Accelerating Dramatic Trends. Ian Bremmer Talks to A&G

know we're likely going to happen anyway. They got sped up because of the coronavirus, and one of them is our crumbling relationship with China. But anyway, Ian Bremer is indeed the president and founder of Eurasia Group of Political Research, risk research and consulting firm that consults all over the globe. And Ian joins us now a good morning or a good day, sir, How are you ye? Happy to be

back with you guys. Thank you. It's it's always stimulating, and I will say the Global List is incredibly thought provoking this year, even by the standards of the previous years. And we will get to that in a moment or two. Yeah, I was fascinated by your take on a lot of things that we're going to happen anyway over a long time, got sped up by the coronavirus. Can you give us an example a couple of those? Sure? I mean the US China confrontation, the lack of trust, their growth, all

of that has been going on. The the disruptions that have come from technology, both in terms of our lives and social media and the polarization that comes from that, but also in terms of people that aren't in the knowledge economy, no longer having anything productive to contribute um to capitalism, and the disenfranchisement that comes as a consequence climate change, and and the move away from fossil fuels. I mean, all of these things trends that were coming

accelerated dramatically on the back of coronavirus. One of the topics we talked about a lot around here, and it's it's difficult to predict, obviously, because change keeps coming. But what's gonna happen to American cities, commercial real estate in the wake of the COVID thing. We have multiple friends and multiple industries to say, not only do we not need office space anymore. We've seen our people's productivity surge. Yeah, there are a lot of the CEOs I talked to

of big companies are all experimenting. So they will try some hoteling and they don't you know, where you get people to come, you know, in maybe two days, three days a week. Uh. Some of them trying you know, virtual completely with a bunch of their teams. But let's

keep in mind a couple of things. First of all, if you're a big bank and um, you're virtual completely and you lose big pieces of business to the guy that is down the street and out hustling you and sending his people in person, uh, you're not going to be virtual for much longer. That's number one. Um. Number two is uh, when your people are virtual and you used to be in New York City, Uh, they may be equally productive, but you will no longer be willing

to pay them New York City rates salaries. And if someone can do their job as easily, um, an hour away, they can probably do their job as easily in the Philippines, in Brazil or in India. And I think we have to understand that the disruption that is coming from the virtualization. The disruption is coming from happening, and of course that's going to transform commercial real estate, but I don't think that's by anywhere close to the biggest thing that's coming.

We're talking before we get specifically to your riskless I saw you tweet this yesterday, and I just want to know what you meant you tweeted out. The business model of social media companies is incompatible with a healthy civil society. Explain that well, because the business model of social media UM is to maximize uh, the eyeball attention that they get in order to sell advertisements, and UM that means and the way you do that is by productizing the

user you and me. And when when you do that, the most effective way to do it is to polarize. The most effective way to do it is to let all the trolls on because you want to maximize the eyeballs to have more disinformation that It's not that Facebook UM doesn't care about disinformation on their site. Actually it's kind of intrinsic to their business model. It's not the Twitter doesn't care about trolls and bots on their site. It's intrinsic to their business model. It actually drives a

lot more people. It drives a lot more eyeballs. So you know, that doesn't mean that you can't continue to have them, but it means either the business model needs to change away from advertisement, you have to charge, you know, a fee for subscription, which would make it very different in terms of improving enhancing the user experiences the first and foremost thing you're doing, and or you need to

regulate it. But the model as it exists right now is antithetical to a healthy, functioning civil society, and we are experiencing that in a very big way in the United States. I personally truly believe that the vast majority of people that rioted and and stormed the capital just forty eight hours ago believed a number of things about fundamental politics in the US that we're completely untrue. Oh, the poor woman that got weaponized this information, the poor

woman that got shot dead. I don't know if you went through her Twitter feed, but she mean heard her news feed was different than mine, right, And it strikes me in from your description that social media is pornographic in the in the broader sense, not just sexual pornography pornography, but ideological pornography, just constant conflict anger, that sort of thing,

because that's the most titilating. But having said that, and uh, and having mentioned yesterday or the other day's craziness, I know the Eurasia Group's top risk for one was already the fact that about half the country rejects the president of the United States. Um, how do you think that recent events might have affected if you were rewriting the

risk list your description of that risk? Man? I mean the pushback that that I got and we got in the forty eight hours after we launched the risk report was how can coronavirus not be number one? And my response was pretty simple. I said, we've got vaccines for coronavirus, thank god. We don't have vaccines for polarization. In the United States, all we have is more political pornography. All

we have is people getting more divided. And uh, and I am disappointed with you guys that you threw out that political pornography thing and you didn't actually go any farther with the metaphor. Right, Usually you guys are good for that any meet me for content than you want. Hardcore, hardcore pornography not the kind of thing you want your

kids learning about. So you know. And I also do think it is relevant that since we're getting back to the social media stuff that um that the the executives of these companies who want to maximize the time that we all spend on them, they don't let their kids on these devices. Yeah, that's interesting in that could anything be more telling than that they absolutely no, Yeah problem? Oh gosh, your your third risk? Climate net zero meets

g zero what Yeah? So I mean, I'll tell you, I'm actually more optimistic right now about um, the planet being able to address climate change than I ever have been, uh in my life. The election, which because of coronavirus, no more Trump, he would have been re elect that if it wasn't for the pandemic, and I do you could Biden massive focus on climate as a consequence, Kerry

