Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / #133: Padraig Carmody / Geography / Globalization / Venezuela / China / Africa & Somalia / BRICS

Transcript

#133: Padraig Carmody / Geography / Globalization / Venezuela / China / Africa & Somalia / BRICS · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of Come Together.
• 0:14
  Paul and yeah, an oil rig. Paul Rig, there we go.
• 0:17
  Paul Rig, Professor, welcome. So happy to have you here.
• 0:20
  Happy New Year and happy 2026, isn't it?
• 0:24
  Correctly returns, yeah. And you have your returns.
• 0:27
  Yeah, well, I got my punt of Guinness and I'm ready for a lot
• 0:30
  of fun and hopefully a very educational conversation about
• 0:35
  geography. So I've been.
• 0:38
  So I got interested in this whole topic of, aside from
• 0:42
  geography, economic relationships, you know, between
• 0:47
  between countries and using economics to kind of expand
• 0:50
  empires. I became familiar with this
• 0:52
  notion when I was reading a book called The Confessions of an
• 0:54
  Economic Hitman. And I actually interviewed the
• 0:57
  author, who is really a wonderful man.
• 1:00
  And, and then he told me after I interviewed him about his first
• 1:03
  book, he's like, you know, I actually wrote two more books
• 1:05
  since. And one of them is specifically
• 1:08
  about how China is so much better at this game today than
• 1:12
  America is at this point in time.
• 1:15
  And I started looking into where China was investing and I
• 1:19
  noticed that a lot of it was in Africa and South America.
• 1:22
  And I so, so that kind of what is what prompted me to, to reach
• 1:26
  out and to start, you know, doing some homework into
• 1:29
  geography and some of this history and some of the impact
• 1:33
  that it leads to today. So that's why we're here today.
• 1:36
  Right. Sounds good.
• 1:38
  So yeah. Please tell me about whatever
• 1:42
  comes to mind. So I suppose, you know, we're
• 1:48
  we're living in a world now where we have two super powers,
• 1:53
  you know, for the first time in a long time since the collapse
• 1:56
  of the Soviet bloc. China, I think by most measures
• 2:00
  is a superpower now. And that means that, you know,
• 2:05
  it takes an interest in all world regions.
• 2:07
  So Africa, Latin America are very important in terms of
• 2:12
  resources. We can relate that to what's
• 2:15
  been happening in Venezuela as well.
• 2:18
  I would love in the last few days and you know the the scale
• 2:26
  of investment in Europe is is quite substantial.
• 2:30
  Oh really? Yeah, so.
• 2:33
  In America near near near the military bases and farm lands
• 2:37
  and stuff like that, right? Yeah.
• 2:38
  Well, I mean, there's obviously there's Chinese investment.
• 2:41
  The Americans have been more restrictive historically.
• 2:46
  So there was a case where there was an oil company, Unocal, I
• 2:51
  think it was in 2005, and a Chinese company wanted to buy
• 2:55
  that out and that was blocked on national security grounds.
• 2:58
  So even back 20 plus years ago, you know that there was
• 3:03
  awareness and tension around those kinds of issues.
• 3:07
  The Europeans have played a more kind of straddling role, but but
• 3:12
  total Chinese investment in Africa apparently is equivalent
• 3:16
  to, uh, Chinese investment in Germany.
• 3:19
  So even it's because African economies are generally so small
• 3:25
  that China's footprint seems kind of oversized there, whereas
• 3:29
  it's not as noticeable in some of the bigger economies like the
• 3:33
  UK, you know, Germany or France, you know, but, but they are
• 3:38
  really strategically important for natural resources.
• 3:41
  And that's becoming a key kind of area of what some people
• 3:46
  refer to as the new Cold War between between the US and
• 3:52
  China. And some people say Africa is a
• 3:56
  key battleground in that. I mean, we can talk if you like,
• 4:00
  more about that. But but to to come back to your
• 4:06
  point about China being better at kind of present projecting
• 4:12
  and exerting power in other parts of the world, I think
• 4:16
  that's largely true. And I think the reason for that
• 4:21
  is because the Chinese Communist Party is able to control and
• 4:28
  coordinate the society, state owned corporations, state owned
• 4:33
  banks, It has all of these kind of vectors of power that are
• 4:38
  integrated into a loose kind of ecosystem, which then can be
• 4:43
  externalized in order to generate both economic and
• 4:48
  political benefits for China. And and the two often go hand in
• 4:52
  hand. Sometimes there are
• 4:53
  contradictions between them. So, you know, China gave out a
• 4:56
  lot of loans to fund infrastructure around the world.
• 5:01
  Many of those projects haven't worked.
• 5:03
  You know, populations have pushed back.
• 5:06
  There have been debt defaults. So sometimes there's a
• 5:08
  contradiction between the economic kind of objectives and
• 5:12
  the the political outcomes. But for a lot of the time it
• 5:15
  works. The two kind of work hand in
• 5:17
  hand. Right, Awesome, awesome.
• 5:21
  So there are a bunch of I mean, you said a whole lot.
• 5:23
  That last thing I want to go back to that we could unpack.
• 5:26
  But the thing that immediately jumps to mind to respond would
• 5:30
  be from my understanding that China has part of the reason why
• 5:34
  China has been so successful in recent years or the last couple
• 5:38
  of decades, say at this investment and influential
• 5:42
  strategy is I think because the US for many, many years has kind
• 5:47
  of overplayed their hand in aggression in, in the loans and
• 5:52
  in the, and also the way that they kind of come to collect the
• 5:56
  loans in the sense that they say, Hey, we're going to build a
• 5:59
  military base here or hey, we're going to overthrow your, you
• 6:02
  know, and, and it's become a lot less subtle over time.
• 6:08
  And I think that, you know, it started off as a much more in
• 6:11
  the shadows. And I think we became a lot more
• 6:13
  self confident and perhaps to a detriment.
• 6:16
  And I think a lot of people started becoming very resentful
• 6:18
  of the United States. And that's where China is almost
• 6:21
  welcoming because. And again with the with the long
• 6:25
  term potential of a of a strategy without elections every
• 6:28
  four years and you can really implement the strategy over 20
• 6:31
  years without ever worrying. And like you say, you have the
• 6:33
  corporations and the private sector all lumped in.
• 6:37
  It gives China opportunity to come to anyone that feels that
• 6:40
  they were slighted or worse by the US and say, Hey, I promise
• 6:45
  we're not going to do that to you.
• 6:46
  We've always been subtle. We don't build military bases
• 6:48
  like that. We don't put, you know, send
• 6:50
  troops all over the place or kidnap presidents in the middle
• 6:52
  of the night. So, you know, I so why don't you
• 6:56
  guys work with us instead? And then, you know, obviously
• 6:58
  that comes with their own set of cons like you mentioned.
• 7:00
  But I think that I think that our own Americans, America's own
• 7:05
  self assuredness kind of shot itself in the foot.
• 7:09
  So, you know, there are different theories about how
• 7:14
  so-called great powers or empires, if you want to put it
• 7:18
  in that term. People dispute whether the US is
• 7:22
  an imperial state or, or whether it's hegemonic or was hegemonic
• 7:26
  or but anyway, very powerful big states like the US and China
• 7:31
  there, you know, there's kind of theories about when they become
• 7:38
  globally dominant, they tend to have to invest militarily in
• 7:44
  security, in institutions to try and preserve their kind of
• 7:49
  global positioning. And so there's this idea of
• 7:53
  imperial overreach. So the, the British, some people
• 7:57
  claim, you know, did that in the 19th century where, you know, in
• 8:01
  Africa, for example, they were interested in colonizing as much
• 8:06
  of it as they could, irrespective of whether it was
• 8:09
  an economic proposition for them.
• 8:11
  But for geostrategic reasons to prevent the French getting it
• 8:15
  to, you know, project power and prestige and, and all of those
• 8:19
  kinds of reasons. So there's a certain hubris that
• 8:23
  may build up. And I think that's kind of what
• 8:25
  you're getting at, that we're #1 nobody's going to be able to
• 8:29
  touch us in the future. This was the way it was meant to
• 8:33
  be. You know, in the US, obviously,
• 8:35
  there was the, the Monroe Doctrine, which is now being
• 8:38
  revived, that the US would be the only real power in the
• 8:42
  Western Hemisphere, Manifest destiny that, you know, the US
• 8:46
  would be able to expand across the North American and much of
• 8:50
  the North American continent. And that was the destiny of the
• 8:53
  nation to fulfill that. So that kind of expansionist
• 8:57
  culture philosophy, uh, we can see kind of being resurrected in
• 9:02
  some of the kind of moves that are, that are being made
• 9:05
  currently. But, umm, I think what's
• 9:08
  happening, you know, the, the US national security strategy was
• 9:12
  released a few weeks ago, OK, the new, the new Trump 1.
• 9:16
  And it was an interesting document, umm, because basically
• 9:22
  it, uh, talked about the Monroe Doctrine and the Trump
• 9:25
  corollary. And some people said this was
• 9:29
  the US trying to carve out a sphere of influence in the
• 9:35
  Western Hemisphere and assert it's kind of dominance or
• 9:38
  ownership of that region. Other people, though, and then
• 9:42
  to leave Asia for the Chinese and Europe for the Russians.
• 9:48
  You know, this idea of kind of spheres of influence.
• 9:50
  But I read it a little bit differently.
• 9:54
  I think that the Trump administration isn't giving up
• 9:58
  on American dominance or primacy, but what it wants to do
• 10:04
  is to actually leverage the kind of geographical advantages on
• 10:09
  resource endowments of South America in order to assert or
• 10:14
  reassert global US dominance. So I've been reading about for,
• 10:20
  you know, Venezuela contains 17% or 20% of the world's oil known
• 10:27
  oil reserves. And so if you, if there is a
• 10:31
  scenario where China is not able to access Venezuelan oil, the US
• 10:36
  has now sanctioned Russian oil companies, Rosneft and others.
• 10:41
  So that means I was reading an article earlier today saying,
• 10:46
  you know, that 70% potentially of Chinese oil imports would
• 10:50
  then be controlled by governments that are favourable
• 10:55
  to the United States. So China wouldn't be able to
• 10:57
  invade Taiwan because the US could constrict it's oil supply.
• 11:00
  So there's a, there's a, a different geostrategy I think at
• 11:04
  play in this national security strategy.
