There's mention of Greenland being invaded by the United States.
There's the situation in Iran.
Trump has snatched Maduro from Venezuela.
There's talk of China taking back Taiwan.
What the hell is going on?
Well, what you're seeing is the West becoming weaker and emboldening our enemies, and the final collapse of a shared myth that we were living in a structured world where everything is done according to the rules.
That is now gone and Trump is acting in recognition of that reality, saying we are not going to play by the fake rules anymore that no one else is playing by anyway.
Is there a risk with this strategy?
Of course.
And we can talk about the reasons for it.
I think it's really important.
The floor is yours.
Constantine Kissin is one of the sharpest voices in political commentary right now.
He's here to unpack the current geopolitical landscape and what could be done to salvage the West before it's too late.
So Russia invading Ukraine was not an accident.
It was a consequence of the fact that Putin felt this was the moment to test the waters.
Can we now do the things we've always wanted to do?
Because the West lost its focus and sense of purpose.
So, for example I don't know if you know this Europe is 12 of the world's population, 25 of the world's GDP and 60 of the world's welfare spending.
Germany destroyed its nuclear facilities, thereby making itself reliant on Russian gas.
And in Britain, we've destroyed our manufacturing, which is now produced elsewhere.
And we've run down our armed forces because we have felt so safe and so comfortable, because there's been no consequence.
Well, the consequences are here.
We have less money today than we did 20 years ago.
We have the highest tax burden in peacetime history.
We're driving out the entrepreneurs and we've already seen a decline in our power in the world and our influence in the world.
That's the big danger.
But there is an opportunity to turn things around if we can make these big decisions.
But are you hopeful?
Constantine.
There is so much going on in the world right now that it is incredibly confusing to somebody like me who doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about geopolitics or the bigger picture.
I'm very, very headstand.
As I imagine a lot of people in my audience are, we kind of get on with our lives.
But every time we look up at the news, there's Trump is... snatch Maduro from Venezuela.
There's the war with Russia and Ukraine.
There's something going on with Iran.
There's mention of Greenland being invaded by the United States.
There's talk of China taking back Taiwan.
I wanted to speak to you today to understand your perspective on the bigger picture here.
What the hell is going on?
Well, what you're seeing is the final collapse of what people described as the post-World War II order, which then became the post-Soviet collapse order.
So if you think about 1945, World War II finishes and the Cold War begins.
So you go from World War II to two big major players in the world competing for dominance.
And that lasts until 1991 when the Soviet Union collapses.
At which point you get the unipolar world in which there's only one hegemony, only one country.
That's really setting the terms of what's happening in the world.
The West lost its focus and its sense of purpose in 1991 because we were like.
Well, we defeated our great rival communism, Soviet Russia, etc.
And then we kind of didn't really know what to do.
And we took eye off the ball.
And what's happening now is that entire framework that we have had since World War II is disintegrating very rapidly.
This is why, in light of recent events and the Maduro situation, you hear a lot of people talk about international law.
International law was, I don't know if you've ever had, you all know Harari on your show?
I have, yeah.
And laws and money and all these things.
They are agreements that we have between us to make things real that are not real.
Money isn't real.
That piece of paper has no value in your pocket really, outside of the fact that other people have got together and agreed that it's money.
Right.
Well, international law really was that, but even weaker than that because, if you think about what a law is, a law is something that has to be backed by not only the consent of the people who are involved, but also ultimately, it's about the use of force, the legitimate use of force.
Now, for international law.
There's never been anything that could enforce that law other than the most powerful country in the world, right.
So if China invades Taiwan, no one's going to do anything about it because there is no overarching authority with the military to be able to do anything about it.
And so that shared fiction that we had, which we were living in a structured world in which everything is done according to the rules, the rules-based order you might have heard that term being used.
That is now gone.
And Trump is acting... in recognition of that reality.
And he's saying well, given that it's sort of every man for himself, now I'm going to do what's in the interest of the United States.
Is it in the interest of the United States, for example, to have an openly hostile leader of a country close to the US which is so destabilized that 7 million people have fled as refugees?
Venezuela.
Venezuela.
Is it in our interest to have this person cozying up to Russia and China?
Is it in our interest to allow him to have Hezbollah training camps on the island of Margarita?
Is it in our interest?
It's going back to the Monroe Doctrine, the idea that America does not allow foreign nations to meddle in its backyard, so to speak.
And so what he's doing now is going, well, look, this is the world we live in.
I'm going to do what's best for my country.
And I think that's what you're seeing.
Is there a risk with this strategy?
Of course.
There's a risk with every strategy.
Of course, there's a risk with this strategy.
There was a big risk inevitably with this strategy.
And I think you know, as I talked about in my book the West becoming weaker and emboldening our enemies, which is what we have done for a long time now, is creating an environment where we are opening ourselves up to challenge from other forces.
Russia invading Ukraine was not an accident.
It was not an accident.
It was a consequence of the fact that Putin and other people in his leadership team felt this was the moment to test the waters.
Can we now do the things we've always wanted to do?
And they felt they could do that under Biden, in your view.
Yes.
But see, I wouldn't personalize it down to that level.
I think far too many people get carried away with.
You know Republican Democrat, left right, Biden Trump.
It's an ongoing process that's been going on for decades.
And the culmination of it was first the invasion of Ukraine, then October 7th.
October 7th was not an accident either.
Hamas, backed by Iran, felt that this was their moment to act because again, is the West going to be able to respond morally, militarily and in other ways powerfully to that?
They felt that they were able to test it.
The fact that China now is openly talking about taking Taiwan is again another symptom of this same thing.
So the risk is there.
And, of course, the risk as well is that...
You know, the crumbling Western alliance, we can talk about the reasons for it.
I think it's really important to particularly we're recording this in Britain and in Europe more broadly.
I think that's an important conversation.
The Western alliance is falling apart.
And that is always going to be a risk.
It's particularly big risk for Europe, I feel.
Yeah.
How much of this?
And before we go into the details and just catch up on a few of the things you said there, how much of this is linked to nuclear weapons?
Because I was thinking I can't really.
All of these superpowers are going for countries that aren't armed with nuclear weapons.
And it somewhat feels to me that the reason why the US wouldn't get involved if China took Taiwan.
It's because they have nukes.
And the reason why the US is a little bit intimidated by Russia is because they have nukes.
So is it really?
The world is splitting into nuclear powers and anyone with nukes can do what the fuck they want, because they can basically wipe out planet Earth if they get angry.
And that has always been the case, except we've been constrained by the framework of the rules-based order.
But that got taken apart.
And this is where I think the West, and the United States including, needs to take responsibility, because the war in Afghanistan, and Iraq even more so completely undermined our moral order credibility.
You know how can you say well, Russia isn't allowed to invade Ukraine, if you go around invading countries on a whim, making up excuses and reasons to do that?
So we have eroded our moral authority and we've also eroded our military strength and the potential that we have to inflict damage on people who misbehave, so to speak.
So both of those things have come together.
It seems so crazy to me that In my lifetime I'm seeing because it's really never happened in the 33 years that I've been alive
I'm hearing a US president talk about kidnapping another president and then going in and taking the oil.
And then, you know what, we might take Greenland as well.
We might have that big country over there as well, even though it belongs to a NATO ally in Denmark.
It feels like something has fundamentally changed.
It has.
And I'm scared of the presidents this is going to set, because do we then all just get to start taking countries we want?
Well, this is what happens when there is a shifting of the balance of power.
This is why I always said maintaining the unipolar moment as it was and not allowing the West to weaken itself was a really important thing, because the moment you have a power vacuum, you always have a power struggle.
Mexico is a very good example of this.
If you look at what's been happening, there's been a gigantic drug war in Mexico for the last 20 years because there are different cartels vying for power.
And the moment you take out the leader of one cartel or something happens, there's a bloodbath.
Because this is what happens when the central authority, the central power, the current system breaks down.
You inevitably end up in a much more violent, much more unstable, much more unpredictable place.
And all Trump really is doing is reflecting the reality that has been already there for years, except he's reflecting it in American foreign policy.
He's saying well look, if Russia is going to do what it wants to do, and we can't stop them, And if China is going to do what they want to do, and we can't stop them well, we've got to do what we've got to do and no one's going to stop us.
And that's the world you've ended up in.
And by the way, just on the nuclear point, I think it's important to say.
You're 100% right.
And this is one of the things I've always said about not supporting Ukraine properly, which we haven't done
We have not supported them enough to be able to actually fully repel the aggression from Russia is it would inevitably lead to lots of other small countries pursuing nuclear weapons, because it is the only guarantee of security in this world.
That is a huge danger for the world in terms of nuclear proliferation, because if the president is like you say,
The people with nuclear weapons can do what they want and they can never be attacked.
And the people with no nuclear weapons are vulnerable and weak.
What would be the most rational thing for you to do if you're a smaller country?
That's the big danger.
Because, you know, you were talking about a unipolar world and a multipolar world.
But I wonder if it's going to be how many nuclear powers are there?
There's like nine or ten.
If the world is actually going to split into these ten nuclear powers and these ten nuclear powers can basically do what they want.
