God Mode: The Technological Battle for Global Domination | Bruno Maçães

In Episode 434 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/god-mode-technology-and-the-new-geopolitics of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Bruno Maçães, a geopolitical strategist and the former Minister of European Affairs for Portugal, whose latest book titled "World Builders" explores the intersection of technology and geopolitics. In the first hour, Bruno puts forward a radical new theory of geopolitics and technology that no longer views the world as a neutral battlefield between great powers to control territory and resources, but rather as a contest in world building that will afford the most powerful states back-doors into all aspects of our lives that they can use to alter the state of the world at any time or place of their choosing. In the second hour, Kofinas and Maçães explore why the United States has ceased building the global order it once championed, paving the way for China to construct a new world according to its own technological standards and ideological blueprints. We discuss what this means for the nature of the international order, individual freedom, the form that governance is likely to take in an increasingly virtualized world, and what is in store for all of us if things remain on their current trajectory and the United States recedes from its world building project, or perhaps, even worse, decides to destroy it entirely. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Joining our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 08/04/2025

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Bruno Massai, a geopolitical strategist and the former Minister of European Affairs for Portugal, whose latest book titled World Builders explores the intersection of technology and geopolitics. In the first hour, Bruno puts forward a radical new theory of geopolitics and technology that no longer views the world as a neutral battlefield between great powers to control

• 0:43Demetri Kofinas?

  territory and resources, but rather as a contest in world building that will afford the most powerful states backdoors into all aspects of our lives that they can use to alter the state of the world at any time or place of their choosing. In the second hour, we explore why the United States has ceased building the global order it once championed, paving the way for China to construct a new world order according to its own technological standards and ideological blueprints. We discuss what this means for the nature of the international order, individual freedom, the form that governance is likely to take in an increasingly virtualized world, and what's in store for all of us if things remain on their current trajectory and the United

• 1:25Demetri Kofinas?

  States recedes from its world building project, or perhaps even worse, decides to destroy it entirely. If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page.

• 2:05Demetri Kofinas?

  If you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this unusually deep and profoundly consequential conversation with my guest, Bruno Massai.

• 2:29Demetri Kofinas?

  Bruno Massai, welcome to Hidden Forces.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  It's a pleasure.

• 2:33Demetri Kofinas?

  I just was working on my Portuguese accent there for a couple of seconds. How did I do?

• 2:38Speaker 01

  It came out like Italian, yeah, but that's pretty good.

• 2:40Demetri Kofinas?

  Really? Well, I used to live and work in Italy, so maybe that's why. But I did get, when I was living in Europe, I did travel to Portugal and I had a wonderful time there and it was unlike anything that I expected it to be. Also, Portuguese Portuguese, the accent of Portuguese from Portugal, it sounds a little bit like Russian almost. Do people say that?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, they say that. I don't think there's any explanation for it. Maybe it's just an odd coincidence. The way we speak, the sounds are very closed, so it almost sounds Slavic, but there's also the "sh" sound, which is common to both. I think it's just an odd coincidence. There couldn't be any reasonable explanation for it.

• 3:20Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, so I didn't bring you here to talk about Portuguese, as you know, and as the audience has probably guessed, based on the title of this episode and the introduction. Before we get into the conversation today and the conversation about your latest book, World Builders, just tell me a little bit about you. What's your story? How did you get interested in writing about these topics and what has shaped your perspective on technology and geopolitics?

• 3:41Speaker 01

  I've been writing about a lot of stuff. Next book is about India and it's not about geopolitics. It's about, it's a little bit of politics, but it's a lot about culture. It's a lot about religion. It's a lot about Indian history. So I write about different kinds of stuff. It's not the best career choice, as you probably know. You're supposed to specialize on something. And I guess if I had specialized, I would have specialized on China because I was very successful, I had a very successful book on the Belt and Road. But I want to look at the world as it is. I want to understand the big changes happening. I'm one of those people who thinks that we are in the midst of really, really significant historical changes that happen once every few centuries.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  And it's a pleasure to be a witness to that, but writing is a way to understand it better. So that's the main idea. My biography, you know, I guess...

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Always wanted to write books, always wanted to be an intellectual in the sense of participating in the big debates about where the world is going. I didn't fit in as an academic, so I left. I'm very interested in politics, so I wanted to have some time in politics, particularly foreign policy. But the books, in the end, is what's most important. I want the books to be kind of alive, living books, in the sense that they're full of stories, they're full of travel, and they talk about important things. They may be difficult sometimes, but the topics are topics that should interest everyone. So I'm really very non-academic in my approach.

• 5:15Demetri Kofinas?

  So I'm actually eager to get into the conversation, but one more biographical question, because your biography is actually rather interesting. You were the former Minister of European Affairs for Portugal. How did you get into politics? I mean, what led to that role? And what did the job entail? And what did you learn from it that you've carried over to your writing?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Got a phone call. It happens a lot, get a phone call. You know, I guess a number of people recommended to the Prime Minister and...

• 5:41Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, why is that? What was it about what you were doing before that made you somebody that people would call for a job like that?

• 5:46Speaker 01

  No, no, just people close to him knew me and liked me. I think this is extremely common, by the way. And if you're in a position where you're looking for people, it was also a time when he was looking for a different kind of people, because we had, you know, the eurozone crisis. There was a sense that the business as usual didn't work, let's try to do something different. So you look outside the normal places. And I think if you're a political leader, it happens a lot, that if someone recommends a person to you, you don't necessarily care, but if the name comes up twice or three times, then you're very interested. I mean, I've seen stories of this kind. They are so common that I don't think my case is that different. The job was extremely interesting, because European Affairs is basically the minister

• 6:30Speaker 01

  in government that tries to connect the country to the EU. But you have a kind of oversight, not decision-making oversight, but visibility over pretty much everything the government does, from fisheries to digital policy, to foreign policy, to Ukraine, to... Economics, finance, and you're present in all kinds of meetings. But you don't have power to decide because, let us say, talking about renewables, you know, we have an energy minister for that. But you know what's happening? You have a kind of global visibility over the whole government and the whole, all the policy areas that only the prime minister and this position have. On top of that, you spend a lot of time in Brussels with your counterparts from the other 26 countries. No, I love the job.