• 11:08
  Yeah, yeah. It was actually, it's so great
• 11:11
  that you bring that up because I was actually initially opposed
• 11:14
  to the whole Venezuela involvement, you know, and, and
• 11:19
  perhaps it was a little nearsighted of me or short
• 11:23
  sighted. And I, I do have that problem
• 11:25
  sometimes or I have, I'm the first to admit that I don't have
• 11:28
  that big picture perspective a lot of time.
• 11:29
  So I have a harder time with that.
• 11:31
  But I thought, listen, if this was about drugs, Mexico is a
• 11:35
  much bigger problem as far as US concerned.
• 11:37
  Even even the northern border by Canada is a much bigger problem.
• 11:40
  And, and you know, if we're going to start there and then it
• 11:45
  turns and and then, and then someone made the argument to me
• 11:48
  that China and Russia do buy an enormous amount of their oil
• 11:51
  from Venezuela. And if you can, and if and if
• 11:56
  America could accomplish this mission without damaging any,
• 11:59
  without any lives given first of all, which is the priority, and
• 12:03
  without. American lives, well, I think
• 12:05
  there were people killed, but really?
• 12:08
  In Venezuela. Yeah, I, I saw some reporting
• 12:11
  that there were people killed in Venezuela.
• 12:14
  There were no American service people killed and obviously no
• 12:18
  aircraft lost. But I think there were
• 12:20
  Venezuelans killed, yeah. In the, I have a buddy of mine
• 12:24
  that does business, he does seafood and vegetables import
• 12:29
  and export into South Florida and he goes to Venezuela a lot.
• 12:33
  He actually said that something happened, his factory burned
• 12:35
  down or something like that. He said he was right around that
• 12:39
  whole, the whole area. But from my, my understanding,
• 12:43
  so you know, minimal, I suppose relatively minimal sacrifice as
• 12:48
  far as a war goes or as far as a change in opposition, A regime
• 12:52
  change goes. And it seems I, I mean, I hope
• 12:58
  that that's it. I don't, I don't know, but I
• 13:00
  hope that that's it, you know, but but the problem also is, and
• 13:03
  again, America has, I mean, I always like to kind of flip the
• 13:08
  script and just say, what would we do if we're in someone else's
• 13:10
  shoes or someone else is doing, if someone else is doing this to
• 13:13
  us, how would we respond if someone did something that
• 13:16
  really damaged the potential for us to get access to up to 20% of
• 13:20
  the like the world's oil? I would consider that, I'm sure
• 13:23
  America would consider that an act of violence in some kind of
• 13:26
  way, shape or form. And that would encourage some
• 13:29
  kind of warfare, whether it's, it might not necessarily mean
• 13:32
  boots on the ground, but it could mean some kind of, you
• 13:36
  know, propaganda warfare or spy warfare or political warfare or,
• 13:40
  you know, soft influence warfare.
• 13:41
  And, and, and I'm sure that that that we're kind of inviting that
• 13:45
  kind of attack from everyone that we're upsetting by shaking
• 13:48
  this up. Yeah.
• 13:50
  So I mean, I think there's a few issues around that.
• 13:56
  And obviously resources in Africa are central as well,
• 14:00
  particularly rare earths, so-called critical minerals.
• 14:04
  We can, we can talk more about that if you like, but I think,
• 14:08
  you know, it's, it's a gamble and the consequences are
• 14:15
  unknown. And some people have been
• 14:18
  saying, you know, that, you know, even even if it seems
• 14:23
  there's, you know, the difference between a kind of
• 14:25
  tactical action and something which is strategic.
• 14:27
  Even from an American self-interest kind of point of
• 14:31
  view, something which may may seem kind of tactically, you
• 14:35
  know, well executed or or well conceived strategically if it
• 14:40
  undermines international law, if it that undermines soft power,
• 14:44
  the kinds of things you were talking about influence more
• 14:47
  broadly, and that's. Incident too, exactly that we
• 14:51
  don't want to necessarily be applied, you know, to us.
• 14:55
  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you know, the old adage,
• 14:58
  violence begets violence. Unfortunately, I think that that
• 15:02
  still holds true. The other, the other question,
• 15:04
  of course, is about to what extent the Venezuelan government
• 15:09
  under the newly installed interim president will actually
• 15:14
  do US bidding or, you know, how will they balance, uh, with the
• 15:20
  demands of political power brokers and, you know, power
• 15:24
  holders in Venezuela. So that's all still up in the
• 15:27
  air. Again, some people, Adam Tooze
• 15:30
  apparently had a peace from Columbia University where he
• 15:33
  said this was imperial cosplay. So basically, rather than having
• 15:37
  a big ground invasion force like Iraq, you know, you send in this
• 15:40
  kind of Delta Force special operators.
• 15:45
  It's a very quick, quick operation.
• 15:46
  They're in and out in a couple of hours.
• 15:48
  And it appears it's it's been a major achievement or operation.
• 15:52
  But in actuality, you've you've let off some bombs, you've
• 15:56
  kidnapped someone. But in reality, maybe not much
• 15:59
  has really changed. Yeah, yeah.
• 16:01
  And I guess we'll have to see. I guess we'll have to see.
• 16:04
  I think that it's just a matter of taking our time and letting
• 16:07
  letting the situation breathe a little bit because we all know
• 16:09
  that, you know, the risks of celebrating a little too early
• 16:13
  is, you know, especially combined with typical American
• 16:16
  arrogance might be it might be a dangerous combination.
• 16:21
  I would love to. So I want to talk to you about a
• 16:24
  bunch of fun topics that I think are important for people to
• 16:26
  learn about or at least to be aware of these concepts.
• 16:30
  Because I think that a lot of these concepts exist
• 16:33
  objectively. And then fun and sometimes crazy
• 16:38
  conspiracy theorists get hold of them and kind of twist
• 16:42
  everything on its head. And unfortunately, they actually
• 16:45
  end up ruining the, the, the truth that is at the root of a
• 16:49
  lot of conspiracy theories. You know, everything the best
• 16:51
  lie has, has, has, has a bunch of truth to it.
• 16:54
  And you kind of just change, you know, the, the, the inconvenient
• 16:57
  aspects of it for, for your bidding.
• 17:01
  You teach and, and, and, and, and, and study globalization.
• 17:04
  I took a couple of classes about that in college when I was, when
• 17:07
  I was back in 2015, 2016, 2017, and I at the time and I didn't
• 17:14
  understand what it was at the time and I kind of understand a
• 17:17
  lot more today of what that looks like.
• 17:19
  Can you explain what the concept of globalization is and the
• 17:22
  potential pros and cons of of a globalized world as opposed to
• 17:26
  the world you've been living in a toenail?
• 17:28
  OK, so you know, there's different definitions of
• 17:33
  globalization as it's most basic, it's increased
• 17:38
  interconnection between places. So through trade, investment,
• 17:43
  flows of ideas, people. So there's a variety of
• 17:46
  different vectors. Umm, there's different types of
• 17:50
  globalization. Umm, so you know, we could think
• 17:53
  of the slave, the transatlantic slave trade as a form of
• 17:56
  globalization or French colonialism in Africa or or
• 18:01
  Indochina as a form of globalization.
• 18:04
  But people have written and talked a lot about neoliberal
• 18:10
  globalization, the kind of spread of free markets, free
• 18:14
  market ideology, privatisation across the world starting from
• 18:19
  the late 1970s through to, well, probably the global financial
• 18:26
  crisis really is, is the high watermark for that.
• 18:31
  But globalization is, you know, if we're thinking about
• 18:37
  neoliberal globalization, it was very much focused on kind of
• 18:41
  profitability and extending this social logic of profitability
• 18:47
  across the globe into healthcare, into water, into
• 18:51
  basic, you know, lots of things that could be commodified.
• 18:56
  We're now seeing that that model of globalization generated these
• 19:02
  huge inequalities that is hollowed out the European and
• 19:09
  American manufacturing bases along with automation and and,
• 19:14
  you know, other developments. And that that has generated this
• 19:18
  political backlash against that kind of globalism as it as it
• 19:22
  has been called. Yeah.
• 19:23
  And then we're seeing then, you know, the use of tariffs, more
• 19:29
  industrial policies, even the American government taking
• 19:34
  ownership stakes of companies like Intel or charging NVIDIA to
• 19:39
  sell microchips to to China, getting a slice of that.
• 19:44
  So that we've seen this resurgence of what some people
• 19:48
  refer to as state capitalism. But that doesn't mean that
• 19:52
  globalisation is dead. If, if we you look at the
• 19:54
  statistics, global trade still grew even under Trump's, you
• 20:00
  know, first year in office, global trade.
• 20:03
  And part of that is because globalization is what social
• 20:07
  scientists refer to as a recursive phenomenon.
• 20:11
  So if I sell you, you're in Florida, I send you.
• 20:17
  A packet of coffee in the mail and then you send me money, you
• 20:22
  know, in exchange for that. So one flow has generated the
• 20:25
  other flow. But I then take that money and
• 20:28
  maybe I buy something from China with it and then the money moves
• 20:31
  on from there and it sets off all of these other flows.
• 20:35
  So it it, it, it has this kind of dynamism or kind of feeding
• 20:41
  back and amplifying itself as one flow sets off another flow.
• 20:45
  And then you have kind of negative impacts, positive
• 20:50
  impacts, you have pushback, blowback, depending on the, the
• 20:54
  particular geographic context and the types of flows and the
• 20:59
  power relations driving those flows.
• 21:01
  So that's why globalization is a deeply embedded phenomenon in
• 21:08
  market economy or economies. It's not going away, but people
• 21:13
  talk about slobalization, you know, maybe it's slowing down.
• 21:17
  You, you, you know. So it's, it's an interesting
• 21:20
  phenomenon to study. Yeah, it is.
• 21:23
  And it feels, I mean, I can't imagine that it is slowing down
• 21:26
  because of how everyone is constantly minding everyone
• 21:29
  else's business and acting as if everyone else's actions are
• 21:32
  extensions of their own. And, you know, and for better or
• 21:35
  for worse, you know, 1 country or, or, or, or the next.
• 21:37
  And, you know, when you have all these and, and, and I mean this,
• 21:42
  I guess, I mean, I, I, perhaps you can argue, and I don't know
• 21:45
  what you think of this, that the World War, I mean, starting with
• 21:48
  World War One is kind of the first case of mass globalization
• 21:54
  in a very negative way, in the sense that everyone kind of got
• 21:57
  involved in everyone else's business.
