Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The Psychology of World War III" with Dr Nicholas Wright

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"The Psychology of World War III" with Dr Nicholas Wright · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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• 1:51
  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 1:55
  Here's a dangerous idea for you.
• 1:57
  The most important object in the world is Xi Jinping's brain because the psychological state of
• 2:07
  that brain Xi Jinping's balancing of the upsides and downsides of invading Taiwan is the most
• 2:14
  relevant factor in whether the world enters a cataclysmic global conflict.
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  In fact, all wars, all conflict, come down fundamentally to psychology, to prediction,
• 2:26
  to second-guessing, to deterrence, to all kinds of mental games.
• 2:31
  Today's guest Dr. Nicholas Wright is a leading neuroscientist who advises the Pentagon,
• 2:36
  he also advises the UK cabinet office, to help them with psychological strategy,
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  gameplaying the psychology of their adversaries, thinking about how to understand their own psychological
• 2:49
  blind spots, and in an era of asymmetric warfare, of killer drones, of bunker-busting bombs,
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  it's more important than ever to tease out the psychological games of strategic conflict.
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  Why did France lose to the Nazis so quickly despite having more tanks and more troops and more
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  gums? How did Ukraine stand firm against Russia? Why was Winston Churchill right and
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  Neville Chamberlain wrong? How do you know when you're wrong? How do you know if you can trust an
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  ally? What's the logic of nuclear, mutually assured destruction and deterrence and does it still
• 3:27
  hold? How will technology shape the future of war? We get stuck into it all, I hope you enjoy
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  as much as I did. The one and only, Nicholas Wright.
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  I am of an age where I was a child when the Cold War had ended, and so I just thought that wars
• 3:47
  were things that happened in the past, and then as I became an adult, of course, we have seen
• 3:55
  a number of wars from Iraq to now Russia's invasion of Ukraine. What's going on and why do people
• 4:05
  go to war? Well, there are two separate questions. The first thing is why they're more
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  wars now than there were, say, 15, 20 years ago, and certainly more wars where other people seem
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  to be doing things to people who are a bit more like us, basically, you know, in some ways,
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  Iraq, Afghanistan, those were wars where we chose in some ways at least certainly to stay
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  there for as long as we did. And the reason for that is that after the end of the Cold War,
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  the United States in particular, but the Westmore broadly, was overwhelmingly militarily superior,
• 4:41
  had overwhelming military superiority, and that is just simply no longer the case.
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  The West is no longer as secure as it once was, and as a consequence, there are simply more wars
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  because more people can now get what they wanted to do anyway, which was, you know, take things by
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  force and now they can actually do that. What is the change in that superiority? Is it a lack of
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  investment on the part of the West, or is it the rise of cheaper forms of warfare for smaller players,
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  or are you talking about China? So, I mean, it's partly, it's strategy. So I mean, humans
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  are always creative. So the first thing to say is that, you know, the way that the West fought
• 5:22
  wars inevitably, people don't just go, do you know what? They're really good at that. So I think
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  what we'll do is we'll just keep on coming at them in exactly the same way so they can mow us down.
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  That's not what people do. War is an area in which you need creativity. And so other countries
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  learned how to counter the types of capabilities that the West has. They were creative and
• 5:45
  thoughtful about it. I'm sorry. I'm just losing you completely audio wise. I don't know what to
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  go on, but as you, as you, the longer you talk, the quieter and quieter you get. Jonno, can you just
• 5:57
  come in and troubleshoot that? Yeah. As you, are you hearing that or completely fine?
• 6:01
  Oh, okay. Interesting. So is it the, could it be the, the cans? But it's of course,
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  quite a consistent like with each, yeah, with each 10 to 20 to 30 seconds, it could just get softer
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  and softer. Right. Another set. It seems like there's an auto thing that's coming in and
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  could it be putting, could I be loud enough that it's privileging my background hum over his,
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  it shouldn't be. If you turn down my input or something. Sorry, Nick, this hasn't happened
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  before. No, we're in a slightly worse area. Well, I can always hear him. It's just that over
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  the course of a minute, it gets softer and softer and softer. Sorry. You're going to have to start
• 6:49
  residing poetry again. That's all right. I mean, it's just the same one, really. Go for it.