• 7:13Demetri Kofinas?

  All right, so let's get into the meat of the conversation, which is about your latest book. So, how does this book, World Builders, fit into or flow from the subjects and ideas you've explored in your previous books? You mentioned one of those, which was Belt and Road. The other books, just for people to know, are The Dawn of Eurasia, Geopolitics for the End Times, for the pandemic, for the climate crisis. And I think the last book you've written is, the other of the four total you've written, is History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America. So what, how does this flow from those books?

• 7:47Speaker 01

  It's more theoretical. The others were more, you know, monographic. They had a topic. You know, they sort of moved around to different things, but this is a general theory of everything. This is a book that, you know, in sort of my ambitious moments, I thought, could help explain pretty much everything, connect the dots. So it brings all the other books together. And he has a theory that is a sort of a very general theory of world politics. Let us say at the level of the clash of civilizations or the end of history, you've got this sort of one very simple view that is supposed to explain everything. In my case, the equivalent to those concepts is world building. And I build it up as a very simple idea

• 8:33Speaker 01

  that you can use to look around the world and try to explain what is happening.

• 8:37Demetri Kofinas?

  So what do you mean by world building and what is the central theory of the book?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Power is a form of world building. Power is world building. You exercise power that by building a world, an artificial, virtual world, increasingly virtual, that others have to inhabit. And because they have to inhabit your world, you can decide the rules, you can change the rules, you can change the state of the world. So my book is a kind of a framework where geopolitics and technology merge. Subtitle is geopolitics and technology, but you know, there's a bit of a wordplay and I went to the reader because they pretty much mean the same thing in the book.

• 9:13Demetri Kofinas?

  All right. So let me tell you what I came away with from reading this book. And then that'll be a useful opportunity, one for you and for the listeners to understand where I'm coming from. And then for you to either validate that view or correct me where I maybe misunderstood it. So it seems to me that the book is a commentary of three different ideas. One is an exploration of what some might crudely refer to as ideological competition between superpowers, but which if I were to be more specific, is more like a critical look into memetic architectures that exert organizational influence over people's lives and that serve as conduits for power and that we are currently living through a competition

• 9:55Demetri Kofinas?

  between who gets to decide that architectural code. And in some senses, it is a quite literal code, a digital code, but it is obviously greater than that, which is why I brought up the point about ideological competition. So that's one category and I'm very interested in exploring that. Another topic of exploration is a contemplation about the sustainability of life when we no longer live in accordance with nature or nature's laws. And much of that has to do with climate change, but not only climate change. And the last is a reflection on the nature of reality, how our perceptions of the world and ourselves are shaped by our minds and how our minds perceptions are being actively shaped and reshaped by digital technologies.

• 10:37Demetri Kofinas?

  And the central argument that emerges, at least to me, is that we increasingly live in social realities created by intelligences. The latest frontier is artificial intelligence, but I just mean non-random patterns that emerge as a result of intelligence acting upon the world, again, conduits for power, and that some sort of emergent source of power exerts influence over the parameters by which social reality is constructed and in so doing exercises invisible control over our lives. And to me, there are two fundamental questions that emerge from the book as a result of this sort of exploration. And that is, what type of world do we want to live in? What type of world do we want to build? And who gets to decide?

• 11:21Demetri Kofinas?

  So I'm curious, what is missing from that framing? How well does that encapsulate what you were attempting to do with the book? And what can you fill in there for me and for our listeners? Then I have lots of pointed questions for you.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  It's not a bad summary. It's pretty good. I just sort of add a couple of qualifications or corrections or additions. First, you emphasize a lot perceptions and a lot of readers, reviewers, even a couple of the people who wrote the blurbs, talk about this. I don't think the book is about perceptions. The book is about reality. But you also added reality later on. So it's about building reality. It's why it's called World Builders. Otherwise, it could be called Soft Power if you're building perceptions, if you're building minds. But that's not what the book is about. And I think the idea of soft power is fundamentally wrong because it just doesn't go far enough at all. Superpowers are building the world. They are not building perceptions inside our mind, and that's why they're superpowers.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  And the second thing is, it's true to some extent, the two goals you mentioned, what kind of world we want to build and who builds it. But I think this book in particular is essentially about the second question. I could very easily try to write another book, which History Ours Began talks about, about is this a good kind of world? Do we want to live in virtual worlds? What are the human virtues that disappear when we migrate to virtual worlds? And what are the human virtues or the human good that emerges only in virtual worlds? I'm very interested in this, but with the exception of a few pages here and there, I don't think this book is about that. So this book is still about geopolitics. But maybe in the future, I'll write a book about worlds more specifically and what they

• 13:02Speaker 01

  mean for humanity.

• 13:03Demetri Kofinas?

  I feel like the main challenge of this conversation is going to be how to avoid it becoming recondite and exhausting the listener's attention span by pursuing all sorts of what I think are very interesting ideas, but ones that may not ultimately lead anywhere concrete or help to build a more navigatable narrative structure that leaves us with more clarity by the time this conversation is over. So. I just want to proceed with that cautionary note in mind. Let me see if I can. Well, actually, let me first address your comment about this distinction that I drew earlier between perception and reality and how it factors into my own understanding of the main argument that you put forward in the book.

• 13:46Demetri Kofinas?

  We've done many episodes on this podcast exploring the mind-body problem and questions about the nature of reality, going back to the very early days of the show. And David Chalmers, who you mentioned in your book, is someone whose ideas, including his formulation of the hard problem of consciousness, had a profound influence on me as a young man. And I had him on the show to discuss the topic of his most recent book, Reality Plus, which is a book about virtual worlds, whether such worlds are more or less real than the analog world that we're born into, and whether we can live meaningful lives in virtual spaces, which is itself an invitation to come to certain normative judgments about whether one particular world is better or worse than another.

• 14:29Demetri Kofinas?

