Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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
00:52:02 · Walter Russell Mead
[00:52:02] S2: I've learned a lot because there's been a lot of war. The first time I went to Ukraine after the war, I went to this drone factory and it really was remarkable because in real time they were starting to get results from the battlefield and then they were adapting But at that time it was very simplistic stuff. They were like getting kids toy trucks and re engineering them into ground drones that could put a landmine on a tank. I was back there a couple of months ago, the advances are just unbelievable. The intensity is the same, but the scope of change is amazing. I talked to people who said that they don't treat bullet wounds anymore. It's all drones. The Ukraine war is no longer a battalion over here shooting at a battalion over there. With these drones, you have this sort of gray kill zone, gray zone, where at most you'd have a couple of soldiers together. One of the hardest problems in warfare now, they tell me, is you'll get somebody wounded, how do you evacuate someone who's wounded? They're having to build a new kind of ground drone that can go retrieve a body or a person and then cover them with a kind of metal shield and wheel them out, but even to do this you need a whole team of drones working with this thing because they're looking for other drones that would try to attack this. They told me they had one soldier that it took them sixty three days to get them evacuated after a wound. This is so unlike what war was even six years ago. And I asked myself too, how fast is the Pentagon learning if the tank and the rifle are becoming as obsolete as the cavalry charge and the sword? What kind of forces do we have? What kind of forces do you need? And again, it changes every six months. Right now, the Ukrainians have kind of a battlefield advantage that could flip. And it's also for us as the power that has the most stuff, we're actually the most vulnerable to technological change because we've got so many tanks that the tank becomes useless, that's more of a problem for us than it is for somebody who's figured out the tank killer Or Navy, you know, the Russian Navy on the Black Sea. The Ukraine doesn't really have a Navy, they got a few little tiny boats, they don't have battleships and stuff. They have kept the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea with drones.
00:54:38 · Walter Russell Mead, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Good news for Taiwan actually, but American power traditionally is about sea power to a very large extent. How does that change over time? We've gone from, you remember in the nineties, you look like you're just old enough to remember the nineties, they used to talk about the revolution in military affairs. We've shifted now, okay, there's this one thing happening and once we've mastered and gotten used to it, then we're good to go. Now it's continuing revolutions in military affairs. That's something that I've learned about war by watching. What do you think [00:55:16] S0: is the most likely thing to happen in Taiwan?