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  In what deeps and in what skies burn the fire of say, not the vine eyes. What, oh, dear,
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  you may have forgotten a lot of the rest of the poem now. And did he who make the lamb make
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  fee in the deeps and in what skies burn the fire of the nice? Or I could do Aussie Mandius.
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  Oh, yeah, that's much louder. Yes, and I do. I am partial to Aussie Mandius.
• 7:23
  Okay. So I once met a traveler from an antique land who said to vast and trunceless legs of
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  stone, stand in the desert and nearby half-sunk a shattered visage lies. The wrinkled lip
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  and snare of cold command tell of somebody somebody somebody. Is this enough? All do you need me to?
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  I was just enjoying it by now. I was waiting till you got to the Aussie Mandius quote on the statue.
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  Yeah. I am Aussie Mandius, king of kings, look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.
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  And the lone and level sand stretch far away, apparently. And I'm actually going to Egypt,
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  because it's Ramsey's, I think, is Aussie Mandius. And I'm going to Egypt.
• 8:06
  This winter. Oh, how fabulous. Have you been? Well, I've never been. I'm really excited.
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  Great. There we go. So you were very loud there. There we go. Oh, okay.
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  I went to Egypt with a lovely friend of mine who's a Brit, also a Brit, who is also a journalist,
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  who works for the Wall Street Journal, and is fascinated in all such things before the
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  Arab Spring, just before the revolution. And then found myself on a subsequent trip, not long
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  there after, in Tower of Square, while everything was going down. And Egyptian fighter jets were
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  flying overhead. And I almost got kidnapped by Islamists and was rescued by a kindly Egyptian
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  student, who shaperoned me back to my hotel. And thereafter, because I was living in the states
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  at the time, I spent the next five years being flagged for secondary security, screening every time
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  I entered the US. So every time I left the US, I would have to come back in and factor in that
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  there were going to be four hours sitting in a, under fluorescent lights in a waiting room while
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  I checked why I was in Egypt during the Tower of Square. Yeah, I mean, although again, not totally
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  unreasonable. Completely reasonable. I was an idiot. But there you go. So sorry, you were just an
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  adventurer. Exactly. I'm lucky. I know. But like, you know, foreign 20-something individual,
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  you know, wandering alone through Egypt at the peak of the... Well, I mean, I had a friend,
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  I was at a medical school with, and when she was in her early 20s, she and another female friend,
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  just two medical students from London, traveled through Syria. Asad Syria, this was in just
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  2000ish. And it was very safe because they didn't want anything to happen to Western medical
• 9:52
  students traveling through Syria. Digitatorships can be safe when they want to be.
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  Yeah, I'm sure North Korea has some wonderful beaches as, you know, we've heard in the last
• 10:03
  period of the way. But yes. So, right. Why are there so many wars? So the gist is to cut to the chase.
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  So why are there so many wars? I'll keep it really simple. Humans and human brains drive us towards
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  war. But for a long time, people couldn't fight wars against the United States and its allies,
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  certainly not very easily, because they would simply be beaten, right? So they didn't fight wars,
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  right? Russia was in no state to fight a war against somewhere like Ukraine. But that's changed,
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  and the world has changed. Now we are no longer materially superior. It is very unlikely we're
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  going to be materially superior again in the near future. It certainly seems unlikely for the next
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  few decades. And as a consequence of that, we're going to have to get used to the fact that big
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  wars could happen. We could fight another big war. And by big war here, I mean, a war on the
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  scale of World War T. But just to lean into the psychological question of it, the address in your
• 11:02
  book, it can't be true materially that Russia would was not in a position to beat Ukraine prior to
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  2022. I mean, Russia was incredibly powerful all the way from the fifties up until today, right?
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  I mean, and its military could have vanquished a small country like Ukraine, not that Ukraine existed
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  back then. But at any point since the end of the Cold War, couldn't Russia have beaten Ukraine?
