Speaker 1: It was actually Ian Bremer's Twitter feed where I came
Speaker 1: across the meme of I'd like to cancel my subscription
Speaker 1: to one. I've experienced the free seven day trial and
Speaker 1: I'm not interested. I follow Ian Bremer's Twitter feed on
Speaker 1: a fairly regular basis. We've had him on at the
Speaker 1: in the January of a year for years now. As
Speaker 1: usually he's got his Global Risk List out. I was
Speaker 1: fascinated by something Ian Bremer um had a while back
Speaker 1: on how there are a bunch of things that you
Speaker 1: know we're likely going to happen anyway. They got sped
Speaker 1: up because of the coronavirus, and one of them is
Speaker 1: our crumbling relationship with China. But anyway, Ian Bremer is
Speaker 1: indeed the president and founder of Eurasia Group of Political Research,
Speaker 1: risk research and consulting firm that consults all over the globe.
Speaker 1: And Ian joins us now a good morning or a
Speaker 1: good day, sir, How are you ye? Happy to be
Speaker 1: back with you guys. Thank you. It's it's always stimulating,
Speaker 1: and I will say the Global List is incredibly thought
Speaker 1: provoking this year, even by the standards of the previous years.
Speaker 1: And we will get to that in a moment or two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was fascinated by your take on a lot of
Speaker 1: things that we're going to happen anyway over a long time,
Speaker 1: got sped up by the coronavirus. Can you give us
Speaker 1: an example a couple of those? Sure? I mean the
Speaker 1: US China confrontation, the lack of trust, their growth, all
Speaker 1: of that has been going on. The the disruptions that
Speaker 1: have come from technology, both in terms of our lives
Speaker 1: and social media and the polarization that comes from that,
Speaker 1: but also in terms of people that aren't in the
Speaker 1: knowledge economy, no longer having anything productive to contribute um
Speaker 1: to capitalism, and the disenfranchisement that comes as a consequence
Speaker 1: climate change, and and the move away from fossil fuels.
Speaker 1: I mean, all of these things trends that were coming
Speaker 1: accelerated dramatically on the back of coronavirus. One of the
Speaker 1: topics we talked about a lot around here, and it's
Speaker 1: it's difficult to predict, obviously, because change keeps coming. But
Speaker 1: what's gonna happen to American cities, commercial real estate in
Speaker 1: the wake of the COVID thing. We have multiple friends
Speaker 1: and multiple industries to say, not only do we not
Speaker 1: need office space anymore. We've seen our people's productivity surge. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of the CEOs I talked to
Speaker 1: of big companies are all experimenting. So they will try
Speaker 1: some hoteling and they don't you know, where you get
Speaker 1: people to come, you know, in maybe two days, three
Speaker 1: days a week. Uh. Some of them trying you know,
Speaker 1: virtual completely with a bunch of their teams. But let's
Speaker 1: keep in mind a couple of things. First of all,
Speaker 1: if you're a big bank and um, you're virtual completely
Speaker 1: and you lose big pieces of business to the guy
Speaker 1: that is down the street and out hustling you and
Speaker 1: sending his people in person, uh, you're not going to
Speaker 1: be virtual for much longer. That's number one. Um. Number
Speaker 1: two is uh, when your people are virtual and you
Speaker 1: used to be in New York City, Uh, they may
Speaker 1: be equally productive, but you will no longer be willing
Speaker 1: to pay them New York City rates salaries. And if
Speaker 1: someone can do their job as easily, um, an hour away,
Speaker 1: they can probably do their job as easily in the Philippines,
Speaker 1: in Brazil or in India. And I think we have
Speaker 1: to understand that the disruption that is coming from the virtualization.
Speaker 1: The disruption is coming from happening, and of course that's
Speaker 1: going to transform commercial real estate, but I don't think
Speaker 1: that's by anywhere close to the biggest thing that's coming.
Speaker 1: We're talking before we get specifically to your riskless I
Speaker 1: saw you tweet this yesterday, and I just want to
Speaker 1: know what you meant you tweeted out. The business model
Speaker 1: of social media companies is incompatible with a healthy civil society.
