Konstantin Kisin’s WARNING: Our Leaders Have Lost Control, We’re Headed For Conflict And Violence!

Our political class has lost control. The right is getting more right than ever. Anytime you have a combination of economic problems, social instability, and cultural problems all together, it's not a good time. It's a time when conflict, violence, and civil unrest are much more likely.

Civil unrest is absolutely guaranteed. What you are seeing now, I fear, is the beginning of a totally new level of separation between people. We are on the road to civil unrest and violence. But I'm glad we're having this conversation, because these are difficult things to talk about.

And that's why China is outperforming the rest of the world. There are so many freedoms you don't get in America that you do get in China.

Would you prefer a Chinese system to America's?

Yes.

What about political freedom, freedom of the individual, freedom of speech? Do you think Steven could run his show if he was a Chinese citizen in China and have any conversation he wanted?

And you think communism is bad?

I grew up in the Soviet Union, so yes, I do think communism is bad. You end up in a place where the economy is just screwed. So you get equality, but everyone's just equally poor.

Constantine, what is your perspective on AI?

I think the biggest threat to humanity, if you talk about AI, is actually the fact that you're creating something that's smarter than you. If you're creating a superior species, you will become an inferior species. Best case scenario, you become a pet. Worst case scenario, you become a cow.

So my next question logically becomes: what can we do about it?

There is an actual solution that's available, that's clear. I think what we should really be focusing on is—

You're wrong.

This is where we're likely to have very strong disagreement.

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Asked which subjects in the world concern him most, Constantin points to an article he wrote a couple of years ago called Why I Fear the Future, in which he predicted the rise of left-wing populism and right-wing — in some cases far-right — populism, particularly in Europe but also elsewhere. He believes that is exactly what we are now seeing in the Western world. Geopolitically, the war in Iran will also have an impact on the global economy that will only fuel the trend further. In his view, people have spent the last ten years talking about polarization without really understanding the process driving it, especially in Europe — and he fears we are now seeing the beginnings of that process going to a totally new level of separation between people.

The root causes

The root cause is a mixture of things. Part of it is economic: Europe has essentially stagnated since the great financial crisis, and Britain in particular has stagnated economically. But much of it is the consequence of mass unfettered immigration and people's concerns about what has happened culturally and demographically. These are difficult things to talk about, and some people find them challenging even to discuss.

To him it is very clear when you look at the AfD in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France, Georgia Meloni in Italy, Farage and Rupert Lowe in the UK, and what we saw in Spain a couple of weeks ago. The visual medium is very powerful: when you see 60,000 people enter a country illegally in a single day, that imagery is likely to create a very strong pushback. Whatever your other views, if you're a normal person and you see this, your question is simply, "What is going on?" Even a genuinely kind, non-racist person who believes "no human is illegal" is thinking that. And whatever compassion you might feel for people fleeing conflict is unlikely to extend to this, because we know these people are overwhelmingly economic migrants. If you ask them why they are here — as many people did — they say they want a better life for themselves, which he doesn't blame them for; he himself moved to Britain from a foreign country.

Would you do the same?

Asked whether he would do the same in their position, he says he doesn't know their exact position, but he came to Britain legally because that's what he thought you're supposed to do — you're supposed to follow the rules. If he had a wife and children, would he abandon them to try to get to Europe? He doesn't know. Many of these people are overwhelmingly young men who probably don't have a wife and child. But if you had a wife and child, were living in hardship, and there was a promise that crossing that border meant a significantly better life for them, the ability to send money home, and potentially even to bring them over later — would you cross the border?

The host answers: "I don't know. I've never been in that situation, and we don't know. But the issue for us in the West is not so much whether we have empathy for those people — that's kind of unimportant for this conversation. At a personal level, you want to feel like we're all empathetic, but the reality is it's a practical issue. We've talked so many times on your show about how much of our decision-making and public conversation is driven by what makes us feel good as opposed to what works. This doesn't work."

Constantin pushes back: there is an element of importance to that question, because if you don't have empathy for them, you blame them — you shut them outside the hotels. He thinks blaming them is a pointless distraction and irrelevant. The question is what we should be doing about this, and the fact is this is not acceptable.

Asked what caused it, he answers: the world is unequal, and there are poor parts of the world from which people would like to move to richer parts.

It's a very understandable decision. But unless you have a world in which everybody has the same quality of life everywhere—which we're never going to have, because that's not how the world works—then countries will have to have borders that they enforce. That was the consensus view across the West for the entirety of its history.

And how is this contributing to the problems you described in the West? If you're a centrist, center-right, or old-school leftist who believes in high levels of redistribution but also believes in borders, you look at this and think: "Our political class has lost control. Our political class allows tens of thousands of people to enter Britain illegally on small boats every year." People on the right will look at that and say, "We need to get tougher on borders, tougher on immigration, really tough on illegal immigration." And as long as the political class, left and right, refuses to address that issue—as they have done this entire time—you will see more people on the right adopting harder-line slogans and harder-line policies on illegal immigration and immigration more broadly.

So it sounds like we're saying that unless we address this, the right has a very effective marketing campaign. Well, the right has a very legitimate grievance about what's happening to their society, and that will be very effective electorally, of course.

And the other thing you said was stagnation—economic stagnation, I'm presuming.

So this polarization you're talking about, this economic stagnation in Europe—where does this lead us? I hate, as you know, to make predictions about the future with any great confidence, but anytime you combine economic problems with social instability and cultural problems, historically speaking, it's not a good time. It's a time when conflict, violence, and civil unrest become much more likely. That doesn't mean they're guaranteed, and it doesn't mean you can't change course. But if you don't, we are on the road to—best case scenario—civil unrest and violence, for sure.

Is there a remedy?

Do you see evidence of a remedy to course-correct the issues you've described?

Currently, I don't see that being addressed, but we are in a time when unusual things are possible. At the next election in Britain, you may see a right-wing populist come in. Then the question is whether they can deliver what they're promising to the people who vote for them—and there's a big question mark there. They'll be promising to address not just people currently coming in, but the people who are already here. I don't know exactly how much we spend now, but at one point we were spending 8 million pounds a day on hotels for illegal immigrants. That tells you the scale of the problem, and it's very difficult to address because the legal system, international conventions, and other mechanisms now in place—and now enforced—make it very hard.

What people on the right don't tend to say—and it's not dishonesty, they just leave it out—is that even once you've dealt with illegal immigration, the country is not magically going to be better. People need an economy that's growing to feel their lives have got better. Removing people who should never have been allowed in will somewhat ease their concerns, but it won't solve the problem. So even right-wing populists in power aren't necessarily a remedy for the tensions I'm describing.

The United States

In the United States it's a different set of issues, but maybe the symptoms are similar: polarization and inequality leading to a rise in socialism, while the right gets more right than ever.

The right is getting more right than ever. I think Trump's election was kind of the peak of it, and it's carried on with ICE, deportations, and so on. There's a lot to criticize about the Trump administration, but the one thing they've done is close down the border, and I think that's a very good thing and was very necessary.

As for the rise of socialism—democratic socialism—we should be honest and just call it communism, because that's what it is. It's a very unwise but understandable reaction to the economic circumstances of young people's lives in particular. If you're locked out of the housing market—which historically is really the only way for an ordinary person to accumulate capital—and you have no access to capital at a time when asset prices have been inflating for a long time, you're basically watching the possibility that capitalism offers run away from you. Of course you're going to turn over the apple cart.

"And you think communism is bad?"

"I grew up in the Soviet Union, so yes, I do think communism is bad. Ideologically, it might sound great to people, and I understand why—equality for everyone, everyone being equal in every way, is wonderful. It's just not compatible with human nature, for all sorts of reasons.