• 21:59
  And a lot of people don't even know why World War One, sorry,
• 22:03
  you could say, started as an assassination, but why the
• 22:07
  entire world got involved and, you know, and why it came to an
• 22:10
  end is, is, you know, equally, it almost feels like there was
• 22:15
  an explosion of potential in terms of trade and technology
• 22:20
  and we didn't quite know. And that and that naturally,
• 22:22
  when you get when you obviously get people involved in that, you
• 22:25
  get humanity for the for better or for worse, involved in that
• 22:27
  as well. And you start to apply these
• 22:30
  human traits that have been very useful in or very or manageable
• 22:35
  in small communities or cities, and you apply them to countries
• 22:39
  at a time or hemispheres at a time, and that changes
• 22:42
  everything. Yeah.
• 22:44
  So I mean, I'm, I'm not a a specialist on European history
• 22:48
  or, or, or World War, but obviously people are talking
• 22:51
  about the potential for global conflict to break out again.
• 22:56
  Yeah. We see that there isn't a, you
• 22:58
  know, dramatic uptick in conflict currently around the
• 23:02
  world from Ukraine to Sudan to many other places.
• 23:06
  So we're in that. We're in an era where there are
• 23:09
  parallels with previous areas. And I think what you were
• 23:14
  talking about there about how power becomes in this global
• 23:21
  political and economic system that we have very, very
• 23:25
  concentrated in particular countries.
• 23:27
  So the US, China, you know, some others are more marginal
• 23:33
  players, but they're the they're the big ones.
• 23:36
  And the Europeans have economic power, but maybe not.
• 23:40
  A lot you can do the a superpower in that way.
• 23:44
  I don't think Russia is a superpower, no.
• 23:47
  No, I think it's a superpower in terms on one axis or vector,
• 23:52
  which is the amount of nuclear weapons it has.
• 23:57
  That makes a. That makes a strong statement.
• 24:01
  So, but you know, Vladimir Putin used to talk about the Russia
• 24:06
  being an energy superpower, but oil prices are quite low.
• 24:10
  Maybe, you know, the US intervention, if that was to
• 24:14
  drive oil prices down further, apparently, you know, below $50
• 24:19
  a barrel, that would really have very negative consequences for
• 24:24
  the Russian economy and their ability to fund the war, all of
• 24:29
  all of those kinds of things. But the Russian economy is about
• 24:32
  the same size as the Spanish economy or the Australian
• 24:35
  economy. Really.
• 24:37
  Yeah. So it it's a very small, I think
• 24:41
  is it the depending on how you measure it.
• 24:44
  So if you measure it in U.S. dollars, I think it's something
• 24:48
  like the 13th biggest economy in the world.
• 24:51
  But if you measure it as what economists call purchasing power
• 24:55
  parity, which is what, you know, rubles will buy you in Russia
• 25:00
  versus dollars in the US. But what's put the the money
• 25:03
  people have in their pockets when they spend it locally, I
• 25:06
  think it's the fourth biggest in the world.
• 25:08
  But if you're thinking about international weight of the the
• 25:12
  international weight of the economy, Russia is is small.
• 25:16
  And some people have argued that the war in Ukraine is partly an
• 25:20
  attempt to and the Russians have kind of talked about this in
• 25:24
  their own F foreign policy statements and doctrine that
• 25:27
  they want to make Russia a poll in the new global order and
• 25:32
  obviously getting access to Ukrainian resources, rare
• 25:36
  earths, you know, and so on. It would be potentially part of
• 25:40
  that. You know, now there's all sorts
• 25:42
  of political reasons for the the Russian invasion of Ukraine as
• 25:45
  well. Sure, but but there's also an
• 25:48
  economic aspect or dimension to it.
• 25:51
  I think so. Yeah, you always follow the
• 25:53
  money. You always follow that money.
• 25:56
  Sure. And also people's ability to
• 25:59
  stay in power, you know? And so, yeah, that's important
• 26:03
  too. Yeah, yeah.
• 26:04
  People that have that get power never give it up willingly and
• 26:07
  certainly. Yeah.
• 26:08
  So pretty crappy part of the human condition, I suppose.
• 26:12
  Yeah. Please.
• 26:13
  Are you about to say something? No.
• 26:15
  So I, I think, you know, when you have that power
• 26:19
  concentration in particular countries and if governments
• 26:25
  feel that the maintenance of their power is dependent on
• 26:30
  competing or even going to war with other countries, Plus you
• 26:36
  never know what other countries are, are thinking necessarily.
• 26:39
  I mean, one of the functions of diplomacy is to try and convey
• 26:43
  and to reassure, you know, that countries don't have aggressive
• 26:47
  intentions or, or whatever. But you could see, for example,
• 26:50
  the Russian and and Chinese governments were obviously very
• 26:53
  surprised at the intervention, the US intervention in
• 26:56
  Venezuela, that they didn't have any foreknowledge, even though
• 27:00
  there was a big military buildup and everybody knew something was
• 27:03
  coming. So you, you, you, this people
• 27:06
  talk about the security dilemma, which is basically you, you
• 27:11
  never know what another country's government's
• 27:14
  intentions are fully. And so you have to take a kind
• 27:18
  of default position that you have to build up your own
• 27:21
  military and security and intelligence in order to try and
• 27:26
  deter and mitigate risk arising from from that uncertainty.
• 27:32
  And that, and that's a super slippery slope because the
• 27:35
  difference between counterterrorism and terrorism
• 27:37
  is just who wins the war at that point, you know, and the
• 27:41
  difference between the difference between someone
• 27:44
  being, you know, doing and also how far are you going to go to
• 27:48
  potentially protect from a potential attack and what lines
• 27:52
  are you willing to cross to do so?
• 27:54
  The show it was, it was fun for the first bunch of seasons.
• 27:57
  Homelands did a really good job, you know, breaking that down.
• 28:00
  That was a great show. It's on Netflix now in the
• 28:04
  States. But I, I, I, I loved it and I
• 28:08
  thought that there was a lot of it that I couldn't believe was
• 28:11
  actually put on screen because of how accurate and chilling it
• 28:16
  was. And they and they got away with
• 28:19
  it somehow. I guess freedom of speech really
• 28:21
  does exist, you know, in certain in certain parts of the world.
• 28:24
  But yeah, I think it's really great.
• 28:27
  So, so overall global, so, so globalization has some pros and
• 28:32
  cons, but unfortunately, the kind of way that we've been, the
• 28:35
  way that we, we've seen globalization, particularly in
• 28:38
  an economic sense, and we're going to kind of get to Africa
• 28:40
  this way, or at least Central South and Central America and
• 28:43
  Africa. The way that it kind of
• 28:45
  manifests from my understanding is it rarely, rarely goes to the
• 28:50
  people and the people and, and, and you know, so for example,
• 28:54
  when America or China will go to Venezuela or Africa or whoever
• 29:00
  it's, or even Ukraine. Yeah.
• 29:02
  You know, when, when, when America gives Ukraine a loan, it
• 29:05
  gives them money. It's not going to the pockets of
• 29:07
  the Ukrainians to manufacture and build.
• 29:10
  It's going to Lockheed Martin or it's going to American companies
• 29:13
  that are delivering their products to Ukraine and then
• 29:17
  handing people handing the Ukrainians over the bill and
• 29:19
  saying, OK, now it's time to pay us back.
• 29:21
  And if not, we'll take your minerals, we'll take your, you
• 29:23
  know, your, your weed and we'll take whatever else we want to
• 29:25
  take. We'll put in any kind of a
• 29:27
  leader we want. But the people, the, the, the
• 29:31
  everyday people end up suffering economically from this enormous
• 29:35
  debt that they didn't even get any opportunity out of
• 29:37
  necessarily. Has China changed up that
• 29:43
  strategy in the sense that they've made it a little bit
• 29:45
  more enticing for the people that that that, that that when
• 29:50
  where they placed loans? Because I know America did a
• 29:52
  poor job with that. And I'm curious if China hadn't
• 29:54
  learned from America's mistakes or if that's some another path
• 29:57
  that's going to lead to more frustration from the.
• 29:59
  Popular, Sure. So I think, you know, what some
• 30:05
  people argue is that if you have a strong government which is
• 30:10
  able to kind of negotiate globalization, that it can be
• 30:14
  very beneficial. So China, you know, was able to
• 30:18
  attract a lot of American, European investment, make sure
• 30:23
  that those companies set up joint ventures with Chinese
• 30:27
  companies, that there was technology and knowledge
• 30:31
  transfer to Chinese people, and then they were able to build up
• 30:36
  their own companies on that basis.
• 30:38
  So quickly to just emphasize your point, because I have this
• 30:42
  book here and apparently alleged, according to John
• 30:45
  Perkins, the annual economic rate of economic growth rate of
• 30:49
  nearly 10% for three decades and elevated more than 700 million
• 30:53
  people out of extreme poverty in China, 700 million people.
• 30:57
  It's twice as many people that are in the States.
• 30:59
  And that's. Incredible.
• 31:00
  Yeah. So, you know, some places have
• 31:04
  benefited from globalization. The Chinese government arguably
• 31:08
  managed it very skillfully to their own ends.
• 31:14
  But to keep that rate of economic growth going, you're
• 31:20
  going to need a lot of natural resources.
• 31:22
  You're also going to need export markets.
• 31:25
  OK. And what if you think back, you
• 31:27
  know, to the 19th century or late 18th century, when the
• 31:33
  Europeans were colonizing different parts of the world,
• 31:36
  what were they looking for? They were looking for natural
• 31:38
  resources to fuel their industries.
• 31:40
  They were looking for their markets to be able to sell
• 31:44
  overseas, right, to boost their own economy.
• 31:47
  So you see these parallels happening that domestically,
• 31:51
  yes, you know, there's been a massive economic transformation
• 31:54
  in China, but externally those kinds of extractive demands are
• 32:00
  still being placed on weaker, if I can put in those terms, parts
• 32:05
  of the world economically and politically.
• 32:09
  And so, you know, it, some people talk about elite capture
• 32:14
  strategies that if you can get to the heads of state, the
• 32:18
  decision makers in Africa or Latin America, convince them to
• 32:23
  give you mineral deals or to take on debt or buy, you know,
• 32:28
  more Chinese goods through trade agreements and things like that,
• 32:31
  you know, that opens up those kind of possibilities.
• 32:34
  So domestically it has been largely economically beneficial,
• 32:41
  but externally it has generated all sorts of, of problems as
• 32:45
  well as new forms of investment. You know, there, there the, the,
• 32:51
  there isn't a one to one kind of analogy between European
• 32:55
  colonialism in Africa and Chinese engagement in Africa.
• 32:59
  Now the, the Chinese have done things like built special
• 33:05
  economic zones. They have invested more in
• 33:09
  different types of infrastructures, often
• 33:11
  benefiting as you're talking about Chinese companies, you
• 33:14
  know, supplying the steel and the cement and getting interest
• 33:18
  on loans and all of those kinds of things.