  And I must say that I was a bit disheartened by David's view on this, which was that he didn't seem to think that it really mattered all that much. He seemed to take the approach that, well, what does it really matter, whether the world is a computer simulation or not? But I think it does matter, which is perhaps another invitation to a discussion about what type of world we want to build, but maybe that's something that we can talk about later. So in the interest of building a useful framework here, let's go right into the geopolitics. And in so doing, I'm sure we'll have plenty of opportunities to play with some of these larger philosophical ideas. I think one of the central geopolitical arguments that you make in the book is that

• 15:12Demetri Kofinas?

  we're moving from an American-led century to a Chinese-led one. You don't say that deterministically. You don't present it as an inevitability. But this is the direction that you seem to feel the world is moving towards, primarily because the United States seems to have given up its empire-building project and is experiencing a kind of heat death. And the Chinese seem to be more than happy to pick up the pieces and pursue a world-building project of their own over what is and was the American sphere of influence.

• 15:43Demetri Kofinas?

  And what follows from this, I think, this primary argument, is a secondary one, that we are also moving from a period of enlightened American beneficence to imperial belligerence, where the tools of American soft power that have been used to craft an inclusive world that other states and peoples were encouraged to join are now being increasingly replaced by the hard power of proxy wars and overt military threats. And I have to say that this is a view that deeply resonates with me. I mean, I think I've talked about this on the show often, that I think the Iraq War was the beginning of this move. This move away from inclusivity and world building toward a more overt form of empire,

• 16:27Demetri Kofinas?

  where we rejected the legitimacy of international institutions and were willing to go it alone and build new tactical coalitions that could rubber stamp whatever policy we wanted to pursue in the moment. Is this one of your central arguments, that the belief structures, the memetic architectures that have long supported the soft power of American empire are indeed crumbling, and that what we're experiencing is a move toward a more overt phase of American imperial domination and power?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much. You know, I think that's what Trump is all about. So there's an idea behind Trump. It's a very simple idea. It's this transformation of American power from a structural kind of power that builds systems and builds worlds into a direct, physical kind of power, where you just exert coercion or blackmail or the forms of direct power over your interlocutor. And there's nothing else about Trump. And this explains everything about Trump. So that's true, and we can talk a lot more about that. I don't think the book defends that China will replace the US for a very simple reason, because I look at these things as a kind of a game. In fact, the book at some point, three years ago, was going to be called World Game, and then I realized that the real game is happening at a higher level.

• 17:42Demetri Kofinas?

  I think you might have been better off calling it God Mode.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Oh, I wanted to call it God Mode. That was my favorite title, but the publisher and I agreed reluctantly said that it would find its way into the religion spirituality shelves in bookshops.

• 17:55Demetri Kofinas?

  That would have been a shame because I think that that really, first of all, there's nothing wrong with the title of the book. It's great and the book is great, but that I was working and playing with titles for this episode and I kept coming back to God Mode.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  That was always my title and I insisted a lot with the publisher, but you know, it was a good argument he had there, you know? It is logistics. It is what it is. Logistics is important. But anyway, there's a game. Of course, God Mode in a game is where geopolitical power is exercised. God Mode is geopolitical power because it's, it's the power to change the state of the world. It's the power to mold reality. It's a power to mold the earth. But it is a game and so if it is a game, you know, I've now returned to watching tennis compulsively, which I used to do in my teenage years and I stopped. So I was watching almost all of Wimbledon, also recovering from a surgery. You know, you're watching a game. You have a certain inclination where things are going, but you know, just the last roll on the rose, it's suddenly turned in the middle. And this applies very straightforwardly to geopolitics.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  So if you ask me where things stand now, it is true that US is not going through a good spell and you see evidence of that everywhere, even when it comes to the dollar and other instruments of American structural power. In my opinion, I know it's a topic you're very interested in, but things could change and could change rather rapidly. And I always point this out, we don't have the same kind of visibility over what is happening in China that what is happening over the US. So I always, you know, I lived in China. I think I have as good a visibility as it's possible to have, but it's not the same levels of transparency there. So things could be worse than I think they are and we have to keep an open mind. You know, I don't understand this determinism where all these books, the new American century,

• 19:33Speaker 01

  the Asian century, the Chinese century, that's not the best way to analyze these things.

• 19:40Demetri Kofinas?

  Okay, so again, trying to think about where I want to go most carefully. Just one quick question. Do you think that Trump's decisions and this sort of reemergent American isolationism reflects American decline, as some people think? Or does it rather reflect a strategic calculation on the part of the United States about the best way to maintain hegemony, or to maintain its power?

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question. I love, by the way, the way you're quite meta about these things. You don't just interview people, but you're always thinking about how the best way to interview, and we don't get enough about that. You know, people just follow the instincts or something, but obviously, the important thing is to think how we're gonna address these things. So very willing to go along with that. So there could be two possibilities. There's a system, there's an American world, there's a set of structures that have been built over decades, or perhaps even more than decades, since 1870, when they started to be built. And you could conclude, as the American president or the American public, that they're not working anymore. And you could try to rebuild them, and then we'd have the world rebuilder or something. World rebuilding, on new basis, stronger basis. I just don't think that's what Trump is doing.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  And by the way, that kind of approach seems completely missing from the American discussion and the American political landscape. There's no one saying that. You either have people that are extremely conservative, and don't think anything needs to be changed, sort of the establishment, or then you have people like Trump, they want to stop playing the game entirely, or play a different kind of game, but not world building, as I call it. And so you don't have that approach of trying to do the same that US did in the past, but on different bases, because the times have changed. You have the US really turning against the very concept of a structure, the very concept of a kind of a system. These are not system builders.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  I think Trump himself, the way his mind work, is incapable of understanding any abstract concept. It always strikes me when I listen to him, he doesn't even understand such basic concepts as the economy.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Or the market. This doesn't work for him. For him, there are companies and CEOs.

• 21:48Demetri Kofinas?

  That's so interesting.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  But he doesn't have abstract concepts, let alone an extremely difficult abstract concept as the world system or world order, which is unintelligible to him.

• 21:58Demetri Kofinas?

