Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Just Josh: Iran's Billions & Elon's Trillion

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Just Josh: Iran's Billions & Elon's Trillion · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:04
G'day humans!
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Oh my goodness, I'm so excited to speak with you today.
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It's been a while.
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I've been ill, I've been a little poorly, and there have been so many things that we need to
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talk about.
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We've got to, first of all, when Elon had his trillion dollar IPO, and everybody was
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like, oh my goodness, he's a trillionaire, what does this mean for the economy, what does this
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mean for capitalism, should we just ban the existence of trillionaires, what is AI going to
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mean in all of this?
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Should we need a UBI?
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Okay, I wanted to talk to you about that, but I was in
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bed with my head pounding like crazy.
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My sinuses were catastrophic.
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It's winter in Australia,
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which means it's 68 degrees and sunny.
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So forgive me for being offline, but now we've got the Trump
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Iran deal, and boy, it's going to be fun to break that down.
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I'm going to essentially outsource that
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to one very trusted individual who I will quote in just a moment.
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And then there's also in Australia,
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if you're a keen viewer of Australian politics, the sort of fringe anti-immigrant party,
1:05
One Nation, which has been banging around with a low single digit vote count for 30 years,
1:11
is now the most popular party in Australia after a reasonably catastrophic budget that the centre
1:18
left government delivered, which doubled taxes on everybody's assets.
1:22
And so the leader of the
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party, Pauline Hanson, gave a speech to the National Press Club this week, which is the
1:28
sort of most august speech that an Australian can give.
1:31
You give it to a bunch of political
1:34
journalists.
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So it's sort of like giving a kind of an ersatz State of the Union, but it's not,
1:39
you know, obviously the leader of the country doing it.
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It's an honorary dignitary.
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And it
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was just incredible to see, you know, an individual up there who is the leader of the most popular
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party in the country saying that Australia should be a monocultural country, not a multicultural
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country.
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And that, anyway, I'll get into that in a moment, but lots to talk about.
1:59
And I hope you
1:59
will enjoy this little explication of the week's news.
2:03
So Trump, wow, wow.
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This is unlike, let me
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begin with Trump's words, Trump's own words.
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This is a tweet from Donald, at real Donald Trump,
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March 27th, 2015, 11 years ago.
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Message to Obama, re-Iran, writes Trump.
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Quote,
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the worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it.
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The art of the deal.
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So there's the president quoting himself from the art of the deal,
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The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it.
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Well, it's a good thing that the Iranians didn't think that the United States was desperate for a deal.
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Because otherwise, this memorandum of understanding could have been quite unsatisfactory.
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Another tweet from Donald J. Trump.
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Five years later, January 3rd, 2020.
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Iran never won a war, but never lost a negotiation!
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Exclamation point.
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Well, that was prescient, wasn't it?
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They've never won a war, but never lost a negotiation.
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Although he did only use one exclamation mark instead of three there, so maybe he was somewhat cynical.
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For the best review of what the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran that is being signed today, I believe, it being Friday in Australia, the best summary that I've seen was from Andrew Neil, the storied British journalist, an absolute attack dog,
3:36
formerly a conservative.
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I think he still is a small-c conservative, but just to stanch any
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assumption that you might have when you hear British former BBC journalist that he might be
3:46
some left-wing kook, he's not.
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He writes, the US has circulated its version of the memo of
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understanding with Iran to G7 leaders in France.
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It's as bad, if not worse, than expected,
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writes Andrew.
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The moment it's signed, Friday, sanctions on the export of Iran's oil are lifted
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so the regime can start replenishing its coffers immediately.
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Two, the US commits to doing nothing
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to undermine or destabilize the Iranian regime.
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It started the war to remove it.
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Three, the US
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specifically commits to ending its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, but Iran doesn't commit
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specifically to returning the Strait to toll or fee-free transit exactly as before the war,
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with no Iranian control or regulation whatsoever.
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Four, all sanctions against Iran will be dropped
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should phase two negotiations go well, and America will withdraw its forces from the region.
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Five, the US undertakes to work with Iran and Gulf allies to create a $300 billion
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reconstruction package for Iran.
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So America will now become a partner with the tyrants of Tehran,
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who Trump only recently wanted to overthrow in rebuilding their economy.
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Six, all matters
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related to Iran's nuclear capabilities are kicked into the, quote, final agreement, unquote, in 60
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days time or longer if necessary.
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Seven, no mention of Iran's ballistic missile capabilities or its
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financing of terrorist proxies.
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And that's just about it, writes Andrew Neill.
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When Trump insisted
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the war would only end with unconditional surrender, it never crossed my mind he meant his own.
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So worth breaking down a couple of those points.
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The main point, I mean, there are so many ways
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that you could evaluate the success or otherwise of this operation.
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You could compare it to what
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Trump said he wanted, Trump and Hegseth said they wanted the war to achieve.
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You could compare it to
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what was actually on the table in late February, just after the war started.
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It's now gone for
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110 days.
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You could compare it to the status quo ante, what existed before the war even began,
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and you could compare it to what the Obama administration managed to get in the JCPOA.
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I like to call this new memorandum of understanding the JCP.
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No way.
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It's not a JCPOA.
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it's JCP, no way, it's heaps better than the other one, except, except, it doesn't contain
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any of the provisions that the Obama plan included for the inspection of Iran's nuclear
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facilities or the withdrawal of nuclear material.
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So, the ballistic missile thing is the main thing,
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for me, yes, look, everybody knows he went in saying that he wanted to topple the Iranian regime,
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and it was pretty clear quite quickly that that wasn't going to happen, so we've sort of banked
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that as a loss.
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So that was one goal that wasn't going to happen.
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You're supporting the Iranian
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people.
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By the way, shortly after the war began, I did an editorial here where I was talking about
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how frustrated I was with the amount of political analysis in this conversation that overlooked what
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to me is the salient point, which is the welfare of the Iranian people, of the Iranians.
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We were
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shocked at Trump saying that he was going to blow a civilization to smithereens.
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We were shocked by,
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I don't know, Israeli, you know, war crimes.
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We were shocked by, you know, the uprisings and the
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Mueller's crackdowns.
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And nobody was really sort of focused on like, here is a people,
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thousands of years old, who have a right to self-determination, who've been brutally suppressed
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by these terrorist financing jihadist death cultists in Tehran for so long, who suck all
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the money out of them and use it to fund terrorist groups in Lebanon and Gaza and elsewhere and Yemen.
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And it's all like a geopolitical game where most of our conversation, most of the oxygen in the
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room is sucked up by our hating of Donald Trump or our analysis of whether or not this is really
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about China and Russia or something like that.