• 33:20
  But the, the balance of benefits, you know, tilts very
• 33:24
  strongly towards China. But there have been
• 33:29
  beneficiaries as well. You know, people have gotten
• 33:31
  jobs, people have been able to set up their own businesses to
• 33:36
  supply Chinese investors. So it's a, it's a, it's a mixed
• 33:39
  bag. Yeah, yeah.
• 33:42
  And I think that this is also kind of a really cool potential
• 33:45
  example of I think that there are ways to succeed as an
• 33:53
  establishment in an established country.
• 33:55
  And there are ways to succeed as a young, nimble, creative and a
• 33:59
  little bit less weighted with your own success.
• 34:04
  You know, country countries that that would be, for example,
• 34:07
  relatively weaker, again, politically or economically
• 34:11
  compared to China or America, that there's a lot of
• 34:14
  opportunity to build things up now.
• 34:17
  And, and there, and I mentioned this other, I was having another
• 34:21
  conversation recently and I was, I was talking about how I teach
• 34:25
  my, I show my high school students Steve Jobs commencement
• 34:28
  speech at Harvard. And one of the things they
• 34:31
  talked about is the value of he says that sometimes when you're
• 34:34
  too successful, you get weighed down and you get comfortable and
• 34:38
  you, you, you miss that young entrepreneurial and excited
• 34:41
  spirit, that youthful spirit. And he said the best thing that
• 34:44
  happened to him was when he got fired from Apple, that he was
• 34:46
  able to, he, he found it and that he found next and Pixar as
• 34:50
  a consequence, because he realized I could I, I, I, you
• 34:53
  know, I was so focused on the mechanics of being Apple and the
• 34:58
  CEO and the man that I, that I forgot what it's like to be
• 35:04
  young and excited. And so I think that there
• 35:07
  hopefully could present a lot of opportunity for I, I hope that
• 35:12
  these younger, these younger, especially less regulated
• 35:16
  societies. I mean, you know, regulation
• 35:18
  obviously is a response to corruption.
• 35:20
  And then regulation breeds its own corruption.
• 35:22
  But, but especially if you're young and you're starting
• 35:25
  America's only 250 years old. And we feel, and we, and the way
• 35:29
  that we go about life is we're the only thing that's ever
• 35:32
  existed on planet Earth for, you know, and, and nothing started
• 35:36
  really before, before we even got here.
• 35:38
  And we know that not to be the case, but we also see that how
• 35:41
  much potential and how much productivity could come from a
• 35:44
  young and inspired and potentially and, and, you know,
• 35:48
  upgraded, upgraded as far as infrastructure, electricity and,
• 35:52
  and, and, and and and and and so on.
• 35:55
  I don't know what else they do, but electricity, at least what
• 36:00
  you can do with it, there's a lot of potential.
• 36:03
  Yeah, I suppose America is young in in one sense, but it's it's
• 36:12
  the established was the established kind of superpower
• 36:16
  and it had that position, you know, pretty much.
• 36:20
  Well, obviously the Soviet Union challenged it, but it didn't
• 36:23
  challenge it economically the way China does.
• 36:26
  So you can still hear me. Oh, you've you've muted your
• 36:30
  mic. Yeah.
• 36:31
  So. Yeah.
• 36:33
  So, you know, it's, it's looking at itself how to preserve it's
• 36:38
  kind of advantages. And one of the ways to seems to
• 36:44
  have, well, the Trump administration thinks it can do
• 36:47
  that is by trying to seal off itself from the outside world,
• 36:51
  reduce the inflow of immigrants, put up tariff barriers, retract
• 36:57
  from international commitments. Whereas that has opened the door
• 37:01
  for China to adopt A different approach, which is no, we're,
• 37:05
  it's not a very welcoming or open country to, I won't say
• 37:10
  welcoming, but it's not a very open country to, to immigrants.
• 37:14
  But in response to the Trump administration levying very
• 37:18
  substantial tariffs on Africa, the Chinese government announced
• 37:22
  that all exports from Africa or African countries with which it
• 37:26
  has diplomatic relations would now enter China duty free.
• 37:31
  So a very different approach, trying to gather in allies, take
• 37:35
  advantage strategically of this attempt to kind of maintain the
• 37:42
  benefits of globalization by promoting American exports, but
• 37:46
  seal off things that are perceived to be less desirable.
• 37:50
  But of course, if you look at the performance of the American
• 37:54
  economy over the last number of decades since the financial
• 37:58
  crisis, it's actually been quite strong.
• 38:01
  You know, the The Economist had a cover story a couple of years
• 38:05
  ago about, you know, talking about how it was the growth
• 38:09
  performance in the United States was absolutely exceptional in,
• 38:14
  you know, in world terms. And so people look at that and
• 38:18
  they say, well, you know, if if the economy was doing well in at
• 38:25
  a kind of macro level, is this a good strategy?
• 38:29
  Now, the problem was that with all of the wealth that was being
• 38:33
  generated in the US, it was highly unevenly distributed.
• 38:36
  I saw a map a couple of weeks ago showing where 50% of wealth
• 38:43
  was concentrated. And it's all in a huge amount of
• 38:46
  it is in big cities, New York, San Francisco.
• 38:49
  And then you have these what geographers called left behind
• 38:52
  places. We still have a lot of people in
• 38:55
  them. They see their industries
• 38:57
  closing, living standards going down.
• 38:59
  They're in debt. They're they're living paycheck
• 39:02
  to paycheck. And so that generates a
• 39:06
  political backlash. So the inequality both socially
• 39:11
  and in terms of the geography then creates, created this
• 39:15
  dynamic where there's, there's this impulse to try and seal
• 39:20
  yourself off and re re engineer the system to try and as I say,
• 39:27
  maximize the benefits and minimize the perceived
• 39:30
  negatives. But it, it doesn't seem to be
• 39:34
  working from an economic perspective.
• 39:37
  I saw, I saw the US only added 17,000 jobs in the the latest
• 39:44
  payroll report. And if you strip out the
• 39:46
  healthcare sector, it's actually strongly negative.
• 39:50
  And that is a big contrast to what was happening previously.
• 39:55
  So again, you have this this paradox where people maybe vote
• 39:59
  for something, but they end up worse off potentially or many of
• 40:04
  them than they were initially. But it's frustration.
• 40:07
  It's kind of throw up the snow globe and and see how things
• 40:10
  land. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 40:13
  It's, oh man, you're cut. You, you're covering so much
• 40:16
  great ground in a few short sentences because that's really
• 40:22
  a huge problem. And and how, and this also
• 40:26
  emphasizes really strongly how important geography is to be
• 40:29
  able to outline and understand exactly what the people,
• 40:34
  especially when you're a populist or, or I guess even
• 40:37
  like you could argue that Trump is definitely ran on a populist
• 40:41
  agenda, whether it's actually being applied or not, it's
• 40:43
  another conversation or how it's going to be applied because
• 40:47
  we'll see. But, but either way, you know,
• 40:51
  imagine and, and this was another example that was, that
• 40:54
  was in the book, we have 5 people.
• 40:56
  And it's very easy to say there's probably even three
• 40:57
  people with half the wealth in America.
• 41:00
  You know, Elon Musk, Steve, you know, Bill Gates and you know,
• 41:05
  and a couple other people, right?
• 41:07
  And they make 10% annual, they make 10% a year on their
• 41:12
  investments, say, and the other half of the economy, right?
• 41:17
  Because they have half the the total wealth, the other half,
• 41:20
  half of them gained 3%. Sorry, lose 3% and half of them
• 41:24
  stay about equal, right? The economy is still doing well.
• 41:29
  The economy is still up because the three to five people that
• 41:32
  have half the wealth have gained enough wealth that covers more
• 41:36
  than half of the total amount of money the country even makes.
• 41:40
  And so when people so when Trump says or when Biden has been
• 41:43
  saying or what? And it's, it's funny because
• 41:45
  again, you vote right, you vote left, you get the same policies
• 41:48
  a lot of time. And at the end of the day, you
• 41:50
  know, the way that it ends up manifesting culturally is
• 41:52
  probably different. But as far as economics and a
• 41:55
  lot of this other stuff, it really ends up being very
• 41:57
  similar. And it's, and people feel and a
• 42:02
  certain point when Trump and Biden and everyone say the
• 42:04
  economy is doing great, The economy is growing every year.
• 42:07
  And people are like, I, I went to the store and I buy cottage
• 42:10
  cheese and milk and I spend 1295.
• 42:13
  And I'm like, what are they talking about?
• 42:15
  I, I can't keep, I can't keep up with this.
• 42:17
  And, and you know, and it happens to be that I happen to
• 42:20
  be fortunate. I am relatively fortunate.
• 42:21
  I, you know, I mean, I, I, I, I, I could, I have a mortgage and
• 42:25
  I, and I own my home and I have two kids and I work extremely
• 42:28
  hard and, and I still can't keep up.
• 42:31
  And, and so I can't even imagine.
• 42:33
  And I had no debt. I had no student debt, Thank
• 42:35
  God. You know, my dad, I went to a
• 42:36
  State College. I paid 5 grand a year for, for,
• 42:38
  for, for tuition. And, but I can't imagine what
• 42:43
  most people are going through and, and, and it's really
• 42:45
  devastating. It's and you're getting that
• 42:47
  feel there's like an impatient feel with at least in the states
• 42:51
  from that's that's very tangible that says can you stop at least
• 42:54
  saying that everything is going well and news pretend to address
• 42:57
  the issues that the people are feeling on a day-to-day basis.
• 43:00
  Yeah. And I suppose one of the other
• 43:04
  features of globalization is it is subject to these periodic
• 43:08
  shocks with long lived consequences.
• 43:12
  And I think probably the two most consequential of those
• 43:16
  recently have been the so-called global financial crisis.
• 43:21
  But really what the Chinese call it is the North Atlantic
• 43:24
  financial crisis because it was the US and Europe that, you
• 43:26
  know, China kept growing and and then and then the COVID
• 43:33
  pandemic, which spread rapidly because we are so interconnected
• 43:39
  and you know, people talk about diseases of globalization.
• 43:42
  So when you have, you know, a transmission as one transmission
• 43:46
  event to a person, however it was transmitted, whether it was
• 43:50
  a lab leak or whether it was, you know, a species jumping
• 43:56
  incident in a wet market in Wuhan.