  I have to really reflect on that. It rings very true, I must say. He's also very animalistic in the way that he thinks. And he does seem to be a rather linear thinker. I don't know, that's something I have to think about. So let me ask you something else. Actually, let me quote from your book. So there are many quotable passages in the book. One that I think is surprisingly good, and I say surprisingly because it's so simple, that I think someone could so easily gloss over it, is the following. You write, quote, "A built world starts to decay the moment you stop building." I like this for so many reasons. First of all, I think there is this, certainly in American politics today, a tendency to think that we can return to some more natural equilibrium,

• 22:41Demetri Kofinas?

  some more natural state wherein we can collect the peace dividend of the post-Cold War era without bearing the costs associated with order building. And I think it speaks to this longing. The other thing I really like about it is that it speaks to an observation that I made earlier, which is that I think the generative energies of American empire building seem to have reached either a cyclical or structural state of exhaustion. And I think we underestimate the extent to which the world as it exists today is a world that we have built. And that absent our participation, someone else, and this is the important point again, because there is no natural state,

• 23:24Demetri Kofinas?

  there is no equilibrium, someone else will invariably have to build it. And that's where I think the word "soft power" is applicable in this framework, and that it has been a net positive force, not only for improving the American way of life, but for much of the world as well. Does that articulation, does anything in that articulation resonate with you? And what are the sort of important questions that you think emerge from this observation?

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Well, if I argue, we live increasingly, but this is a process that's been going on for centuries, its inner structure of modernity of modern societies. If we live in virtual worlds, and modern societies are to a greater or lesser extent virtual, then the task of building has to be permanent. These worlds have no subsistence or substance on their own. So this is an important lesson. I don't remember the context. Thankfully, I'm starting to forget the book, which took me a few months. I used to know every single passage and where it appears. So I don't remember the context, but that's the main point. And obviously, it has consequences. This idea of the end of history is absurd from this point of view, because you're never in a state of rest.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  You always have to be building, and these worlds simply disaggregate. And I think you see today that US has stopped building. It no longer has the mentality of a builder. China, on the other hand, and this is, I think, where I do suggest that China is in a better place right now. What is significant about China is this full focus and attention and investment in the task of building. You could think, for example, and this has happened many times before in history, that China would be focusing entirely on building a very powerful army.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  But I think they have doubts, and very reasonable doubts, about this kind of strategy. Because even if you build a very powerful army, in a world with nuclear weapons, you'd essentially be preparing for a thermonuclear war with the United States to decide who rules the world. And a thermonuclear war between China and the United States is fundamentally inconceivable, and it's certainly not a good strategy to become an hegemonic power. So they invest more. Obviously, you have to be prepared, you have to have a strong army, but they're investing more in what I call world building. Infrastructure, technology, influence, networks of influence, even new sources of energy that will replace the existing sources of energy.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  And you'd never see China waver from this path, even though it became a lot more difficult, let us say, around... 2017 because the US started to try to block those efforts. They have tried to work around those difficulties and they have never deviated. I think this is what Xi Jinping believes in more than anything else. That it's through the technological task of world building that you become a leading power. I think is fundamentally correct about that. I've even come to believe that scholars are wrong when they think that hegemonic transitions, transition from one hegemonic power to another, happened through war. I think they don't happen through war.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  They more likely than not happened through the inauguration of new energy systems. I think that's what happened with the United Kingdom in the 18th century and what happened with the US at the turn of the 20th century. And so China is trying to do the same, trying to replicate what the US and Britain did in the past.

• 26:50Demetri Kofinas?

  Okay, so there's another great quote that emerges in the book that speaks directly to what you just said. And you wrote, "China conceives of its world building project as something assembled piece by piece. It will be finished when it is ready to be turned on and start operating at full power." I love that quote, by the way, that resonates with so much of what I've learned over the years studying how China goes about methodically building its version of China's, either a Chinese-dominated sphere or an influenced sphere. How would you explain China's approach and vision for building this new sort of global technological future that is fundamentally different from the American or Western one

• 27:28Demetri Kofinas?

  that we have been living, at least in the West, under for the last three generations?

• 27:36Speaker 01

  So, you know, for China, if you ask a Chinese author or intellectual, they'll tell you the predominant value is harmony. And harmony doesn't mean what we think it means in the West. It doesn't mean this sort of peaceful existence. It means something closer to what we would call synergy.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Or system, it's the idea that every part works better and magnifies its power if it's integrated into a global system. Then you have synergies at work. And this is what China is trying to do, to build a system where each part is for the sake of the whole and therefore is magnified in its efficiency and influence. They're doing this in different ways, but they're not that strange. You know, the more I studied China, the more I realized it's essentially what the United States did in those decades from 1870 to the Second World War. Create new energy sources, create new trade patterns, potentially create a new currency or a new currency system.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Influence ideas, essentially try to build a world and try to invite everyone else to join your world. This invitation is not necessarily coercive. It can have some coercive elements. You can tell people that you either join or you don't get this. But there's an element of offering other countries more possibilities that they would have outside the Chinese system. That's happening as we speak, right? Particularly when it comes to energy. Let's look at Pakistan. You know, China offered Pakistan two things that are very difficult to resist. When Pakistan started having trouble buying LNG because Europe was sucking in all the LNG that was available, some LNG carriers actually had to turn around when they were

• 29:21Speaker 01

  docking in Karachi and go to Europe a couple of years ago. They asked China to provide them with solar panels and now Pakistan is one of the eight leading countries when it comes to solar. And of course, these airplanes, they were so important in the war against India a few months ago. So this is how China works. You offer possibilities to other countries that they won't have outside your system and slowly you draw them in. But this is what the US did, right? When it created the American world a century ago.

• 29:50Demetri Kofinas?