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So I would just like to refocus somewhat on the
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Iranian people who are horribly betrayed by this memorandum of understanding.
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So they're not going
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to get their regime change.
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We've sort of banked that.
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Then there's the whole nuclear question,
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completely and utterly failed.
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I mean, there is no agreement here whatsoever.
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They're just kicking
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it down the road.
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So that is worse than the JCPOA, the Obama deal was, which actually had
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international inspections.
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Now there's just what, the Iranians saying they're not going to create a
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nuclear weapon.
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And they don't even really have to say that because the actual agreement about it
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is kicked off at some point in the future.
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The two biggies for me are the ballistic missiles
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and the Strait of Hormuz.
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The ballistic missiles and the slush fund of $300 billion.
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I mean,
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there's so many things to tear your hair out over this.
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This is why we don't, you know,
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this is the problem with thinking that it's a great idea to kick all these policy wonks out of
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you know, these elite policy nerds out of your capital city and bring in the swinging arm of
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somebody who just knows how to make a deal.
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Shit's complicated in the world.
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You know,
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things are complicated.
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It's not good enough to just go blustering in and be like, well,
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I'm going to get the best deal ever.
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You might very well not because you don't know what the
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fuck you're doing.
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So the ballistic missiles, this was the, you know, the main thing really
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was just that on the ballistic missile front was that Iran was getting to a point at which it would
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have a sufficient capacity so that anti-missile systems in allied countries, in our allies,
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the Gulf States and Israel and Saudi Arabia, would not be able to withstand them anymore.
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They might be able to send such a deluge of missiles that we wouldn't be able to catch
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them in the air before they hit Tel Aviv or Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Riyadh.
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Well, they have done
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nothing about the, apart from the 30% of Iran's ballistic missiles that they took out in the early
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days of the war, there's nothing in this agreement about any reduction of Iran's missile capability.
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The second outrage is this $300 billion reconstruction fund.
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I mean,
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when you it's not unprecedented for to have a reconstruction fund after a war and it is
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particularly apt that this memorandum of understanding was signed in versailles
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i mean could it was literally signed in versailles right versailles where the treaty was signed after
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world war one that paved the way for world war ii by completely bungling how world war one uh ended
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so they're in Versailles
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and they create this
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multi-billion dollar reconstruction fund
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and the reconstruction fund
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normally at the end of a war
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is because you've deposed the old government
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and then you go
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okay well now that we've ruined your country
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and gotten rid of the government
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we have to give you new guys a leg up
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so let's go around with a cap
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like a or like at the end of you know
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a mercy charity plate at the end of mass
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and we'll try to get people to donate
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we'll busk a little bit
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We'll do some live performances maybe, and everyone can donate from around the world,
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and they can chip in for this reconstruction fund for the new government of a new country
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that has been decimated and forced to unconditionally surrender.
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In this case, the reconstruction fund is for the same government that has basically won the war
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and is now extracting hundreds of billions of dollars out of other countries
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that were allied with this buffoonish superpower
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that blundered in against the will of all of those other countries,
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with the exception of Israel, but all the other Gulf states,
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to this war, created the problem for them,
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and now they're going to be asked to fund the reconstruction
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of their deadly enemy who's been bombing them for months,
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because that's a price that has to be paid for Donald Trump
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to save face and his party not to lose the midterms
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as catastrophically as they would have
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if he was still tied up in the Strait of Hormuz.
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So it's a reconstruction fund, not for the new government, but for the same government, not only the same government, but the very government that Donald Trump vowed would fall as one of the justifications for going into the war in the first place.
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So not only does the government not fall, now there's a reconstruction fund, which unlike every other reconstruction fund, is not to assist a new fledgling democracy to get on its feet after the fall of the enemy, but is to the enemy, is to the enemy that has won.
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So it's not a reconstruction fund.
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It's essentially, you know, it's Iran demanding Bakhshish and Donald Trump giving it to them.
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Much more money even than was unlocked in the Obama deal, the JCPOA.
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See, remember, this is the JCP.
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No way.
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No way, JCP.
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and so Obama at the time said look we're not actually giving them money but we're just
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unlocking money that was already theirs that had been held up in sanctions and Trump was absolutely
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insistent at the time he was furious he was vitriolic in saying that is sophistry what is
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happening is you're flying plane loads of money over to Iran and apparently there were actual
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instances because of the sanctions and the way that the international banking system works and
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the inability of transferring money into Iran, actual instances of pallets of cash being loaded
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onto planes and flown to Iran.
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Now, Obama was saying it was Iranian cash, they're entitled to
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it back if they're willing to join the community of nations, and we just have to wait them out
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until the regime falls.
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And Trump thought that logic was completely unsound and that we shouldn't
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be giving the Iranians a dime.
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Well, now he's giving them more money than the Obama deal did
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in exchange for much, much less.
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He's not getting in return the entry of weapons of
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nuclear inspections into Iran.
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I mean, he's not even getting, well, we'll get to the Strait of
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Hormuz, but he's not even getting, you know, a willingness on the part of Iran to agree to a
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particular reduction in its nuclear weapons capability, its nuclear program.
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So that's the
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money flying over.
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Trump used to say, oh, we shouldn't give him any money.
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Now he's giving
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the money.
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He used to say, you know, we can't let them have any ballistic missiles.
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Now he's
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saying it's fine.
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In fact, Trump literally said, he literally said when asked about the existence of
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Iranian ballistic missile capabilities in the memorandum of understanding, he said,
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well, why shouldn't they have missiles?
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Everyone else has got missiles.
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They need to defend
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themselves.
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He said, why should we let Saudi Arabia have missiles and not Iran have missiles?
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now imagine if you were in Saudi Arabia hearing that you're like what do you mean why should you
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first first of all you don't let us have missiles we're a country we're allowed to have missiles
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secondly I thought the reason why we have missiles is because we're your friend and they're your
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enemy and I thought you didn't want your enemy to have missiles and they are our enemy and we don't
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want them having missiles.
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So, I mean, the head-spinning 180-degree turnarounds are staggering,
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staggering.
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I mean, I only hope that there's enough analysis in the United States on the right,
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and it seems like a lot of conservatives from Mike Pence to Ted Cruz and others are horrified by this
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memorandum as well.
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Of course, Trump and Vance say, well, this is only an initial memorandum.
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There's lots of other stuff that the Iranians have agreed to that isn't in this MOU.
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and if you believe that, I got a bridge to sell you.
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I tell you what, why wouldn't they put it
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in the MOU if they'd agreed to it?
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I mean, the reason it's not in the MOU is because it's not
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part of the agreement.