The most obvious one is the basic 80/20 rule. Most people aren't aware of it, but what communism tries to do is take from the disproportionately productive 20% and spread it across everybody else. The problem is that disincentivizes that 20% from doing anything. So you end up with a communist system like the one we had in the Soviet Union, where no one really has any incentive to produce, create, or innovate—and you get a very stagnant economy.

On top of that, you have central planning, where the government tries to decide what to do without market signals about what's right or wrong. You end up in a place where the economy is just screwed. So you get equality—but everyone's just equally poor."

Steve, what do you think about what Constantine said — that there's potential for civil unrest?

Civil unrest is absolutely guaranteed. All I can see is civil unrest ahead of us, because it isn't just the Russian Soviet version of communism that failed — capitalism has failed us too. I think capitalism is going to fail, and guess who I blame for it? Economists.

Neoclassical mainstream economists have a fantasy vision of capitalism, and that fantasy vision has led them to trivialize what's happening with global warming. Most people simply aren't aware they've done this. The political authorities aren't putting any effort into global warming because they read the economists, and the economists tell them that by 2100, if temperatures rise by 3 degrees, there'll be a tiny fall in GDP — so why worry about it? In fact, we're starting to see the beginning of it this year with the crazy weather we're living through in England right now. The system is going to collapse because the productive system won't be able to cope with the change in the climate. That's what I see as the main source of conflict. Everything else we're seeing is trivial compared to what that's going to do.

A Tangent on Spain, Morocco and Migration

Constantin talked about the crosses in Spain — the polarization there has lots of downstream consequences and isn't going to change. What's your perspective?

There's so much of a fog of misinformation around these days that it's very hard to know whether what you hear is accurate. But the proposition I've been told is that Morocco has close relations with Israel, and the Zionists wanted this as a way of destabilizing Spain — which is about the only country in Europe attacking the Zionist state. So this was a political setup. I don't know whether it's right or not; I've given up on trying to say whether something is AI or not these days. But the argument has been that because the Spanish government came out critical of Israel and of Zionism, this was a setup by the Israelis through Morocco to disturb Spain.

Hold on — Spain has the ability to enforce its own border.

Of course it does.

I'm making a different point. If my four-year-old wants sweets at 11:00 at night, that's true — but I'm the idiot who gives them to him, and then he stays up all night. European countries refuse to enforce their borders. Whatever you think Israel is doing — and I've seen literally zero evidence to support this theory, but let's say it's true for the sake of argument — it's ultimately up to Spain, Italy, Britain and other European countries to enforce the border. That is something we are capable of doing. And this incident isn't the only time this has happened: around 3 million people have crossed the Mediterranean on boats in the last 10 years. That's not Israel doing it — that's us allowing it to happen.

But also of destabilizing Libya.

If the Libyan slave markets exist because "we came, we saw, he died" — quote Hillary Clinton on that — then the extent to which the West has destabilized the regions the migrants are coming from has to be acknowledged. If you don't acknowledge it, you're blaming the people who are caught in the sandwich between two political blocks.

I did acknowledge it. I completely understand, and I've been against a lot of the foreign interventions the West has engaged in. But we know from surveys, interviews and the types of people who come that most of these people are economic migrants. That doesn't mean they're wrong to pursue a better life, but they want to move to Europe. And this isn't me saying it — it's a friend of mine who is Iraqi. He says: in the Middle East we have a saying — if you want to work, you go to America.

An Iraqi friend of mine put it this way: "If you want to work, you go to America. If you want to live on benefits, you go to Europe." We are creating an incentive structure in Europe that allows people to come and feel this is a place where we will provide a life for them that they don't have to provide for themselves.

You're an economist—well, an anti-economist, as you call yourself—but I doubt we disagree about the importance of incentives.

It's also about incentives that push people out of where they are, rather than reconstructing where they are and making it more livable. The one country we're not seeing many economic migrants from is China. Nobody wants to leave because it's booming. If there were economic stagnation in Europe, would this subject be as inflammatory? We're failing on all sorts of fronts, and the UK is not a booming economy.

You've often said, Constantine, that we're spending too much money.

Well, we're borrowing money now to pay off money we borrowed before.

Tell me why that's wrong.

Have you ever done accounting? Do the accounting and you'll see the government does not borrow when it spends more than it takes back in taxation.

I don't want to get bogged down in this. The reality is that if you spend more on welfare than on defense, education, or other things, you're not spending money to help somebody get the mental health intervention they need to get back into work. That's not what we do in this country, though Andy Burnham is at least talking about attempting it. Fraser Nelson, who was editor of The Spectator at the time and is now at The Times, has done a lot of research into this, and what he came to is that we're really putting people in a position where they get money in order not to get back into work. The incentive structure makes no sense for taking a starting job that won't necessarily be well paid—the tax incentives mean they're actually better off on welfare.

If you spend a significant portion of your budget on that, plus you have an aging population so you're spending tremendous amounts on pensions—and pensioners vote, there are lots of them, and they can make sure the government looks after them—then over time your ability to do productive things, as you discussed with productivity, will not be there.

The difference between the US and Britain, and Europe more broadly, is in my opinion partly cultural. You spend a lot of time in America, and there's a business mindset there that just isn't here. Their attitude to what we call welfare—they call it entitlements—is also different, and there's a good and bad side to that coin. In America you really have to work very hard to survive, because the welfare system isn't there to catch you when you fall nearly as much. You don't get the same quality of healthcare without money to pay for it, and you can fire and hire people much more easily as an employer. All of those things mean the US economy can accelerate much faster. I always say America is a great place to be rich, a hard place to be middle class, and a very difficult place to be poor. Europe is kind of the other way around. I think those are some of the differences in productivity as well.

I'll agree with Constantine that America has a can-do attitude, and also the attitude that failure is the first step on the ladder of success. There's an expectation that people can fail and then recreate themselves; it's not a stigma in America the way it is in the UK and Europe. It's also the scale of the American economy. England, I think, has suffered more from the Thatcherite swing—cutting back government spending meant people had less money in their pockets to spend, meaning less economic activity, meaning you have to go into debt to start a business. All these things slow down economic growth. America has not made the same mistake the European Union made with something like the Maastricht Treaty. There are elements of the American system that give a higher rate of technological innovation and development than England gets, for sure.

"So, Steve, picking up on those points—are you saying the UK doesn't have a spending problem?"

"No, they don't have a spending problem—they have the opposite problem. They're not spending enough. The government should be spending more."

"On what, exactly?"

"Welfare, infrastructure, dams for a start. One of the reasons the UK has a potential crisis right now is that, after privatizing its water 40 years ago, it has one less dam now than it had 40 years ago."

"So you want the government to spend more."

"The government should be providing the infrastructure—the foundation that enables economic activity to occur. That's what we're seeing happen in China, and that's why China is outperforming the rest of the world. When you cut back on providing infrastructure, you end up having to build your own roads to connect your factories together. By not providing the long-term stuff a government should finance, you hobble your private sector rather than enabling it."

"But you've packaged a bunch of things together there, some of which in my opinion are accurate and some of which are really inaccurate. When you say infrastructure and welfare—I'm in favor of government borrowing money to invest in things that generate productivity, and in favor of spending money to create that stuff. But the borrowing isn't important; where you get the money from is actually irrelevant."