  Okay, so let's try to draw out a distinction between what America did a century ago and what the Chinese are doing today, because I went into this book not really seeing a big difference. And still, it took a little bit of time for you to convince me while I was reading it that there is a difference. And that difference, it seems to me, is around technology. That while previous orders were focused much more on either acquiring land and resources, or in the case of the Americans, building a panoply of international institutions and normative standards, including the spread of our political economic model, the Chinese have an opportunity to oversee the build-out of a new set of technological standards for

• 30:30Demetri Kofinas?

  a suite of technologies that threaten to subsume reality in a way that no previous ideologies or memetic superstructures were capable of. And that we go from a world where these systems of power operate in a manner that is covert, to one where they become completely invisible. So it's not necessarily a distinction in kind, but in degree, and the degree is significant. So how would you articulate this argument that you make in the book about how geopolitical power and competition have shifted from these traditional struggles over physical territories and natural resources and ideologies, toward a contest to control these critical technologies

• 31:13Demetri Kofinas?

  of modernity and the virtual landscapes that derive from them?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  The more virtual the world you're building is, the greater your power. Because after all, reality is an obstacle to the power you want to exert. So the more you get rid of reality, the more power you have. In the book, I try to present what would be the final stage of this process, and I actually think it's AI. By the way, people think AI is about intelligence, because it seems much more about a virtual world, that what AI does is to build a virtual world. There's a couple of essays we can link, if you do that, that have emphasized this. I think we're seeing it more and more, that AI essentially now creates a sort of bubble that you inhabit, which is extremely dangerous, by the way,

• 32:00Speaker 01

  because this is a bubble that is meant to explore and incentivize your narcissism, that offers you your own version of reality. But at the geopolitical level, it's also extremely powerful. Because if we imagine that one of these language models becomes universal and starts to be implemented everywhere, from, for example, central banks, to schools, to advertising, to public policy, then the biases that are introduced into this model, and are always there, are going to determine how people think about reality, and they will take it as reality. I saw a couple of days ago, or yesterday, that the Swedish prime minister is now using one of these language models, probably ChatGPT, to help him think about policy.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  You know, thankfully, he's not making policy alone. But if you were making policy alone, and in some countries that may be the case, you could say this AI model is already ruling Germany. Because, you know, if he asks, if I do this, will it create inflation? And the model says, yes, he won't do it. So this is essentially the point where reality has been replaced by a model.

• 33:06Demetri Kofinas?

  Okay, so this wasn't where I was going with this line of inquiry, but I do want to ask this question. And then maybe we'll find our way back into the geopolitical aspect of the discussion. And the question has to do with how people use these models. So, for example, I actually have started using ChatGPT to speak to ahead of an interview. This actually started, listeners know I talked about this. It started because I did an episode with the head of Millet's Doge department. And there were no good books. I mean, there was one good book that I had read years ago on the Argentine economy. It was focused very much on the bankruptcy in the early 2000s. But there was no good book in English that I could find on the Argentine economy and the history of Argentine politics. So I took a bunch of these books that were available. I asked ChatGPT, what books would you recommend that I read? It gave me a bunch of books that were in Spanish.

• 33:51Demetri Kofinas?

  I then fed those to ChatGPT, and we talked about the books. And it was incredibly helpful. And I was able to draw on my own knowledge and my own ability to ask questions. And so I actually find it very useful. I don't find it useful as a source of canonical truth. So is your, do you believe that what's going to end up happening is that, like so many other technologies, just like Google Maps, for instance, or reviews on the internet, that we will eventually just come to default, take whatever answers?

• 34:21Demetri Kofinas?

  This software provides us and that we will cease to think critically ourselves. Is that sort of where you think this is all going?

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, first thing you have to realize, these models are virtual reality simulators. That's what they are. In a virtual reality simulator, you're flying an airplane and you hit the commands or you turn right or left and the model responds to your prompts in a simulator, right? A headset, a virtual reality headset. And with the model, it's the same thing. Your prompts are, what do you think Millie is going to do about inflation if this or that happens? That's equivalent to a prompt in a virtual reality headset.

• 34:56Demetri Kofinas?

  What's interesting about that, just to add quickly to what you're saying, is that it isn't just true for instances where the model is prompted to theorize about something that hasn't happened. It's also true in cases where the answer should be readily apparent. And it's the same reason why these models hallucinate, because when you prompt them with a question, what they're doing is providing you with an answer based on their understanding of the statistical structure of the corpus of data that they've been exposed to and the rules that they've intuited from that data. It isn't that they know what the answer is, it's that they're modeling in real time what they think makes sense statistically.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  They build a model which is virtual and it can approach very closely to the world we know, which by the way, has been built by our brain, but it's never the same. And that's why you're always going to have hallucinations. It's not possible not to have hallucinations because this is a simulator. And a simulator always has possibilities that are not present in the physical world because the physical world is not a simulator. And you know, in the book, I give the example of, you know, a Taylor Swift song about Shakespeare or a Shakespeare sonnet about Taylor Swift. It's very close to our world, it's just mixing a couple of things. People like this freedom that the model gives them, but again, this is not intelligence. This is simulation and that's what people like, the ability to simulate. But obviously, I'm very worried that you take these things for reality.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  You take them for truth when in fact they are simulation. So that's, I think, the problem. And then there's a second problem. You know, as I told at the beginning, I'm more concerned with the second than with the first. The first would be for a different book. Who built the model and according to which specifications and according to which biases? I think this is going to be the fundamental question, of course, because the superpowers will be there sooner or later, if not there already. Okay, DeepSeek was not built by the Chinese Communist Party because it's still too early. By the way, first you want DeepSeek to become accepted worldwide and you make it open source without biases. I asked DeepSeek, "What's the most evil country in the world?" Do you know the answer? It may have changed now, but when I asked it.

• 36:56Demetri Kofinas?

  What, the United States?

• 36:57Speaker 01

  No, Russia. Yeah, because of course the data comes from mostly the internet as we develop it in the West. But, you know, one time in the future, this can be very easily tweaked. And this will be the world we'll be inhabiting inside these models. I just wish, you know, we're talking about artificial general intelligence, that we'll be talking about an entirely virtual world. That's a different acronym, but that's what we're trying to do here. And it's very geopolitical in its nature.

• 37:22Demetri Kofinas?

