Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:44:30 · Walter Russell Mead
[00:44:30] S2: Well, I've gotten very interested in India. I've been lucky enough to get to know a number of the folks that are close to the BJP and the RSS, which is the kind of Hindu nationalist group that helped to create the BJP. And this is a group of people who, a hundred years ago, was basically five guys in a house, and they've now built this mass movement that has something like 86,000 small groups around India that meet weekly. They're an incredibly dynamic political force, they powered Modi, and they have very strong ideas about what India should be, what makes a country. India is now the most populous country in the world. India has been pretty successful at developing a tech industry, it's not in the frontier of AI, I think it may get there faster than people think, And it has its own sharply different view of what the world should be like. Which is what? Multipolar, but not in the Chinese way. Jaishankar, who's the foreign minister of India, once said that China is a revisionist power, India is a reformist power. That India is not really happy with the global status quo. In the United Nations system, India with 1,400,000,000 people in nuclear weapons has exactly as many votes in the general assembly as Liechtenstein or Luxembourg. One vote. It's ridiculous and there's a certain kind of Western domination to the way a lot of international life is organized, because it was basically organized by the Europeans and the Americans at a time when nobody else really had much of a standing. There are a lot of changes they want to make, but they really don't see the kind of Chinese autocratic top down approach as possible for India or also good for the world. They're an interesting power with different ideas and I'm very much looking to see how that develops. I think the Islamic world, again, we are seeing the world of Islam, it ranges from super sophisticated scholars and intellectuals and writers to jihadis in North Africa with machetes torching huts or something. All of this range, it's an immense civilization but as a force in the world, there's more of it, it's becoming stronger. Understanding how it's changing, how the culture in The Gulf States and Turkey is changing and developing.
00:47:16 · Walter Russell Mead, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
I think the industrial revolution forced societies to become similar to each other because if you're going to have big manufacturing plants, big infrastructure, trains, highways, airports, all of this, there are certain things you just have to do institutionally and organizationally that tend to kind of force you toward what we would think of as a European Western way of life and politics. The information revolution enables countries to use their own cultures, languages and so on as platforms. And Turkey is more Turkish. It's less like Europe now than it was twenty five years ago. India is becoming more, think Japan is becoming more Japanese so that in the industrial revolution there was a tendency toward convergence of the great civilizations. Now I think we're seeing a divergence. [00:48:15] S0: I'm not sure I fully understand the reason why that is. Can you explain it a little bit more? [00:48:20] S2: MTV, when it first went into Latin America, it was showing American rock videos on there and everybody says, Oh, is gonna, you know, it's the end of indigenous Latin culture and so on. But before long they weren't showing many American videos at all because local artists were able, really in a pretty cheap way, to have their own music, their own videos that responded to those sensibilities. So I think we're seeing a lot of that now, where instead of having to be on the mainline programming of global programming, you're much freer to go off into your own
00:48:20 · Walter Russell Mead, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:48:20] S2: MTV, when it first went into Latin America, it was showing American rock videos on there and everybody says, Oh, is gonna, you know, it's the end of indigenous Latin culture and so on. But before long they weren't showing many American videos at all because local artists were able, really in a pretty cheap way, to have their own music, their own videos that responded to those sensibilities. So I think we're seeing a lot of that now, where instead of having to be on the mainline programming of global programming, you're much freer to go off into your own [00:48:59] S0: civilization. In that structure, I'm sure AI just pours fuel on that fire. What scares you the most? Like as you think about the global power dynamics and I'm assuming your vision of the future that's optimistic would be progress and prosperity or something, What most would get in the way of the kind of future that you'd want [00:49:16] S2: to Oh, a lot of things. The industrial revolution was in the long run a pretty good thing, but it had little side effects like the communist party, the killing of one hundred million people, World War I, World War II, reign of terror. [00:49:31] S0: Why were those necessarily side effects of
00:49:31 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:49:31] S0: Why were those necessarily side effects of [00:49:33] S2: the industrial revolution? Because I think the social stresses that come with these new technologies uprooting millions of peasants from the farms where they've lived forever and now they're in cities and they're getting exploited, yet discontent and the old social institutions that used to manage discontent, legitimate the stay, don't work as well in this new context. Everything is changing, everyone's heads are scrambled and things happen. So I think the information revolution, [00:50:04] S0: which is Fat on steroids.
00:50:04 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:50:04] S0: which is Fat on steroids. [00:50:06] S2: Exactly. So I definitely see that. But then I look at things like, in some ways one of the biggest geopolitical problems of the last sixty years has been nuclear proliferation, continues to be obviously to this day. But when I think about weapons of mass destruction in the future, obviously biology, cyber, all kinds of things. While we have not been able to completely stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, you can usually tell when somebody's trying to build them. Usually you have enough lead time to try to do something about it. How could you verify whether somebody was abiding by some sort of cyber arms control agreement or bioweapons arms control, when basically in a basement lab somewhere you can cook up a pathogen that could destroy half the planet. The idea that we're going to have accelerating arms races in a condition with an almost utter lack of strategic trust, where you can't appeal to verifiability as a way of ensuring compliance, I think it's a pretty serious problem. So I think the rapid and dynamic technological change across a whole range of disciplines and technologies is destabilizing the balance of power. And this, I think, does significantly increase the chance both of confrontation and ultimately even of war between great powers.
00:51:35 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:51:35] S0: Speaking of maybe Ukraine is the right flashpoint for this, but it does seem like there's been quite an evolution of non weapons of mass destruction, just regular old weapons. This is a highly contested topic now because of the conflict in Iran and some reports that we've run out of certain types of munitions, even as The United States Of America. What have you learned from the last several years of conflict about the nature of military technology, weapons, their relative importance in the AI world and Unfortunately, so