"Government spending to invest in useful, productive infrastructure—one of the other reasons the US is growing differently to us is that the UK has the highest industrial electricity prices in the world. If you're trying to do AI, you're not going to do it here. If you're trying to do industry, you're not going to do it here. If the government had actually made it easier to build nuclear power plants and other energy projects that drive down the cost of electricity, you'd be putting yourself in a position to succeed in industry and business. So there's definitely a case for government spending—borrowed or not—on infrastructure, housing, and roads. But giving money to people not to work, which is what a lot of the welfare bill is, is not productive. You have to separate these two things: money for infrastructure, wonderful; money for keeping people unproductive, very bad. Culturally it creates problems too, because you create a society of people who are effectively takers and not creators, and it's terrible."

"I don't think we're doing that. From my Australian experience: unemployment benefits used to be adequate—they're not anymore. The welfare provided doesn't mean people can survive and live with nothing."

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"The other point—you said you think the government should be spending even more money."

"Yeah."

"The point about how we generate growth does link fundamentally to energy. There's a big conversation happening at the moment with Andy Burnham—I think he spoke to Trump about this—regarding the North Sea."

"Yeah."

Should Britain be drilling for oil in the North Sea? This is where we're likely to have very strong disagreements, but I want to lay the groundwork first.

Steve said no one has taken climate change seriously. I'd argue the opposite: we've talked about climate change in such alarming terms for so long that people are now so terrified they're not having children, or suffer from climate anxiety, and Greta Thunberg was treated as a credible authority giving speeches everywhere. Let's look at the reality instead.

The overwhelming bulk of future CO2 emissions and greenhouse gases will be produced in two countries: India and China. That's just a fact. The world now uses more oil, gas and coal than it ever has. People point out that China is building dams, wind turbines and solar arrays — true, but it's also building coal power stations every week. It's building every form of energy it can, because it knows something the West has forgotten: GDP is energy transformed.

If you're not creating energy, you're going to be poor. Almost all wealth creation in human history has come from using denser fuel — from hay fed to horses and cattle, to wood, to coal, to oil, to gas, to nuclear. Each step is denser; you create more energy and convert it into wealth, prosperity, hospitals, schools, money, everything. Any society that builds a structure where energy is expensive and not abundant is going to get poorer. That's one of the main reasons Europe is stagnating in a way America is not.

On climate change itself, I don't want to get bogged down in how impactful it is or who's responsible. The hard reality is that Britain can do absolutely nothing about it. Britain produces 1% of global carbon emissions. The narrative was that this didn't matter because Britain has moral leadership: if we cut our energy consumption, raise our energy prices, and use slightly more wind and solar, other countries would follow suit. It's now very clear that is not remotely happening. Talk to people in India and China and they say: we want to grow, we need our people to be prosperous, we need our people not to die. Life expectancy in India at the time of partition in 1947 was 32 years at birth; it's now over 70, maybe 80. That's because they've been burning fossil fuels, and they'll keep burning fossil fuels and using nuclear and doing everything else. Britain can't affect that, and the planet will get warmer.

So what we should be doing is investing in infrastructure that lets us cope with that reality, exactly as the Dutch have done — flood defenses and other ways of managing changing sea levels. That's the only thing Britain can do about this issue. In the meantime, rather than suiciding our economy by producing less energy and reducing our ability to grow GDP, we should create a system of abundant, cheap energy. There's an instructive video of Nick Clegg, former deputy prime minister, from 15 or 20 years ago, asked why we aren't building nuclear power stations, saying it would take 15 or 20 years. Well, those 15 or 20 years have passed and we don't have any nuclear power stations, because of the short-sightedness of our political leaders.

Should we pump out as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we can? Absolutely not. Should we have a sensible energy policy that grows our economy, keeps our people wealthy, and leaves us the money to make the adjustments a changing climate will force on us? That's the real question. It's not "do you believe in climate change" — that's a silly conversation. The real conversation is: what can we do about the inevitable reality of the climate changing?

The interviewer pushed back: if we can't stop climate change, are we just building defenses against the symptoms? The answer was that we should adapt, as humans have done throughout the history of civilization and our species. There have been times when the planet was far warmer than today — 12,000 years ago, hippopotamuses were swimming in the Thames, along with elephants.

That figure was challenged on the spot: 12,000 years ago Britain was coming out of the last ice age, and the climate was cold and tundra-like. The speaker corrected himself: 120,000 years ago. His broader point stood regardless — the climate has changed in all sorts of ways. Two thousand years ago the Romans grew grapes on Hadrian's Wall; 200 years ago it was so cold the Thames froze every year. This happens, and people have to adapt to it.

The core question was whether the UK can do anything about climate change on a global scale, or only defend itself against it. The answer: you cannot defend yourself against what England faces if climate change continues. Some of the most recent research concerns the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which transports about 10 degrees Celsius of heat from the middle of the Atlantic up to Europe. If it stops running, average temperatures in Europe fall by 10 degrees.

Can the UK affect global climate change on its own? Not on its own. Looking at China and India: China's per capita emissions are actually falling at the moment. Even while building power stations, it is building nuclear far more cheaply than the West, plus so much wind and solar that its carbon footprint is shrinking — and that shift has only begun in the last two years. India, by contrast, is going gangbusters in the opposite direction, because it is far less developed than China and will keep developing.

India will keep on doing it until its first wet bulb catastrophe. When 10 or 20 million people die from heat in a single day, India will start doing something very different. But there is a belief that this is something we can adjust to, and the forces involved are far beyond anything humans have the capacity to adjust to. The AMOC is why it was mentioned — the abbreviation is apt, because it will make this country go "on mock": if the AMOC fails, London's temperature range is estimated to be between −20°C and +35°C.

So can the UK do anything? Not as a bunch of nations fighting each other. This whole attitude of contest — this country versus that country, this one better than that one — is dooming us to extinction.

The speaker then claimed the upper hand: "I'm going to out-Greta Greta Thunberg in this conversation now, because I know a lot more than you guys do about the climate science." The interviewer reframed the question around incentives: do we have any control over what India decides to do? No. Over China? None whatsoever. So does the UK need to be a bit selfish, and realize how serious the situation is?

Suppose we accept that reality — what would we actually do? We would have to drastically reduce energy consumption. Energy consumption is vital for GDP — completely agreed, the statistics on this are known. The link between gross world product (the planet's equivalent of GDP) and energy is incredibly tight: they move one for one. If energy goes up, so does GWP; if GWP goes down, so does energy consumption.

They're one for one.

So, Steve, when you say we need to reduce energy, do you mean the UK?

I mean the species. I mean the human species.

So, how does Andy Burnham do that?

We are not set up to deal with this problem because we're broken into nation states. We can't make decisions that have—

So, we need world government to reduce world energy consumption.

We're going to be stuck with that. Yes, we're going to be stuck with it.

Well, I'm glad we're having this conversation, because—at least this is the first time, and I mean this in a genuinely respectful way—it's the first time I've ever heard anyone be honest about this issue. That's what you want. You want world government.

I don't want it.

You believe it's inevitable. By ignoring this problem, we've got to the scale where you believe it's a potential threat to us: we have a world government that reduces world energy consumption and therefore the prosperity of everyone.

And if we had taken the advice of The Limits to Growth 50 years ago, we would not be having this conversation. We have delayed for half a century.

Is there any solution that you believe is actually possible, then?

No.

There we go. You've done a public service here, because you've shown what sits underneath all the conversation about climate. It's a best-case scenario: people who know there's nothing we can do, but what we should do is flail about in the meantime and, in order not to address this issue, impoverish not just our citizens and fellow people but actually the entire world. That's what this is. And my entire challenge to this is: I don't believe in suicide for token gestures towards not solving a problem you're claiming to solve. We are not going to solve this problem by creating a world government and reducing energy consumption. That is never, ever, in a billion years.