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There is absolutely no scenario in which they're agreeing to things
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secretly that they're not allowing the United States to put in the memorandum.
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It serves
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nobody's interest.
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So yeah, the ballistic missiles previously are absolutely non-negotiable.
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Now
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they're just fine.
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You know, every country has a right to defend itself.
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Hang on, three seconds
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ago, you were saying you weren't going to tolerate anything short of unconditional surrender from the
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Iranians and the destruction of their ballistic missile program and them stopping funding terrorist
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proxies.
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There's nothing in the memorandum about that.
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They're still going to be able to create
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all of the mischief that they want to in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Yemen, in wherever they want to.
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and most egregiously the final thing I'll say about the Iran agreement is the Strait of Hormuz
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Iran agrees that for 60 days it's going to leave the Strait open and free 60 days 60 days
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I mean in 60 days it's sometimes you know 60 days is not a very long period of time
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What happens on day 61 or day 68 or day 83 or day 122 if Iran decides to start charging vessels to go through the Strait or kind of blocking a few vessels from countries that it doesn't like?
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It's not going to just close the Strait immediately and block all American traffic and invite another conflagration.
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That's not the way that the Iranians do things.
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They, like Putin, are shrewd enough to sort of begin by sending, you know, just testing the waters.
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China does this as well, just pushing and pushing and pushing until you create new realities on the ground that become unavoidable and that your enemy just has to live with.
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the importance of the Strait, not just to America, in fact, not even to America,
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but to a lot of countries.
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I mean, if you're a regular listener, you may have heard my
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episode, which was a dispatch from the Solomon Islands last year.
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And this is just one of many
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countries in the Asia Pacific where all of their electricity comes from diesel on boats.
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that may be crazy it's crazy that they're not using solar and uh you know hydro hydro hydro
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electric but they're not and so what happens to people in the poorest parts of the world
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when the cost of their fertilizer goes sky high again the cost of their diesel goes sky high again
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because of disruptions to the straight i mean iran basically retains a blank check over mostly
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poorer countries, but these include countries like Australia and New Zealand, which happen
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to be located in a part of the world which gets a lot of its oil from Iran.
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And there's no reason
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to expect that the Iranian regime, now more radicalized than it was before the war, now more
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antagonistic, now more entrenched, more dug in, is going to maintain an open strait in perpetuity,
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not if they can use it as leverage over countries like what if suppose suppose you know 18 months
18:54
goes by this is all in the rearview mirror and iran just decides that unless japan or australia
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or belgium drops its support for certain sanctions its ships won't be able to get through
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i mean who calls iran's bluff on that does the united states go back to war definitely not
19:16
does Australia declare war with Iran?
19:18
Definitely not.
19:20
Nothing in this memorandum, even, I mean,
19:22
what's extraordinary is that the Iranians are good at talking out the side of their face.
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I mean,
19:25
you know, they're good at saying one thing and doing another.
19:27
And as far as they're concerned,
19:28
so is the United States because they had a deal with the United States under the JCPOA
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and Trump ripped it up as soon as he came into office.
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But the idea that they would not even
19:37
be willing to put into the memorandum that they will keep the straight open and free
19:44
indefinitely is such a fuck you.
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I mean, their balls are the size of watermelons.
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That is,
19:52
to force Trump and Vance to grovelingly sign something that doesn't even talk about returning
19:58
to the status quo ante is such a humiliation, such a way of rubbing their noses in the shit
20:04
that they've created.
20:05
It's almost beyond belief that they would sign this thing.
20:08
But what other
20:09
choice did they have apart from a ground invasion to try to clear the Strait from any Iranian
20:15
missile fire or drones?
20:17
So it's just extraordinary because, I mean, you would expect that the
20:19
Iranians, they would at least have, that the guy who wrote the art of the deal would be able to get
20:24
the Iranians to at least say something on a piece of paper that they have no intention of sticking
20:27
by, but they won't even say it on the piece of paper.
20:30
Such a big fuck you.
20:32
So the Strait of
20:32
Hormuz, what we've basically done in this conflict is we've revealed to Iran, who probably didn't know it to this extent before, just their extraordinary leverage over the globe.
20:47
It previously seemed like if they got a nuclear weapon, then they would hold a trump card that would imperil us all and the global system.
20:57
Well, now it seems like they don't need a nuclear weapon to do that.
21:01
They actually had an economic nuclear weapon in their back pocket all along that they didn't really realize and that we certainly couldn't fathom.
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They hold a chokehold on the capacity of the global economy to function.
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That's just the reality.
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and in coming years surely there will be all kinds of oil pipelines built to try to circumvent the
21:24
Strait of Hormuz and maybe in 10 years this will be a non-problem because our reliance on
21:28
diesel will have declined or bloody bloody blah but over the time frame that anybody cares about
21:34
5 years, 10 years, 15 years, this has handed Iran not exactly a new tool of influence but has
21:44
unveiled a tool of influence that it already possessed, but hadn't had the opportunity to
21:48
try to flex.
21:50
We've given the Iranians, Trump has given the Iranians, the opportunity to
21:55
experiment with a new weapon and they like it.
22:00
And why would they give it away?
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And they won't
22:03
even say that they intend to give it away.
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They're saying they'll give it away for 60 days.
22:08
And then they might take their shiny new weapon out of the box again and start playing with it
22:13
and playing with all of our lives as a result.
22:16
So that's that.
22:18
That's the great Iranian deal, the JCP.
22:20
No way.
22:23
And it comes at a time, it comes in a week where we were all thinking about
22:27
the impact of money in the global economy, not just from oil,
22:31
but also from artificial intelligence.
22:33
When Elon did it, it became the world's first trillionaire.
22:38
Trillionaire, largely, I mean, they call it about the SpaceX,
22:40
you know, they try to wrap it in the space thing,
22:42
but it's really because everybody's so bullish about AI.
22:46
And there was a really interesting
22:48
exchange on Substack in Substack Notes that I saw, which revealed a lot about the way that
22:56
people are thinking about wealth inequality, about vast wealth, about productivity, about,
23:01
you know, this whole climate of kind of Mamdani and AOC on one side, and then you've got your,
23:07
like, you know, Pauline Hanson, I suppose, and Nigel Farage on the other side, and then in the
23:12
middle of these kind of lost center-left and center-right parties trying to figure out how
23:15
to wrestle with artificial intelligence and wealth inequality and declining services and public
23:20
frustration and rising prices.
23:23
And this came across my feet.