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  No. So at the end of the Cold War, I mean, it's very important to remember how badly Russia did
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  at the end of the Cold War, right? I mean, Russian life expectancy went down between the mid-80s
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  to the mid-90s by, I can't remember how many, like eight years also, I put the figures in the book,
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  right? I mean, they really lost and they lost catastrophically. The Russian state ceased to function
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  in important ways, right? I'm employed from 0% to about 30%. It was a deeply troubled society
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  in which where they couldn't, you know, when I was my dad, for some, like ludicrous reason,
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  thought he'd take his children into a railway trip in Eastern Europe in 1990. So we were there,
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  I was a small child, and you could literally buy, and I did, you could buy Russian, I had a Russian
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  officer's hat, right? Because the Russian troops are just selling their Soviet belts and hats and
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  gloves and whatever you want. Have you still got it? Literally at the side of the street. Sadly,
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  it did not stand the test of time. And I've, I got out of the draw one year, and I was like,
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  this is simply, this become a completely bald hat. You mean quality, Soviet material engineering
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  was not up to scratch? Oh, the thing is, so, look, at the end of world protein, the 1950s,
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  the Soviets had just beaten the, what was the best land army in the world, which was the German army?
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  And it gives me no pleasure to say that the Germans were the best army in the world, but they
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  were the best land army in the world, they were better than the British, they were better than
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  the Australians, they were better than the German and the Americans, they're better than the Russians,
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  right? They were simply very, very good, and the Russians beat them, right? The Russians
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  had no choice, Soviet Russia beat the Germans, they were very good, right? At Blitzkrieg. By the
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  end of World War II, the Russians were extremely good, and they outfought the Germans. Now,
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  they were very good, but, right, the nature of war always remains the same, right? And the reason
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  why the nature of war always remains the same is that war is, like, by definition, war is
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  politically motivated violence between human groups at scale. That's what war is, it's always about
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  human on human, but the character of war will always change, right? So new technologies, new ways
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  of organizing your society, all of these things will, will change. And so you have to
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  keep reinventing your military, otherwise you're going to lose, right? You have to keep
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  remember things like the will to fight. If you don't have the will to fight, you're not going
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  to be able to succeed. You have to keep reinventing how you do things they've done to new technologies.
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  Now, at the end of the Cold War, to get back to your question, the Russians were in just,
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  they were a country in collapse, in crucial ways. They had no capability to marshal their tanks,
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  physical tanks, and get them anywhere, right? And that was the problem with Russia,
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  but Russia rebuilt. Badad Mehputin is a nasty man, right? Badad Mehputin is a very capable man,
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  and he has rebuilt a lot of Russian capabilities and put Russia in a position where it can now invade
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  countries along its borders. So when you talk about the will, there's an interesting parallel
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  that you make in the book between Ukraine and 2022 through to today and France in World War II.
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  You know, France is caricatured by the more unkind allies in America as cheese-eating surrender
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  monkeys because they folded so quickly in World War II. And in actual fact, it's a more complicated
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  picture, but why was it so easy for Hitler to, what was the military position and situation and
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  capability of France at the beginning of World War II? And why does that not align with our
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  recollection of what happened to them in contrast to what's going on in Ukraine?
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  Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, we forget this now because obviously we then saw Hitler take over
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  so much of Europe. I mean, there was virtually none of it left other than Britain in the West and
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  the Soviet Union in the East. But, you know, on May the 9th, 1940, there were two armies facing
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  each other. There was the Nazi Germans on one side and there was Britain and France defending
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  France on the other side. And, you know, the Allies, the British and the French, we had more
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  trained men, more guns, more tanks and more planes. And yet the Germans cut through extremely quickly.
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  Now they did that partly because they were better. And again, it gives me no pleasure to say that.