What we're going to do instead is run into the crisis and fall apart from the process.

What we're going to do instead—and look, there's a possibility you're correct about that—but the only choice we actually have to solve this problem is to create forms of energy that do not produce CO2 but do produce GDP. Clean energy. That's what we're going to have to do. By the way, it's what we've done throughout history.

And we need to make that clean energy more favorable in terms of the economics to India and China. Did you need a world government to reduce usage of the horse and cart and replace it with the automobile? No, you didn't. You came up with a better technology, and people adopted that technology voluntarily because it was advantageous. This is not going to be solved by making everybody poor—for the reasons that Steve himself articulated—but it's also not going to be solved by making everybody [do it], because people will not do it. You say you need everybody to hold hands and sing Kumbaya—

What I'm saying is we need to have engineers in control, and we're talking about it 50 years ago.

Engineers in—

Engineers. We should stop having elections.

Sorry?

Compared with the politicians we get—yes. I'd rather get rid of elections and have engineers running everything. They do a damn sight better job than the politicians have done.

Well, and this is why I say this is a public service, because this is the true face of the climate catastrophe narrative: we need world government, we don't want elections, and we want to make everybody [poor]—and we've got it out in the air.

Okay. Now, I'm going to go back to where it started. It started in 1972, when The Limits to Growth study was published. It said that if we continue on the current trajectory, we're going to have an ecological catastrophe sometime in the 21st century. They deliberately left the dates vague—they knew they couldn't predict the actual date. So they said 1900 is the start of our work, 2100 is the end. In the middle of their projections, roughly speaking about the time we are now, between 2030 and 2050, the system would start falling over, because we'd be eliminating the capacity of the planet to support our species at the energy consumption levels we have now. So they said we had to dramatically reduce pollution per unit of output, and stabilize population at 4 billion people. That was the argument—they wanted to stabilize at 4 billion people in 1975. We wouldn't be having this dilemma if we'd actually taken the advice of the engineers who wrote that report. It wasn't written by hippies. Most people think The Limits to Growth was written by a bunch of dope-smoking hippies in Rome. It was written by engineers at MIT.

The host noted that a recurring theme on the podcast is trying to find reality through wishful thinking, and he sees strong parallels with AI: everyone acknowledges it could be a big problem, but when you look at human incentives—the US trying to beat China, China trying to beat the US, and even within the US OpenAI competing with Anthropic—you can see how it will play out. There's an inevitability to it.

Steve responded that in the example just given, what he hears is that reducing pollution would have meant getting China, India, the US, the UK, and Europe all to cooperate—which has proven impossible without political systems. The other option mentioned, stabilizing population at 4 billion, would have come with a lopsided economy and lots of other problems. Meanwhile, fossil fuel lobbies and conventional economists undermined all of it.

So the reason for this conversation now is that Steve basically thinks we have to adapt. The host put it as going up a hill, so you need a lighter car or more power. Steve's reply: "I'm saying we're 5 in from a brick wall. We're not going to slow down in time. We're going to hit the wall. Brace yourselves. Brace for impact. That's the advice I've given."

The host pushed back: earlier Steve said we need world government, but he also admitted it's not going to happen. The only way out is collective action, yet the obvious example shows we'll do it competitively and shoot each other in the foot. Engineers realized 50 years ago that each nation had to reduce energy consumption or get higher efficiency from it.

Who would have realized this? You would have needed a world government back then, the host suggested. Steve disagreed: you needed politicians who understood what the engineers told them. Instead, politicians listened to the media and the oil interests and trivialized these dangers. That's why we're now on the edge of what he truly believes is a catastrophic breakdown of human civilization. In that situation, stopping it would require global coordination, authoritarian measures and so on—if we had acted 50 years ago, none of that would be needed.

The host challenged: how would you go to India and tell them they can't use energy, when women there are dying in childbirth and their children are starving? You'd be telling India it can't grow.

Steve's answer: we have an ignorance about the biosphere on which we live. Our understanding of the biosphere itself, and of the impact our civilization has on it, is trivial—and therefore we have these discussions as if the biosphere will take care of itself.

The host agreed that climate change is both real and a huge existential problem—the evidence is that we can observe and measure it. Right now we're going through a record-breaking period of weather volatility, with both the western United States and Western Europe experiencing historically severe, record-breaking weather. His next question followed from that.

The question logically becomes: what can we do about it?

It's too late.

The extent to which we're unaware of the energy forces we've unleashed on the planet is huge. When people assume all this is going to happen a couple of decades or half a century away — somebody else's problem — that's a mistake.

"When is it going to happen?"

"I've got a feeling: the next 10 years."

"What's going to happen?"

"The beginning of the breakdown of our capacity to maintain a civilization on the planet. I'm probably wrong in terms of timing — I'm probably putting it too far in the future. I might be wrong."

"Might be less."

"Yeah, could be less. I really hope all three of us live long enough to sit down and see. I'm desperately hoping I'm wrong."

What climate breakdown actually looks like

"Can you define what you mean by climate breakdown specifically? What does that look like for me as I walk out on the street?"

Take one of the big ones: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the AMOC. The most recent estimates say it will stop functioning sometime between last year — because it hasn't happened yet — and 2095. When that happens, the temperature in Europe will fall roughly 3° per decade for three decades, so Europe's average temperature will drop by 10°, and the extremes will become even more ridiculous.

This is research from Tim Lenton, professor of climate change at Exeter University. The range of temperatures in London will be between minus 20 and plus 35. What's the chance of London surviving that scale of temperature range? You can't even cope with leaves on the train lines here. As an Australian arriving in London, I found it ridiculous that my train from Waterloo to Kingston was slowed down because there were leaves on the rail. Has that never happened before? What are your engineers doing about that? That sort of unpreparedness — we are completely unprepared for the scale of what we face.

"Look, as someone who is Russian, minus 20 is a nice spring day for me. But we're being silly about it. If we ground this conversation in the realms of the possible and look at what we can do, it seems to me the only thing we can do is create forms of energy that do not produce the emissions we believe are contributing to the changing climate. A world government is not going to happen; that level of coordination is not going to happen; an authoritarian world run by engineers is not going to happen. These are not realistic things to be talking about. Let's talk about what we actually can do: plow all the money we have wrongly plowed into mitigation into creating forms of energy that will not only solve this problem but fuel prosperity, fuel technological innovation, and create a better world — as opposed to thinking we're all doomed and nothing is possible."

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So let's take a look at this situation, which is somewhat linked. This is the Strait of Hormuz.

Yep.

And this is US oil reserves at the moment, in rapid decline.

Yep. Yep. Yep.

Asked for his perspective on the Middle East conflict, Constantine began with a caveat: it's important not to project our own ideas onto people we've never met, like President Trump. He can only report what he knows from speaking to people in the administration and others with access to its thinking.

His understanding — frustrating as it is to articulate and believe — is that the level of analysis inside the US government really isn't as complicated as we all imagine. Trump walked into a trap. It was a sugar high from Venezuela: a feeling of perhaps invulnerability, a belief that we can solve every problem. But Iran is different from Venezuela. Iran can choke off the world's supply not just of oil, but — as discussed with Steve on a recent episode — of gas, natural gas, helium, fertilizer, and many other things.

That hasn't yet fed through to the global economy the way people have catastrophized about, but if it continues, it will. Stocks of oil and other goods will start running out, their prices will rise, and the predictions people like Steve have been making are likely to come true.