Speaker 1: Explain that well, because the business model of social media
Speaker 1: UM is to maximize uh, the eyeball attention that they
Speaker 1: get in order to sell advertisements, and UM that means
Speaker 1: and the way you do that is by productizing the
Speaker 1: user you and me. And when when you do that,
Speaker 1: the most effective way to do it is to polarize.
Speaker 1: The most effective way to do it is to let
Speaker 1: all the trolls on because you want to maximize the
Speaker 1: eyeballs to have more disinformation that It's not that Facebook
Speaker 1: UM doesn't care about disinformation on their site. Actually it's
Speaker 1: kind of intrinsic to their business model. It's not the
Speaker 1: Twitter doesn't care about trolls and bots on their site.
Speaker 1: It's intrinsic to their business model. It actually drives a
Speaker 1: lot more people. It drives a lot more eyeballs. So
Speaker 1: you know, that doesn't mean that you can't continue to
Speaker 1: have them, but it means either the business model needs
Speaker 1: to change away from advertisement, you have to charge, you know,
Speaker 1: a fee for subscription, which would make it very different
Speaker 1: in terms of improving enhancing the user experiences the first
Speaker 1: and foremost thing you're doing, and or you need to
Speaker 1: regulate it. But the model as it exists right now
Speaker 1: is antithetical to a healthy, functioning civil society, and we
Speaker 1: are experiencing that in a very big way in the
Speaker 1: United States. I personally truly believe that the vast majority
Speaker 1: of people that rioted and and stormed the capital just
Speaker 1: forty eight hours ago believed a number of things about
Speaker 1: fundamental politics in the US that we're completely untrue. Oh,
Speaker 1: the poor woman that got weaponized this information, the poor
Speaker 1: woman that got shot dead. I don't know if you
Speaker 1: went through her Twitter feed, but she mean heard her
Speaker 1: news feed was different than mine, right, And it strikes
Speaker 1: me in from your description that social media is pornographic
Speaker 1: in the in the broader sense, not just sexual pornography pornography,
Speaker 1: but ideological pornography, just constant conflict anger, that sort of thing,
Speaker 1: because that's the most titilating. But having said that, and uh,
Speaker 1: and having mentioned yesterday or the other day's craziness, I
Speaker 1: know the Eurasia Group's top risk for one was already
Speaker 1: the fact that about half the country rejects the president
Speaker 1: of the United States. Um, how do you think that
Speaker 1: recent events might have affected if you were rewriting the
Speaker 1: risk list your description of that risk? Man? I mean
Speaker 1: the pushback that that I got and we got in
Speaker 1: the forty eight hours after we launched the risk report
Speaker 1: was how can coronavirus not be number one? And my
Speaker 1: response was pretty simple. I said, we've got vaccines for coronavirus,
Speaker 1: thank god. We don't have vaccines for polarization. In the
Speaker 1: United States, all we have is more political pornography. All
Speaker 1: we have is people getting more divided. And uh, and
Speaker 1: I am disappointed with you guys that you threw out
Speaker 1: that political pornography thing and you didn't actually go any
Speaker 1: farther with the metaphor. Right, Usually you guys are good
Speaker 1: for that any meet me for content than you want. Hardcore,
Speaker 1: hardcore pornography not the kind of thing you want your
Speaker 1: kids learning about. So you know. And I also do
Speaker 1: think it is relevant that since we're getting back to
Speaker 1: the social media stuff that um that the the executives
Speaker 1: of these companies who want to maximize the time that
Speaker 1: we all spend on them, they don't let their kids
Speaker 1: on these devices. Yeah, that's interesting in that could anything
Speaker 1: be more telling than that they absolutely no, Yeah problem?