  Okay, so this is probably a good opportunity to bring up the work of Walter Riston, who I wasn't familiar with until you mentioned him in your book, as well as a particular book that he wrote in 1991, which, you know, is an interesting day to reflect on in light of your earlier allusion to Francis Fukuyama's article, "The End of History," that was published in 1989, also around that same time in anticipation of the collapse of communism. Is that your view that we stopped building after the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union? Was that when the United States really stopped engaging in world-building, in your view? Or is that when the generative energies of American order-building began to peter out towards the end of the 1990s?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  It could be. I think I have a kind of a different narrative that what did it was China's rise. China's rise convinced the US that the current model that was built by the US is not working. And so convinced, unfortunately, from an American perspective, it convinced pretty much everyone that it was better just to destroy, to dismantle it, and to go back to a physical world of power, let us say, rather than rebuilding on different bases, for example, could be an alternative. Or, you know, keep playing in the same model. Sooner or later, we'll come out on top. After all, we built it. That could also be an approach that I don't think would be deranged. Makes some sense, and this is what the American establishment argues all the time. "Let's keep playing the same game. We'll win in the end."

• 38:50Speaker 01

  But most people, and Trump took advantage of this, just said, "We're losing. If we keep playing this game, we're losing." So I don't think it came out of triumphalism, it actually came out of fear. Fukuyama, you know, I don't like his book. By the way, he didn't write a blurb for me once, saying that he only writes blurb for close friends. So I guess I can also criticize him publicly. The book is very confusing, because he argues that, you know, history is coming to an end. We've all agreed on this model. And then in the last page, he says, "Maybe not. Maybe everyone will be so bored that history will continue." Out of boredom, you create history to fight your boredom. Obviously, that's not what's happening at all. If you look, it's not that people in America are bored. They, in my opinion, are full of fear, anxiety, and hatred.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  These are opposite passions. There's a sense that the world is not working anymore, that we're losing, someone else is winning. This is not boredom coming out of triumphalism. So I think, I guess I would disagree, because this line of thinking would take us in the opposite direction from what I want. In the book, you know, I talk a little bit about how we got to this point, and I think it's China's rise. There are other factors, but China's rise is really quite important. Immigration, but immigration is the same dynamic. Suddenly immigrants are coming in, and rather than wanting to integrate, they have lost faith in our values, Western or American, and so they want to have a little more money than they can have in Pakistan, or Egypt, or Sudan, but they want to live according

• 40:19Speaker 01

  to their own values. But it's the same dynamic, makes people in the West very anxious, very doubtful, very afraid, and it's fear that is driving this. And then Trump just says, "Okay, let's destroy this whole thing, throw the chessboard into the air. We have more power, we have a more powerful army, we're gonna play the game on different terms now, not according to the rules that we built, but according to a sort of direct clash between the power we have and the power everyone else has." I think this is gonna be extremely destructive, although at first it works very well. In the first few months or years, it works very well, because you do have an imbalance of power. But at the same time, you're completely undermining this imbalance of power, the sources of your own power, and soon enough, it will stop working.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  That's my firm belief, at least.

• 41:05Demetri Kofinas?

  That's interesting. I think I agree. I think I agree that China may be a good origin point for thinking about when we stopped building, but I'm not sure that 2016 is the date where I would choose to start the clock. But I do distinctly remember in the early 2000s that this, there was this operating assumption that people seemed to have that had entered the popular discourse. And you could even see it in films where people ran with this idea that the future was going to be Chinese, that China was the future. And there was a kind of broad acceptance of this assumption within certain circles in American society, specifically, I think, in the commanding heights of American financial

• 41:48Demetri Kofinas?

  and cultural power, any areas really where people were making money as a result of the world that had come into being after the fall of the USSR. So I remember that there was this movie called Loopers. I don't remember exactly when it came out, like 2012, I think, or something like that. And, and by the way, there's just one example. I mean, there are many instances where I recall seeing things like this referenced in film, but Jeff Daniels' character in the film, and one of the loopers, and I'm not going to get into like what these loopers were, what they did, but this particular looper, the protagonist of the film, was studying French. And Jeff Daniels' character says to him, "Don't learn French, learn Mandarin."

• 42:29Demetri Kofinas?

  And the looper goes, "Yeah, I like French. I'm going to learn French." And Daniels then forcefully responds and says, "Trust me. I've been to the future. Learn Mandarin." And this, this was the message that was being delivered, that I feel like we were being told, which was, you know, "Shut up and accept it. This is an inevitability." And so on that front, I do think that it was healthy to reject this, what was an entirely artificial framing about the inevitability of Chinese cultural and economic domination.

• 43:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What I would agree with is that the way Trump and his coalition have gone about rejecting it by simply destroying what it is and not offering to build something new is the wrong way of going about this.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, because in the end, there's no natural world where the competition can take place. If you're destroying the world as it exists now, there will be a period of chaos where we live among ruins and then someone else will build something else. So I think it's fundamentally mistaken. I have a slightly different reading of that process. By the way, the book took its inspiration from this sentence that I kept hearing in Washington. You write about that part, that we're going to live in a Chinese world. It wasn't a Chinese century, which is a sort of a more intelligible expression, but when people said a Chinese world, I started thinking, well, it's an interesting expression, a Chinese world, and do we live in an American world? And let's try to take this literally, Chinese world and American world, where will that take us? And that's how the book started, in fact, in my mind.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  But I think, and you know, I think I have a very personal experience of this because around 2017, 18, I was writing about China. I was going to a lot of think tank meetings in Washington to talk about this. People loved it when I said that, maybe I said it even more than now, that we're heading towards a Chinese world or Chinese century. But they liked this idea because they regarded it as a wake up call. And so they thought it was healthy. And so even conservative think tanks would love to hear about this. But they never took it seriously as an actual prediction about the future. Again, it had the functional role of waking people up, but there was always the confidence that once we wake up, and inevitably we will, the question was always about whether to

• 44:43Speaker 01

  wake up in 2017 or are we only going to wake up in 2024? And we want to wake up early. But there was always the full confidence that once we wake up, China won't stand a chance. I think the really traumatizing moment happens, and it may be quite recent. For some people, it may even be the last six months. When the US starts to realize that its levers are not working well anymore, and there aren't that many levers left in the cupboard, and maybe we can't stop this. This is the real trauma. It's very different from the moment you're describing a decade ago or fifteen years ago, where it was just a wake-up call. But when Trump kind of goes full steam ahead in this economic war against China, and then has to backtrack, I think the consequences of this, you know, I've said on some podcasts or interviews already

• 45:28Speaker 01

  that I think twenty, thirty years from now, that moment is going to be regarded as extremely important.