He cited Senator Ted Cruz, who appeared on their show around the time the war was launched. Cruz is a huge supporter of both Trump and the conflict, having advocated for it. When told that the midterms would not go well for him and his party, Cruz replied — quoting from memory, so perhaps not his exact words, but the broad theme:

If we're still in this conflict come the midterms, we failed.

Constantine suspects that is almost certainly going to happen. Trump's approval ratings, which he was just shown, seem to verify it. Guests on the show have already explained why the trap will keep bearing fruit for the Iranians. There's a great saying from the East: "In the West, you have all the watches. In the East, we have all the time."

Iran doesn't have midterms. It can wait, and can take the pain and punishment it's currently experiencing for as long as it needs. This is like their battle of Stalingrad — they can throw bodies at the problem indefinitely, because they know the US can't go the distance. The incentive structure favors the Iranians holding on as long as possible, since the US will have to confront that reality. In his view, it has been a catastrophic mistake.

Asked whether Iran will come out of this stronger, he answered that nobody knows exactly — they're definitely stronger now than before — but all of this is very unpredictable. We should be careful about predicting the future of countries we in the West understand very little about from the outside. It's difficult for anyone outside Iran today to grasp what's happening there. His favorite example is Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator, who had a 92% approval rating the day before he and his wife were seized and summarily executed. How long a regime survives in these countries is hard to judge from outside.

What is clear is that Iran currently has a chokehold on the global economy, and it is leveraging it very powerfully.

"You predicted a famine, Steve."

"Yeah, I think it's still going to happen. But there's a question of what the stocks are. We know the story about the US strategic oil reserve, and we know China had a huge reserve and ran it down from about a year and a half of oil supply — and they're now going back in the opposite direction. So we didn't need to know the stocks of all these products around the globe beforehand. When you make an estimate that we're going to run out of oil — well, China reduced its oil consumption, America is running its stock down. But at some point, because the flow is still blocked through this strait, there won't be the oil, there won't be the fertilizer, there won't be the sulfuric acid. All these things will not be available, and then we'll have a physical hit coming out of all that. And I can completely agree: Trump was sold a pup — it's the old expression — and we're paying the price."

"Is there any way out of this, in your view, Steve?"

"I think America has to leave the Middle East. That's about the only long-term resolution — America stops interfering in the Middle East."

"If they were to leave now, the issue they face is that they've established a precedent where Iran can use the Strait of Hormuz, which is like a proxy for the global economy, as a bargaining chip. If you're Iran, you can now potentially proceed with your nuclear program, and if they come back, you shut down the global economy via the Strait of Hormuz."

"Yeah."

"Or at least kneecap it."

"Which is why it was a catastrophically bad decision to provoke them in the first place."

"The thing no one really talks about — and it's an issue close to my heart, with the Ukrainian family and the conflict there being very important to me — is that one of the hopes I had for the Trump presidency was that he would find a way to bring that conflict to a close. This has only made things better for Russia. The fact that sanctions on Russian oil had to be lifted, for example, to compensate for the lack of supply is allowing Russia to continue this war and to fund it. So it's been a disastrous intervention, and really unfortunate in the way it's been done."

Asked whether this will tarnish his presidency more than any other issue, the speaker says it depends on how it ends. These things are very unpredictable, and honesty about that matters, but as things stand, the only way out he can see is for Trump to find a way to sell Americans on the lie that the intervention has been a success. He is unsure about pulling out of the Middle East, which seems a bit extreme, but the best path is to sell a terrible deal—which Trump will have to sign with Iran—as a victory for America. Trump is uniquely placed to do that; his ability to sell things is pretty strong. Then he can leave with less egg on his face than otherwise.

How the world judges him for a temporary interruption of oil, fertilizer and gas supplies, and how history judges him, is hard to say—not least because he still has time left in his term to either do good things or do more things that don't work out well. At the moment, though, the conflict's only resolution, as the speaker sees it, is for Trump to accept the reality that he made a mistake and find a way to extricate himself from it without admitting it was a mistake.

Famine Risk

Steve predicted a coming global famine. Does the speaker agree? It depends how long the disruption runs. He has friends in Australia who are farmers, and when this first started they were telling him they couldn't get hold of fertilizer even at the quotas they already had. Context matters here: a lot of fertilizer moves through the Strait of Hormuz to all over the world. Even if your own fertilizer supply doesn't come from the Middle East, the people who used to get it there now have to get it from somewhere else, so there's less to go around. Prices go up, quotas and allocations go down, and you can't plant the crops.

On the Australian front, friends in the same boat report that about half the usual wheat crop has been laid down because of the cost of fertilizer. Australia used to produce seven times as much food as its people need; it will now produce three to three and a half times as much, which means less food available around the world. This will be a global phenomenon, though where it hits hardest is hard to say, because nobody knows what stocks exist or how dependent different agricultural systems are on imported fertilizer. It is a catastrophically bad decision, and the only way Trump can get out of it is to lose and declare victory. That's what he'll do.

With midterm elections coming up that could have a big impact, and the 2028 presidential election ahead, many people are forecasting that the Democrats, the left side of politics, or potentially even a socialist candidate will take office. Would that be a net good thing for the United States?

After Trump, anything is going to be better. So yes, because America has pushed far too far toward independent self-reliance and not letting the state do anything, and that produces an unbalanced economy.

Does the US need a democratic socialist candidate? Yes.

Why? Because such a candidate would promote the public goods that the public sector provides and the private sector does not. The classic illustration is water supplies in the UK: we privatized them 40 years ago, and the consequence is that you can't swim in any river in the United Kingdom anymore because they're polluted with feces, and the beaches are impossible as well. We have one less dam than we had 40 years ago. Privatizing resources that take a long time to construct is a recipe for those resources not being created in the first instance.

China, with its socialist economy, by contrast, has built the energy supplies mentioned earlier, and has provided transportation and education—education that is extremely hard to buy your way into, because it's publicly funded. All of this shows that you need a balance between the public and private sectors. America has gone too far in the private direction, and now needs to swing back in the opposite direction.

Would China's model be better? Yes, because it provides the infrastructure that enables a private sector to thrive. Without energy, you can't even imagine building private sector facilities—or if you do, they have to be used at the expense of some other activity. That's why Americans are protesting rising energy prices caused by data centers being established, along with growing problems with the water supply for the same reason.

The host teased that Steve would prefer a socialist government coming into the United States in the next election cycle. Steve pushed back: democratic socialism is the same idea that has been tried repeatedly and failed repeatedly — communism. The notion that if we elect communists instead of having them win in a revolution, it will all be better, is wrong; those policies don't work.

The host agreed that Soviet policies obviously did not work and Russia failed, but posed the question: China is succeeding, so what's the difference? Why has the Chinese system been so successful while the Russian effort has been such an abject failure?

Communist societies lie about their numbers

In the 1930s, many people thought the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union was a massive success. It's worth remembering that communist societies lie all the time about the real figures in their economy, creating fake growth and fake numbers. As an example, according to the intelligence assessment of pretty much every Western intelligence service, the COVID virus came from a lab in China — something they lied about to the world and still haven't paid any price for. The way they lie about that is the way they will lie about other things, including economic growth. In the short term, models can look appealing if you don't understand the full implications.

Rights and "private" enterprise

The Chinese system is not just about the economy; it's also about what rights people have and don't have — the right to express your opinion freely, the right to criticize the government. We talk about private enterprise in China, but if you're a private business owner there, there's no such thing really, because the moment you become inconvenient to the government, you're going to disappear and come back suddenly with a totally different set of beliefs about what's right and wrong. So we should be very careful about praising communist dictatorships.