• 43:59
  A tiny little event like that has these global ramifications
• 44:04
  in terms of people's lives, inflation, debt levels for
• 44:08
  countries, you know, massive. And of course, the the big one,
• 44:14
  that is what some people refer to as a kind of grey rhino.
• 44:18
  So it's slow moving. You can see it, but it's not a
• 44:22
  Black Swan. You don't see it, you know, very
• 44:24
  clearly it's not coming quick, but it's it's moving.
• 44:27
  It's moving slowly trundling towards us.
• 44:29
  Yeah. Is the climate crisis and and of
• 44:33
  course also we have artificial intelligence.
• 44:37
  You know, there there is a, an economist who was a former
• 44:41
  adviser to, I think it was, it was George Bush senior in the
• 44:46
  White House, Richard Bolton. He teaches in Switzerland and he
• 44:50
  had a book a couple of years ago.
• 44:52
  Yeah, the Graduate Institute, I think in Geneva.
• 44:56
  We he came to give a talk here a few years ago, but he had a book
• 45:00
  a few years ago called The Globotics Upheaval.
• 45:02
  And he said, he says in that book, if you thought, you know,
• 45:07
  the hollowing out of the American and European
• 45:11
  manufacturing sectors and the political backlash that we are
• 45:14
  getting from that was bad, wait until the accountants, wait
• 45:18
  until the teachers, wait until the middle class professions are
• 45:23
  gutted by artificial intelligence.
• 45:26
  What will that do for inequality and the politics associated with
• 45:31
  that? So it's not a very kind of
• 45:35
  optimistic necessary, but it's, it's, it's necessary to be
• 45:39
  realistic, to think about, you know, what kinds of regulations
• 45:43
  then need to be put put in place.
• 45:45
  How can these things be kind of developed in responsible ways
• 45:50
  and used in responsible ways so that they don't feed into these
• 45:54
  bigger problems that we we all see kind of emerging?
• 45:58
  Coming down the road, Yeah, yeah, I, I have a lot of
• 46:00
  thoughts and I want to actually, I, I, it's been 45 minutes and
• 46:05
  we haven't even touched Africa yet, which I even showed how
• 46:07
  much I'm enjoying this conversation.
• 46:09
  Yeah, but, but I, I, I, you know, our last thought perhaps
• 46:14
  and, you know, and then we'll move over.
• 46:15
  Is that what I'm, I'm more concerned about over AI is the
• 46:22
  combination of AI and robotics, where as in you put, you take
• 46:26
  Elon Musk's Tesla robot and you stick Grok in it and then you
• 46:30
  have it, then you have it doing actual manual labor.
• 46:33
  And I think that I, I don't know.
• 46:37
  I think that in the future, even 50 years from now, and perhaps
• 46:41
  I'm, I'm, you know, I'm sure there'll be varying degrees in
• 46:44
  which this is kind of right and mostly wrong.
• 46:46
  That, that, that the, that the difference between I think
• 46:50
  classes and people and society is not going to be based on
• 46:53
  money, but can be based on meaning and Wellness and like
• 46:57
  mental Wellness. And, and I think that it's going
• 46:59
  to, and if you really combine AI and robotics to the extent that
• 47:03
  you can really make everything so cheap and create wealth and
• 47:07
  create resources that we've not never been able to do on a scale
• 47:12
  that cheap before. Then the question really is
• 47:15
  going to become, well, what do you do with your life?
• 47:17
  And what do you do if you if you don't have a job and you don't
• 47:20
  need a job and you have a house, Are you gonna be smoking weed
• 47:23
  all day? Are you gonna be drinking
• 47:24
  Guinness all day? Are you gonna be, are you gonna
• 47:26
  be having ten kids? Are you gonna be, are you gonna
• 47:28
  be doing creative projects? What are you gonna be doing?
• 47:30
  And I think that what's gonna be the difference?
• 47:32
  I think that we're gonna go through definitely.
• 47:35
  And also I think that even as far as technology goes, wherever
• 47:39
  technology is, it also takes people a long time to kind of
• 47:42
  catch up to what technology is capable of actually achieving.
• 47:45
  Like what AI can do at the moment versus what people are
• 47:48
  using AI for are worlds apart, you know?
• 47:52
  And I think that it takes time for people to kind of figure
• 47:54
  out, oh, I can do that and I could do that and I could do
• 47:57
  that. Eventually I'll get to the point
• 47:58
  where it's kind of where it's almost self-explanatory,
• 48:01
  self-explanatory and it won't need to catch up.
• 48:04
  But I think at that point, the question really is going to be,
• 48:08
  I think life is going to become about exploration and meaning.
• 48:10
  And at that point, you know, we're going to get somewhere
• 48:13
  else. Yeah, sounds a bit like Karl
• 48:15
  Marx's vision of communism, that Frank.
• 48:21
  Capitalism, it's post capitalism for sure, but we know that this
• 48:24
  version of this corporatocracy capitalism where it where, where
• 48:29
  corporations, banks and governments suck out the the
• 48:34
  resources from the people is not going.
• 48:37
  It can't be sustained very long. And, and it's been going on for,
• 48:42
  let's say, if you want to say like very, very conservatively
• 48:46
  25 years, but it's been really going on since World War 2
• 48:49
  almost it feels like. So yeah, I'm just saying one
• 48:54
  thing. You're prompting a thought as
• 48:55
  well, which is apparently one out of every two robots in the
• 48:59
  world is now deployed in China. And if you look and that and
• 49:04
  they're manufacturing them as well.
• 49:07
  But but if you look down at Chinese exports there in the
• 49:12
  last couple of years, they're actually gaining market share in
• 49:16
  traditionally labor intensive things like clothing, which used
• 49:20
  to require a lot of manual labor.
• 49:22
  The robots that would be purposed and designed to do
• 49:26
  these things. So.
• 49:26
  So China is mocking the trend by not losing a lot it's
• 49:32
  manufacturing industry, but automating, robotizing, using
• 49:36
  AI, the things you're talking about in order to maintain its
• 49:40
  advantage even in the lower end or what were traditionally
• 49:43
  thought of as lower end kind of economic activities.
• 49:46
  And what are the people doing now?
• 49:48
  What are the people, the people whose jobs they're replacing
• 49:51
  now? Are they What?
• 49:53
  What happened? So.
• 49:54
  So the Chinese economy is a kind of dual economy.
• 49:59
  So if you look, you know, the Chinese government says the
• 50:02
  economy is growing at around 5%, which is still a fast rate of
• 50:06
  economic growth. Other independent groups like
• 50:09
  the Rhodium Group say it's much closer to two and a half, 3%.
• 50:14
  And property prices are falling dramatically and property
• 50:18
  accounts for about 1/3 of the Chinese economy.
• 50:21
  So the, the macro economy and the macroeconomic picture in
• 50:25
  China is very poor. There's high debt levels.
• 50:30
  So people talk about peak China. Have we hit peak China has, you
• 50:34
  know, the, the idea that China is going to be ruling the world
• 50:38
  in the next couple of decades, Is that misplaced because of
• 50:42
  these troubles that the Chinese economy is undergoing?
• 50:46
  But at the same time, there is very dynamic sectors of the
• 50:51
  Chinese economy, artificial intelligence, renewable energy,
• 50:57
  you know, the, the, the Chinese trade surplus hit over a
• 51:03
  trillion dollars last year for the first time.
• 51:05
  So they're dominating in the industries of the future.
• 51:08
  But when you have approximately 1.4 billion people, not
• 51:13
  everybody can be a software engineer or design robots or
• 51:16
  whatever. So it's a very, it's a very
• 51:18
  dualistic economy. And youth unemployment was
• 51:23
  reported a couple of years ago at 21 or 22%.
• 51:28
  The Chinese government didn't like that statistic, so it
• 51:31
  cancelled the statistical series which produced that result.
• 51:37
  And then now on a youth unemployment in China is now
• 51:41
  apparently about 14%. Wow.
• 51:43
  That's incredible. But they're, but they're all,
• 51:46
  there's this phenomenon called lying flat in China, which is,
• 51:51
  you know, the kind of Western stereotype of Chinese college
• 51:57
  students or educated people is they're incredibly motivated,
• 52:01
  high achieving, you know, really good at STEM math subjects, all
• 52:06
  that kind of stuff. But this phenomenon of lying
• 52:09
  flat is basically where young people say, OK, I have a college
• 52:12
  degree, maybe I even have a master's, but there's no point
• 52:15
  in looking for a job because I'm just not going to find it.
• 52:17
  It's better to lie flat and just take it easy.
• 52:21
  So there were the, The New York Times had a story a couple of
• 52:25
  years ago about I think it was a cigarette factory.
• 52:29
  And a lot of the people working on the production lines had
• 52:33
  undergraduate degrees, if not master's degrees, you know, So
• 52:36
  that gives you a sense that there's something wrong, wrong
• 52:40
  and badly wrong in the economy. So it's.
• 52:44
  Not happening here fortunately either.
• 52:46
  And I don't know whether Europe is experiencing the same kind of
• 52:51
  issues with America that we call it education inflation or the
• 52:56
  degree inflation occurs. I don't know if it's quite the
• 52:58
  same there as it is here, but to do anything you got to, you got
• 53:02
  to get a job that requires a master's degree and several
• 53:05
  $100,000 of debt to start paying.
• 53:07
  You start getting $60,000 a year, $75,000 a year, even 100.
• 53:11
  But like, how, how, how, how far does that take you in today's
• 53:14
  world, really? Yeah, Yeah, I suppose education
• 53:16
  is generally more socialized in Europe and cheaper if you have.
• 53:20
  So yes, debt, the debt is not as big generally as.
• 53:25
  Someone yesterday that went to that A musician, Doctor
• 53:32
  Ellenberger, and he said that he was in Austria for a couple of
• 53:36
  semesters and he said that the school was free.
• 53:40
  He goes they had a fraction of the students attending the music
• 53:43
  school as America did, but the people that did attend the
• 53:46
  school were he goes, these were the equivalent of really
• 53:50
  sophisticated and mature musicians at 1718 years old.
• 53:53
  And he goes so the bar is high education is free, but the but
• 53:56
  the classes and the amount of people attending are smaller.
• 54:01
  Really interesting. Yeah.
• 54:03
  So Africa. Yes, Africa.
• 54:06
  We can talk. I want to talk.
• 54:08
  There's a couple of topics I think I would like to learn more
• 54:11
  about. Why don't we?
• 54:15
  Can we start as far just for I think because it's kind of a hot
• 54:18
  topic in the news. Somalia.