Well, nuclear powers are different.
I don't see Pakistan likely to be rampaging through its neighbors, not least because they're all nuclear powers themselves.
I think you're talking about Russia, China, and the US primarily.
I don't see Britain, you know, reinvading France, although that's something obviously I'm in favor of.
If Pakistan decided to take a neighboring country though, nobody can really come for them, because
Having one nuke is not the same as having a gigantic nuclear arsenal.
I think Pakistan is relatively constrained in its behavior, but the big superpowers are not so.
By the way, retaking France was a joke.
I just want to make that clear.
There's nine nuclear powers United States Russia UK France China India Pakistan, North Korea and Israel, although I don't think they admit it.
Yeah.
Israel's policy on nuclear weapons is very funny.
Do you know what their official position is?
We don't have nuclear weapons, but if the state of Israel is at risk of being destroyed, we will definitely use them.
So how did we get here?
What are the factors at play that brought us to this particular situation?
You talked about the crumbling of the Western alliance and other things.
What do we need to know about what happened for us to get to this state where it seems like it's every big power for themselves?
Well, partly we've already talked about it.
So it's after 91.
In particular, the West loses not only its sense of purpose, but it loses its sense of danger and sense of risk.
So we get very comfortable.
I don't know if you know this.
Europe is 12 of the world's population, 25 of the world's GDP and 60 of the world's welfare spending.
Okay.
So if you do that, that is a sign that you've got very comfortable.
You've got very lazy.
You have lost the ability to realize you live in a dangerous world.
This is a bit of a sidetrack, but it is an important addendum to this conversation.
This is why European countries have pursued economic suicide that we call net zero as vigorously as we have.
Because we have felt so safe and so comfortable.
We've engaged in all this luxury obsessions to the point where, as you know, Germany destroyed its nuclear facilities, thereby making itself reliant on Russian gas.
So that when Russia invaded Ukraine, the Germans opened.
The first thing that they said is oh, we were going to support Ukraine, we're going to give them 5000 helmets.
Because they were so dependent on Russian gas, because they refused to produce their own energy.
This is exactly the same thing we've done in Britain.
Britain has the highest industrial electricity prices in the world in the developed world, which means we basically destroyed all our manufacturing industry, which is now produced elsewhere.
We're getting to the point where we can't make our own virgin steel.
Steel is kind of important if you want to have a military, etc., etc., etc.
So in Europe in particular, this has happened because we've just felt so safe and so comfortable, and also so rudderless, that we've been able to engage in all these loony ideas because there's been no consequence.
Well, the consequences are here.
Where does Britain and Europe sit in the sort of rankings of importance in the world and power?
It's plummeting.
I mean, look at the Trump's 12 day war in Iran, destroying Iran's nuclear facilities.
No one even asked the British what we thought about anymore.
And that's not because you know a lot of people like to say oh, you know the Americans, they hate the British.
Americans love Britain.
As you know, you live in America now.
You have a British accent.
I'm sure people come up to you all the time and talk to you about their connections with our country, the shared history, all of that stuff.
The problem is, we have made ourselves irrelevant, because everything that Trump is looking at is strength, right.
Is Britain strong now in the world?
No.
Is Europe strong now in the world?
No.
And so if you're not strong, you will not be taken seriously.
And unfortunately, because of what our leaders have done over successive and it's left right every political party that we have that's been in power, they have overseen a decline in our status in the world, in our power in the world, in our influence in the world, to the point now where the Americans are looking at Europe and they're going.
Why would we be allied with people who are not useful to us?
An alliance is kind of like a marriage.
Both people have to bring something to the table.
What do we bring to the table from an American perspective?
This is a fairly new thing, isn't it?
Because I remember growing up I'd repeatedly hear the prime minister of the UK talking about how he had spoken to his US counterpart and they had made a decision.
And then even with the Venezuela situation.
I think Keir Starmer came out the next day and said like I had no idea this was happening.
Of course.
But why would you consult with people who don't matter?
Why don't we matter?
We don't matter because we have nothing to bring to the table.
Despite the extremely high level of professionalism, our technological superiority, the courage of our soldiers and our sailors and our airmen, despite the immense military tradition Britain has, our debt interest repayment annually are 15 times, heading towards being twice our defense budget.
We spent more on paying off the debt, the national debt, every year than we spend on defense.
How did the UK get here?
Well, our debt to GDP is over 100%.
We keep borrowing money.
We talked about the disproportionate amount of welfare spending and social spending and so on.
We got here by forgetting that we live in the real world and engaging in lots of luxury beliefs about what we ought to do.
So we have the highest tax burden in peacetime history in this country.
And we do that not because we want to have a robust military or to do other things like that.
We do it so that we can continue to pay ourselves money.
We don't have borrowing it from our children and our grandchildren.
And this is the case across Europe, really.
America also has a high level of debt, but they have a growing economy unlike ours.
Britain's GDP per capita is lower today than it was in 2006.
We have per capita, which is what matters per person.
We have less money today than we did 20 years ago.
So our economy has declined.
We've destroyed our manufacturing.
We've run down our armed forces.
And also...
I mean look, President Trump I think is fair to say is quite sensitive about what people say about him.
We have a government now that very imprudently and unwisely spent the time they were in opposition, shitting on him on a daily basis.
David Lammy, who's our foreign secretary.
If you take some of his comments about President Trump, they were just deeply irresponsible.
Whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of what he said, someone who has the potential to be this country's foreign secretary in charge of our relationship with the United States cannot be irresponsible, so imprudent as to make those kinds of comments.
And then you're going, well, you've just been calling this guy every name under the sun.
And now you want to be relevant.
You want to be taken seriously.
You want to be engaged with as he makes huge decisions about geopolitics.
Actions have consequences.
And the actions we have been taking have produced the consequences that we've got.
Now, look, I am not all doom and gloom about that.
If we change our strategy and if we change our behavior, we can change the end product of that.
We can do that.
But that's going to require a massive readjustment.
With the current direction of travel, where does the UK end up?
We're already there.
We're irrelevant.
We are irrelevant.
Like you said, Venezuela happens.
No one cares about us.
When Iran gets bombed, no one cares about us.
All the future big decisions about geopolitics are going to be made without Britain even being considered, because it's going to be made by the major powers, of which Britain is no longer one.
You choose to live in the UK, despite your views that the UK is a bit of a sinking ship, I guess.
Because of my views, actually.
Because of your views?
Yeah like look, you've moved to the United States, which I'm grateful for because it's made us the biggest UK podcast in our space.
I appreciate that.
But as you can imagine, we get offers to do the same in all sorts of different ways.
And we could have done the same.
I love this country.
I'm very grateful to.
And I feel to stay and fight for it and to articulate my views and try and persuade people to my point of view so that we can have a British renaissance, so that we can have a British recovery, is my duty, for as long as I can do that.
And if at some point, you know, I feel it's completely futile, which I do not.
So you're hopeful.
I'm not despondent to the point of giving up is where I am.
Are you hopeful?
No, no.
But I'm also not at the point where I feel it's futile.
I think there is an opportunity to turn things around if everything comes together and we're very fortunate.
And that's what I'm hopefully trying to contribute to through history.
When companies pursue the strategy that the UK is currently pursuing, where does it end up economically?
Stephen, you're the business guy.
No, but I don't have the greatest view of history.
And so I'm wondering if there's because you know, in the UK I was born 33 years ago in Botswana and I moved to the UK when I was young and I've always known the UK to be important and consequential and the economy to be much better than where I'm from in Botswana.
So it's almost inconceivable for a British person of my age to think that the UK could ever not be that, because it's always been in my lifetime.
Yes, but that is in many ways and I'm not pinning the blame on you, obviously but that is in many ways how we got here, because what we thought collectively was well look, No matter what we do, we're always going to be Great Britain.
We're going to have a great economy.
We're going to have a strong military.
We're going to have this.
We're going to have influence in the world.
And then we started doing lots of stupid shit.
And that's how we've ended up in the place that we've ended up.
So this country has every potential to be great.
The people are incredible.
The level of education, the scientific and technological advances that this country has produced, the cultural
Look at the greatest bands in human history.
Half of them are British.
Comedians, I mean, stand-up comedy is not a British invention.
It was actually invented in America.
But look at some of the greatest comedians in human history.
Again, lots and lots of British people.
So culturally, scientifically, technologically, economically, we have the potential.
We have to have the correct leadership and the right strategy.
And those two things have been lacking for a long time.
That's how we've ended up here.
Can we turn it around?
It's going to be very, very, very difficult.
But we've got to try.
Why would these issues impact us on an individual level?
So I'm thinking about the average person listening now, whether they are in the United States or here in Britain.
You know, this stuff happens kind of up above us and we get on with our lives.
But what are the symptoms we'll begin to see?
This multipolar world or the fall of Britain.
You're already poorer today than you were 20 years ago per capita.
In the UK.
In the UK.
Yeah.
That seems to me quite important.
And, in fact, many of our conversations about domestic issues, whether it's mass immigration and all of these other things.
They're really proxies for that conversation.