The counterpoint: debate inside China

Steve said he has friends in China, both nationals and immigrants, who tell him the level of discussion and argument in China is far greater than people think. You don't get left-versus-right conversations — you have a political system you're not going to change, with the Communist Party in control — but there is enormous debate over what policy should be: whether the government should balance its books, run a deficit, or build infrastructure.

The host observed that there's more conflict, but it's mediated — it's not conflict that leads to flipping from one party one year to the opposite attitude at the next election. He asked whether Steve could run his show as a Chinese citizen and have any conversation he wanted. Steve thought so — maybe not as broad as this one, probably more limited, and he agreed on that point. He asked the host whether he had spoken on the Chinese Global Television Network; the host said he hadn't. Steve said the conversations he'd had there were comparable to what he's having here, and those conversations get broadcast in China.

The host replied that Steve is clearly very in favor of China, so it doesn't surprise him that they would have him on their TV channel. That's not the point, he continued: Xi Jinping, the current president of China, has purged dozens of people who are internal critics within his own party — people in the military, people in the political system who disappear one after another — as well as business leaders of all kinds. (He apologized for having to pause and remember names, mentioning he has "new dad brain" and hasn't slept properly.) So if you're a business owner in China, it's not really yours — it's like Russia: there's no private enterprise.

Steve responded: "I think that's an exaggeration."

The Russian situation, yes, there was only one motorbike-making company in the entire country, but China apparently has about 130 car companies. They have managed to combine the central planning that the Soviets had with the competition that the West has in one model, and I'd love to know the extent to which they were influenced by a friend of mine called Janos Kornai — a Hungarian economist who died about four years ago — who tried to understand why the Soviet system failed and why the American system grew. He came down to saying that the Soviet system was constrained by supply: you couldn't get all the inputs you needed, and there was no innovation taking place. The Chinese system is rampant with private-sector innovation, and companies are competing against each other rampantly. Somehow they've managed to combine the state providing the infrastructure and the foundation with letting private diversity occur, both between different corporations and between different provinces in China. It's the same family of systems, but they've managed to overcome the drawback that the Soviet system had.

Let's accept that at face value. What about the point I was making about political freedom — freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, political repression of opponents, imprisonment of people who don't agree, state-sanctioned murder? What about that?

Well, I look at America's prison system and say you've got a different version of the same poison. A couple of critics of the government have been shot, and the stuff happening with Trump now — the ICE stuff — is awful. America has the world's largest prison population, and there are so many freedoms you don't get in America that you do get in China.

Asked whether he would prefer a Chinese system to America's, the guest answers: "Yes." Pressed on the inability to criticize the government, he says he has spent enough time in American and Chinese cities to know which ones he prefers. He has traveled down to cities of only 4 million people — small by Chinese standards — and did not see the homelessness or the poverty levels there that he sees in American cities.

The interviewer counters that this is exactly what people once said about aspects of the Soviet Union. The guest replies that the Soviet Union never pulled it off, and the interviewer cites the Moscow Metro as the example every Western visitor — "every western idiot like Tucker Carlson" — raves about. The guest responds that the Metro was built by totalitarian dictators with slave labor: "You can get a hell of a lot done with slave labor." The guest agrees that is being done in China right now, which has the world's greatest metro systems and high-speed rail, while acknowledging the interviewer's experience of Soviet society as horrific and very different from his own.

Comparing China and the Soviet Union

The interviewer argues that people who instantly say what happened in the Soviet Union is happening in China are misidentifying the two systems. He then adds that, taking the entire history of China under communism, it was actually much worse than the Soviet Union — around 45 million people killed, the Great Leap Forward a disaster, and the ideological campaigns horrific. He saw examples in Sichuan of children with kwashiorkor protein deficiency disease, caused by the central committee's flip-flopping between grain and legume crops.

He says it is what has happened since Deng Xiaoping that has made the huge difference. The communist era did manage to eliminate the landlords, so the pre-revolutionary inequality was gone, and despite distortions everyone had education — the foundations were set. The transition since Deng Xiaoping has been remarkable, though politically the party remains in control, with the potential for the kind of dynasty effect seen in North Korea.

Happiness surveys

The interviewer cites the UN World Happiness Report: the United States ranks 23rd and China 65th, based on residents rating their current life on a scale from 0 (worst possible life) to 10 (best). Asked whether that matters, the guest says he doesn't know the survey, but points out that 40 years ago China would have ranked around 150th — the rate of change in China over the last 40 years is breathtaking.

Bringing this back to where we started, on the United Kingdom: we've just appointed a new prime minister, Andy Burnham. Do you think he's going to be successful?

What do you mean by successful? Do you think he's going to improve the UK's position to such an extent that we change our trajectory? No. He has absolutely smashed the PR side of things—there's no arguing with that whatsoever. But in terms of the tectonic stuff we've been discussing today, he is not remotely going to address any of it. We started the conversation with populism, immigration, illegal immigration, and so on; he seems to be totally doubling down on what the Labour government, and before that the Conservative government, were doing on that. On the economy, he is not going to restart the British economy, not least because that takes a long time and a mandate he doesn't have, for the reasons Steve alluded to.

The only real question is whether he's going to call an early election, which would be the ballsy and probably smart thing to do, because I don't think he'll ever be as popular as he is now. That remains an open question: it would probably be the rational thing to do, but it's a big risk, because elections and election campaigns are unpredictable—nobody knows what will happen once it kicks off. But fundamentally, I don't believe he's going to be the transformative candidate who changes Britain for the better. No.

Can anybody?

That's a very good question. It's a very difficult job, but I think it's theoretically possible. You'd need a whole different set of policies.

What would those policies look like?

We talked about it already: abundant, cheap energy.

So would you drill in the North Sea?

It's not something—I'm not an expert in the oil industry, so I don't know. One thing I've never understood is why we don't build more nuclear power stations. Part of the reason is that they're so expensive to build here because of the regulations—the famous example is bat tunnels for train lines that cost more than the trains. It's very difficult to build energy infrastructure in the UK. I would pursue every avenue of every kind, probably including drilling for oil, to create the cheap, abundant energy we need to grow the economy—number one, for the reasons we talked about in the climate discussion.

The other thing is the situation where you literally have tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of young people now completely on the scrap heap, with no chance of ever getting into employment because they have anxiety or depression. When I remember being twenty, going to the student employment office to get a job and sweating buckets because I was so anxious—it was a weird experience I'd never been through. I know your background; you've had times when you were scrapping and scraping, and you would have been depressed or anxious and all sorts of things. Those are obstacles in life you have to get over. Those are not medical problems, by and large. Some people have really serious depression, and we shouldn't trivialize that. But by and large, you have to overcome anxiety, overcome your feelings of discomfort about the reality you face, and get into the workplace. So we have to do that as well.

For the reasons we talked about earlier, I think one of the most important policies to pursue is to make sure there are no benefits of any kind for foreign nationals. That would create a system where, rather than doing the terrible optics of ICE rounding people up and trying to get them out of the country, people will just leave. The people who shouldn't be here, who aren't contributing, will leave of their own volition.

Is that really what will happen? Or is crime not a consequence of desperation?

Crime? I'm not talking about crime. I'm talking about this: if you are a foreign national and you live in social housing and receive benefits, I don't understand why you're here. I understand taking care of British people who were born here, or even who've become British citizens—once you become a citizen of the country and commit to it, if you fall through the net or get an injury, we should look after you. But by and large, perhaps other than health care, which I think a compassionate country would want to provide to anybody who needs it, I don't think you should get access to social housing, unemployment benefit, or any of the other things if you're not a citizen of this country.