23:27
It was a Natalie Robin Justice
23:30
who had tweeted the following, if a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat,
23:37
while most of the other monkeys starved
23:41
scientists would study that monkey
23:43
to figure out what the heck was wrong with it
23:46
when humans do it
23:47
we put them on the cover of Forbes
23:48
so there you go
23:50
a nice articulation
23:52
of a pointed critique
23:54
of Elon's trillion
23:56
saying if a monkey hoarded a trillion bananas
24:00
we would study what's wrong with it
24:01
we wouldn't celebrate it
24:03
the way that human beings do
24:05
and a colleague of mine, Gawinda, who's been on this show,
24:09
a very interesting fellow, great person to follow on Substack
24:12
and you can go back and listen to my interview with Gawinda.
24:16
He said, this tweet got 222,000 likes on X
24:19
because most people don't know how wealth works
24:21
and think Elon's trillion dollars are just sitting in a bank account
24:23
rather than being tied up in his companies.
24:26
We desperately need to teach the world basic economics.
24:30
Now, I somewhat agreed with that,
24:31
But I also thought the diagnosis of the problem with the monkey analogy missed the mark a little bit.
24:35
So I then followed up to Gawinda saying the worst assumption here isn't that the trillion is in cash, Gawinda.
24:44
It's that the, in other words, the worst incorrect assumption here isn't that the trillion is in cash.
24:51
It's that the banana stockpile is fixed, that Elon hoards some at others' expense.
24:58
and I said when that belief runs an economy you really do end up with bananas instead of Starlink
25:03
and Teslas now I got a lot of shit for that because people are saying yeah but what about
25:07
the money that Elon gets from the government because there's subsidies for SpaceX and they're
25:11
paying for him and now why are you defending Elon hang on hang on just let's I know that it's
25:16
unreasonable to expect social media or any comment thread indeed to be cool-headed and rational but
25:22
Let's just look at the actual point that I'm making, because I am a major critic of much of Elon's behavior.
25:29
I think he's destroyed X.
25:31
I think Doge was a calamity.
25:33
There's lots to not like.
25:35
But on the specific question of whether or not there is something illegitimate or dysfunctional or pathological about a human being who has a trillion dollars,
25:48
and that our conclusion should be that we need to construct an economy
25:52
in which that's not possible or study that individual for psychopathology
25:56
instead of putting him on the cover of Forbes magazine,
25:59
that particular point is worth drilling into
26:03
because I think this misunderstanding underpins a lot of Mamdani and AOC
26:09
and the rise of the populist far right and Pauline Hanson's speech in Australia
26:12
and the rise of Farage in the UK.
26:17
the problem the fundamental underlying problem that gives rise to so much other dissatisfaction
26:22
is a lack of growth and productivity people feel poor when prices rise faster than their wages do
26:30
people feel poor when they don't think that their lives are going to be better than their parents
26:34
were people feel poor when they don't see an increased standard of living from one year to
26:40
the next when they don't feel like things are getting better when they don't feel like things
26:43
are progressing.
26:44
Now, part of that might be cultural or sociological issues like immigration,
26:49
like demographic change.
26:50
That's certainly what gets blamed by, you know, it's an easy target.
26:54
It always ends up being, you know, picking on minorities for ruining everything for the rest of
26:59
us is a hoary old tactic that gets used since time immemorial.
27:06
And, you know, there is a certain
27:08
element of misdirection here.
27:10
But it's also the case that there are genuine underlying economic
27:15
problems, especially in the UK and Europe, and to some extent in Australia, with productivity and
27:21
with growth.
27:22
I mean, in Europe, they even have a whole movement now, which is about sort of
27:26
managed decline.
27:27
Just understand that their attitude is, given climate chaos, given the
27:32
you know, the rise of China, given aging populations and given unrest about immigration,
27:41
we're just declining now.
27:43
Our populations are shrinking.
27:44
Our economies are shrinking.
27:45
We're
27:45
going to have to do more with less.
27:46
You know, we're going to have to have less energy and get by
27:50
with more scarcity.
27:52
And we just have to manage that decline.
27:54
It's the antithesis of the American
27:57
Silicon Valley tech bro culture, which is constantly sunny and optimistic.
28:01
And, you know,
28:02
we're entering an era in which AI is going to cure cancer and solve climate chaos and
28:06
make us all bazillionaires without having to do any work because we'll all have a stake in AI
28:11
companies, which will somehow get nationalized and will derive a UBI, a universal basic income
28:16
from them, and everything's going to be peachy.
28:20
We all seem sort of torn between these two
28:22
extremes.
28:23
And I don't think it helps to misunderstand the allocation of resources
28:27
and capital as if they were fixed.
28:30
So, you know, Elon doesn't have a trillion dollars.
28:34
Firstly,
28:34
yes, he doesn't have a trillion dollars in cash, but I think that's sort of immaterial.
28:37
He's still
28:38
got a trillion dollars worth of assets.
28:41
He's not worth that much because he was able to
28:46
go around collecting lots of dollars from places and hoarding them for himself,
28:51
dollars that would otherwise exist in the economy.
28:53
I mean, it's a bit hard to understand how growth
28:56
works or even how an economy works.
28:57
Like where does money, where does value even come from?
29:01
You know, like I buy my coffee and I pay the money for that coffee, but the money only has value
29:07
because I earned it doing a podcast, which only has value because you subscribe, hopefully,
29:15
and if you don't, you should, you subscribe because you find value in it and you want to
29:19
support it and you want to get more of my content, but that money that you're giving me only has any
29:24
value because you have done something in order to earn that money.
29:28
I mean, in a sense, an economy is
29:29
just a gigantic circle jerk, right?
29:31
I mean, it is, you know, we're all just paying each other.
29:33
It
29:33
doesn't go anywhere.
29:35
It's all just being manufactured.
29:38
And value is being manufactured
29:40
through the productive capacity of human beings and their ingenuity.
29:43
And so the rich person being
29:46
rich is perfectly legitimate to tax people up the wazoo.
29:49
I mean, I think people who are making,
29:51
you know, more than, what, $10 million, $100 million a year should have stratospheric tax
29:57
rates, 90%, 95%, something like that, on the marginal rate of those earnings.
30:04
But the idea
30:06
that they've gained it illegitimately by taking it out of other people's pockets is not true.
30:11
There is an opportunity cost to letting them keep all of it if you have a taxation system that does
30:15
that because of course the tax revenue that you could be getting from Elon Musk could be going to
30:20
either pay for poor people's food stamps or for inner city schools or whatever, pick your social
30:27
welfare program that you'd like.
30:29
But they created that money.
30:32
I mean, they didn't take it from
30:33
somewhere else.
30:35
Jeff Bezos is rich because I like being able to order my replacement electric
30:43
toothbrush, toothbrush heads, uh, at 9 PM and having them sit on my doorstep at 4 AM.