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  They were better at using the technologies of their time, combining those with key psychological
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  factors like they were able to make faster decisions to communicate more effectively,
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  having better ways of leading their troops. And so their troops could then make decisions more
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  flexibly, right, and more creatively to achieve the goals only to achieve. And they also used
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  shock, surprise, skill and daring much more effectively than the Allies. And unfortunately,
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  that meant that they created an opening, you know, very rapidly. But then the key reason why
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  Hitler's cavalry was claturing up the Shunzelese in a victory parade less than seven weeks
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  after the German tank started rolling, right, less than seven weeks. And the reason why that happened
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  so quickly was that French will to fight collapsed. Right. And so enormous numbers of French troops
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  surrendered. Now you're absolutely right. Why did that happen? It, it, there are many factors,
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  partly that a lot of the key troops who faced the Germans were some of the poorest trained
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  French troops. More broadly, the France, the Germans trained furiously in the opening months
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  of the war. The French did not train very much at all. Right. And training is crucial because
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  training turns what is a terrifying and fearful environment, one that is yes still fearful,
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  but one that you can be managed. And for a wide variety of factors, the French will to fight
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  collapsed. And as a consequence of that, you know, it was in many ways that that defeater France
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  was a key turning point, possibly even the key turning point in the whole of 20th century history.
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  I was thinking about how that must have felt Nick when I was reading it and trying to recall
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  the fact that everything was quite recent at the time that this happened. Like we think of
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  World War II because it was so cataclysmic and such a pivotal turning moment in world history
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  as this standalone event. But if you were French, the, I mean, the Napoleonic wars were as recent
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  as the Beatles are to us. And World War II, right? Like 60 or 100 years or something. I mean,
• 18:06
  well, what? No, it was 100 years. 100 years in 1815. Yeah. Sorry. Yes, yes, I'm getting my
• 18:16
  1800s mixed up. Sorry. So just going back in time from like 19, say, 39, the World War I for a
• 18:26
  star had happened during the Obama administration for us, right? It was that recent 2008. So, yeah.
• 18:39
  Yes. Well, it happened. So it ended in, it ended in 1918. So just over. So it was like George,
• 18:45
  George, George, George W. Bush to, yeah, George W. Bush. It's like World War I,
• 18:50
  it happened during George W. Bush. I mean, and so, and you've had this incredible victory. And
• 18:54
  you've squeezed the Germans to the end of their lives at Versailles. And you probably feel
• 19:02
  somewhat indomitable. And then in a matter of weeks, they annihilate you. And so is it, is it the
• 19:10
  surprise? Is it the, I mean, yes, you've mentioned training, but is it akin to what we felt after
• 19:17
  911 where it was like a rupture in the psyche of what's possible that sort of demoralizes the French
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  spirit? I think I think there are two factors. One is the Germans were very good, and they were
• 19:30
  also lucky. So in fact, the German plan, the original German plan, they had for what became the
• 19:37
  the attack on France. And the plans got captured. And so they had to change their plan at the
• 19:44
  last minute and come up with a different plan, the attack to the old den. So they were lucky.
• 19:48
  But the Germans were also just much better at planning, right? So the Germans were much better
• 19:53
  at planning. So they wargamed a lot of situations. So, for example, so last year's Nobel prize
• 19:59
  winner in AI, a chap called Demis as Abbas. And he and I shared an office together when he was
• 20:04
  researching Braille at Queen Square in London, where I work. And Demis did his PhD. His research was
• 20:13
  a part of the brain called the hippocampus that is very involved in memory and in using those memories
• 20:17
  to imagine new features, right? So our brain is about imagining and simulating new features.
• 20:22
  And what the Germans are very good at doing was wargaming, simulating new features, and then
• 20:27
  adapting much more rapidly, thinking up new things and then adapting off rapidly than the alas were
• 20:33
  unfortunately. Another thing that is really important is people often rely on technology,
• 20:38
  right? Technology is important. But what was the point of the imagino line, right? We laugh at
• 20:43
  the imagino line now, but the imagino line, the imagino line was true. I'm sure you remember,
• 20:49
  you know, on the list, there's remember like World War One was lots of series of trenches,
• 20:54
  right? Lots of trenches and it was horrible, right? Really awful.
• 20:58
  So what they thought is what we'll do instead is we'll build an industrial version of that,
• 21:03
  right? So they built a huge set of fortifications. Huge set of fortifications, the line of fortifications
• 21:08
  and there were, you know, gun turrets and there were, you know, cinemas and air conditioning and
• 21:14
  cafeterias and little underground trains and all the rest of it, right? They were like this time
• 21:19
  we're going to have this impenetrable line, the imagino line. And it was seen as a, you know,
• 21:23
  a technological marvel of the time, right? Hugely expensive. We're at a run, Nick.
