competitive, the most attractive place to study, the most attractive place to live, most attractive place to work. This has had probably the single biggest impact on my office of all the products that I've tried that have given me productivity gains or cognitive boosts. I would say that exogenous ketones are in the top three most pivotal things out here in massive productivity game.
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