• 45:33Demetri Kofinas?

  Which moment specifically?

• 45:35Speaker 01

  The moment when Trump, you know, we could even give it a specific day if we go and look. The moment when Trump realized that he can't do that, and he had to take back the tariffs and start negotiating with China and bring those tariffs down because of two things. First, people start telling him that the supermarket shelves are going to be empty, that Christmas is going to be over, that inflation is going to go through the roof. That's number one. Number two, the rare earths and the impact on the auto industry and perhaps military industry and so on. And so he has to, of course, Trump is very good at this. It's sort of hiding his backtracking. But it was very clear. And I think not only will historians talk about it a lot, but also I think people around the world noticed. And it was a real moment of affirmation for China.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  And I think Xi Jinping, actually, this time around, I'm not a big fan of Xi Jinping's strategic genius, but I think this time around, he played his cards very well. He knew that he was waiting for the moment where, you know, it's very dangerous for a superpower to bluff. And the US had been bluffing for many years. And this is the moment when China decided to call the bluff. And I think, you know, the call was heard around the world. China's call of America's bluff. So it was a really important moment, more important than anything else that's happened in the past six months than the Israel-Iran war or so on, in my opinion. I do this a lot. I try to project myself twenty years from now and see how people would look back. I think it was a really important moment. Because running out of levers, running out of tools, it's a moment of real anxiety or even panic, if you want to call it.

• 47:03Demetri Kofinas?

  So maybe we'll have a chance in the second hour, Bruno, to sort of explore more of what you think the world will look like 20 to 30 years from now. That'd be an interesting conversation. But let's go back to Walter Ristin, who I mentioned earlier, that got us detracted into a conversation about Francis Fukuyama and the end of history in the 1990s of when did we stop building? And Walter wrote this book called The Twilight of Sovereignty, which he published in 1991, in which he argued that, quote, "No one is in control of the new technologies that were coming to force during that time, and that the new system that was coming into being was not one built by states, but by the technology itself." What do you think he meant by that? And how does that view differ from what you're proposing about the present moment?

• 47:48Speaker 01

  So what's odd about these books, like this one, but others that were published in the 80s? And I'm now old enough to kind of remember a little bit of the late 80s. You know, a book like this, back then, would have been regarded as so obvious that maybe people would criticize. The book is very smart, clever, well-written. So it would always not be that criticized. There were worse books. But criticized for saying the obvious. And now, 30 years later, you actually have to make an effort, because the idea sounds so odd, that you have to make a real effort to try to understand it.

• 48:19Demetri Kofinas?

  What is the idea? Can you enunciate that, please?

• 48:21Speaker 01

  The idea is that power is disappearing. For example, sovereign power, the power of states. And so this was obvious back then. I remember it. And now, it's just so odd, so weird that someone would say this, that you have to make an effort. But what exactly is he saying? And you know, as far as I can tell, what he's saying is, when you have a knowledge economy, and sort of not the cliched knowledge economy, but a real knowledge economy where everything is knowledge because of microchips. Microchips are knowledge, and microchips are everywhere. That's his argument. Once you have this kind of knowledge economy in a very literal sense, states can no longer control it. Knowledge flows. There are these virtual worlds being built. He talks a lot about that. And virtual worlds have no connection to territory.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  And that means two things. First, states can't control these worlds anymore, because they exist above territorial borders. And second, because territorial borders don't matter anymore. Was the source of conflict and state power. There won't be any conflict or state power anymore. States will be want to be open to knowledge. And so on and so forth, you know, this is kind of the constellation of ideas, which now has to be reconstructed. Because we no longer have intuitive, natural access to this way of thinking. Things have changed so dramatically in thirty years, this is almost become a foreign way of thinking. I'm like trying to interpret the Aztec language and the Aztec way of life. I mean, it is striking. But that's, I think, what he means, and this turned out to be completely wrong. And it turned out to be completely wrong because of the problem of world building.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Because he's correct that these virtual worlds exist, but he forgot. Unfortunately, you know, it was not the time to realize this, he forgot that the worlds have to be built. And they are built by someone, and once they are built by someone, that someone has enormous powers over the worlds. That were built, and so I think I think I say in the book that my book follows very naturally from Walter Riston's book. It's almost like a second part, if you regard it as. An evolution in time, this is where we were, but now, look, there's an element that wasn't talked about, and this will take us in a different direction.

• 50:21Demetri Kofinas?

  So before I move us to the second hour, Bruno, let's try and tie off one loose thread. And directly address the contest between these two competing visions. That we've been talking about the Chinese vision of the future and the American vision, which. Isn't entirely clear anymore like what that even is, and I think part of the the problem that we have. Is that we don't even know who we are anymore, feels like. America is in this place right now where we're grappling with trying to answer that more fundamental question. And until we do that, we can't really put forward a larger vision of how we want the world to look or what type of world we want to build. And I don't think that. We're even aware that there is an ideological competition underway, I mean.

• 51:07Demetri Kofinas?

  We were very conscious and attuned to the contours of the ideological competition between the US and the Soviet Union. During the period of the Cold War, we understood that both sides were proponents of a radically different. Political and economic model. And that we were both trying to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the world and. Build an order around those values and beliefs. But there isn't anything similar happening today in the public discourse, and in fact, I feel like if anything. America is becoming more like China, not in terms of its economic model, but in terms of its totalitarian tendencies. I mean, anyone arriving from an overseas flight who has to pass through American immigration can attest to this. And it's not, you know, something that just happened in the last few years.

• 51:51Demetri Kofinas?

  This move toward trampling on civil liberties and becoming more of a surveillance state has transpired over the course of several decades since, I think, at least 9/11. So are these competing visions, to the extent, again, that we can put a temporary placeholder on the American vision that leans on what we would have traditionally called a liberal order? Are these visions inherently conflictual? Or are they actually, in fact, potentially complementary at this point?