• 21:27
  I think it's on. Where did it run? Where was the line? And it ran along the border between
• 21:34
  France and Germany. Now, for political reasons, it didn't cover the border, like between France
• 21:41
  and Belgium, right? Keybotta, Belgium. That was for difficult political reasons, which I'm not
• 21:47
  going to go into, but kind of long story short, the Germans went round the imagino line.
• 21:52
  So the imagino line was just, how did the French not see this? But they didn't buy
• 21:56
  one. Am I misremembering my von Schleefen plan or something where like, didn't the Germans come
• 22:01
  around the top in World War One? They did. And in fact, this time they came to a slightly
• 22:06
  different bit, the Ardenne, which is that thought to be these forests that were thought to be
• 22:09
  impenetrable, right? Team laterized vehicles. But the French basically, what they wanted to do
• 22:17
  is the French. So, I mean, it's very important to remember that there were hundreds of thousands
• 22:21
  of, what, the dead in France is about one and a half million, right, in World War One.
• 22:25
  And there were hundreds of thousands of orphans, right? Hundreds of thousands of invulids.
• 22:32
  It was an absolute catastrophe. It was for what was the population of France at the time, Nick?
• 22:36
  Do you know? That is a good question. I would estimate something like 40 odd million. So it's a lot.
• 22:42
  If it's like 60,000 or 30,000, maybe it's about 67 million. Yeah.
• 22:49
  So the France did not, they wanted to substitute technology for manpower, right? That's what they
• 22:59
  wanted to do. But the problem is is the Germans prepared to fight and fight very hard. They weren't
• 23:05
  prepared to, they wanted to use technology, but not substitute technology for manpower. And as a
• 23:10
  consequence of that, they were able to cut through the French, drive around the French, drive
• 23:14
  much harder, surprise the French and out with the French. And unfortunately, that's exactly what
• 23:20
  they did. And it's just very important when you remember now that if you look at a lot of what
• 23:23
  we're trying to do on the eastern flankers of Europe now, again, what people are talking about is
• 23:28
  they'll be a drone war, right? We don't want to send our boys to go and fight over there because
• 23:33
  they'll be the drone war, they'll be technology, they'll be missiles. But the thing is that war
• 23:38
  will always come down in the end to people who are prepared to fight and people who are prepared to
• 23:43
  risk their own lives and people, you know, they have the will to stand and people who are also prepared
• 23:49
  to kill others, right? And that's what will always end up coming down to. And any group of people
• 23:55
  who are not prepared to defend themselves, they will make easy pickings for those who are prepared
• 24:02
  to attack them. Why do you say it will always come down to that? Because there's a lot of wiggle room
• 24:06
  in that, in that claim. It may be true that at the end of the day, somebody's going to have to
• 24:12
  stand up if the shit really hits the fan. But as military sophistication improves,
• 24:19
  there's an obvious, I mean, we've seen the sort of asymmetry of warfare where a drone operator
• 24:25
  sitting in a bunker in Nevada can be, you know, operating a drone that's high over the mountains
• 24:31
  of Wazirostan in, you know, northern Pakistan or Afghanistan and they can blow a village out of the
• 24:37
  to smithereens with the press of a button. That person doesn't need to have skin in the game
• 24:42
  and the bar of how much skin you need to put in the game gets lower and lower such that maybe
• 24:48
  yes, at the end of the day, you know, when you're being invaded, everyone's going to have to stand
• 24:51
  up and fight. But isn't there an expansion of the capacity for bloodless warfare as technology
• 24:56
  improves? Bloodless on one side at least. I wish that that were the case, but unfortunately,
• 25:03
  I mean, you could make exactly the opposite claim and I think that opposite claim would actually
• 25:07
  be reasonable. So you look at World War One, for example, World War One was industrialized warfare,
• 25:13
  barbed wire machine guns. What is a machine gun? A machine gun is like the essence of
• 25:18
  rifle fire, the essence of an infantry, right? That's what a machine gun is. It's mechanized
• 25:24
  firepower, right? So and that, you know, killed people enormously more efficiently and effectively,
• 25:32
  which is not necessarily a good thing. You know, then then was able to be done before.