• 54:20
  And I know that the CIA has been sneaking around there quite a
• 54:25
  bit. And since they've been sneaking
• 54:27
  around the Somalian population in Minnesota, I believe the alma
• 54:32
  mater and, and Ohio have really, and I think Columbus or
• 54:38
  Cleveland, OH have really spiked.
• 54:40
  But I don't know anything that's going on over there.
• 54:41
  And what do they have that we would want as far as far as
• 54:46
  geography, minerals or strategic planning that we'd be invested
• 54:50
  in? Them OK so the central
• 54:54
  government in Somalia collapsed Siad Barre's government
• 54:58
  collapsed in 1991 so. Where's Somalia?
• 55:01
  Real quickly. Somalia, Somalia is in the Horn
• 55:04
  of Africa, the so-called Horn of Africa.
• 55:06
  So it's on the on the Red Sea on the East Coast of Africa,
• 55:10
  Northeast Africa. Gotcha.
• 55:12
  OK. And so it's very close to the
• 55:14
  Suez Canal. Apparently 1/3 of global
• 55:18
  shipping passes off the coast of Somalia.
• 55:21
  So it's a key, a key trade route, you know, from Asia to
• 55:25
  Europe in particular, but also for oil coming out of Iraq and
• 55:30
  Iran through the Suez Canal to, you know, South America or
• 55:34
  wherever or the US or wherever it might be.
• 55:38
  So it's very geostrategically important and the government
• 55:44
  collapsed in 1991. Somalia fractured into different
• 55:50
  parts essentially so that there's a northern part called
• 55:54
  Somaliland, which has been effectively self governing.
• 55:58
  It hasn't been internationally recognized as an independent
• 56:03
  state, but it has been a functioning democracy.
• 56:07
  It you know, there there generally has been law and
• 56:10
  order. The economy has done much better
• 56:13
  than other parts of Somalia. Then there's another region
• 56:17
  called Puntland, kind of in central Somalia, which has
• 56:21
  declared kind of independence. But it's still, it's a complex
• 56:26
  relationship with the the central government.
• 56:28
  There have been a variety of attempts to kind of reestablish
• 56:31
  central governments. But interestingly, a number of
• 56:36
  months ago, Taiwan recognised Somaliland as independent in
• 56:42
  Israel, in Israel just recognized it.
• 56:46
  So Israel is actually the first internationally recognized
• 56:49
  country, wow, to recognize Somaliland.
• 56:51
  So people have been asking why is this why?
• 56:54
  And the Trump administration has toyed with the, or at least
• 56:57
  spoken about the possibility of of recognizing Somaliland.
• 57:00
  OK. And the logic that's put forward
• 57:03
  is that Somaliland is a functioning policy that we
• 57:08
  should support places that function well, you know, rather
• 57:11
  than pouring endless, you know, in one of his tweets when he was
• 57:17
  elected, the first bit, just before his election, first time
• 57:19
  said all aid to Africa was stolen, you know, so this idea
• 57:22
  that aid is just being wasted, it's not having any impact.
• 57:26
  You're just reinforcing kind of bad governments and so on.
• 57:30
  You've heard that we've heard that storyline before too,
• 57:32
  right? Yeah.
• 57:33
  And but other people have argued that recognizing Somaliland
• 57:40
  could be strategic because it does sit on this major trade
• 57:46
  route. And if there was to be a
• 57:48
  conflict with China, being able to project military power, you
• 57:53
  know, from there and to have what the American military call
• 57:58
  a choke point, you know, where you're able to cut off your
• 58:01
  adversaries critical supplies of, of oil or or minerals or,
• 58:06
  you know, other things could be advantageous.
• 58:09
  So there's a, a geopolitics to this as well.
• 58:14
  So Somalia is, you know, there's still, there's been a resurgence
• 58:23
  of ISIS in the last couple of years, mostly so that, you know,
• 58:27
  that obviously was centered in Iraq and Syria initially Islamic
• 58:32
  State in Syria and Iraq, that's what ISIS, you know, stands for.
• 58:36
  But because it was forced out of that region, there's now been a
• 58:41
  a resurgence of ISIS, which is centered in Africa and what are.
• 58:47
  They what are they? What's their mission there?
• 58:52
  ISIS, Yeah. Well, it's, you know, again,
• 58:57
  there's debates in the in the literature about this.
• 59:00
  There, there are different kind of terrorist fundamentalist
• 59:05
  groups. The argument or the consensus
• 59:10
  seems to be in a lot of the literature that it's largely
• 59:13
  local grievances that drive the insurgencies, you know, dis
• 59:17
  disaffection with poverty, disaffection with corruption in
• 59:22
  governments, feeling voiceless, you know, all of all of those
• 59:25
  kinds of things. And also sometimes these groups
• 59:28
  recruit people who young people who are unemployed maybe pay
• 59:32
  them $100 a month, which is a lot of money.
• 59:35
  Al Shabaab in Somalia was doing that, paying people about 100,
• 59:39
  you know, so it's a livelihood. So there's an economic dimension
• 59:43
  to it as well. But the, the, there is this kind
• 59:48
  of global franchise that ISIS has.
• 59:51
  So you're able to access, even if a lot of what's motivating
• 59:55
  your recruits locally is local grievances, they're tapped into
• 1:00:00
  this global network where they're able to access arms,
• 1:00:04
  resources, money, you know, promotional materials, all of
• 1:00:09
  that kind of stuff. And so the agenda obviously is
• 1:00:13
  to overthrow the government. Establish Islamic law, Sharia
• 1:00:21
  law as the governing principle of society.
• 1:00:25
  Kick Westerners and Western influence and also what are
• 1:00:29
  perceived to be the influence of of corrupt governments, you
• 1:00:34
  know, in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf states.
• 1:00:37
  Get rid, get rid of foreign influence.
• 1:00:39
  Have a kind of supposedly pure society where it's governed by
• 1:00:46
  local people without external interference, based on the
• 1:00:51
  principles of kind of a fundamentalist reading of the
• 1:00:55
  Quran. Yeah, where, you know, you can't
• 1:00:59
  really argue with that. You can't argue with God if God
• 1:01:02
  is on your side. You're right.
• 1:01:07
  So, so, so, so. That's what makes fundamentalism
• 1:01:11
  very dangerous, irrespective of whether it's free market
• 1:01:14
  fundamentalism or Islamic fund, that there's no room for debate,
• 1:01:18
  learning, discussion, understanding other people's
• 1:01:21
  points of view. It's a, it's a, It's a kind of
• 1:01:24
  IS. Somalia, a Muslim country, is
• 1:01:27
  nor is that part of Northern Africa, Muslim primarily.
• 1:01:30
  Yes, it is. It is.
• 1:01:31
  And that that has some interesting effects.
• 1:01:36
  Positive. Effects kind of sense there in
• 1:01:39
  that context. In in what way now?
• 1:01:42
  In the sense that meaning they're not going to a Christian
• 1:01:45
  country and trying to preach Muslim values to a Christian
• 1:01:47
  country. They haven't.
• 1:01:48
  They have a audience that's already relatively open to
• 1:01:51
  hearing what they have to say. OK.
• 1:01:55
  So yeah, I mean, there's a long tradition of religiosity.
• 1:02:01
  Obviously it's close to West Asia or the Middle East.
• 1:02:05
  Yeah, there's a whole history there.
• 1:02:08
  But also Islam historically has been an axis of resistance to
• 1:02:13
  Western intrusion. Yeah.
• 1:02:15
  So going back to British colonialism, General Gordon in
• 1:02:19
  Sudan and the Mahdi, you know this, this is something you can
• 1:02:24
  mobilize people around against foreign interference or
• 1:02:29
  influence. It's a great message.
• 1:02:31
  It's a great I, I, I, I don't mean to say the fundamentalist
• 1:02:34
  part of it, but the part the argument that, Hey, other people
• 1:02:36
  are, you know, that don't have necessarily your best interest
• 1:02:39
  in mind. And, and you're the ones that
• 1:02:41
  are, that are fronting the bill every time and having a hard
• 1:02:43
  time. And you know what?
• 1:02:44
  Aren't you better off just living by yourselves and doing
• 1:02:47
  what like what Somaliland is, you know, and just self
• 1:02:50
  governing and making life better?
• 1:02:51
  Like isn't that like since I mean, I showed my high school
• 1:02:55
  class because I teach high school English and I showed my
• 1:02:58
  Class A video of the neo Nazi recruiting, you know, video.
• 1:03:03
  And I said, listen, a lot of these kids are not different
• 1:03:05
  than you guys. A lot of these kids don't start
• 1:03:07
  off on a very different page than you guys.
• 1:03:10
  The the leap they make is is, you know, and like what we said
• 1:03:14
  earlier, all conspiracies kind of start with a grain of truth.
• 1:03:16
  And and you know, if there, if there are grievances with
• 1:03:20
  someone else minding your business without your
• 1:03:22
  invitation, then it's a legitimate grievance as far as I
• 1:03:25
  can. So I, I was out of talk by a
• 1:03:28
  famous African is called Christopher Clapham a number of
• 1:03:32
  years ago. And he was talking about when he
• 1:03:34
  visited Somaliland and he said the money dealers used to just
• 1:03:39
  draw a piece of cloth over their piles of dollars and EUR and
• 1:03:44
  pounds and whatever else. When they it was time to go to
• 1:03:47
  prayer and nobody would touch their money, they'd leave it out
• 1:03:50
  on the street. So that, you know, so very
• 1:03:53
  secure. Now there has been conflict in
• 1:03:55
  Somaliland as well, but some people argued that Islam or
• 1:04:01
  particular types of Islam provide a very strong basis for
• 1:04:05
  social connection and cohesion and a strong moral code around
• 1:04:11
  community. And that, you know, can, can be
• 1:04:15
  very advantageous. And also, if you look at HIV
• 1:04:21
  rates in Somalia, they're very low.
• 1:04:24
  And that again, there there's kind of strict mores around
• 1:04:28
  sexuality and that has reduced transmission rates there, you
• 1:04:33
  know, to around 1% maybe or less, less, less than 1%, you
• 1:04:37
  know, as compared to some countries in southern Africa,
• 1:04:40
  you know, at times over a third of the population was infected.
• 1:04:44
  So, so there, so there there's been benefits, but obviously it
• 1:04:48
  depends on, you know, I'm not an expert on religion, but a lot of
• 1:04:54
  people argued that these kind of insurgent movements, they're
• 1:04:58
  fundamentally political. They're not really religiously
• 1:05:01
  motivated. The religion provides a kind of
• 1:05:04
  motivating ideology. But fundamentally it's about
• 1:05:09
  material conditions, political grievances.