Because if the economy was growing and people felt richer, all of this stuff would become less important, right?
Well, I think we'd agree with that.
So that's one aspect of it.
The other aspect of it is, as I talked about, the multipolar world being, by necessity, more violent and unstable, right.
I don't know when this will go out, but we're recording this in the middle of January.
It's been like two weeks since the year started and we've already seen crazy amounts of instability geopolitically already.
Is that fair to say?
So this will continue and that will bleed through to domestic politics, because if you have to spend more of your resources worrying about things abroad, it means you can do less at home, and so on, and so on, and so on.
So the ramifications of this will be very impactful on everybody around the world, more on non-Western countries, because a lot of them are going to be in the front line of this in the way that I doubt we will be.
But still, the consequences for us will be very significant.
And we're seeing adjacent to this, this rise in socialism.
Yeah.
The conversation around socialism.
Obviously, Mendani has been elected mayor.
But do you think this is at all linked to the bigger picture, this rise in socialism?
Yeah.
In fact, I think, you know, I wrote an article a long time ago called Why I Fear the Future.
And I did a video based on it in which I talked about something.
It's interesting.
I did a live show here in London just before Christmas and I did a book signing.
And one of the guys came up to me and said, I've got two kids.
They're both teenagers, daughter and a son.
And I'm trying to pull the daughter in from the far left and I'm trying to pull the son in from the far right.
That's going to be the big challenge going forward, because the amount of chaos and instability and cultural kind of cultural upheaval that we've seen has produced a craving for order.
And on the social, that's the right side.
You know, we must, you know, get this.
And on the other side, it's produced a sense of injustice and the pursuit of inequality.
That's why you hear people talk so much about the rich, the rich, the rich, the rich.
And, you know, eat the rich.
We've got to redistribute all of this stuff because, particularly in the big cities, young people rightly feel that they can't really get on the housing ladder.
They can't establish a family.
Life is more difficult.
So they reach for these very – disproven, discredited and completely unworkable solutions of the kind.
Mamdani will, of course deliver, but it's because their sense of Their sense is that the future has been taken away from them.
And in many ways, they're correct.
Because as I said earlier, we have been borrowing from our children and our grandchildren.
We've been saddling with crippling debts, our entire economy.
That will come to an end.
And it's going to be them that is left to foot the bill.
And it's going to be very painful.
And partly they see that.
And already they see that they just can't afford the life that they want.
I do think in the United States, it's a much more contained phenomenon.
I think Mamdani.
And if you look at sort of the American socialists, they all tend to cluster around New York and one or two other big cities.
It's not like the entirety of America is going socialist.
But I think housing unaffordability is one.
Another explanation, which I think is also powerful, is what's called elite overproduction, which is, if you have, as Tony Blair did, this idea that 50 of the public should go to university.
Well, they do.
And then it turns out there's not enough jobs for them, particularly in the age of AI, where they are the jobs that are being eliminated very rapidly.
You then get a lot of people whose entitlement is up here and whose prospects are down here.
That produces a tremendous amount of social disease as well.
I think this is a really important connected point.
On the subject of socialism and the rise of socialism that we will see is this point of AI.
And when I listen to very, very smart people who are considered to be the godfathers of AI or CEOs who are building these technology companies, there seems to be a consensus that socialism will only increase because the job losses associated with AI are going to be pretty quick and pretty extreme.
And I mean one of them, that most Brits won't understand is something we understand now living in America, which is my car drives itself.
Yes.
And I said this a few times because I'm really trying to, it's like the first moment eureka moment I think you have is in America.
When I get in my car, I don't touch the steering wheel, all the pedals and it can drive me to Joshua Tree, which is like two and a half three hours away, uninterrupted.
And I say this because driving is like one of the biggest employees in the world.
I think it is the biggest profession in the world.
Yeah.
And London just announced that Waymos are here.
And soon, surely, Teslas will be allowed to do full self-driving here as well.
And in such a world, delivery drivers, taxi drivers, Uber drivers are going to be without jobs.
And we're seeing this huge rise in... autonomous humanoid robots as well.
And Elon's pay packet says that he will make a million of these autonomous robots and get them out into the world.
And Jason Kalakanakis, who just visited Elon's factory, said there'll be a billion of these.
And he thinks that we won't even remember Tesla for making cars.
We'll only remember them for the robots they're made, because these Optimus robots which are coming are going to be so consequential.
And the last point here is a very good friend of mine.
He runs this big sort of innovation accelerator in san francisco.
I visited the accelerator a couple of weeks back and um he's.
I said to him why?
Why is everybody here, all these young founders, these 40, 50 young founders in your building called effing, all working on robotics?
And he goes.
Well, you know we've had all the parts for like 20, 30 years, but the expensive part was the intelligence, the brain Yeah, the brain.
He goes, now we have the brain.
He showed me this arm, this robotic arm that had a frying pan on it that would cook for you in a box.
It just cooks whatever you want in a box.
And he goes, we've had all these parts for the last 30 years.
They were cheap.
He goes the intelligence part.
The brain would cost 20000 or 30000 just for this little robot arm.
He goes, now it's like two cents.
And you're seeing this huge explosion in robotics.
I don't think people understand what's coming.
Yeah. no going to san francisco is eye-opening on two levels number one is like a quarter to a third of the cars on the road don't have drivers yeah and just visually seeing that is so striking um but the other thing is talking to some of the people involved there is a there are some people who are fairly sensible about it fairly responsible among the founders although they will still say and i think they're right that like if we don't do this china will and so we've got to do this But there's also a lot, and I'm sure you've encountered, there's a kind of, you know, that famous Facebook mantra of move fast and break things.
There's a lot of that going on in the AI space.
And so it's going to be hugely impactful.
I don't claim to know all the little details of how that will play out, other than to say it's going to be very disruptive.
And disruptiveness has happened throughout human history.
It's always produced a backlash.
It's always caused a lot of disease.
But then humanity has managed to recover.
This is a different level.
And we will see how it plays out.
But yeah, of course, it's going to be.
And yeah, a world in which millions of people no longer have jobs and most of them are disproportionately young people who are more prone to extremism anyway yeah, that's not a pretty picture.
And one would assume that the wealth will accrue to a few.
Yes.
In such a scenario.
And what's funny is I have said really only half jokingly.
I mean, I wrote a whole book about my opposition to communism and socialism, based on experience, but in a world in which no one has a job, I'm like 100 on board with communism.
Do you think that's the world we're heading towards?
Possibly.
But it makes sense.
I mean like, if you think about it from the perspective of 50 people in the world have all the money in the world and everyone else has no job.
I think a little bit of wealth redistribution is going to be unavoidable in that situation.
And it can either happen voluntarily or it's going to happen at the end of bayonets.
That's the choice.
When you say communism would be the only choice in such a scenario, what does that mean?
It means everybody gets paid for existing.
Well, I mean, what else is there?
You're going to create fake jobs for people?
That's not going to work.
So if all the wealth in the world is going to be created by robots, a world in which the products of their labor only accrues to 50 people who had the idea or did the work 20 years ago, that's not going to sustain itself.
And so it would be very, very unwise of those people to attempt to hold on to all that wealth.
It would not end well for them, in my opinion.
On a personal level, you know, this disruption is going to happen in your lifetime.
Yeah.
Are you thinking much about it or planning for it at all?
Has it changed any of the decisions you make on it day-to-day basis or month-to-month basis?
Well, i'm very fortunate that i am probably a little harder to replace with a robot, just because people don't really want to hear robots opinions.
I would imagine we might get to that point, but i think it's unlikely.
So on my own level, i'm probably you know the time scale i'm working to.
In the next 10 years, i imagine i'll i'll get myself to a point where i'm going to be reasonably comfortable, no matter what happens for my children.
That was us cutting forward 10 years and yeah yeah, Totally.
Me just unemployed.
I can't believe what happened.
For my children, it's a very different conversation.
So a lot of people are like, well, you know, what should I teach my children?
And people are, oh, yeah, this should be a plumber.
I don't think you're going to need plumbers 15, 20 years from now either.
So I honestly don't know what that future looks like.
And in many ways, that's always been the reality of life for most people.
We are living through one of those great transitions in human history in which all you can do is equip your children with the basic skill sets of life, and as opposed to what might have been done 20, 30 years ago where you go to school to develop a skill, to go to university to build a career.
Now, you're going to have to show a lot of flex in this modern world.
So you're going to have to be personable.
You're going to have to be resourceful.
You're going to have to be creative.
You're going to have to have a positive go-getter mindset.
You're going to have to have those basics nailed down, as opposed to Here's the career that you've been predetermined to have.
Unless, of course, you go into AI and robotics, in which case you probably won't be replaced for at least five years.
I think there's something to the fact that there's an angst with AI.
And when people listen to podcasts all the time, everyone who has a job in a big corporate environment now is being told by their CEO that you better learn AI or it's going to replace you.
So we're living in this moment of...
There's like aliens coming over the horizon and we've spotted them.
They're not quite here yet.
But it's like saying to the general public look, there's aliens coming and they're coming for your job and everything you value.