30:50
When, for when I wake up and need to brush my teeth instead of either not being able to brush
30:54
my teeth or having to use a dirty old brush head or having to go out to the pharmacist the following
30:58
day and or supermarket and buy some, there is an actual value to my life that Jeff Bezos has
31:03
produced.
31:04
And that value exceeds the amount of money that Jeff Bezos captures.
31:07
It actually is
31:08
And the wealth is greater when you look at the amount of increase in the value of these people's companies that they produced than the amount that they draw down from it for themselves.
31:21
So understanding that, I think, has to be the starting point of where a robust and vital kind of center-left policy comes from, a kind of abundance policy, if you will.
31:31
Like, yes, let's encourage growth.
31:32
Let's encourage innovation.
31:33
Let's encourage ingenuity.
31:35
and then let's figure out how to capture some of those gains and allow all boats to rise at the
31:41
same time so that people aren't getting left behind.
31:44
That's the, I suppose, 20th century
31:47
welfare state ethos of Northern European countries, rather than the degrowth mindset of
31:54
some of the more rigid economies, thinking about maybe Southern European countries
31:59
and Greta Thunberg-y philosophies about everything is going to hell,
32:04
so we just have to manage the sinking ship.
32:07
I don't think that's going to be a political winner at all.
32:10
Which brings me to the rise of Pauline Hanson
32:13
and the fringe right anti-immigration party being so popular here in Australia.
32:22
Pauline gave this speech in which, as I mentioned earlier,
32:25
She did not just say we want to reduce immigration and we want to listen to hardworking Australians.
32:32
She said Australians should be monocultural.
32:35
Now, more than half of the Australian population has arrived since the Second World War.
32:41
And in the past couple of generations, since the 80s, very large proportions of those have come from Asia.
32:49
and so the idea of alienating all Asian language speaking
32:54
or, excuse me, Arabic speaking populations in Australia
33:00
is not going to be a political winner.
33:04
The instinct I sort of understand,
33:07
and I'll give you an example.
33:09
One of my friend's daughters had a speaking competition at school.
33:14
This is at elementary school, okay,
33:16
in like second grade.
33:18
And I looked at the,
33:20
they showed me the grading metrics
33:24
that were used.
33:25
So the topic of the speech was
33:28
every family has a story.
33:30
And you'll see these little kids,
33:31
you know, they're seven years old,
33:32
eight years old,
33:33
they get up and every family has a story.
33:34
They read, they've written it down in advance.
33:36
It's a three minute speech.
33:38
And I'm like, this is great.
33:40
This is great.
33:40
As a former university debater myself
33:43
and someone who loves a good way with words,
33:45
I thought this is excellent.
33:47
Get the little kiddies into public speaking early.
33:51
But their kid didn't get through.
33:53
And so they showed me, they then looked at how the speech was scored, which you didn't see before the speech, right?
34:00
You weren't aware of this.
34:01
And I would have thought, like, if you thought, how are you going to grade a little kid on whether a public speech about their family's story is good?
34:12
Well, you'd go for the content, right?
34:14
Maybe the argument, maybe how loudly they spoke and how much they looked around, how articulate they were, maybe their posture or something like that.
34:22
It would be those kinds of things.
34:24
and indeed the first four of five grading metrics that the graders use,
34:30
and this is for a big competition, right?
34:32
The best in the class goes to the school, the best in the school goes to the regional,
34:37
then you end up with the crowning the best Thanksgiving turkey child in public speaking.
34:44
So the criteria were speech structure,
34:47
whether it had a clear introduction, body and conclusion or logical flow, very good.
34:52
Ideas and content.
34:53
whether the ideas were engaging and relevant, easy to follow.
34:56
Speaking voice, fabulous, speaks clearly with appropriate volume and expression.
35:01
Body language, good, excellent eye contact, gestures enhancing the speech, very good.
35:05
And the last metric on which they were graded unbeknownst to the children was multicultural awareness,
35:11
demonstrates understanding and respect for diversity.
35:16
and the sort of fail pass on that was if the child exhibited if the child's speech
35:24
showed limited relevance to multicultural ideas now i don't hate that because i think multiculturalism
35:36
as australia uh does it which if you're listening abroad is not this quite the same as what it means
35:41
in Europe.
35:42
In Europe, it means more these kind of balkanized suburban communities in the Banglia,
35:48
which are disconnected from the rest of society.
35:50
Here, it means, you know, different cultures that
35:52
are all enmeshed together and bumping up against each other, but are sort of hopefully integrated.
35:57
I think that's the way most Australians understand it.
36:01
Not as a bunch of little sort of cultural
36:02
fiefdoms that remain separate.
36:04
But why, I can imagine, if I did not believe that multiculturalism
36:11
had served Australia well.
36:13
And there are clearly some problems with the way that Australia is
36:16
enacting multiculturalism because we have refused to acknowledge the clash that sometimes exists
36:21
between multicultural values and liberal values.
36:24
You know, what happens if a migrant community
36:27
is particularly wedded to ancient beefs that it has imported from overseas or is particularly
36:33
extreme in its religious beliefs or has a component of it that are religious fundamentalists
36:39
or maintains an allegiance to countries outside of Australia, over Australia, or becomes more insular generation to generation instead of more enmeshed in the greater Australian liberal democratic project.
36:54
And so, you know, we have to, and I think the Bondi Beach terrorist attack kind of brought this home where it was like, hang on, how did an Australian citizen end up, you know, who was the son of someone from abroad end up so radicalized that they were an ISIS sympathizer and, you know, pulled off this incredible anti-Semitic jihadist attack?
37:14
so a feeling that we need to make sure that all of the communities are being integrated
37:18
sufficiently and are on board with the liberal part of the liberal democratic project
37:22
not just the multicultural part that's that's all fair enough if you were particularly concerned
37:28
about this and your child lost a speaking competition because although they had great
37:33
speech structure great ideas and content a great speaking voice and great body language
37:39
they had failed adequately to parrot the ideological priors of the ruling intellectual class as it manifests itself in the Department of Education, you would probably feel a little bit miffed.
37:57
But, you know, multicultural awareness is the only component of that grading that is about ideas.
38:03
It's not about structure.
38:04
It's not about format.
38:06
It is putting your thumb on the scale of what ideas the child should be articulating.