• 52:18Speaker 01

  They are rival models. I don't believe in the clash of civilizations. I believe in kind of the growth of civilizations. The one grows, the other declines or shrinks and so on. This is my model. I think they represent different civilizations. We can try to look at the differences. What I think is true is that the US, as you said, doesn't know very well what it represents anymore. I think this is what reduces the ideological or the civilizational conflict, because if you don't know very clearly what it stands for, that conflict will be reduced, but not for the good reasons, simply because you actually don't know what you're representing. Allow me a little diatribe against the US. It won't take long, but along the lines of what you're saying. I'd like someone to try to use software, to have like a word count used by American officials. It seems to me that all the verbs are negative.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  It's like contain, stop, reduce, and so on, applied to China, but not only to China. But you have almost no positive verbs of build, construct, create, develop. They don't appear in any speech. It's almost now become normal that you're going to have a speech about containing, stopping, reducing, slowing. It's asphyxiating. And second, the amount of fear you see in America. Last time I went to the US, a couple of months ago, yes, the immigration is a little different from what it used to be. I said at one point, I'm a writer, and I immediately regretted it because now I'm going to have to explain what I write about. But anyway, when I was studying in the US 20 years ago, I once crossed with a bag full of Spinoza books, and that also created a problem. So that is not a recent thing. What is a recent thing, though?

• 53:48Speaker 01

  And they wanted to know who Spinoza was, so I gave a 20-minute talk about Spinoza. But what is very recent is this: I was at a dinner at an embassy, a European country in the US, we're talking about Exet, the Defense Secretary, and a former Pentagon official that is already retired, and so I guess he felt free, he insulted Exet, like many people do, in Washington. Everyone around the table, mostly kind of current Trump officials, think tankers, started looking at their shoes, and I could sense these people, they don't want to agree or disagree, they don't want to be here, because they don't want this conversation to be reported, and to be reported that they were there. Because whether it's going to be reported that they defended Exet is very contingent, might be or might not be.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  So they just don't want their name to appear in a conversation of this kind. This is exactly my experience in China when I lived there. Also, people are very uncomfortable with these things, and they start to look at their shoes. I don't think this is convergence of models, this is just a kind of disaggregation of American liberalism, that I think comes out of fear, anxiety about losing the global competition. You feel that rules and laws are too soft, they don't work anymore, we need strong power, executive power, and I think that's where it's coming from, honestly. I think there's a turn towards authoritarianism that, in my view, comes out of a sense that in order to fight China and all the other threats, that we need these strong tools.

• 55:11Demetri Kofinas?

  That's interesting. I don't know, I mean, some of that definitely resonates with me, but we've seen a growth in executive power and a trampling of the Constitution, going back to, well, I mean, I feel like we've gone through cycles of executive power waxing and waning since the founding of the republic, going at least all the way back to the Alienous Seditions Acts. But executive power has certainly been on a supercharged growth trajectory since at least FDR's administration, and I think the overall trend has been one of growing executive power. I mean, I remember, and this is a bit of a sort of segue, but... I remember when George W. Bush made a comment early in his first term about how

• 55:56Demetri Kofinas?

  he wished that he were a dictator because everything would be a lot easier. And of course, he laughed when he said it because it wasn't something that even he could seriously contemplate. And I feel like we've gone from presidents wishing that they could do something like that to now giving into those desires and dispensing with any sort of constitutional processes and cultural conventions that have traditionally constrained the office in favor of just getting things done, you know, expediency and the growth of personal power. So a kind of like unrestrained wish fantasy of executive primacy. And what's especially concerning is that no one seems willing or prepared to stop it.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  How wide executive power is was always an open question in the American tradition, and it varied, as you said. But, you know, there were limits, there were borders. The area could be very wide, but it was ultimately constrained, and so you could decide what the area is. Now, it's a completely different situation. A couple of days ago, there was this insane moment connected to this in an interview with Trump where the interviewer asked him whether Diddy is gonna be, is it Diddy, they're gonna be pardoned or not? And, yeah, whatever he's called. And you know what Trump answered? I mean, it's one of those moments. He said, "I don't think so," because he said really nasty things about me. And, you know, he discusses it with the interviewer, and there's absolutely no awareness from

• 57:24Speaker 01

  either one that this is not an argument, that, you know, what has happened between Trump and this individual is completely irrelevant to the question of whether he should be pardoned. But the interviewer actually goes along with it. So this is personal power. This is, in fact, the disappearance of the state. This is the replacement of the state with a personal will, with its idiosyncrasies and personal desires. This is what a monarch would answer. But what is incredible is not that he said that, but that around him, there's an environment of people who seem to think, you know, I could imagine the viewers, this was Fox News, I could imagine the viewers at home nodding their heads and saying, "Yeah, yeah. Well, if he really said some nasty things, then maybe he shouldn't be pardoned."

• 58:09Speaker 01

  What? This is absolutely insane. And I'm surprised that people don't realize how insane and dangerous the moment is. This is an understanding of power that hasn't been around in Western societies for centuries.

• 58:21Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, that's very well said. You know, not only, just to add to that before I move to the second hour, Bruno, not only is it an understanding of power that hasn't been around for a very long time, but I would also say that people's understanding of power in general, or their ability to visualize it, to see it, to name it, is something that's missing in the public discourse. I mean, we talk about power on this show quite a bit, but I don't feel like it's adequately discussed. You know, who, who has power? How is it being wielded? And to whose benefit? So I'm going to move us to our conversation of the second hour, Bruno. Let's continue this conversation about power and governance. And let's tack on to that, an exploration of what governance looks like in a virtual world. And then I'd

• 59:03Demetri Kofinas?

  like to explore how the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and climate change, as well as the physical environment factor into your thinking, because you devote an entire chapter to each of these topics in your book. And then let's take a look at all of these lessons, and all the insights that derive from the book, and from this conversation, and construct some thought experiments about what the world is going to look like 20 or 30 years from now, if things remain on their current trajectory. And if the United States does, in fact, either recede from the world it has built, or perhaps even worse, decides to destroy it entirely. For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like

• 59:48Demetri Kofinas?

  you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Bruno, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device, using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Bruno, stick around. We're going to move the rest of our conversation on to the premium feed.

• 1:00:17Demetri Kofinas?

  If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter @Kofinas, and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.