That angst in and of itself, I think, can drive people towards ideas like socialism, understandably.
Because, you know, it's a deep existential angst.
Yeah.
And also a lot of the AI people not all of them.
A lot of them are being, but a lot of them are being deeply irresponsible and very unwise with their messaging.
Last time I was in New York, I was walking through Times Square.
There was this giant billboard which said it was the name of the company, which I don't remember.
Stop hiring humans.
The age of the AI employees here.
I'm going, have you really thought about this?
Have you thought about putting your company's name on this poster?
Do you understand the impact this is going to have on a normal person looking at that?
But they are.
So The thing is with AI is the positive upsides of it are limitless, literally limitless.
And so a lot of the people who are in that space, that's what they focus on.
And they're like, we can solve...
We can solve medical problems.
We can have AI that's better than any physicist that's ever lived, that can give us the eternal engine, or whatever.
We don't need energy anymore.
Like there are all sorts of crazy things that come out of AI that are potentially beneficial.
And that is exciting.
But the angst that you talk about, I think, is there.
And I think it's also quite rational.
You just reminded me of a video that came out this week from Elon where he says this.
I'll play it for you.
I think it's this one.
So he's talking about Elon's talking about the robots that are about to be released from Tesla, which are called Optimus.
And someone's asking him how good they will be at surgery.
Do you think Optimus will be a better surgeon than the best surgeons?
How long for that?
Three years.
Three years.
Okay.
And by the way, that's a three or three years at scale.
Yes.
There'll be more.
There'll probably be more optimist robots that are great surgeons than there are all surgeons on earth.
And the cost of that, but that's an important statement in three years time.
Yeah.
Um, because that is, I mean, like absolutely.
If it's four or five years, who cares?
It's still an extreme precision.
Yes.
Three years.
Um, Yes.
Better than any, I'd say if you're like a little margin on it, better than any human in four years.
Who's in plastic surgery?
By five years, it's not even close.
I think your point was medicine is going to be effectively free.
The best medicine in the world.
Everyone will have access to medical care that is better than what the president receives right now.
So don't go into medical school.
Yes.
Yeah. pointless going to medical school.
Look, he knows way more about this than I do.
I would also say that I think both the incentive structure and his personal temperament lean towards a kind of optimism.
And there's a sales dimension to this as well obviously, because he's one of the people producing this stuff.
So his optimism may be a product of the incentive structure that he's.
I don't think it's more than 10 years.
So that's the timeframe.
And given how long it takes to train to become a doctor.
Yeah.
I want to talk about the situation in Iran.
We're seeing what one might call an uprising at the moment, where protesters are on the street in a country where it is very, very dangerous and also very brave to protest against the leadership there.
Where does this fit in the broader context?
What the hell is going on?
I am not an expert on Iran, but effectively what's happening in Iran is an attempted counter revolution.
So they had a revolution in 1979.
They overthrew the ruler, the Shah, and they replaced him with an Islamic dictatorship, which is what you've had since 1979.
And the people of Iran have attempted to overthrow this Islamic dictatorship repeatedly.
They've always been brutally suppressed.
And that's basically what's happening now again.
And does this fit somewhere into the broader conflict of geopolitics and the US, the multipoly?
Well, only in the sense that you can see that even President Trump, who's talked quite brashly about what he might do if this sort of gets out of hand, is still not, as we speak, doing anything about it on a kind of kinetic level.
And that's partly for the reasons that we talked about earlier, which is the United States public are deeply, deeply skeptical about foreign interventions.
And so the idea that we, the West, would support a regime change in Iran is not something that you can sell to the American people right now.
And so he has to be much more careful about what he might otherwise have done in, And so, because of that, the leaders of Iran probably feel like they're in a better position to crack down and survive versus what might have happened in the past.
I mean, Trump's been quite vocal in what he might do and his threats.
He said that the US would come to the protesters' rescue, that we are locked, loaded and ready to go.
He announced that countries doing business with Iran faced a 25 tariff on their trade, with the US ramping up pressure.
And he called for Iranians to keep protesting.
And then more recently he said I've cancelled all meetings with Iranian officials until the senseless killing of protest stops.
Help is on the way.
Make Iran great again.
Well, Iran – I mean.
One thing that should be said is the Persian Empire and the Persian people are a great people with a very rich history.
And what's interesting is in attempting to – I don't know if you've ever seen pictures from Tehran from before 1979.
It's like women walking around in miniskirts and all the rest of it.
So they have a very long history of freedom in a way that we don't tend to think of the Middle East as having today.
And that's an example of how it's perhaps different from other parts of the Middle East.
But you can see the reluctance to actually do anything about it.
Because the question is well, let's say you do remove the current leadership.
Let's say you bring back the son of the former Shah Reza Pahlavi.
He oversees a transition to some kind of democratic thing.
Who is there protecting that process from being disrupted by the remnants of the old regime?
Who's going to do that?
Is there american boots on the ground?
Because there's literally zero appetite for that in america.
That's the challenge that i think he faces, which is probably why he hasn't done anything.
And how do you think the story plays out?
No idea, mate.
I have no idea what's going to happen here.
I fear unfortunately, that what the regime will do – I'm not saying this is what will happen, but my fear is, and it's one of the reasons that I am –.
I sympathize so deeply with the Iranian people that are rising up against their oppression, but I am wary of encouraging them unless we are willing to back them fully.
This is exactly in a way that what happened with Ukraine.
There was a lot of rah rah, rah and there was not nearly enough support to actually help them defend their country.
My fear is there will be a lot of rah, rah, rah.
We support the Ukrainian people.
We stand with them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But ultimately the regime will kill more of them, and it will kill enough of them for this to go away.
That's my worry.
Well, I hope the world does come to the support of the Iranians.
I really do.
Me too.
Because for all the reasons you've said, beautiful country, beautiful people.
And it's horrific to see what's going on.
There's varying estimates.
Unfortunately we don't have accurate numbers because, I mean, the internet is down and it's always hard to get accurate numbers in this situation.
But I've heard estimates ranging from 2,000 to 18,000 people being killed.
And it's inconceivable, I think, for Iranians, westerners like us, to understand what it is to live in an environment like that, which is why they're protesting as courageously as they are.
I just hope that the geopolitical realities allow us to support them in the way that we keep saying we would do.
You see what i'm saying?
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, and this is yeah, and this is my big worry.
We have, we have done a lot of this.
We stand with you, we support you and then, when push comes to shove, the realities of the thing come into play and suddenly we're a lot more careful about.
Trump seems to walk the walk more so than others.
Absolutely.
And he seems to.
It's funny because I think it was Biden that said to China that if they took back Taiwan, he would get involved.
Trump didn't say that.
I was looking at some quotes from Trump and it seems like he's basically like well, if they take Taiwan back, I'm going to get robbed.
But in other instances where he warns countries that he'll bomb them or take action, like Venezuela or like Iran with the nuclear weapon situation, he does seem to follow through.
And Marco Rubio and Hegseth were saying the other day in the interview.
I was watching that listen.
When is the world going to land?
If Trump says something, he's going to do it.
And, you know, him saying that we will come to your rescue.
Well, hopefully they come through on that, but also hopefully they have a plan for what happens after that.
Yeah.
And this is the mistake we've obviously made in a number of countries, Libya, Iraq.
Afghanistan, Syria, which is now basically headed by a jihadi.
Yeah.
Right.
Where we go, oh, yeah, we've got to remove this terrible guy.
And yeah, this terrible guy, and we're right to remove him.
But then what do you end up with afterwards?
So if they do help the Iranian people, which I hope they have the plans to do, then I hope they have a plan for what happens after that and how you get.
Iran to a position where the people of Iran get to choose their own leaders and those leaders stay in power.
And those leaders are the sorts of people that you might want to see in charge, because you know this happened in Egypt.
They have the Arab Spring.
They overthrow the evil dictator.
And what do they do?
They elect the Muslim Brotherhood.
And then the people go, no, no, we need the military back, etc.
So these are not easy problems to solve, which is why people are being careful about it.
So I hope they have a plan and a solution for what comes after, if they in fact act.
And Trump's also talking about taking Greenland, which is the first time I heard him say that.
I thought he was joking.
I thought this is just a funny Trump.
You know, when he was talking about taking Canada.
Yeah.
He was calling it the great state of Canada.
I thought this was him just joking.
But in more recent times.
In the last week I heard him say in an interview we're going to do it the easy way or the hard way.
Words to that effect.
Yeah.
What's going on?
Well, we talked about it.
They're trying to protect their sphere of influence in North America and South America.
And they want to have the military bases there that they want to have there.
They want to have the resources and access to that.
Are we returning to empires?
We never left them.
But this is the great thing that we've been living in the dream world.
We've been pretending these things haven't been going on the entire time.
They have.
The world's always been like this.
There was a brief moment after World War II when it wasn't like this, because we were fighting the Soviet Union.
And the Soviet Union, the battle in the Cold War was very similar.
There was proxy wars all over the place between those two great powers, right?
Now there's two different great powers and a third smaller power in Russia and India is rising as well who are all trying to make their moves.