• 1:05:12
  You know, there was there was a good documentary about Somalia a
• 1:05:16
  few months ago about ISIS in Somalia on Sky News and Donald
• 1:05:22
  Trump ordered drone strikes there against ISIS.
• 1:05:26
  Didn't doesn't get reported so much in the Western media.
• 1:05:30
  But one of the things that struck me in that documentary
• 1:05:34
  where there were children's toys kind of burned up leftover from
• 1:05:39
  one of these missile strikes, you know, So again, we're.
• 1:05:42
  Going to talk about that, do we? Yeah, so it doesn't, but it
• 1:05:45
  doesn't doesn't really get reported in the same way as you
• 1:05:49
  know, Venezuela or if, if something happens in the UK or
• 1:05:54
  or the US, you know. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:56
  Well, I'm sure someone makes a phone call and says this is a
• 1:05:58
  matter of national security. And, you know, right now we
• 1:06:01
  have, you know, we're trying, we have something in the works.
• 1:06:03
  And right now we need you just to keep this quiet for a little
• 1:06:06
  bit and. Also get it like Alex Crawford
• 1:06:10
  was the Sky reporter who went to kind of investigators.
• 1:06:14
  But again, you know, it's a, it's a tough assignment I can
• 1:06:17
  imagine to get in and talk to people there, so.
• 1:06:21
  I can imagine. I can imagine, Yeah.
• 1:06:24
  OK. So that that provides pretty
• 1:06:25
  good context is, is anyone else, are there other players like
• 1:06:28
  China that are involved in Somalia as far as you know or is
• 1:06:32
  it? So Turkey has had a Bigfoot
• 1:06:34
  there and there's a whole regional geopolitics, you know,
• 1:06:39
  the United Arab Emirates and Turkey are essentially
• 1:06:46
  supporting different sides in Sudan's civil war.
• 1:06:50
  So they're they're, I was reading about this recently.
• 1:06:53
  Some people again say that it is a contest to have influence
• 1:07:01
  along that very strategic trade route.
• 1:07:04
  And of course, there's resources, there's gold, you
• 1:07:06
  know, there's other things there.
• 1:07:08
  There are huge exports of livestock from the Horn of
• 1:07:13
  Africa to the Gulf states. So it's kind of a food basket
• 1:07:17
  for the Gulf states. So again, power money, follow
• 1:07:23
  the money, as you were saying. So that that contest is is
• 1:07:27
  ongoing. Somalia, for the most part, has
• 1:07:30
  been so. OK.
• 1:07:31
  Sorry about that. Yeah.
• 1:07:32
  So, so as you were saying it, you know, follow the money,
• 1:07:37
  Where can money be made? Power projection, these things
• 1:07:41
  go together. Somalia has I think, you know,
• 1:07:49
  fossil fuel deposits off the coast fisheries, Somali
• 1:07:55
  fisheries have been plundered for decades.
• 1:07:58
  Once the the apparently the original kind of Somali pirates
• 1:08:03
  were ex members of the Somali Navy who saw foreign fishing
• 1:08:08
  fleets come into their waters, kind of just extract the fish
• 1:08:13
  talk, dump toxic waste. Western and other, you know,
• 1:08:17
  companies dumping toxic waste there because it was a kind of
• 1:08:21
  ungoverned space, because it didn't have a central government
• 1:08:25
  for a long time that could have kind of enforced security and
• 1:08:29
  rule of law. But so the but getting large
• 1:08:32
  scale foreign investment in Somalia has been very difficult
• 1:08:38
  because it has been so insecure. I did see that the the Tourism
• 1:08:43
  ministry was looking to promote tourism to the country.
• 1:08:48
  The security situation did improve quite substantially
• 1:08:53
  there for a time, but The Ethiopians have also been very
• 1:09:00
  interested in Somaliland in particular as an alternative
• 1:09:05
  route to the sea so. Ethiopia.
• 1:09:07
  Ethiopia relative to Somalia. It's next door.
• 1:09:11
  OK. So, so the Ethiopian government
• 1:09:14
  actually invaded Somalia in the 2000s to depose a government
• 1:09:20
  that came to power called the Islamic Courts Union, which we
• 1:09:24
  established order in the country.
• 1:09:27
  But it, it was a repressive government, but The Ethiopians
• 1:09:32
  invaded and the country kind of plunged back into chaos.
• 1:09:35
  So there are debates about and actually the head of that
• 1:09:38
  Islamic Courts union actually ended up becoming the president
• 1:09:41
  again with kind of Western support.
• 1:09:43
  So there was a lot of kind of in Ireland, we, we, we talk about
• 1:09:49
  kind of slips between the cup and the lip.
• 1:09:51
  You know, there was a lot of politics and a lot of
• 1:09:53
  machinations and all sorts of different actors involved.
• 1:09:58
  But it's generally been too insecure to really attract a lot
• 1:10:02
  of big investment from from overseas.
• 1:10:06
  But, you know, that may, may change in the future.
• 1:10:09
  But Somaliland has been relatively stable.
• 1:10:12
  And there was a deal that was meant to be inked with Ethiopia
• 1:10:17
  around leasing a port to The Ethiopians so they'd have an
• 1:10:22
  alternate route to the sea from Djibouti that they they
• 1:10:25
  currently rely on. Again, there was a lot of
• 1:10:28
  controversy about that. Was this de facto recognizing
• 1:10:32
  Somaliland as an independent state?
• 1:10:35
  You know, the African Union doesn't recognize it, but Israel
• 1:10:38
  recognizes it. So, so who says, you know,
• 1:10:41
  again, these external powers and players should be able to make
• 1:10:44
  decisions, you know, which affect Africa when the the
• 1:10:49
  continental institutions don't recognize Somaliland as
• 1:10:53
  independent, for example? Yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:56
  And I guess it's just a matter of how many Big Brothers say
• 1:11:01
  you're for real until everyone says, OK, fine, you're for real,
• 1:11:04
  whatever, you know. And it could be for the better.
• 1:11:08
  I don't know. I don't know what's gonna.
• 1:11:10
  I guess we'll have to see that in the coming years and pay
• 1:11:12
  attention as it plays out a little bit.
• 1:11:14
  I wanted to also talk about BRIC because I saw you would write
• 1:11:18
  about that and then I had to look it up.
• 1:11:20
  And then once I did, I was like, oh, I definitely want to want to
• 1:11:23
  dive into that a little bit. So if you wouldn't mind.
• 1:11:26
  Sure. So the BRICS is a grouping of
• 1:11:33
  mostly what are called global S countries.
• 1:11:37
  So Brazil, Russia, India, China and then South Africa joined in
• 1:11:42
  2010. There's some.
• 1:11:44
  Bricks now, so bricks. And then Indonesia and Ethiopia
• 1:11:49
  and Egypt and other countries have joined.
• 1:11:51
  There's also partner countries. So it's been expanding in the
• 1:11:55
  last couple of years pretty, pretty substantially.
• 1:11:58
  And the UAE is a member. Saudi Arabia was meant to join,
• 1:12:04
  as was Argentina, but Javier Malay decided not to join
• 1:12:10
  because, you know, he's pro US rather than pro China, let's
• 1:12:13
  say. And again, the Saudis may be
• 1:12:16
  thought better of joining a grouping that was certainly
• 1:12:20
  perceived by the Trump administration to be anti
• 1:12:23
  American in in orientation. But I think BRICS really came
• 1:12:29
  about after the global financial crisis because it was sensed
• 1:12:34
  that, you know, the West was kind of in decline, its
• 1:12:39
  influence was in decline. There was an opportunity for
• 1:12:44
  countries from the global S to kind of come together and have a
• 1:12:48
  collective voice in a way that they hadn't really for decades.
• 1:12:52
  And China's economy was still growing rapidly.
• 1:12:56
  India's economy is currently growing, you know, very rapidly.
• 1:13:00
  And to to they have a shared interest in reforming the global
• 1:13:05
  system so that it's less Western centred and dominated and more
• 1:13:09
  reflective of the interests of, well, they say the majority
• 1:13:15
  world, you know, the developing world or global S where most of
• 1:13:18
  the world's population. Lives.
• 1:13:19
  And what would that look like? That look less capitalistic?
• 1:13:24
  Would that look more communist? How, how?
• 1:13:26
  What's the vision for for? That so part of the issue is
• 1:13:30
  that the different countries in the grouping are very, very
• 1:13:34
  different. So there's no one model that's.
• 1:13:36
  Noticed. Yeah.
• 1:13:37
  So, you know, India has popular elections, China doesn't.
• 1:13:43
  They compete with each other. They have border clashes, They
• 1:13:47
  have different security interests.
• 1:13:49
  So they're they're they cooperate on some things and
• 1:13:52
  they compete on others. So there's no real one model.
• 1:13:56
  But the way I read it, you know, the apparently one large city in
• 1:14:04
  China's economic output is the same size as the entire economy
• 1:14:10
  of South Africa. So you you kind of see who the
• 1:14:14
  big dog is in Brexit, China. And China economically,
• 1:14:19
  politically, you know, it has a permanent seat like Russia on
• 1:14:24
  the UN Security Council. It has all these power
• 1:14:26
  resources. And this is a way of trying to
• 1:14:32
  gather in other countries to support China as it has risen in
• 1:14:40
  importance economically and politically.
• 1:14:42
  So but but other countries have and people in those countries
• 1:14:47
  have their own visions and interests.
• 1:14:49
  But the idea that globalization has been too Western dominated
• 1:14:55
  that the institutions of global governance, the United Nations,
• 1:14:58
  you know, headquartered in New York, the World Bank, the
• 1:15:02
  International Monetary Fund headquartered in Washington, DC,
• 1:15:05
  these have been too Western dominated.
• 1:15:08
  And there's a need both to reform those institutions and to
• 1:15:13
  develop new institutions. So kind of twin track strategy,
• 1:15:16
  develop new institutions which will better serve the interests
• 1:15:20
  of the, the participant countries.
• 1:15:23
  And then there are concrete initiatives.
• 1:15:26
  I don't know if you saw a few months ago, Donald Trump said
• 1:15:29
  that if the BRICS tried to move away from using the dollar for
• 1:15:33
  trade, he would impose massive tariffs on them if they tried to
• 1:15:38
  do that. But there is an interest in de
• 1:15:40
  dollarisation. So because the US dollar is
• 1:15:44
  effectively the world's reserve currency, that gives an immense
• 1:15:47
  amount of power to the United States.