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, your your third risk? Climate net zero meets
Speaker 1: g zero what Yeah? So I mean, I'll tell you,
Speaker 1: I'm actually more optimistic right now about um, the planet
Speaker 1: being able to address climate change than I ever have been,
Speaker 1: uh in my life. The election, which because of coronavirus,
Speaker 1: no more Trump, he would have been re elect that
Speaker 1: if it wasn't for the pandemic, and I do you
Speaker 1: could Biden massive focus on climate as a consequence, Kerry
Speaker 1: is the most important appointment he has. All of the
Speaker 1: European stimulus is oriented towards sustainability on the back of coronavirus.
Speaker 1: That's a really big deal. The Chinese don't want to
Speaker 1: be left out. Jes Paying moving in that direction. The
Speaker 1: new Japanese Prime minister, same thing. We really are taking
Speaker 1: steps that make it more possible that we don't have
Speaker 1: three or four degrees centigrade of warming. That's a very
Speaker 1: big deal. But that's that's the net zero piece. It's
Speaker 1: less carbon into the atmosphere. But the G zero piece
Speaker 1: is we are living in a world that's incredibly political
Speaker 1: divided and doesn't have global leaderships got a G seven
Speaker 1: or G twenty two zero? And so what it means,
Speaker 1: I mean, for all of these years, you'd have people
Speaker 1: saying that if we could just focus on climate, we'd
Speaker 1: come together, right, we could all save the planet, will
Speaker 1: save the whales, will plant the trees. That's not going
Speaker 1: to happen. There's actually going to be a lot of
Speaker 1: competition and confrontation or over climate, over who has the resources,
Speaker 1: who gets the resources, who dominates the new technologies for energy?
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, the United States has over the
Speaker 1: last ten years worked hard to become energy independent in
Speaker 1: oil and gas. Now that we're getting away from fossil
Speaker 1: fuels and we're focusing on things like solar and wind
Speaker 1: and the rare earth metals we need for electric vehicles
Speaker 1: and their batteries. You know, who dominates all of that, China,
Speaker 1: all of it, and they're putting a lot of money
Speaker 1: in and this is actually going to drive much more
Speaker 1: confrontation between the Americans and the Chinese. So you've got
Speaker 1: NET zero, which is positive, You've got G zero, which
Speaker 1: is negative, and they're coming together. You have US China
Speaker 1: attentions as number four, and we can talk all day
Speaker 1: about that. And I'm fascinated with that whole story. Jumping
Speaker 1: around a little bit. I just wondered, you've got the
Speaker 1: cyber tipping point um on here. I'm wondering, you know,
Speaker 1: we had that big attack recently. At what point does
Speaker 1: a big cyber attack start getting treated like a military
Speaker 1: at tech and responded, uh, you know, in the same way. Well,
Speaker 1: not when it involves only espionage, which involves the Russians
Speaker 1: inside all of our institutions and stealing information. And part
Speaker 1: of the reason for that is because we do that
Speaker 1: to them. So that's already going on. And how good
Speaker 1: at it? How good at it are we are? We are?
Speaker 1: Are we better than everybody else? Or at least as
Speaker 1: good as China and in uh, in Russia and everybody else. Well,
Speaker 1: we never admit this stuff. But whenever you have the
Speaker 1: conversations with the people that truly do understand it, um
Speaker 1: inside the US government, they they certainly are not bashful
Speaker 1: about American offensive capabilities. The problem is that we don't
Speaker 1: have defensive capabilities, and that's being shown to be the
Speaker 1: case on a daily basis. And we also don't have
Speaker 1: much capability to deter um and so it's not like
Speaker 1: you know, mutually assured destruction, where the American Soviets had
Speaker 1: all the nukes, but we knew that if we used one,
Speaker 1: it could blow up the world. I mean, here the Americans,
Speaker 1: the Russians, the Chinese dominate cyber offensive capabilities, but we
Speaker 1: can't prevent each other from using them against each other.