And all Trump is doing is saying, well…
We are not going to play by the fake rules anymore that no one else is playing by anyway.
And so is Trump endeavoring to take that part of the world, take control of that?
Take control, yeah.
In many ways, it's what every great power seeks to do is to control its neighbors so that they don't have foreign influence in their backyard, so that they have the strategic advantage in that area.
It's the way of the world.
I mean, I didn't hear this rhetoric for the other 30 years of my life.
Yeah.
As explicitly.
Yeah.
And when you say multipolar, what are the poles?
Well, it's the US and China.
Yeah.
Are the two.
Russia wants to claim it's a third one.
And then you will see the rise of India, I think, over time as well.
India is a lot more sensible about these things, about the way that they're developing.
And is the multipolar world a good thing or a bad thing?
Or is it just indifferent?
For whom?
For, let's do people living in Europe.
I think it's likely to be a very bad thing for people living in Europe.
Because we become less powerful, less wealthy, less relevant, for the reasons we've already discussed.
We could change it if we wanted to.
We could abandon our suicidal economic policy.
So we could have economic growth again, which would increase our share of GDP.
We will make our people more prosperous.
It would help to quell domestic unease, part of which has been created by mass immigration.
People care about that more because they're poorer.
If we were growing, then everybody's a little bit happier.
It's like you moved to LA, the sunshine is nice, everybody's a little bit happier.
When you're getting richer, everybody's a little bit happier.
So that's one of them.
The second one is you've got to recognize that the huge waves of immigration we have had have brought some positives.
They've also brought a tremendous amount of cultural instability.
People feel like their country is changing.
They never voted for it.
In fact, they repeatedly voted against it.
So you have to arrest the sense that our country is ceasing to be one place and instead we're becoming different communities.
The this community, the that community.
Instead, we've got to go to a place where we're all British, or we're all American, or we're all French, or whatever it is.
We've got to integrate fully the people who have already arrived.
And to do that you have to make sure you don't continue to have the same scale of inflows that we've had.
You have to deal with illegal immigration.
You have to stop that from happening because that really affects how people feel about sense of fairness and a commitment and loyalty to their country.
One of the reasons if you talk to young people, they'll say they're disillusioned, they won't fight for their country, et cetera, is they feel like well, their country doesn't care about them, is bringing in people that it's paying to have a house and so all the rest of it, while they can't get on the property ladder.
So you've got to deal with immigration as a whole package.
Then you have to rebuild your military.
You have to rebuild your military capacity.
And then you have to understand the new world in which we live and really pick a team and say which alliances are we going to nurture?
In my opinion, the best thing Britain could do is to nurture the alliance with the United States, to make itself relevant within that alliance in the ways that I've already talked about, and then join forces with the US and recognize that we have very similar interests in a lot of things.
And if we were prepared to act like it, then we'd be in a much better place.
And also, you've got to have more kids.
A lot more kids.
Why?
If you look at, forget about the moral kind of sensibilities and politically correct stuff about it.
The more people you have, the more powerful you are compared to all other things being equal, right.
A country with more people is more powerful than a country with fewer people, just if everything else is the same.
But more importantly, we're in the demographic death spiral.
And this is one of the reasons we have had mass immigration.
Politicians won't tell you the honest truth of it, but the real reason is they keep bringing in hundreds of thousands of people is.
If they don't, we will see the reality, which is that we're getting poorer all the time.
But if they bring in a mass of people from outside, they can say that the economy is growing, not because it's growing on a per capita basis, but because you've simply added more people to the population.
And if this seems abstract, think about it like this.
Let's say you have You have a family, you, your girlfriend, and you've got two kids, right?
And your total household income is 100,000 pounds a year, let's say for the four of you.
Now, let's say you bring in your in-laws, they live in the same house, right?
They don't earn anything.
Let's say they own 10 grand a year each.
So now your household income is 120,000.
So you've got richer, haven't you?
No, you've now got six people to spread that money over.
And now you're per person a lot poorer, right?
That's what British and European leaders have done, so that they could pretend that we're not getting poorer all the time.
That's why they've done it.
This is what they say.
We need people to come and do the jobs.
That's what they mean.
They mean we need to bring in more people so we can tell you the economy is growing by 03, while you've been getting poorer.
So you've got to address the economic side of this as well, of the demographic thing.
And the third thing actually is societies with lots of kids.
Kids are just much more dynamic than societies without them.
You know, you get very stale when you've got too many older people.
You need that young energy, that young blood.
You need young people.
You need children around.
And then they will, of course, be the next generation that drive things forward.
So, you know, we've got to have loads more, loads more kids.
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And what do you think of Keir Starmer and the way he's leading the UK?
It's very tempting always – we come back to the Biden-Trump left-right thing – to put the blame on one specific person.
I don't think he's doing a good job for the reasons that I told you.
We've got the highest tax burden in peacetime history, so he's driving business through the floor.
I know that you will – you and I have never spoken about this, but I bet you could name –
50 people off the top of your head who've left the UK to go to other places who run businesses.
You're nodding, right?
People listening.
But why is that happening?
Because the business climate here is not good.
The taxes here are very high.
And also the quality of life here has declined.
And generally, you know, I think maybe the first point you said about climate, there's a pessimism.
Yes.
Why is that?
Why is that?
It's self-fulfilling.
Yes.
It's like a self-fulfilling pessimism where founders who are in my portfolio that I've invested in will come to me and say hi, we've just sold 10 of the business for 20 million.
And then the next sentence will be their escape plan.
And that didn't used to happen even 10 years ago.
And that's because of government policy.
That's the only way that this happens, right?
Because if the government A keeps taxing you up to your eyeballs and B keeps telling you that you are evil, which is what it does, right.
If you're rich in Britain, you are evil.
That's the algorithm we have.
And we treat successful people, we immediately assume that they're privileged people.
My pet theory is that this goes back to the landed gentry, the idea that in this country, if you were rich, there was a time when that was almost certainly because your dad was rich, or at least people thought that.
And so...
This sense that if someone is successful economically financially, it's probably because they've benefited from some sort of ill-gotten privilege.
It permeates everything.
In America, people don't feel that way.
They go, you've been successful because you've worked really hard and you've had a great idea.
I'd love to learn from you.
I'd love to be more like you.
In Britain, we go, you've been successful.
You know, we got to tax you.
So if the government keeps taxing you and then telling you you're a bad person, while you pay the overwhelming share of the taxes in the country, it's not a great place to be.
If I come home tonight and my wife says yeah, you earn all the money, but you're a dick and I don't like you and blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah.
After a while, you sort of go, well, if this isn't working, I'll go somewhere where I'm wanted.
Do you know what I mean?
And I think that's what's happening to a lot of the most driven, the most talented, the most successful, the most creative people.
And so we're driving out the business.
We're driving out the entrepreneurs.
Then on the industrial side of it, we talked about it before.
Net zero basically means that any energy intensive business is completely unviable in Britain.
And I'm sure you've seen this with AI and lots of other things.
You go to where you can do your business.
Then on top of that you add regulation, particularly in Europe, which restricts your ability to do things again.
So there's this...
And it doesn't have to be like that.
It wasn't like that in the 90s in this country, right?
There was a positive go-getter business climate.
And you can do that again.
You just have to have a leader who is willing to do that.
And Starmer is the opposite of that.
And part of the reason is that they simply can't do anything about the fact that we are spending huge amounts of money, keeping lots and lots of people trapped in welfare against, in many ways against, their interest.
And actually, in some ways, I would argue even against their will, because and I've made this point before if you said you're a very driven person, I'm a very driven person.
But when I was in my early 20s, if you'd said to me, you don't need to work.
You know, I know you're feeling a bit depressed as I was in my early 20s.
I wasn't sure where I was dealing with life.
You're a bit depressed.
You're a bit anxious.
I remember going to apply for a job and just sweating buckets because I was so anxious, right?
Well, you've got anxiety.
You've got depression.
You can't work.
We'll give you 20 grand a year and you can just you know we'll write you off and you just sit at home playing the PlayStation smoke weed.
I would have taken that.
Most people would have taken that.
And that's the position we have put a lot of our young people in.
We just write them off.
We give them benefits and we forget about them.
And that welfare bill has become, A, unsustainable, but it's also uncuttable.
The Labour government tried to cut it.
They tried to reform welfare.
And their own backbenchers revolted and they caved.
And they said, no, no, no, we're not going to reform welfare.
We're going to tax the rich because the rich don't pay enough tax.
When in the reality I think maybe look this up the top 10 of taxpayers in this country pay, I think, more than half of all the tax, probably significantly more than half of all the tax.
But look it up.
I think the top 1% pay 33% of all the tax.
Fact check me on this.
Okay, so the top 10% of taxpayers pay 60% of all income tax.
And also, what's the other one?
The capital gains as well.
If you look up capital gains, it's basically the same.
So if you put those two together, which is basically what we pay on earning, The top 10 pay 60 of it.
So what happens when you chase out those people, which is what we're doing?
What happens to your tax base?
You get less and less tax.