• 25:38
  Now, I completely agree with you that as we now get to, so you look at World War Two,
• 25:43
  so what was the Hitler's first major defeat? What was Hitler's first major? Hitler's
• 25:47
  first major defeat was the battle of Britain, right? The battle of Britain was essentially a war
• 25:53
  or a battle of dueling technologists, right? You had a relatively small number of about 2,500
• 25:59
  pilots in the RAF, mostly British, but also Australian, Canadian, New Zealanders, polls, and so on,
• 26:06
  checks against the similar number in, what more, right, in the Luftwaffe. So you had
• 26:13
  dueling technologists, right? And then the air control and support systems that enabled the RAF,
• 26:18
  for example, to detect adversary, you know, enemy fighters and bombers and take them on.
• 26:25
  Now, that is true. And I think in the future, what we'll end up with is dueling technologists,
• 26:31
  where it will be swarm upon swarm of drones, and there will be dueling technologists to control
• 26:35
  of these swarms of drones. We can talk about what AI means and why it will happen and how humans
• 26:40
  can potentially control those swarms of drones and so on. But I think you're absolutely right.
• 26:46
  And in addition to that, if you think about, so what I think you're stating in Australia now,
• 26:51
  what is the most likely war Australia is going to get pulled into serious war in the near future?
• 26:56
  It is a contingency over Taiwan, right? A US China contingency over Taiwan in which the Australians
• 27:04
  will get involved, right? Now, there is no war game that I am aware of, where many thousands of
• 27:12
  US service personnel on a variety of different ships and different types of platforms don't get
• 27:17
  killed, right? When did that type of war really take off? And if Australia is involved,
• 27:22
  there will be a lot of Australians who will die as well in the Navy, Marines, and so on and
• 27:27
  so forth. That is what will happen. So, yes, potentially in the future, we'll get to a point
• 27:35
  where it will be drones upon drones. But even then, why will people not attack if they can
• 27:41
  the drone bases? Why will they not be attacking the forward drone controllers because people are
• 27:46
  jamming other things, right? Right now, the drones in Ukraine, a key Russian technology now,
• 27:52
  is drones that are connected by a fiber optic cable, right? Because they can't be jammed,
• 27:59
  right? Which means you have to physically be relatively close to the to the Ukraine in front lines.
• 28:04
  Wait, the drones are connected to each other via fiber optic cable or to the controller or
• 28:07
  the controller. So the controller, so a controller. So first person for you drones are amazing.
• 28:12
  I don't give a flowing one. I bought one for my son. Actually, you can buy them from really
• 28:15
  cheaply in that. You can just literally get them anywhere in it these days.
• 28:20
  And the reason they're so good is that you kind of sit in the drone and you look out, you basically
• 28:24
  look out the front drone. You can fly this drone around. It's very intuitive. What are you looking at?
• 28:29
  What on the screen is it on your phone or whatever the camera of the drone is looking at? So normally
• 28:34
  it's me looking at myself in a park in London. Yes, but what are you looking at while you're standing
• 28:38
  in the park? Where are you seeing the drones POV from? So I'm looking down at the handset.
• 28:43
  So I put my phone on top of the drone controller and I'm looking at my phone.
• 28:48
  I'm sure there's more sophisticated things when you get to them. I'm looking for my 3D
• 28:53
  adviser like my headset where I have a full, full range view of me just.
• 28:58
  Well, if you want to buy my son a fancy drone using all of your podcast money, I'm more than
• 29:03
  happy for you to buy my fancy drone. But with my... Now, when I'm one buying the drone, he's
• 29:09
  going to get like a cut-priced drone. And also, we've already crashed the drone in broken bits.