Speaker 1: And when it would become a war is not the
Speaker 1: kind of attacks that you've seen in the last week's announced,
Speaker 1: but rather you remember the attack on Ukraine a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago. That was the reverse engineer, the not
Speaker 1: Touch attack. There was a reverse engineered n S, a
Speaker 1: malware piece of malware, and that was an espionage that
Speaker 1: was actually going in and breaking critical infrastructuring Ukraine, and
Speaker 1: then it got out of Ukraine and cost billions of
Speaker 1: dollars of damage for companies like FedEx Europe and Marisk
Speaker 1: and others. Um If that would happened at scale, I
Speaker 1: think that could lead to escalation where a lot of
Speaker 1: people could die. That's that, and that is certainly becoming
Speaker 1: a greater danger over time because that Russian attack on
Speaker 1: Ukraine wasn't meant to get outside of Ukraine. It just did.
Speaker 1: And so the lack of determined and also means there's
Speaker 1: a lot of danger when you're operating this stuff. Ian
Speaker 1: Bremer is the president founder of your Asia Group. The
Speaker 1: Global Risks List, for one is out. Even if I
Speaker 1: were to go back to grad school number one, I'd
Speaker 1: yell at the professors and call the Marxists and be
Speaker 1: expelled immediately. But if somehow they tolerated me and kept
Speaker 1: me there, I would love to study Central and South
Speaker 1: America and and why it hasn't emerged as an economic
Speaker 1: and political power. And I keep waiting for it. I
Speaker 1: keep waiting for the US to really turn its attention
Speaker 1: to our neighbors. UM. And I know that that Latin
Speaker 1: America is on your list of risks. What's going on there? Well,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not like Latin America is not growing
Speaker 1: and a robust middle class across Latin America, particularly Brazil,
Speaker 1: the largest economy, truly has been a success story. UM.
Speaker 1: But a lot of mismanagement and a lot of frustration
Speaker 1: as their middle classes get bigger, that their their services
Speaker 1: aren't very good, that the kind of social contract that
Speaker 1: a lot of people come to expect, whether it's you know,
Speaker 1: good mass transit or effective policing or education that is
Speaker 1: affordable and high quality, they don't have these things, and
Speaker 1: coronavirus is making life a lot worse for them because
Speaker 1: in the United States, we're going to roll out these
Speaker 1: vaccines this year, and once we get ten percent of
Speaker 1: the population vaccinated, our mortality rates going to go down
Speaker 1: by that's going to happen by the end of first quarter.
Speaker 1: That's a big deal. That doesn't happen in Latin America
Speaker 1: until later in the year and in some cases next year,
Speaker 1: so they're going to have big impact on that. Still,
Speaker 1: like major new waves of coronavirus, a lot of people dying,
Speaker 1: but they can't shut down the economies because they don't
Speaker 1: have the fiscal flexibility to pay for lockdowns the way
Speaker 1: we do in the United States or in Europe and Japan.
Speaker 1: And so you know what happens when that occurs is
Speaker 1: that the existing governments, whoever they are, left wing or
Speaker 1: right wing, are blamed and so you get this whip
Speaker 1: saw in anger on the streets spilling out that's happened
Speaker 1: in the last year in Chilean and Peru could be
Speaker 1: a lot broader across Latin America. And I was very
Speaker 1: concerned that in Brazil. Just two days ago, the Brazilian
Speaker 1: President Bolsonaro was pointing to what happened in the United
Speaker 1: States in our capital and said, this could happen in Brazil.
Speaker 1: And here's a guy that is absolutely prepared to weaponize
Speaker 1: using social media disinformation and claim that he has won
Speaker 1: the election if he doesn't. And you could easily see
Speaker 1: what played out in the United States play out in
Speaker 1: Brazil with a lot more violence, biggest economy in South America.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Ian Bremer of Eurasia Group the Top Risks.
Speaker 1: It's always fun. Let's talk against soon and we'll try
Speaker 1: to be more outrageous and entertain you better. I appreciate
Speaker 1: that gent call whatever. All right, thanks, I feel like
Speaker 1: board the great Man. I got some comments on serious times,
Speaker 1: damn it. I got some comments on some of that stup.
Speaker 1: But we gotta take a break. Text Lin and five
Speaker 1: k F T. C. Barnstrong and Jetty