That means you have to tax the people who haven't left yet more and more in order to pay people who are net consumers of tax revenues.
According to HM Revenue and Customs data in the UK, the top 1% pay 30% of all income tax.
I said 33, so 30, yeah.
So what happens when you say that 1% are evil and they must pay more?
1% pay 30% of all the tax.
It's funny.
I'm quite a torn person on this subject because I represent kind of two sides of this argument.
The first side of the argument.
I just have this sort of visceral memory of being sat at my desk in Moss Side with these bailiff letters on my right, this smashed up laptop on my left, knowing that I had no way of eating that day, and thinking oh, do you know what I need to do?
There's this thing called Job Seeker's Allowance.
And I was like messing with the, do I join it?
Because, like right now, I'm like scavenging for pound coins to see if I can buy some Chinese from Yongda takeaway.
And I printed off the forms, and the forms were there in front of me on the desk to apply for job seekers allowance when I was maybe 18 years old, roughly that age 18, 19 years old.
And because I got so close, I have this huge amount of empathy for people that get to that point.
And then on the other side, because I'm now in a different world and I am around entrepreneurs so much, who are so frequently telling me their escape plan from the UK, that I feel the need to let the average, the normal person that's listening to this podcast, that maybe doesn't have the access to entrepreneurs or the inside conversations that I have with entrepreneurs, know that when people come on the show and tell you that rich people will leave,
It is my experience that rich people leave.
Because there is an argument, ongoing argument.
No, they won't leave.
And there are people pointing at different things.
No, they leave.
They leave.
I mean, we just saw Revolut, which is one of the most successful companies emerged from the UK in recent times.
It's probably going to be worth 100 billion.
The founder left.
I think it's Dubai or somewhere he's gone to.
And people say, well, Britain can't compete with a zero tax environment.
We don't need to compete with a zero tax environment.
People want to live in Britain.
Still, you just have to stop clobbering them over the head and calling them evil.
Right.
Yeah.
Now, look, you know, I can give you a sob story as well.
Like when I was at university, I had to stop university because I couldn't pay for it.
I slept on the street in a park, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Empathy for days for people who are in that position.
And there are lots of people, by the way and this is important to say, Stephen who are not in your position.
They're not super talented.
They're not predisposed to success.
They're not as hardworking and motivated as you for whatever reason.
Many people are disabled.
Many people have all sorts of other issues.
And of course, we've got to help them.
But what we have done is trapped now hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who could be working and have meaning and purpose in their life on welfare and we're not helping them get off it because it's much easier to give them a payout and forget about them.
That's what's happening.
And so, I've had these views since before I was in any way successful.
I just looked at what works.
And when we talk about rich people leaving, the thing is, I don't care about rich people leaving.
People who have a lot of money leaving is not really an issue for me.
What's an issue for me is people who are going to create wealth leaving.
So on that point, the founder of Revolut leaving the UK, Nick Strinsky, I think his name is estimates say, credible reports say that because he's leaving, there's going to be a £3 billion potential loss of capital gains tax that he would have paid had he not absconded to the UAE.
Now, to put this into more stark terms, what that means.
I then did some research and I was looking at how many people it would take to pay that 3 billion, how many average taxpayers it would take to pay that 3 billion that we lose by him leaving.
And it says roughly 450000 average UK taxpayers, because the average UK taxpayer pays about 7000 to 7500 pounds a year.
So very simple math, 3 billion divided by 7,000 equals 430,000 people.
So in plain English, that billionaire's potential tax bill is equal to the entire income tax of a mid-sized UK city for one year.
Because that person decided to leave.
Congratulations, you taxed the rich.
Congratulations.
Now half a million people have to pay more tax.
Well done.
That's what we're doing.
And because it's become a moral argument, because the rich are evil in our mentality.
People don't hear this point at all.
It just totally goes over their head.
They go, you know, but the rich are evil.
They must pay more tax.
And you go, even if I agreed with you, it still doesn't work in practice.
So if something is not working in practice, why would you keep doing it?
Think as well, you know one of your other points was around what the uk has to offer them and i think if the uk was really growth focused and you know the energy point you made the energy was cheaper here then that equation that these founders are making, whether to stay or to leave, would tilt a little bit further in our direction.
So it's super, it's so difficult and no, no disrespect to dubai, but most people don't want to have to live in dubai.
I think the UK is a lovely place, honestly.
That's what I mean.
And I say this, there's lots of great appealing things about Dubai.
But if you dealt with Prime in the UK and you had a growth-focused mindset, you had a tax climate that encouraged people to start businesses and employ people we wouldn't be losing these people.
And we shouldn't be losing these people.
They are the people who will create the wealth of the future, and they should be doing it here.
They should be founding and keeping their businesses here.
And if you did that, then you start to turn the whole thing we've been talking about around.
Because ultimately, everything is about economics in this sense.
The military is about economics.
It's about do you have the resources to have a strong military?
We don't.
So we don't.
So which leader do we need?
Again, I don't like getting into the personality side of things, but what you need is someone who understands how the economy works.
Why don't you like getting into the personality side of things?
Because what happens when If I give you a name, then immediately people say oh, he's one of them.
Okay.
Right?
I am not one of them, of any them.
I'm just telling you what the policies are that I think would work for our country.
If Keir Starmer tomorrow came on your show and said Steven, I'm here to announce a great British transformation.
We're going to cut business taxes.
We're going to get rid of net zero.
We're going to make sure that we have the cheapest energy in the world for our businesses to grow and thrive.
We're going to have a strong, capable military.
And, by the way, I've just hired 50000 new police officers to deal with all the ridiculous amounts of street crime we've got in London.
Sign me up.
I'm all Keir Starmer, ride or die, right?
But that's probably not going to happen.
That's probably not going to happen with any of the other leaders that we have.
So I'm here telling you what I think the right policies are.
And if there's a leader who advocates for those policies, that's the sort of leader that I will support.
Only 18% of Britons view Keir Starmer positively.
Yeah.
With around 65 to 72% holding an unfavorable opinion.
You're desperate for me to slag off Keir Starmer.
I'm happy to do it.
No, no, I'm...
Do you know what?
My opinion of Keir Starmer?
Probably a really nice person.
Probably a really nice person.
I don't really care how nice he is, and that's my attitude to all politicians.
I care about whether they're going to do things that are good for our country.
From what I know, he strikes me as a very well-intentioned, probably fairly competent person.
But what he's doing is completely wrong.
The only reason I don't like to go in on him is I think he's useless.
I do.
I also don't think it's fair to lay the blame for everything that's happening at his feet.
The Conservatives were useless before that.
The Lib Dems and the Conservatives were useless before that.
The Labour Party under Blair were actually not useless.
They were really, really good at doing terrible things to the country.
They were very competent at doing that.
So what we have had for now, on to three decades, is terrible leadership that's taken us in completely the wrong direction.
I have to cite the statistics around his favorability or popularity, because it puts everything you're saying in context, which is, these ideas aren't popular.
Polling has shown that Starmer's approval among the British public is the weakest of any recent UK prime minister, with dissatisfaction levels on some trackers showing him to be below most predecessors, even in the Labour government.
So that's the weird part, because it doesn't seem to be working well to drive favorability in any way either.
No.
But this is why I'm saying focusing on him individually isn't helpful, actually.
And this is not to argue with you unnecessarily.
If you put Kemi Badenoch in his place, she'd have the same favorability ratings.
Really?
Even though she has different ideas?
Does she?
I don't know.
You tell me.
She has some different ideas.
I mean the Conservative Party has gone a long way to changing their policy on things like net zero right.
But while they were in power, they were doing all the same stuff.
They were arresting people for tweets.
They were driving the economy into the ground with this green lunacy.
They were the ones that oversaw the decline of our military.
So in some ways, the personality conversation is really not that important here.
What's important is a gigantic paradigm shift needs to happen to our attitude to everything.
And one of them is dealing with unaffordable welfare.
The Tories didn't do that.
Labour aren't doing it.
I actually thought Labour had the better shot because at least...
People wouldn't say labor are evil and they hate poor people.
That's what they say when the Tories try to cut welfare.
When labor tried to cut welfare, I didn't think that would happen, but they just caved to their own backbench.
And maybe they had to for political reasons.
But you just have to – the shift that needs to happen in Britain is not political.
It's cultural.
We have to change the mindset that we have as a country around these things.
Cultural transitions are very, very, very hard.
And I say that from the perspective as a business owner.
If you try to get me to change when I had a lot of people, so say I remember in my German office back in the day in social change German office we had 100, 150 people very, very different culture to the UK.
So I thought naively, as a 23, 24 year old, I could fly there and change the culture of the Berlin office.
Yeah.
How was I?
This is not how we do things.
I could not change.
I could not change the culture of the Berlin office.
So I think about a country changing the culture of a country.
That's why I'm what I call an accelerationist.
What does that mean?
It means that I believe that the only thing, the only way that these things will truly fundamentally get better, is when they get really really bad first.
The only way to change the culture is for people to understand what's actually happening, so that they can't pretend the things that are happening are not happening.
And that's what's happening at the moment.