38:12
I mean just swap it out for anything else that you know the left might disagree with
38:18
imagine that the imagine that instead of multicultural awareness one of the metrics
38:21
suppose Pauline Henson became prime minister and one nation was the government and the
38:26
you know the department of education was staffed with right-wing cronies and it's impossible to
38:31
imagine it would never happen in a country like Australia or the UK or the United States
38:37
but believe it or not sometimes it does happen even in places like the United States so imagine
38:41
you've got a Trumpy department of education and instead of multicultural awareness they've got
38:49
white Australian unity the unity of the unity of white Christian Australia the you know the
38:55
cohesion the Australian white Australian heritage or something like that and a child is going to
39:01
fail if they don't adequately or sufficiently demonstrate fealty to this notion about what
39:09
the country should be.
39:12
That's not what we should be doing.
39:14
We should be, I mean, living in a
39:15
pluralistic society, living in a liberal society, living in a society that's a rambunctious public
39:21
square full of quarrelling people who are living their best lives, trying to figure out what the
39:26
best way of constructing their country is.
39:29
That would require you to keep your finger off the
39:32
scale of what seven and eight year old children are being told to say in their elementary school
39:38
speeches.
39:39
It would encourage you to have the fullest diversity of opinions.
39:45
And, you know,
39:45
anytime I make this argument, people will push back and say, well, do you think there should
39:49
be a child up there advocating Nazism?
39:53
No, probably not.
39:55
You always lose the argument
39:56
when you bring up Nazism.
39:58
There will be boundaries, but I don't think that it should be
40:01
part of the scoring to judge whether or not children are exhibiting fealty to abstract ideas
40:10
when those abstract ideas are in dispute by some parts of the country.
40:14
And so I give this little
40:15
analogy only as a way of trying to understand the context in which Pauline Hanson would go and stand
40:19
in front of a national press club and give an address in which she says that Australia should
40:23
be a monocultural country.
40:26
A large number of Australians think that there's too much immigration.
40:29
And if you're listening in the States or the UK or elsewhere, you may not be aware of just how high Australia's immigration rate is.
40:37
Australia is well known for having a brutal immigration policy towards unauthorized arrivals.
40:44
Essentially, if a boat approaches Australia, it is intercepted by the Navy, dragged to a friendly neighboring tin pot country whom we bribe to set up concentration camps there, and all of the people are dumped out there.
40:58
and even if they're legitimate refugees there is the guarantee that they will never set foot on
41:01
australian soil they'll either stay there until they die or we'll try to ship them off to another
41:06
country and have them relocated there but if you arrive in australia illegally by boat
41:10
you will never uh you'll never set you'll never remain in australia and we're able to do this
41:15
because we're unlike the united states uh you know we can intercept these people before they
41:19
enter australian uh territorial waters so we're not bound by refugee conventions and international
41:26
law the same way the US is if someone manages to set foot on American soil.
41:31
So that's what we're
41:33
largely known for.
41:34
But the flip side of that is that Australia has had one of the highest rates
41:38
of immigration per capita and one of the highest rates of refugee resettlement, of accepting of
41:43
refugees in the world.
41:45
I mean, I think we're always in the top three countries for refugee
41:47
resettlement for decades and decades.
41:52
After the pandemic ended, when the borders had been closed
41:54
for a couple of years, more than half a million migrants came in a few years ago, 2022 to 2023,
41:59
I think.
42:00
More than half a million in a country of 26 million people.
42:04
I mean, you do the math
42:05
there.
42:06
That's like the United States having, what would it be, probably seven or eight million
42:11
people legally being allowed in each year.
42:15
The UK numbers, which are regarded as being
42:17
catastrophically high by Nigel Farage's, are approximately the same or slightly less,
42:23
And that's in a country that has more than double the population of Australia, the United Kingdom.
42:29
So a lot of Australians think it's too high.
42:32
Even the centre-left government is saying they're going to bring it down.
42:35
The centre-right opposition party says they'll bring it down even more and they'll peg it to new home construction so that it doesn't put upward pressure on home prices, on house prices.
42:46
but the number of Australians who would be on board with saying that Australia should be a
42:50
monocultural country where there is an intentional government bias towards what white Christian
43:01
British Irish derived culture that is vanishingly small so I if anyone's afraid of the fact that
43:10
One Nation is currently leading in the polls I would say that once it comes crunch time and
43:13
people actually have a legitimate choice to make about whether or not they want a party that is
43:18
saying it believes in monoculturalism, whether they want a party that has quite wackadoodle ideas
43:24
often about the economy.
43:25
I mean, Pauline Hanson in her speech, she was talking about how
43:28
she's on the side of the Australian battler, the Australian worker.
43:32
She was talking about
43:32
giving these very evocative images of Australians eating out of garbage cans and lying in the gutter
43:38
and, you know, they're just single mothers who just can't make do.
43:40
And she's going to be on the
43:41
side of the poor, hardworking Australians.
43:44
And then in the same breath, she talks about how
43:47
industrial relations, employment and employer laws in Australia are outdated because she speaks to
43:54
so many small business people who find it too hard to fire their employees and who are struggling to
44:00
make do because minimum wages are too high.
44:03
So we have to renegotiate that and lower minimum wages
44:06
and make it easier to fire people.
44:08
Well, presumably the voters who she's going after by talking about
44:12
Struggle Street and how she wants to help hardworking Australian families make more money
44:17
and take home more money in their paycheck, those can't be the same people who are going to be
44:22
sympathetic to her liberalizing employment rules to make it easier for people to get fired and
44:30
easier to be paid less.
44:32
So it's a bit of a muddle.
44:33
And when it comes crunch time and people actually
44:34
look at the policies and try to figure out where she stands on things.
44:38
I don't think that her
44:41
current kind of ascendance is going to translate in any way like it has in the United States into
44:45
electoral victory.
44:47
But it is worth heeding, and it is worth understanding, and it is worth thinking
44:52
about the ways in which policies, vision, a sense of ambitiousness can contribute to turning the
45:00
volume down on the kinds of grievances that drive people towards people like Pauline Hanson and
45:05
Nigel Farage.
45:07
So that's all a way of saying that the monkey hoarding a trillion bananas analogy
45:12
is not a helpful thing to inject into the political discourse.
45:17
You know, think what you
45:17
want about Mamdani.
45:20
He may be great in certain ways in terms of if you're an egalitarian and
45:25
you want more of the wealth to be shared around.
45:28
But he lacks the fundamental component that any
45:32
successful centre-left party will have in the future, I think, which is an optimistic,
45:36
expansionist sense of us all being on an exciting journey to somewhere better,
45:43
rather than us squabbling with each other about who's got the trillion bananas and who doesn't.
45:49
Last thing, I had Sarah Wilson.
45:52
I did a lovely event with Sarah Wilson.
45:53
I think this partly
45:54
got me sick.
45:55
To be honest, no offense to Sarah, certainly not her fault, but I got off the plane
46:01
from New York.