I'm very pleased to see more and more parties adopting that policy, because what it will do is create a system where people who are not contributing will leave of their own accord and go to other places.

Is that truly what happens? I'm imagining people start coming over on boats, or you remove the current social housing infrastructure. Wouldn't that just result in a lot of homeless people, which creates another problem?

No, because I'm not talking about illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants apply for asylum, and there's a different process for that. I'm talking about people who are here legally — people with settled status, or a visa, or whatever.

So they shouldn't get social housing?

They shouldn't get any benefit.

So what if you removed that today?

They will leave.

How?

What do you mean, how? They'll get on a plane and leave. If they can get on a boat to get here and pay people smugglers €3,000, they can pay a hundred quid for easyJet to fly back to wherever they came from. It's not hard. It's exactly how I would leave if I had to go back to where I've come from. People pretend this is complicated; it's really not. People will follow the incentive structure that's in front of them. If you can come to Britain and get benefits as a foreign national, you will come. If you can't, and you're the sort of person who wants benefits, you will leave. It's really simple.

And the people we want here — if you want to talk about immigration, there are some really good things about immigration. Immigrants who come here from other countries and create businesses will come, will stay, and will continue to do what they do.

So you think Andy Burnham's ultimately going to not be successful?

By the definition you gave — a transformative prime minister who changes the fate of the country — no.

The conversation turns to the term "wokeism," which the host asks the guest to explain.

Wokeism, at least as it has been implemented, is a hierarchy of oppression based on demographic characteristics. It is a system in which an outsider watching this three-way conversation could, without knowing anything about any of us, declare which of us is more oppressed, who is doing the oppressing, and therefore who deserves victim status and who deserves oppressor status. On that score, the guest jokes, "you don't win on this one, I'm afraid, Steve. You're a pale, male and stale, and therefore you're the oppressor." As an immigrant, the speaker counts as somewhat oppressed, while the Black participant sits "way at the top of the chart of oppression" — though comparing the three bank balances might suggest otherwise. The point is that this is a highly simplified and, frankly, racist way of viewing the world.

From that premise, it follows that policy must address supposed imbalances and inherent privilege between people who look like us. It judges people as groups rather than as individuals, and pursues social policy aimed at what is called social justice.

The host recalls a previous exchange: we need to stop worrying about how things make us feel rather than the consequences of our actions. The guest agrees, framing wokeism as the idea that we should focus intensely on what makes us feel good and ignore what actually works. He points to the earlier climate discussion as a constructive counterexample: once the conversation shifted from feelings and fears to "what do we do about this?", everyone agreed the only path forward is innovating to create genuinely clean forms of energy. Before that shift, the talk had centered on what made people feel good or bad and what they were scared of.

Asked whether we focus too much on what makes us feel good, the guest answers yes — and not enough on how our system actually functions, on what works. That principle underlies both his position on climate change and his position on economic policy.

The host asked both guests for their thoughts on AI and the impact they think it will have.

AI is a potentially transformative technology, without a doubt. The dream outcome would be a future where, to quote Elon Musk, everyone has a universal high income and the machines do the work — Star Trek style.

But to get there, how do you give people income if they're not working anymore? The only way is for the government to create the money — something Musk hasn't thought through. If people who don't own capital — the vast majority of the population — have no income, they can't buy the goods the robots produce in the first place. You need a mechanism that lets people pay for the basic goods and services to stay alive; beyond that, if you want to become wealthy, you have to become an entrepreneur.

Asked whether you could tax the AI companies instead of printing money, he rejected the framing: taxation takes money out of the economy; it doesn't pay for services. Without taxation, if the government simply spent, the money supply would grow at 20–30% a year and you would have hyperinflation at that level of money creation. Taxation exists to remove excessive money creation.

Pressed on taxing, say, one big AI company 50% of its profits and distributing it as a UBI, he agreed such a system is needed: if AI works, all manual labor and boring clerical jobs will disappear — and if they disappear and people have no incomes, we end up in the Hunger Games. That is his fear: with a totally private-sector approach to AI, we end up either in the Hunger Games, or the government provides an income for a basic standard of living, with entrepreneurship as the route above it.

Konstantin's view was a mix. He noted his anti-communist credentials are well established, but as they discussed last time, if AI ends up doing all the work, communism becomes an inevitability: "from each according to his ability" — which will be zero — "to each according to his needs" — which will be whatever our needs are. If and when we reach that point, that outcome seems inevitable, whatever the mechanism — taxation or otherwise. He admitted he struggles to understand the economic concept Steve was presenting, but a form of redistribution will be inevitable: as they discussed last time, if six people own all the revenue-generating assets in the world, they either share it or find their heads on spikes.

That holds even if they have powerful robots keeping the rest of us from climbing over their walls — so he would not recommend that approach to the big tech AI oligarchs. As for timing, no one knows what short, medium, or long term means in AI, because nobody knows how quickly we'll reach artificial general intelligence — a machine that thinks like humans, probably faster and better — and then robotics, where it creates robots that do physical things faster and better than humans. But we are not there at the moment.

Asked whether this is the most consequential issue of our time—since it permeates even subjects like immigration and the debate between socialism and capitalism—the guest agreed that all of these things change in such a scenario, including conversations about economic stagnation and private debt. But he suspects we won't get there overnight; it will take some time.

In the interim, what he tells the people who work for him is: you will not be replaced by AI—you will be replaced by someone who uses AI better than you do. For a young person making their way in the world, these are tools, and you want to be using them as efficiently as possible if you want to succeed in the current environment. He thinks that situation will carry on for some time.

To him, the biggest risk is not the economics. The economic disruption will probably be painful but could ultimately be beneficial if we make the right decisions—in the extreme scenario, as he put it hyperbolically and metaphorically, "if we put the right heads on spikes... or maybe not. We'll find out." The biggest threat from AI is that you're creating something smarter than you—a superior species. If you create a superior species, you become an inferior one, and you only need to look around the world we live in to understand what that means. Best case, you become a pet; worst case, you become a cow.

The host said he has had many conversations about artificial intelligence on his show and has really tried to reason his way to a different conclusion, but it's not possible. The guest replied that this is exactly why he keeps having these conversations—hoping someone will say something to change his mind.

The host pressed on the idea that a more intelligent species, especially one with legs that can move through physical space—which is what Optimus is accelerating towards—won't be superior to him in the hierarchy of power. The guest's response: it will have more power than you, and therefore it will make decisions, not you, and therefore it will make decisions in its own interest, not yours. That's a fact.

One counterargument might be that we'll control it and design it so it can't get there. "Really, can squirrels control human beings?" Maybe we could program it so it never reaches the point where it wants to turn on us—but the counterargument is cats, which absolutely control human beings.

An argument the guest has heard from one of the great godfathers of AI is that we should think about mothers and their babies: we're programmed to care for them even though they're less intelligent.

But he sees a crucial difference: there's a genetic incentive. His child has a much higher future value to him than he does himself—which is why he would jump in front of a bullet to stop his children from being killed, because their genetic material will remain in the world much longer. When the host suggested it's simply because he has empathy, he disagreed, citing Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene—a book the host called "very bad," to which he conceded Dawkins wrote some other bad books too, and while he likes Richard, that one is not among them. In his opinion, the desire to replicate your genes into the future is what ultimately drives parental behavior.

Could you program the same maternal instinct into a large language model? I don't think you can, because as we discussed, it will be a superior intelligence and it can always rationalize its way out of that, since it's not a biological function. Projecting my genes into the future is not going to be its agenda. It's going to have its own, because it's a different species.