Most people don't yet quite know that they're poorer today than they were 20 years ago.
Most people still think that we are saving the planet when we reduce Britain's carbon emissions from 2 to 19 of global carbon emissions, while in fact we're not even doing that.
We're taking our carbon emissions and we're sending them to India and China and then shipping back the stuff they make for us in a dirtier way, on big tankers which actually consume more dirty fuel, and we're actually ending up increasing our CO2 output, not reducing it.
Most people don't know that.
But when they feel it in their pocket, when they feel like we're having a fiscal crisis, when they feel like they really can't afford their life anymore, that's when they're going to start to ask some of these questions.
It's one of the reasons actually the narrative on net zero is shifting.
Almost nobody other than the government in this country still believes in the idea of net zero.
Because it's moving quite quickly in that direction.
And on lots of other things, it will happen when things get much more difficult for ordinary people.
Sadly, I don't want that to happen.
But I think it's the only way things get better.
But on the subject of global warming, it's scientific fact that the climate is changing unfavorably.
What do you mean by unfavorably?
Well, if the scientists talk about the poles melting and how that will have big impact on third world nations and how that will be a net negative for the planet, because then you'll see more migration, you'll see more sort of natural disasters and those kinds of things.
Well, let's not argue about that, because neither of us is a climate scientist, but let's accept that for the sake of argument.
How is outsourcing our carbon emissions to other countries while destroying our economy making that better?
It's not.
It's not, right?
And that's all I'm saying.
All I'm saying is we are pretending to be saving the planet when we are not saving the planet, while also destroying our economy, while also making sure that pensioners in this country die every winter because they can't afford to pay the heating bills that they need to pay to stay warm.
In what is a first world country, that's what's happening.
And it's happening because of government policy.
So we are not saving the planet by killing pensioners.
I'm not in favor of killing pensioners.
Have you ever thought about going into politics?
Are you eligible?
Eligible?
Yes.
Have I ever thought about it?
No.
People offer me to go into politics regularly, but it's just, it's not my game.
Why?
You know, when you talked about your mission, it seems very aligned with going into politics.
I feel I have way more influence doing what I do now.
Than being, I don't know, prime minister?
Well, that's extremely unlikely.
Than being the MP for the whatever on C who gets one chance to ask a question of prime minister?
No.
No, no, no, no.
I get to speak to way more people and to persuade more people and to articulate ideas in a much more unfiltered sense.
And I think that's really important in the modern climate.
What happens when you become a politician is you start having to talk the party line and then you suddenly don't quite follow what you actually believe.
Now you have to adjust and you have to say, well, you know, the party believes this.
Well...
I'm not interested in speaking for the party.
I'm interested in describing things in reality as I see them.
And then if there are politicians who want to take that on, that's their job, not mine.
I just don't have the temperament for it either.
I'm much more interested in the truth than I am in getting along with people coalition building, caring about potholes, all of this other stuff.
In this multipolar world, this is how we got to the subject.
I asked you who would benefit and is it a good thing?
Then I asked you, is it a good thing for Europe?
And you said no.
Who is it a good thing for?
China.
China.
Because they get to do what they want, whatever that is.
They're much less restrained by the US.
It's good for India, same reasons.
Is it good for Russia?
We'll find out, possibly.
Is it good for America?
Yes and no.
I think that is more complicated.
I think America will be able to get what it wants in that world, but it's probably going to find itself in a lot more confrontations internationally.
And that will obviously be a drain on its resources and its energy.
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Have we ever been in a multipolar world through history?
Well, yeah, loads of times.
What happened next?
A friend of mine, a very good friend of mine, gave me the history of the English-speaking peoples by Winston Churchill.
And it talks about the history of this country, of England in particular.
And basically, you go from strong ruler, and then he has no heir.
You have a period of weakness.
And what happens?
There's a big power struggle over the throne, over power.
This is what's going to happen.
You are going to see more instability, more violence, more attempts to fight for dominance in the world.
It's going to be a much more unstable period of time, unfortunately.
It's one of the reasons I've been so passionate about trying to say, let's not allow this to happen.
Instability.
In terms of war?
In terms of war, in terms of conflict, in terms of people trying to redraw maps, in terms of people trying to get access to resources that otherwise would have been considered unchallengeable, etc.
Yeah.
I was looking back through history and I was asking the question has there been a multipolar world before?
And there's these moments through history 5th century BC with ancient Greece, 19th century Europe between the 1815s and 1914s.
The Waring States of China in 475 BC.
And then my next question was, what happens next?
And the short answer is...
More friction, less restraint, higher risk.
Realistically, the first thing that happens is rules weaken, which I guess is kind of what we're seeing at the moment with this whole idea of international law.
Yeah.
Regional wars begin.
Not one big war.
Arms races accelerate.
Some alliances harden.
Economic fragmentation.
Domestic pressure rises.
So higher defense spending, higher taxes, etc.
Lower growth.
And the three endgames.
History keeps showing that we have managed chaos, major war, a reset and then a new hegemon emerges.
Yes.
What the fuck does that mean?
Hegemon is the one dominant power, that sort of, in the same way that the US had that moment between 91 and recently when it was the only undisputed power in the world.
Do you agree with that pattern of events?
Well, I was going to say, you sort of make it look like I've got all my ideas from AI, but.
Yeah, but this is the thing.
Before we started, I said to you, Stephen, do me one favor.
Don't present me as an expert, because I'm just a guy thinking from first principles and explaining the basics as I understand them.
All of this is common sense because ultimately it comes back to human nature.
We are a tribal competitive species.
That's what we are.
So when there isn't a dominant force that everyone respects and accepts as the leader, What happens?
Every single time when you have a power vacuum, you have a power struggle.
That's what we are seeing and that's what you're going to see.
It's human nature.
It's not about knowing geopolitics and having studied international theory for 40 years.
It's just basic human nature.
When there is a dispute about who the leader is, that always creates the thing that AI just told you.
Well, the next step in that is a power struggle.
Yeah, but that's what you're seeing now.
But there's never been a nuclear... Right.
And nuclear weapons have been the great force for peace.
We had the great historian from The Rest Is History, Dominic Sandbrook, on the show and I asked him about this.
And he said, yeah, I mean, nuclear weapons is why we haven't had a major war.
And it's maybe the one thing that will constrain our ability to have a major war.
It's one possibility.
It's also the great risk.
Maybe this is where the cycle ends because of nuclear weapons is what you're saying.
Maybe this is...
Yeah, I am hopeful on that front, actually.
I am hopeful that human beings ultimately, their instinct for self-preservation is so strong that we do not go there.
I think that's by far and away the most likely scenario.
But of course, it is something that humans have to reckon with and we have to be very, very careful.
And, by the way, nuclear weapons may not be the most powerful weapons that exist in the world 20 years from now.
In such a world and I know you don't like it being about individuals, but Trump is a certain type of leader.
You know, quite unapologetic in what he says.
I think he's got even more unapologetic, because he only has a couple of years left and he can't be re-elected because of the laws.
Are you concerned that if a different type of leader arrived into power in the US, maybe someone who China and Russia thought was less likely to send the jets in at nighttime and bomb nuclear bunkers or snatch a president from their house, would that be a risk for the West in your view?
Massive.
But that's how we got here.
This is why that withdrawal from Afghanistan, embarrassing as it was, is exactly how you get everything else.
It's just one symptom of people thinking.
We talked about October 7th, we talked about the invasion of Ukraine, right.
That's what happens when they see weakness.
This is what happens.
I remember, you know, it's kind of funny.
It shows the cultural differences between the Russian mindset and the Western mindset, because the Jungle Book that we had in the Soviet Union is very different to the one that you guys had here.
Did you see the original Jungle Book?
The Disney one?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, it's all heavy.
For context, you should probably say where you come from.
I'm from the Soviet Union.
I was born there.
You've got mother and father that are Ukrainian and Russian.
Yeah, basically, yeah.
So the Soviet Jungle Book adaptation, very different.
And one of the opening scenes is Akela, who is the lead wolf.
He's the leader of the wolf pack.
They're on a hunt.
And they're hunting and he misses.
He's supposed to grab the animal and he misses.
And suddenly the cry goes around the jungle, Ikela missed.
And everybody knows what that means.
Everybody knows when the leader shows weakness and fails, that's the moment when everything goes to shit and there's a power struggle for his role, because he's no longer top dog.
It's really as simple as that.
So do you think Trump's a good thing for the West?
Trump is a good thing for America.
I think what he's done by virtue of his behavior is he's exposed the weakness of Europe.
And there is a cleave now happening between Europe and America.
And to that extent, I think...
It could be a good thing for Europe if Europe gets its act together and says actually, we've got to wake up from the nightmare that we've created for ourselves and start acting differently.
If that happens, it will also be a good thing for the West.
That is not what's happening right now.
It's going in the exact opposite direction.
What would it take for you to leave the UK?
Um...
Well, look like you know, everybody gets job opportunities and stuff goes for a year or two somewhere
That could happen in any circumstance.
If you mean like for me to say I'm leaving Britain, never coming back.
