What Comes Next Will Shock You (Uncut) 02-03-2025

Is U.S. Hegemony Over? – What Comes Next Will Shock You

Today, what I wanted to do from all three of you is get your high level thoughts on, you know, we’ve had a pretty dramatic first half to this decade. Every year has delivered some sort of a haymaker punch, sometimes global like 2020, sometimes regional like 2021 and the massive civil unrest, a couple hot conflicts in 2022 and 2023. I’d like to begin by asking each one of you, if you were to reflect on the decade thus far and projects into the second half of it, what are the flashpoint or what is the flashpoint that you’re most focused on? I’m going to ask you each individually and then I’d love for the panelists to provide your feedback on what everybody shares and we’ll go down the road just like that.

Dr. Pippa, I’d love to begin with you. Yeah, the flashpoint this decade that you’re most focused on. Okay, and I apologize in advance, I’ve slightly lost my voice.

The first thing is to even understand where we are in geopolitics, right? So the picture is usually there’s a war in Ukraine and it’s boots on the ground, it’s tanks, it’s good guys versus bad guys and it’s simple. But I think we’re in a hot war in cold places, meaning we’re in conflict in space, in the Arctic, in the high north, the Baltic and across naval spaces. And we’re in a cold war in hot places, meaning Africa, the Pacific, jockeying with China for islands, for example.

So where you begin affects the outcome of what you think. So I think we’re edging toward resolution of the larger war. Ukraine will be a beneficiary of that, but I think that we’re going to end up with a deal between the new White House and China and Russia.

And what will happen is the visible war will subside, but the war for the technological frontier will accelerate. And that is where the fight is. It’s for quantum computing.

It’s for nanotechnology. It’s for space. It’s for the things that the public doesn’t realize are battle zones.

Because whoever wins those wars is so far ahead of everybody else. Again, my voice will get better when the tea comes. I have ordered it.

You’re doing a great job. I appreciate that. And so just to reiterate, it’s the technological frontier is where you’re most focused on right now.

You’ve written a lot about this, the hot war in cold places, as you called it, which is referring to both deep sea, effectively internet cable warfare, and deep space, satellite warfare, which is something that does not get reported like the hot wars in Europe or the Middle East, probably because there’s no body counts, right? And they’re kind of out of sight, out of mind. There’s no photographer. When I ask big organizations like the Washington Post, why are you not explaining that on January 6th, the day we usually think of as the issue in Washington, D.C., that somebody cut the fastest internet cable in the world, which is found in Svalbard in Norway.

And why? Because that’s where satellites connect to the subsea cable network. So in theory, if you cut that thing, your phone stops having sat nav, right? Boom. Luckily, we had so much redundancy built in that that event did not become visible to the public.

But the militaries understood this is effectively an act of war. Nobody wants to say that because there will be a war. And that is why, for example, the Norwegians, the Danes, when they are investigating these ships that are cutting the subsea cables, they keep saying, we just can’t figure out who did it.

You know, we’ve really investigated. It’s super hard. It’s because they don’t want to say.

Because the moment you say who it was, you’re at war. Right. Right.

Right. Okay. And that’s the triggering event.

Dr. Pascal, Colonel McGregor, any thoughts or comments on the concept of the hot war in cold places and the technological frontier? Well, we are going through various phases of cold wars. And maybe war, I don’t like conceptualizing everything as a war because it kind of hollows out the word. I recommend looking at it through a word that John Mearsheimer often uses, which is security competition.

And we get a lot of security competition, especially amongst these three major powers, the U.S., Russia, and China. And they play out in different spheres. And technology is, of course, one of them.

And the big question is whether the security competition will remain at the level where, well, cutting cables is the worst we get. I mean, it’s bad, but at least it’s not mass dying, right? The big danger that we’re going through right now is that they do turn very hot. And one of the things that concerns me the most is that we are going through an insane moment of our global history.

At least it’s the most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis. And what makes this moment here so dangerous is that some people in Europe and North America don’t think of nuclear war anymore as something that’s unthinkable. It’s like we can maybe go there.

And the whole mad doctrine of keeping mutually assured destruction, therefore nobody uses these nuclear weapons, doesn’t work if one side believes that, oh, maybe we can use them. So this is extremely dangerous and what worries me the most. And then the flash points, like let’s say Taiwan, the Philippines, of course, Europe, Ukraine, and the Middle East, they are there.