46:02
I spent one night in Sydney.
46:03
I got back on a plane to go to Melbourne the following
46:05
day.
46:06
Sarah and I did a fabulous event at the Wheeler Center in Melbourne in front of a live
46:13
audience.
46:13
It was great.
46:14
Then I came back on a plane the next day.
46:16
Then the next day was a long
46:17
holiday weekend.
46:18
I went away with some friends, with all of our families.
46:21
By the time I got back,
46:22
You know when you sometimes, your body just needs a rest and you just keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it and then eventually it just falls apart and goes, I'm not going to keep doing this.
46:29
I think that's what happened.
46:30
And then I got a terrible cold.
46:32
So anyway, I blame Sarah Wilson for the cold.
46:35
No, I don't.
46:35
I speak in jest.
46:36
But one of the disagreements that Sarah and I had in that interview and that she and I have more broadly, and I love speaking to Sarah, she's one of my favorite people because she genuinely has a totally different worldview than I do.
46:48
But when the two of us sort of share our ideas, it's really nice to talk to somebody whose kind of prior expectations about the way the world is going to unfold are so different from my own.
47:00
But she's also not censorious or finger waggy or preachy about it.
47:04
She's just like, I mean, this is the way I see it.
47:05
And if you don't, that's totally fine as well.
47:08
It would, you know, take what works for you.
47:10
But she's definitely on the, you know, dark European, we're in decline, the world is collapsing.
47:16
You know, we've built a civilization that is so interconnected that, you know, we only have to sort of blow on it and the whole house of cards will collapse.
47:26
and that's largely the point of her really interesting and quite beautiful new book which
47:31
you can read on your own time which she also wrote here on Substack but there are a couple of things
47:37
that I wanted to address in out of that conversation that a few people on Substack have
47:41
asked me about or have noted in the comments on that episode which is this idea that we are sort
47:48
of living everyone can feel that we're living in uniquely troubled times you know that these are
47:52
extraordinary times for people and that things are tough and things are really tough.
47:56
I mean,
47:56
I saw a survey the other day that more people since the 1970s say that things aren't good.
48:04
But I was wondering whether or not maybe that's just a function of the information that we're
48:10
getting.
48:11
You know, are things actually not good?
48:14
Or are we just attached to a fire hose of terrible
48:17
things on social media.
48:20
You know, in the 1970s, there was the environmental movement.
48:23
That would
48:24
be a reason to worry.
48:26
In the 1960s, there was the nuclear crisis.
48:28
I mean, literally a global
48:30
nuclear crisis in the Cuban missile standoff.
48:33
In the 1930s, there was fascism.
48:34
In the 19th century,
48:35
there was worker exploitation.
48:37
In the 14th century, there was the Black Death.
48:39
Like,
48:39
by what yardstick are things terrible at the moment?
48:44
Sarah's thesis, and I'm not going to
48:46
pick on Sarah because this is a much larger thesis.
48:49
Let's call it the decline thesis or the
48:51
collapse thesis.
48:52
It says, if you look at Trump and you look at the far right and you look at
48:55
house prices and you look at the Middle East and you look at Ukraine, things are going terribly.
49:01
Well, yeah, but I mean, in our parents' generation, they just weren't looking at all those things.
49:05
There were all those things.
49:07
There was famine in Africa.
49:08
There were global nuclear standoffs.
49:09
There
49:10
was apartheid in South Africa.
49:11
There was heaps of stuff that you could see if you were glued to a
49:15
social media feed that was showing it to you all the time, but we won't.
49:18
So we went out and touched
49:19
grass.
49:20
In terms of being immiserated right now, in terms of the idea of how people's lives actually
49:24
are and whether they're awful, yes, this is not me speaking from a position of middle-class
49:31
privilege and saying nobody has it tough.
49:32
Of course, people feel that they have it tough,
49:35
but my grandmother had meat once a week.
49:39
When they had chicken, it was an event.
49:41
They would
49:41
get dressed up to have a chicken.
49:44
My parents didn't get takeaway coffees.
49:45
You didn't go to
49:46
a cafe.
49:47
You didn't just go, oh, should we just go and get something at a cafe?
49:51
There was no money
49:52
for that, even for middle-class people in the 90s, in the 80s.
49:56
Well, in the 90s, it just started
49:57
turning around, but in the 80s.
50:01
We have gotten to where we are today by having a sense of optimism
50:04
and a sense of faith in human purpose.
50:08
Industrialization plus the liberal institutions of democracy
50:12
have given us longer lives, a wider range of food,
50:16
extraordinary creature comforts, the ability to eat out,
50:19
to taste an array of cuisines that even our parents could never dream of.
50:24
They've liberated us from back-breaking labor.
50:26
They've taken us off the farms and out of the factories
50:28
into the intellectual work life.
50:33
you know babies aren't dying anymore the way that they were it used to be a commonplace
50:37
occurrence all over the world that you know babies would die in the west you would you know
50:42
it was not that you would everyone knew somebody whose baby had died these are not things to just
50:48
ignore and to bank as obvious wins while we continue to complain about how terrible things
50:54
are these are things that we should be great grateful for it is worth having a little humility
50:58
and gratitude for where we are in the world.
51:01
PJ O'Rourke, the great humorist, had a line in one
51:04
of his books that we all know what whiners rich people are.
51:09
And in a sense, we've all become rich.
51:11
We've all got the luxury of complaining because we don't have to worry about actual tangible
51:16
problems.
51:17
Now, people will say, well, how can you say that?
51:19
What about the rising cost of bread?
51:22
Yes, of course.
51:22
All of those things seem like problems in comparison to what you had to pay for
51:26
a loaf of bread or a liter of milk three years ago.
51:29
It's more.
51:31
But how many televisions do you
51:32
have in your apartment?
51:35
I mean, how many cars do you have?
51:36
How many laptops do you have?
51:40
How easy is it for you to see a doctor?
51:43
I mean, these things on a literal statistical metric
51:49
are much better than they were 30 years ago and heaps better than they were 50 years ago or 80
51:53
years ago.
51:54
They might not be better than they were two or three years ago, which is one reason why we
51:58
have the far right.
51:59
And the last thing I'll say about declinism, which I do think ties into
52:04
everything we've been talking about, Elon and also Iran in the sense that Trump is a consequence of
52:10
dissatisfaction and unrest and a sense of alienation from the major parties, a sense of
52:16
not being listened to.
52:17
So all of that is downstream from this sentiment that I'm talking about.