Yeah.
I think it would have to be clear at the next election that Britain is actually going further down the path that we're on.
So two or three years from now, I'd have to conclude that there's actually no way we're coming back.
It's over.
And that's happened to great countries and great civilizations in history.
If that's what happens, then I don't see why I should do my children to living here.
If we can rescue it and make this country I'm sounding like Trump make Britain great again, but you know what I mean.
Then I would love to fight for that and I'd love to have my children be part of that.
What is the most important thing that we didn't talk about that we should have talked about?
This point I keep coming back to, Stephen, which is...
We can't live in a world in which we care more about how things make us feel than about the consequences of the actions that we take.
So much that this is a Thomas Sowell, and last time you had me on, I mentioned to you what a great writer and thinker Thomas Sowell is.
I don't know if you've had a chance to check out any of his work, but I recommend it thoroughly to everyone.
Watching and listening.
He talks about the fact that the last several decades have been spent replacing what works with what feels good.
That's the one thing we're not talking about.
All of the policies you and I have been talking about are all about what makes us feel good, as opposed to what actually works in practice.
And our conversation about chasing out entrepreneurs, it's exactly about that.
It's exactly what it's about.
It's about fulfilling your ideological, emotional needs, as opposed to doing things that practically work.
If we can make that adjustment and get back to reality, the world's our oyster.
The book that you wrote, it was a smash hit, Sunday Times bestseller.
Yeah, unfortunately it gets more accurate every day, which is really worrying, because I was very pessimistic about a lot of the things I said.
That is absolutely right.
You wrote this, was it 2022?
2022 came out.
2022.
Yeah.
And it appears to be a prediction as the days go on, a prediction that is being validated, unfortunately.
I highly recommend everybody reads this book.
I'm going to link it below for anyone that hasn't read it.
What's unique about you is you do appear to be very wedded to objective truth as you see it, versus being ideologically captured by either side.
And I've seen you both attack the right at times, and I've also seen you attack the left at times, which is It's a unique position to be in in a world with algorithms that try and push you into a particular echo chamber.
I guess on that point, what is it about the right that you take most issue with at the moment?
Oh, there's a thing that I've other people have at a similar time.
So I'm not claiming authorship of it.
But there's something that I call the woke right, which is essentially an identitarian resentment, victimhood based movement on the right, represented by the sort of extreme characters like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens in the United States.
You know, their worldview is that they they've been oppressed.
In the work narrative was we are oppressed.
Well, now they say we've been oppressed and it's all the fault of various groups the Jews, the whoever's.
So it's a kind of there's almost you know.
I think it's fair to say that there are elements of it that are just openly fascistic and reminiscent of the Nazis that we saw in the 1930s, ideologically speaking.
And the mainstream right has utterly rejected these people, which I think is really reassuring.
But there are some people who say, well, actually, no, no, we need to include them.
We shouldn't divide the conservative movement, which I think is a huge mistake for conservatives to make, because their movement and their reputation with normal people will be very, very badly polluted in the eyes of independents and moderate people, who actually represent the overwhelming majority of the public.
Even in America, which is so divided and so partisan, the normal average person will vote for this party or for that party, depending on what they see.
And in Britain, that's even more the case.
And so to the extent that the right.
So basically, there's a risk of the right repeating the mistakes of the left.
What happened on the left?
Woke people came along and they said, we are the left.
Our crazy work ideas is actually the left.
And the sensible people on the left were terrified of challenging them.
And so over time, most people began to associate the left with blue-haired, nose-piercing, Greta Thunberg kind of ideology.
And they went, oh, I don't want any of that.
Well, on the right, if the right allows its extremist fringe to do the same thing, then lots of people are going to distance themselves from that.
So I think...
The right has a tremendous opportunity to – we've had this great tension.
I know you've had Jordan Peterson on your show, and I'm sure he talked about chaos and order.
And that relationship is a very fragile thing in society.
We have had so much chaos that there is a lot of craving for order now.
There's a craving to deal with crime.
There's a craving to deal with illegal immigration.
There's a craving to deal with cultural disruption that we've had.
There's a craving for that sense of order to come back.
And if the right is reasonable and sensible about addressing those issues, they could be in charge for a very long time and have an opportunity to put some of their views into public policy, which they haven't had the opportunity to do for a long time.
If they allow the extremists to take over, they will be painted.
The entire movement will be painted as the extremists.
And then they will not have the opportunity to actually implement their agenda.
Are you happy?
Very.
What makes you happy?
My family.
What about your family makes you happy?
Having children is a blessing.
It's the best thing ever.
I, you know, I banged on about this to you last time, but it is.
Why?
Why are children the best thing ever?
Yeah.
Can't explain it.
It's not one of the, like I can find some words to give you, but it's just one of those things.
It's like, you don't know it until you have that experience.
Uh, I could give you some nice sound bites.
You know, one of the things I've said in the past is that the future is no longer an abstraction.
What does that mean?
It means that in the past I cared about this country or this civilization from a fairly theoretical perspective.
Now, the future of this country is one person and maybe other people coming along.
Right.
Little people that I have, they are the future in my mind.
Right.
So I'm much more attached.
I'm much more attached to the people who came before me.
I have much more understanding of my.
When you have kids, you have a much better understanding of your parents.
Because you go, oh, wow.
So the reason they did this stupid thing is, A, I'm also doing it now for some reason.
And also, they were really dealing with all the things that I'm now doing.
I've got a job and I've got a relationship and I've got this and I've got that.
So of course they sometimes behaved in ways that I didn't understand or like or whatever.
So you have more empathy for your parents.
You also have much, much more concern about where your country is going, your nation is going, your community is going, your immediate environment, because that's where your children live.
And then there's just joy.
I mean it's um, there's nothing like it.
There's really really nothing like it.
It's the most wonderful thing.
It's fucking hard, you don't sleep a lot and it's stressful at times, but it's the best, it's absolutely the best.
And you've got two kids.
I've got one uh, but maybe more on the way.
Oh okay congratulations, thank you, and what is your primary concern for the world they're coming into?
Well, we've talked about all of this, right?
I think my primary concern for my kids is that my wife and I do the best job we can in raising them well.
And then ultimately, they're going to be their own people and they're going to have to deal with the world in front of them in exactly the same way that others before have done.
My grandfather, my great grandfather.
He was younger than me now when he was sent to the Eastern Front while he had a baby son at home, and he never came back.
Human beings have had to deal with all of this throughout history.
We always have to deal with the reality of the terrible world that we face at that moment in time.
They're going to have to do the same.
I can't protect them from that.
What I can do is set them up in the best possible way.
And that's the only thing I can do as a parent is what I'm trying to do.
We have a closing tradition where the mask leaves a question for the next.
Yeah.
The question that's been left for you is who was the biggest non-family member influence in your life and how did they make you a better person?
Yeah, not fair to boil it down to one, I think.
I had a teacher once who basically made me realize that it's very, very important to give people an opportunity to prove themselves.
And he did that by giving me an opportunity when I really didn't deserve it.
But he gave it to me and I took it.
I've also just intellectually Thomas Sowell.
I mentioned him.
Reading his books is just completely transformational for me and it really helped me think about the world.
I think on a kind of personal behavior level.
I got a huge opportunity to tour with Jordan Peterson for three weeks a couple of years back.
And that was completely transformational seeing him up close, spending time with him, seeing that this is a man who
The way he is in public is exactly the way that he is in private.
And so he really one of those very, very rare people who preaches what he practices.
I remember we I think it was El Paso.
We arrived right on the border and we arrived.
We were late from the airport starving starving, and one of the things that tends to happen is everyone who goes to his live shows works out that he might be at the best steak restaurant in town on the day.
So we turn up to the steak restaurant because he only eats steak.
We're starving, we sit down And the waiter brings the menus.
The moment we start looking at the menus, this group of guys and girls comes over.
He stands up, forgets about the menu.
We're starving.
Gives them all the attention in the world.
Selfies, has a little chat, ask them what they do blah blah blah blah, blah sits down, places the order.
Another group of people come over, gives them the same amount of attention and by this point we're dying of hunger.
Finally our steaks arrive, and you know they do in america.
They say please check that it's been cooked properly.
So he cuts in.
He cuts off a piece, he puts on a fork and as he's about to place it in his mouth, a group of literally 20 people shows up saying dr peterson, i'm so sorry.
He puts the fork down, stands up and gives them all the exact same amount of attention that he'd given the previous people.
And just in everyone that he interacted with, that's what I saw.
A guy who talks about living in a certain way actually practices it.
And that was, you know, incredibly inspiring for me, really educational.
Gave me a lot of thoughts about my relationships, how I live my life.
He's a great man constantine, thank you.
Thank you very much thanks for having me staying in the pursuit of truth and i highly recommend people check out trigonometry, your podcast.
I'm going to link it below um, and also the book is going to be linked below.
Is there anything else?
Yes steven, when are you coming on trigonometry?
That's the question.
I've just finished my book.
Oh, it comes out in a uk exclusive is what i'm hearing.
Deal, deal signed.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks mate, appreciate you having me.