• 1:15:50
  Because if you transact your oil purchases in dollars or anything
• 1:15:56
  else, you have to have a bank in the USA, Correspondent Bank, who
• 1:16:01
  is going to kind of oversee that transaction because it's in U.S.
• 1:16:05
  dollars. And that means the US can
• 1:16:08
  sanction banks, companies around the world and stop them using
• 1:16:13
  U.S. dollars, cut them off from the US banking system.
• 1:16:16
  They even sanction individuals like Francesca Albanese, the the
• 1:16:20
  UN special rapporteur, for trying to remember what her
• 1:16:26
  exact title is. But it's Palestine, I think, so
• 1:16:30
  they sanctioned so she could. Sanctioned things as if she
• 1:16:33
  couldn't get access to American dollars.
• 1:16:36
  No, she can't have a bank account because if her Italian
• 1:16:40
  bank, I think she's Italian, if her Italian bank allowed her to
• 1:16:43
  have a bank account, then they wouldn't be able to engage in
• 1:16:47
  any dollar transactions or have a corresponding bank.
• 1:16:50
  In the United States, they've sanctioned International
• 1:16:53
  Criminal Court judges, so you can sanction.
• 1:16:57
  So there's there's a book called Underground Empire which talks
• 1:17:01
  about this. So there's about 3000.
• 1:17:03
  I've got to talk about it during the summer in the US there's
• 1:17:08
  over 3000 prescribed entities, they call them now where the US
• 1:17:16
  has sanctioned companies or individuals or networks or
• 1:17:19
  whatever. And so this this gives the US
• 1:17:24
  this massive leverage. And some people have argued that
• 1:17:27
  the because Venezuela was beginning to sell oil in the
• 1:17:32
  Chinese currency, this was one of the motivations for, for the,
• 1:17:37
  the decapitation operation in Venezuela, that to preserve, to
• 1:17:42
  preserve the primacy of the US dollar in international trade
• 1:17:46
  and finance. You know, Saddam Hussein started
• 1:17:49
  selling oil in euros. Moammar Moammar Gaddafi had a
• 1:17:57
  plan to have a gold backed gold dinar currency that oil would be
• 1:18:03
  sold in. And again, we know what happened
• 1:18:05
  to him. So so yeah.
• 1:18:09
  So there's, you know, the other thing that that the fact that
• 1:18:14
  there's such demand for American dollars does in the world in
• 1:18:19
  order to facilitate trade and investment is that it means the
• 1:18:25
  US can print money and buy stuff effectively for free from other
• 1:18:30
  countries without having to work for it.
• 1:18:33
  We. We just pay later.
• 1:18:37
  There's downs, you're right, there's all sorts of downsides
• 1:18:41
  to this, but but you can print dollars and buy things from
• 1:18:47
  Japan or buy things from Ireland.
• 1:18:50
  But obviously trade, there's all sorts of problems with it in
• 1:18:54
  terms of trade deficits. It gives rise to other
• 1:18:56
  dysfunctions as well. Yeah, yeah, I did a great
• 1:18:59
  episode with a gentleman named. He's a Professor Lawrence Levy.
• 1:19:03
  Lawrence. No, White.
• 1:19:04
  Lawrence White. I'm sorry.
• 1:19:05
  And he? Yeah.
• 1:19:08
  Oh, yeah. And he, he was wonderful.
• 1:19:09
  And he and I and he and I talked because I don't understand
• 1:19:11
  anything about the gold standard or when we got off it or what
• 1:19:14
  the point of it was. And so he and I talked through a
• 1:19:17
  lot of this stuff for like an hour and a half and that was
• 1:19:19
  really, really wonderful. But yeah, I mean that that was.
• 1:19:24
  And you're just going to get the same.
• 1:19:26
  I mean, the, The thing is, you can make the same points, but
• 1:19:34
  they don't, you know, to the, to two different people, but they
• 1:19:37
  won't see it the same way. And that's just what it is, you
• 1:19:42
  know. And so whether it's a good idea
• 1:19:44
  or not, I think that people could always convince themselves
• 1:19:46
  one way. And by the way, you always can.
• 1:19:47
  I mean, there's always studies for everything you want to, you
• 1:19:49
  want to say, and there's always something to back up everything
• 1:19:52
  you want to, you want to point out, but you know, whether or
• 1:19:55
  not it's a good idea. I think that that has been, I
• 1:19:58
  think that free, that free will and that that willingness to
• 1:20:02
  just spend and print money. Has arguably is the source is,
• 1:20:06
  is a, a big part of the reason why the economy in America is
• 1:20:09
  the way it is today. And you know, and, and I, and I
• 1:20:13
  give this example that the America, the homeland, the
• 1:20:15
  taxpayers are the life source of this empire.
• 1:20:18
  And it's the heartbeat of the, of the, of the arms and the
• 1:20:21
  fingers and the, and the limbs that are spreading out around
• 1:20:23
  the world. But you got to make sure that
• 1:20:25
  your heart's healthy. And I mean, Americans of all
• 1:20:27
  people should, should, should understand the, the dangers of,
• 1:20:31
  of heart condition. And so, you know, I think that
• 1:20:34
  if you want to say that this was an experiment that you could try
• 1:20:36
  for a little while for 50, sixty, 7080 years, great.
• 1:20:39
  But like, how, you know, how much longer is that?
• 1:20:43
  Are we going to, are we going to try to do that for?
• 1:20:45
  So I've been reading a little bit about this as well that, you
• 1:20:50
  know, the Trump administration is very keen on stable coins and
• 1:20:54
  cryptocurrency. And so is this a way, is this a
• 1:20:59
  kind of vector of competition of the future which doesn't have
• 1:21:05
  maybe some of the disadvantages of dollar primacy, right.
• 1:21:10
  And you know, the Chinese already have the Digital 1.
• 1:21:14
  So will this be a way of competing with China in that
• 1:21:17
  space as well? Yeah.
• 1:21:19
  And then the potential downstream consequences is that
• 1:21:22
  social currency that, that we're all afraid of that I think we
• 1:21:26
  saw a little bit of, I mean, if the if the individual in Italy
• 1:21:29
  got debanked for saying something like free Palestine or
• 1:21:32
  something like that. I mean, you know, what's stopped
• 1:21:35
  that from happening on a mass level throughout the States one
• 1:21:38
  way or the other? And I always like to make this,
• 1:21:40
  this argument, you know, I, I think that when you're in power,
• 1:21:44
  you lose, you really lose sight and vision as to what, you know,
• 1:21:48
  real values are. And you kind of want to maintain
• 1:21:49
  that power. And, but you, you're opening the
• 1:21:52
  door for people to do the exact same thing to you that, you
• 1:21:56
  know, as soon as the pendulum swings back and the pendulum
• 1:21:59
  always swings back. And it's so funny because I, I
• 1:22:03
  just turned 30 recently and I'm having a little bit of a heart
• 1:22:06
  attack about it. And don't worry. 57.
• 1:22:12
  One thing that I was thinking about was the fact that I'm
• 1:22:15
  thinking these things that I would have absolutely ignored or
• 1:22:19
  blown off 10 years ago. And that's how I know that I'm
• 1:22:21
  an adult and you know, when I'm giving my, when I'm giving my
• 1:22:24
  siblings or my students advice that.
• 1:22:28
  And I know as I'm saying it, if I were them, I would not hear a
• 1:22:30
  word of this. But like, that's what that's
• 1:22:32
  what it means to be young. That's what the human condition
• 1:22:34
  is. Is this this endless cycle of
• 1:22:36
  just learning and trying and self correction and mistakes and
• 1:22:41
  back and forth but. Be very boring otherwise,
• 1:22:43
  wouldn't it? Yeah, yeah.
• 1:22:45
  But you know, hopefully that that's the point of these
• 1:22:46
  conversations. And you know, I mean, as a as a
• 1:22:49
  young parent and I understand my parents more now.
• 1:22:53
  You, you, you want to teach your kid to avoid the mistakes before
• 1:22:57
  they have to actually experience and pay the repercussions
• 1:22:59
  themselves. And there's different degrees to
• 1:23:01
  which that I think is healthy or not healthy.
• 1:23:04
  But I think there's a lot of things in life that we could
• 1:23:06
  just cut out that, you know, we don't have to experience all
• 1:23:09
  that unnecessary, all the unnecessary pain.
• 1:23:12
  If you just listen to history, you just listen to these kind of
• 1:23:14
  conversations going back and forth.
• 1:23:18
  Yeah, I suppose it'd be nice if we could do that, but we don't
• 1:23:22
  seem to be very good at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:23:25
  Have you watched this this new Apple TV show Pluribus?
• 1:23:29
  I haven't. Do you know the premise of it?
• 1:23:31
  It's really fascinating. I don't know.
• 1:23:33
  The premise is that there's a virus that escapes a lab and
• 1:23:38
  it's not a bad virus. It's a virus that everyone that
• 1:23:41
  is infected by it shares one conscious mind, 1 consciousness
• 1:23:46
  and, and there's only 10 people in the world that have or that
• 1:23:50
  are immune to this virus. And everyone is completely
• 1:23:55
  benevolent. They're all kind.
• 1:23:57
  Because a lot of the things that make that the worst of human
• 1:24:00
  traits come from individuality. They come from the need for the
• 1:24:03
  best partner or the most money or the most security or whatever
• 1:24:06
  it is. But if you don't have that
• 1:24:07
  concern, then everyone just good.
• 1:24:09
  And so the show really wrestles with the question of what, you
• 1:24:13
  know, what's it mean to be a human?
• 1:24:14
  Is it about individuality? Is it collective?
• 1:24:16
  Is it, you know, what's it, what's it really mean to be
• 1:24:19
  happy or not? And I'm only a couple of
• 1:24:21
  episodes in, but it's really. Really good, I'll check.
• 1:24:25
  Yeah, provoking. I really, I, we're just about up
• 1:24:28
  on time. I had really such a blast.
• 1:24:31
  This was so educational. I would love to do this again at
• 1:24:35
  some point in the coming year because I think there's a lot
• 1:24:37
  that, especially as news is unfolding that we could take to
• 1:24:41
  kind of going back and forth and talking about the context of
• 1:24:44
  what's going on. But thank you so much for the
• 1:24:46
  time. Thank you for getting back.
• 1:24:48
  I reached out and I'm really this is This is so much fun.
• 1:24:51
  Great. Great to talk to you and I hope
• 1:24:54
  2026 is good for you and your family.
• 1:24:57
  Same. Same to you.
• 1:24:58
  Well, I hope to be in touch. All the best, OK?
• 1:25:00
  Bye.