52:23
the person who responds to the doomer
52:28
by saying, ah, she'll be right
52:30
we've had problems before
52:33
we've had problems in the past
52:35
but we've always got over them
52:38
that person is uniquely irritating
52:41
to the person who believes in collapse
52:43
because the person who believes in collapse
52:45
is right to say that at some point you're going to be wrong
52:48
at some point the fact that we've
52:51
overcome nuclear proliferation, we didn't blow ourselves up during the Cold War.
52:58
The fact that we've been able to maintain rising living standards and population growth
53:04
in spite of the hysterical claims of Paul Ehrlich or other doomers in the 70s who believed that we
53:10
were all going to starve because humans were breeding at an exponential rate, but they were
53:15
only able to grow food at a linear rate.
53:18
The fact that so many prognosticators of doom have been
53:20
wrong in the past doesn't mean that they're always going to be wrong in the present.
53:24
But my retort to that, which I wish I'd had time to get into on the live event, and which I hope
53:33
I might be able to get into it on a future podcast with Sarah, is that the claim that
53:40
she'll be right and that we'll be okay may be not just a technological predictive claim.
53:50
it might actually be an epistemological claim
53:53
by which I mean it may be
53:55
that what the person at the barbie
53:57
who's dismissive of the collapse thesis really means
54:00
is not things will always go right
54:04
but you the prognosticator of collapse
54:07
you the doom scroller
54:09
you the person who thinks that everything is going wrong
54:11
and going to shit
54:14
might just be wrong
54:16
you might just be mistaken
54:19
about the nature of the world right now
54:21
and as a result
54:23
about the likely future of the world
54:26
so yes there are all kinds of technological
54:27
and historical reasons
54:28
why they might be wrong on the merits
54:30
on the specifics
54:31
on you know okay
54:31
so in you know 1798
54:34
Malthus writes about how
54:36
agricultural production is fixed
54:39
and so therefore
54:40
there's you know
54:41
humanity is going to starve
54:43
but he can't foresee
54:44
the invention of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer
54:46
which creates an incredible abundance and revolutionizes agriculture in the 1860s everyone
54:52
in britain is arguing oh my god coal we're going to have a collapse because we're running out of
54:55
coal they couldn't foresee the internal combustion engine they couldn't foresee liquid fossil fuels
55:01
they certainly couldn't foresee electricity or solar um in 1968 as i mentioned paul ehrlich
55:07
writes this bombshell of a book talking about how uh you know agricultural yields are going at one
55:13
rate but birth rates are going at another rate so everyone everything is going to collapse in fact
55:16
he has a famous bet.
55:17
He has a famous bet with Julian Simon about whether or not a basket of
55:23
essential metals is going to go up or down in price.
55:25
And Julian Simon says, I bet they keep
55:27
going down in price.
55:28
And Ehrlich is like, no, no, no, you're wrong.
55:30
Everything's going to get more
55:31
expensive all of a sudden because we're running out of stuff.
55:33
And some decades later, they resolve
55:37
the bet and Ehrlich actually pays Julian Simon and makes some excuse about why the timeline was
55:41
off, but I'm still right in the future.
55:43
Ehrlich couldn't see the invention of miracle rice,
55:45
which was a semi-dwarf cross of rice that in 1966 completely changed rice harvests around the world.
55:53
He couldn't foresee the invention of dwarf wheat, which was Norman Borlaug's Nobel Peace Prize
55:58
winning invention.
55:59
He won it in 1970 and revolutionized wheat harvest.
56:03
I mean,
56:03
those two inventions alone turned India from famine to a surplus producer of grains,
56:10
just thanks to two inventions.
56:12
So there is this human ingenuity thing, which is like,
56:14
you don't know enough to know that we're doomed.
56:16
You don't know enough to know that everything's
56:18
going to shit.
56:19
Things are coming down the pike, especially with AI that we can't possibly
56:22
envisage.
56:22
That doesn't mean it's certain that things are going to get better, but it sure as
56:25
hell means it's not certain that things are going to get worse.
56:28
So there's that argument, which is
56:29
kind of a technological or historical argument.
56:31
But then I think what speaks to me more is,
56:34
as I say, the epistemological argument, the argument about how can we know?
56:38
How can we know?
56:40
you know doomers always make the same predictive error they take a snapshot of what's going on
56:48
right now present rates of change and they project those snapshots into the future without accounting
56:54
for the complexity of not just ecological systems but of human responses of human ingenuity
57:01
so yes it's the doomer's job to say if everything stays exactly as it is right now and we continue
57:07
emitting the same amount of carbon that we currently do, and we continue needing as much
57:11
more energy as AI currently needs, and everything remains fixed, we're on a path to nowhere.
57:17
Okay,
57:17
fine.
57:18
That's your job as a doomer, as a collapse advocate.
57:22
But then it's the gene scientist's job
57:23
to figure out the new types of agriculture, and it's the agriculturalist's job to implement them,
57:30
and it's the hydrologist's job to find new sources of water that your model hasn't accounted for,
57:35
and it's the demographer's job to figure out whether or not people are actually having more
57:39
or fewer babies and how that's going to map and what immigration rates we would need to
57:44
keep the economy growing it's the policymaker's job to figure out what incentives we need to
57:49
put in place for all of this to work together it's the entrepreneur's job to get all of the
57:53
money together to make sure that startups can do all of these things that the gene scientist and
57:59
the agriculturalist and the hydrologist and the demographer and the policymaker want to do
58:04
and then it's your job 20 years later to lose the bet and have to pay back the person who didn't
58:10
think everything was going to go to hell because you just didn't have enough information to know
58:15
to me that you know certainty is irritating to me it's just inherently irritating to me and people
58:20
who bang on about how terrible things are and how much worse they're going to get unless we resort
58:26
to alternatives that entail the overthrowing of liberal, democratic, industrialized capitalism.
58:37
To me, that is an expression of epistemological arrogance and certainty, which is no less
58:45
off-putting than the epistemological arrogance and certainty of the tech bros in Silicon Valley
58:51
who think everything is going to be fantastic just because they believe in it.
58:55
the great thing about sarah wilson is she's fully mindful of all of that and at the same time as she
59:01
is personally certain of collapse she is enormously generous in saying like this is my point of view
59:06
and you're entitled to have another one and if i had to leave us with one takeaway it would be that
59:11
that sensibility that sensibility of generosity and empathy and um humility and non-self-certainty
59:21
is precisely what we need to carry forward
59:24
at a time when we're trying to figure out
59:25
what the hell the world means
59:26
with a shitty Iranian memorandum of understanding
59:29
and a newly minted trillionaire
59:32
and the rise of far-right parties all over the place.
59:36
Those are my thoughts this week.
59:37
I hope you are well.
59:38
Have a fabulous weekend.
59:40
I'll see you next week.