• 29:13
  Of course, yeah. So there's a 5-bit cable linking and so the drone has to be connected to the
• 29:21
  controller using electronic warfare. And I'm sorry, using electromagnetic communication,
• 29:29
  so waves, electromagnetic waves. And of course, those can be jammed. So now,
• 29:37
  so in Ukraine, you've got to excretial things. So you and I are looking at each other right now
• 29:43
  using vision, ultimately. That's how my eyes are getting light waves. But actually,
• 29:49
  sharks, for example, detect electrical fields. There are lots of other things that we could
• 29:55
  sense in the world other than the particular senses that we happen to have. And
• 30:00
  those types of things are actually used in Ukraine. So people will try and find others,
• 30:07
  command control nodes, right? So it places lots of computers because of the signatures,
• 30:11
  the electromagnetic signatures they have, and then you can destroy them. Right. Equally,
• 30:16
  you can jam communication between the drone controller and the drone. So that's why you know
• 30:21
  have distributed command centers. Right. It's not like Afghanistan or whatever. You'd have a
• 30:25
  like a big camp with all the British and the Americans and the Australians in there. That's
• 30:30
  the best way to do it anymore. You can't do that. Right. So just to drill down on that,
• 30:35
  that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. It is already the case that technology in the
• 30:40
  form of cheap drones has revolutionized the geographical map of warfare just since Afghanistan and
• 30:50
  Iraq in the sense that if you had a big central command, bagramar force base or something like that
• 30:57
  in the 2020s, the Taliban would just swarm drones over it and blow the shit out of it for
• 31:03
  it's not clear that the Taliban will be capable of doing that. But certainly if you're,
• 31:08
  this is the thing Iran could have. But ultimately the types of wars that people involved in
• 31:13
  in Afghanistan and Iraq, they want one side of the same ground forces were defeated. Right.
• 31:18
  He had a reason be capable military. He had a military equivalent to the Chinese in 1990. Right.
• 31:23
  For the time of the first Gulf War, and this is one of the reasons why the Chinese was so
• 31:27
  terrified if the American military is at the time of the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's military
• 31:32
  was pretty capable. It was large. It was reasonably well equipped. It was an excellent cold war,
• 31:37
  so early cold war military equivalent to what the Chinese had. And basically the Americans
• 31:42
  and the British and the French who are with them and others cut through them extremely
• 31:47
  effectively. Right. Through a lot of it was better technology, but also better planning.
• 31:52
  Right. And better decision making. Now, that type of advance right now, so for a long time, no
• 32:04
  really sizeable military would stand up against the United States. But that is just no longer the case.
• 32:09
  Now, when you're talking about great powers going into competition, so a great power is a country
• 32:13
  like China or Russia or the United States. Right. All Germany or Japan. Great powers or Britain
• 32:22
  or France. Great powers. When they go to war with each other, they bring a huge number more,
• 32:31
  other more, you know, greater number of capabilities. And wars between great powers very often
• 32:36
  go on for years. Right. World War II for Australia or for Britain went on for almost six years.
• 32:42
  The China World War II went on for eight years. Right. Because it started started earlier for China
• 32:47
  than it did and Britain or Australia. It goes on for years. Right. And World War I,
• 32:53
  you know, went on for four years. Right. And these are pretty short wars in comparison to
• 32:57
  the 21st century wars. Right. I mean, all the things that Afghanistan, the thing is is those
• 33:06
  weren't, I mean, it's impolitic to say, but I mean, ultimately, you know, after the first
• 33:11
  Gulf War, but it's only get an even in the 2003 invasion. After that, it was to all intend to
• 33:17
  purposes a counterinsurgency releasing. You just count the Iraq war up until George W. Bush flies
• 33:25
  onto an aircraft carrier with his enormous cod piece and says mission accomplished. Then it's a
• 33:29
  pretty quick campaign. Yeah. I mean, but because also by that point that they've been starved
• 33:35
  of spare parts for all of the machines, it's since since the first Gulf War. Right. And they just
• 33:41
  didn't have a functioning capable military by that. But just to clarify, Nathan, the point quickly
• 33:45
  about asymmetric warfare and the relevance of hardware versus psychology, I just want to make
• 33:54
  the point that is it true when I was saying that an increase in military capacity can lead to more
• 34:03
  to less bloodshed on the side that has the military capability. I guess my assumption was that
• 34:08
  you're fighting someone who doesn't have an equivalent military capability. So the machine gun
• 34:13
  example does cause less bloodshed for the person with the machine gun because they can kill 100
• 34:19
  people assuming that the other guy doesn't have the machine gun. Right. So the I'm just sort of
• 34:25
  noting the possible temptation that great powers might have to wage wars against smaller or
• 34:32
  insurgent adversaries thinking that they're going to be bloodless. And am I right in assuming that
• 34:37
  the point that you're making is it really goes according to plan perfectly. And at the end of the
• 34:42
  day, if things can escalate, they may escalate. And at the end of the day, the bottom line is that
• 34:48
  you're going to cash out the value of the war in blood and lives, probably not just in robots.