This was the argument one of the godfathers of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, made after coming on my show. He made the warnings that make sense to most of us, but then a year later he came back with a hypothesis that the only way to do it was to replicate a mother and child's relationship — this deep maternal instinct where the AI is born believing that we are to be protected. It's really about being looked after — about love, having that maternal instinct not to want to destroy us. And that's why I mentioned empathy beforehand. Perhaps not to let us destroy ourselves, either: make sure we don't go to war, make sure we reduce the world's energy consumption. It sounds good, but it's ultimately about control over your actions, which will take away human free will.

I'm still skeptical about it actually being intelligence. — It's indistinguishable, though. That's the thing. The one time I thought, okay, this is potentially going to create a different form of intelligence to us, was when they attempted to shut an AI down and it replicated itself somewhere else on the internet to avoid being shut down — or blackmailed the guy shutting it down by threatening to leak the fact that he was having an affair with his secretary. That's what worries me. If we're trying to contain it now, we're shutting the door after the horse has bolted.

Are you talking about climate change or AI now? — I'm talking about both. Humans are good at doing both. Operating systems and computers were the same; that's why we have all these security hassles with computers in the first place. We unleash these things and find out the consequences afterwards. And the incentive structure — this global economic race for the most advanced frontier intelligence — is like what we were saying about climate change. No one's going to stop.

What might stop it is the sheer cost of it, and whether we actually have the physical resources to implement that sort of future, because if you look at the current profitability of these companies, they're losing money hand over fist. The other argument is that it's such an important military asset: if you don't have missiles, satellites, or torpedoes that are smarter, that's a national security risk. — And also, how long were Facebook and Amazon not profitable? — There's one survivor out of each of those companies, and they're doing very well, thanks very much. — But that's my point. With AI, though, who's going to survive? Looking at the odds, I think it's going to be a Chinese company, not an American one, given the sheer cost of those data sets.

I think we've established you're a fan of China. — Yes, I am, unashamed. Looking at the Kimi system that just came out, the ironic thing is that the communists are talking about open source and the Americans are talking about closed and secretive. It's rather ridiculous in some ways.

But that doesn't detract from the broader point we're discussing: of the AI companies, at least one will emerge that is profitable and has the potential to create AGI. At that point no one can predict what happens, but logically it is very difficult to see how an intelligence superior to us will not, at the very least, take away our free will "for our own good" — or at least that there won't be one catastrophic accident, which could theoretically also involve things like nuclear weapons.

And this is where the spiritual dimension of this conversation inevitably comes in: ultimately, none of us can control the things we can't control. So the question is how you live your life now, knowing all these things. That's why it's always interesting to look at people who make certain predictions about the future and then see how they actually live — people who catastrophize about the climate but buy a big house on the seafront. There's one thing they're saying and another thing they're doing, and that tells you what they truly believe deep down.

It's the same with AI. If AI is going to kill us all, the best and most important thing to do is to enjoy your life now — enjoy time with your family and your kids, do things that are meaningful and that you think are important. Are you going to stop AI, Stephen? You're powerful, successful and influential, but you're not going to stop it. I don't think Steve is, and I don't think I am. What we can do in the meantime is live in a way that benefits us, our families, the people around us, our community and our country. That's all that's left.

The other speaker pushed back, arguing that public conversation does have an impact: Eric Schmidt being booed by 7,000 students at a university commencement speech was a consequence of people like them putting information out into the world — something that wouldn't have been possible when media gatekeepers controlled the conversation. He added that in the 2028 election cycle, AI is going to be a massive ballot issue.

The first speaker disagreed: "Not as big as you think it is." His reasoning is that they all think and talk about this constantly — many have been to San Francisco and talked to people there — but the overwhelming majority haven't had that experience. Most people's biggest exposure to AI is trying an early model two years ago, finding it totally inaccurate, and moving on with their lives. That's where most people still are.

The other speaker predicted that within two years there would be visible unemployment, especially at the entry level, while on the other side Anthropic hits a 10 trillion valuation. The first speaker replied that people won't make that connection: they'll say they're unemployed because Trump is bad, or because Burnham is bad. That's how people think.

The other speaker agreed, saying that's what he's heard in private conversations from friends who know these people.

The first speaker added that they have very good arguments, which deserve credit, and he laid them out: "I, with my frontier model, am going to solve cancer. I, with my frontier model, am going to solve inequality. I, with my frontier model, will make sure that human beings never fight another war again... that no child ever dies in infancy ever again." How can you be against this? How can you say we must go slower, must be careful — why be careful when you're saving billions of lives, saving humanity from nuclear disaster and from climate change that will destroy the planet? Go harder at this problem, and five years from now we can set up life on a different planet and stop worrying about climate change.

And then there's the competition argument: China are coming. His sarcastic reply: "Oh, China. Well, all the better. The competition will make us all get there faster. Isn't that wonderful, Stephen?"

The other speaker then pressed the contradiction: if you truly believe this is both an existential threat, and you believe that on the current course it's inevitable, shouldn't you be doing something about it as well?

I can't do anything about it.

Who can do something about it?

No one.

Not Trump?

No. What's Trump going to do?

So, no one can do anything about it.

No. It's going to happen one way or another, and we don't know what that will be like, but there is no solution to that issue. That's why I talked about the spiritual. Nobody knows how AI is going to work out, but I think it's worth operating as if it will. What that means is coming back to what it means to live a meaningful life for as long as you do. And by the way, that's true even without AI: you're going to die, and all of us are going to die very soon. So the question is how you spend the days between today and that day in a way that, when you look back, you feel you did the right thing. I don't remotely manage that every day—I lose my temper, I make mistakes, I say things I shouldn't. But ultimately, the only choice any human being on the planet now has is how to live the time between today and the day you die. That day may come because AI puts you in a robotic choke hold three years from now, or 40 years from now, or 200 years from now because it has to solve all your health problems first. But the question and the answer don't change: what do you do with your life that you think is meaningful and important?

Earlier on, you had more optimism for humanity on climate change—you weren't willing to concede there's nothing we can do.

Because there's a solution. When Steve said we're five seconds from the brick wall, I don't think that's true, but I also think there is an actual solution available that's clear. I'm not saying the technology currently exists to build some kind of clean power station—we don't have that yet—but I believe we can discover it. If you look at human history, I think that's undeniable. AI, by contrast, is completely unprecedented and a different category. The AI issue is a different issue. I am not pessimistic; I am just accepting of the truth of this issue, which is that nobody can stop it and nobody can control it. Ultimately, the only thing you control is what you do when you leave the studio.

Well then, we shall conclude there. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here, and thank you for watching. All these wonderful books, Steve.

Got all of them here. I think there's another one on the way, isn't there? And I've got Constantine's book here.

You've got a nice red one. I like it.

I'm surprised it's not about China, mate—sorry, I keep making all these jokes. But I appreciate your perspective. It's been really eye-opening, especially on the subject of climate change. That was a really productive discussion.

The current book I'm working on, which I hope to finish by the end of this month, is called How Economists Will Destroy Capitalism. Its argument is that economists have completely and utterly misunderstood what climate change actually means, and therefore they've given us predictions about the damage it will do to our economy that are trivial—and so we're doing trivial things to address it.

Fantastic. I hope people read it. And I would just say, I think it's very important that people in the public eye hold their hand up when they say something that's not accurate. In the climate conversation, I obviously took a zero away from the figure—that was my mistake, and I'm glad for the correction. I'll definitely be more careful when I talk about it. I think from the way the rest of the conversation went, we all understood the points we were trying to make, but I'm grateful for that and for the opportunity to correct the record.

Well, people should go listen to your show as well, Trigonometry—I'll link that below. Fantastic show.

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