is the most important appointment he has. All of the European stimulus is oriented towards sustainability on the back of coronavirus. That's a really big deal. The Chinese don't want to be left out. Jes Paying moving in that direction. The new Japanese Prime minister, same thing. We really are taking steps that make it more possible that we don't have three or four degrees centigrade of warming. That's a very big deal. But that's that's the net zero piece. It's

less carbon into the atmosphere. But the G zero piece is we are living in a world that's incredibly political divided and doesn't have global leaderships got a G seven or G twenty two zero? And so what it means, I mean, for all of these years, you'd have people saying that if we could just focus on climate, we'd come together, right, we could all save the planet, will save the whales, will plant the trees. That's not going

to happen. There's actually going to be a lot of competition and confrontation or over climate, over who has the resources, who gets the resources, who dominates the new technologies for energy? I mean, you know, the United States has over the last ten years worked hard to become energy independent in oil and gas. Now that we're getting away from fossil fuels and we're focusing on things like solar and wind and the rare earth metals we need for electric vehicles

and their batteries. You know, who dominates all of that, China, all of it, and they're putting a lot of money in and this is actually going to drive much more confrontation between the Americans and the Chinese. So you've got NET zero, which is positive, You've got G zero, which is negative, and they're coming together. You have US China attentions as number four, and we can talk all day about that. And I'm fascinated with that whole story. Jumping

around a little bit. I just wondered, you've got the cyber tipping point um on here. I'm wondering, you know, we had that big attack recently. At what point does a big cyber attack start getting treated like a military at tech and responded, uh, you know, in the same way. Well, not when it involves only espionage, which involves the Russians inside all of our institutions and stealing information. And part of the reason for that is because we do that

to them. So that's already going on. And how good at it? How good at it are we are? We are? Are we better than everybody else? Or at least as good as China and in uh, in Russia and everybody else. Well, we never admit this stuff. But whenever you have the conversations with the people that truly do understand it, um inside the US government, they they certainly are not bashful

about American offensive capabilities. The problem is that we don't have defensive capabilities, and that's being shown to be the case on a daily basis. And we also don't have much capability to deter um and so it's not like you know, mutually assured destruction, where the American Soviets had all the nukes, but we knew that if we used one,

it could blow up the world. I mean, here the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese dominate cyber offensive capabilities, but we can't prevent each other from using them against each other. And when it would become a war is not the kind of attacks that you've seen in the last week's announced, but rather you remember the attack on Ukraine a couple of years ago. That was the reverse engineer, the not

Touch attack. There was a reverse engineered n S, a malware piece of malware, and that was an espionage that was actually going in and breaking critical infrastructuring Ukraine, and then it got out of Ukraine and cost billions of dollars of damage for companies like FedEx Europe and Marisk and others. Um If that would happened at scale, I think that could lead to escalation where a lot of

people could die. That's that, and that is certainly becoming a greater danger over time because that Russian attack on Ukraine wasn't meant to get outside of Ukraine. It just did. And so the lack of determined and also means there's a lot of danger when you're operating this stuff. Ian Bremer is the president founder of your Asia Group. The Global Risks List, for one is out. Even if I were to go back to grad school number one, I'd yell at the professors and call the Marxists and be

expelled immediately. But if somehow they tolerated me and kept me there, I would love to study Central and South America and and why it hasn't emerged as an economic and political power. And I keep waiting for it. I keep waiting for the US to really turn its attention to our neighbors. UM. And I know that that Latin

America is on your list of risks. What's going on there? Well, you know, it's not like Latin America is not growing and a robust middle class across Latin America, particularly Brazil,

the largest economy, truly has been a success story. UM. But a lot of mismanagement and a lot of frustration as their middle classes get bigger, that their their services aren't very good, that the kind of social contract that a lot of people come to expect, whether it's you know, good mass transit or effective policing or education that is affordable and high quality, they don't have these things, and coronavirus is making life a lot worse for them because

in the United States, we're going to roll out these vaccines this year, and once we get ten percent of the population vaccinated, our mortality rates going to go down by that's going to happen by the end of first quarter. That's a big deal. That doesn't happen in Latin America until later in the year and in some cases next year,

so they're going to have big impact on that. Still, like major new waves of coronavirus, a lot of people dying, but they can't shut down the economies because they don't have the fiscal flexibility to pay for lockdowns the way we do in the United States or in Europe and Japan.

And so you know what happens when that occurs is that the existing governments, whoever they are, left wing or right wing, are blamed and so you get this whip saw in anger on the streets spilling out that's happened in the last year in Chilean and Peru could be a lot broader across Latin America. And I was very concerned that in Brazil. Just two days ago, the Brazilian President Bolsonaro was pointing to what happened in the United States in our capital and said, this could happen in Brazil.

And here's a guy that is absolutely prepared to weaponize using social media disinformation and claim that he has won the election if he doesn't. And you could easily see what played out in the United States play out in Brazil with a lot more violence, biggest economy in South America. Welcome to Ian Bremer of Eurasia Group the Top Risks. It's always fun. Let's talk against soon and we'll try to be more outrageous and entertain you better. I appreciate

that gent call whatever. All right, thanks, I feel like board the great Man. I got some comments on serious times, damn it. I got some comments on some of that stup. But we gotta take a break. Text Lin and five k F T. C. Barnstrong and Jetty