• 34:55
  I think it's something slightly different. So I think the key thing to remember is that Iraq and
• 35:01
  Afghanistan are small countries that were not very capable, societally or technologically.
• 35:09
  Right. If America and China went to war, right. All for example, as you see now with Ukraine,
• 35:16
  which is a population about 50 of me and it gets around 150 of me and reasonably technologically
• 35:21
  capable countries, both of them. That is just very different to anything that it's just very
• 35:27
  different. Right. When you're talking about great power wars, and this is what like if Australia
• 35:33
  gets dragged into a, you know, a Taiwan contingency, a war over Taiwan, that is going to be a really
• 35:43
  big deal. Right. Now, the thing is is that say, for example, that the Americans lose in the
• 35:50
  first 30 days of the war and China then gets the whole of Taiwan. Right. Well, the Americans just
• 35:56
  say, do you know what guys are ubiquitous there? Fair enough. I think we'll just leave it as it is.
• 36:01
  Right. Well done. Well done you. No, of course they're not going to say that. Right. Now it's not
• 36:06
  certain what they'll do, but those types of wars often go on for years. Right. They become
• 36:12
  prolonged wars. Now, if once you get prolonged wars between great powers, you know, that then
• 36:20
  entirely class of machines and capabilities are invented. Right. There were no nuclear weapons
• 36:27
  at the beginning of World War II. There were nuclear weapons at the end of World War II. Right.
• 36:32
  You know, what the types of drones and swarms of drones people are going to be using
• 36:37
  and by the end of a major Chinese US war are going to be very different and far more capable
• 36:43
  than those used at the beginning. And how we use them, how humans will be able to control them.
• 36:50
  That will often determine you need to build them and you need to control them well. And
• 36:54
  if we're not able to control them well, if we're not able to use our brains well, decide faster
• 36:59
  and better than the adversaries, then we're not going to be able to win. And I think to remember
• 37:03
  about, and again, I forget to some extent, Afghanistan and Iraq, those were essentially large-scale
• 37:09
  policing operations. Right. And that's it. You know, you'll be littleing all of the people who
• 37:15
  bravely risk their lives to go and do the stuff, but that is nothing. That's like the
• 37:19
  ball war compared to World War I. Right. Or even the Spanish Civil War compared to World War II.
• 37:26
  Right. It's just an order of magnitude two, orders of magnitude three, orders of magnitude bigger.
• 37:32
  And that's something we've forgotten a lot about in the West, but we no longer have the luxury
• 37:37
  of forgetting about that. Yeah. I mean, not to mention not to be dark, but the disruption to
• 37:42
  global trade that we saw at the beginning of the pandemic. If you multiply that by 100 because
• 37:47
  China is blockading Australia and we only have about two months worth of fertilizer in Australia,
• 37:52
  even though we're an incredible agricultural powerhouse, we haven't bothered to stockpile anything
• 37:57
  that we need. I mean, I don't know what fuel. Yeah. It's like there's insane reliance on
• 38:03
  the shipping lanes of the South China Sea being open. So, you know, that's a whole other
• 38:09
  kettle official we don't have to go into, quite apart from the military horrors of being a war.
• 38:13
  So since you raised Taiwan and this dark vision of my Antipodian future, you make the point in the
• 38:19
  book that the most important object, I think you say the most important brain, but I like the
• 38:23
  idea of the most important object in the world being Xi Jinping's brain because that is the
• 38:28
  object that is probably the most consequential item in determining how the next few decades go.
• 38:37
  And one way of framing the question about how to deal with China and how to think about Taiwan is,
• 38:44
  are we currently at a moment before World War One or are we at a moment before World War Two?
• 38:49
  What do you mean by that analogy? So this is one of the…
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