And they can get worse. They could get even worse than they are. So that’s what keeps me awake at night.

Okay. And so that was a good segue, actually, Dr. Pascal, into your flash point. It’s that nuclear events.

When you look at those, you know, I’d say tensions that exist, the conflicts that are rolling versus maybe the brewing tensions. So I’m referring to a hot war in Europe and a hot war in the Middle East, but simmering tensions in the South Pacific. There’s no war there right now in the hot war sense.

You know, on my podcast, whenever I have anybody on who’s, you know, one step out of the White House or in the White House, China is always the first thing they want to talk about, the number one threat that they want to talk about. You know, Elbridge Colby has been on my show a couple of times, I’m sure a connection of yours. And this is the number one thing that he’s concerned about.

And how would you validate that concern today? Do you think it front and center, should be front and center from an American standpoint or from a global perspective standpoint? The question to me is how to engage with China. I mean, you’re not going to get rid of it unless the dream is that to China something happens of the event that what happened to the Soviet Union. So the question to me is how to do something constructive and how to also turn this security competition into something that actually helps the entire planet.

We all, especially in capitalist societies, understand the value of competition, right? So why is the idea that the competitor has to be destroyed instead of actually outperforming them? I would hope that we get to that point where we don’t think of this as an inevitable war rather than an inevitable, let’s be better than the other guy. Colonel McGregor, I’d love to go to you next. And I’ll begin with the same question, flashpoints that are front and center for you right now.

Well, the good news is that nothing keeps me awake at night. I sleep very soundly, always have. I see the world a little differently.

I think there are a number of different developments right now, all of which deserve serious attention. Particularly if you live in Washington, by the way, I spent 50% of my time in Orlando and 50% of my time up in Washington in my jobs. And I’m often confused because both of them to a greater or lesser extent are fantasy island.

And in Washington in particular, there is a failure to understand the world. And that’s because we have been the center of it, at least in our imagination, since the end of the Second World War. There are many nations, India, China, Iran, I don’t wanna go down the whole list, but these are great nations that rest on the foundation of ancient civilizations and cultures.

They are roaring back into the world. They have either been sidelined, oppressed, suppressed. Now they’re coming back into view.

And they’re not the only ones. You see some of this in Latin America as well. We’re not very comfortable with that.

And we have a bad habit of denigrating it and ultimately grossly underestimating them. And we’ve seen that with Russia. That’s not a phenomenon in the history of the U.S. government.

So the world itself is changing. And we are not really changing at all. Our view of the world is that we are the center of it.

It’s a huge problem. Secondly, we no longer have the monopoly on technology that we once did. Most of the technologies that people are expressing concern about, particularly in terms of military application, those were ours 30 years ago.

They are now proliferating everywhere. This has changed warfare fundamentally. We have not changed.

We don’t even look carefully at what’s been happening in eastern Ukraine and recognize that that’s a very different kind of warfare from anything that we have seen since World War II. And of course the other problem is that if you don’t like the world you live in, then you create fiction. We do that very well.

Ukraine is winning. The Russians are losing. They have no chance.

Nonsense. Just total nonsense. The Ukrainians have had at least 1.2 to 1.5 million casualties, over 600,000 dead on the battlefield.

The Russians have taken on the whole a ratio of about one to six, one to seven, one to eight, one Russian versus Ukrainians. And as this war has wound down, the numbers of people being killed has risen dramatically. That happened during World War II.

The Germans took their worst casualties in the last six months of the war. People don’t understand that. When armies collapse, when they fall apart, that’s when you take the heavy casualties.

But the Russians have taught us a great deal, though we don’t care to learn from it. And then finally, when you look at the financial situation, I would argue that the United States, in particular our economy, is afflicted with stage four terminal cancer. It’s no longer a question of when will this grossly inflated bubble, the bubble of many bubbles, collapse, but when it will happen.

And I think we’re looking at something like that in the next year. This is going to have a big impact because you cannot maintain the kinds of forces we have all over the world intervening in other people’s affairs, telling other people how to live if you can’t afford it. We have a trillion dollar defense budget.

It’s unaffordable. And people are saying, well, we have a new administration. I read the headlines yesterday.

The House and the Senate want to add $200 billion to the defense budget. It’s insane. This is not sustainable.

I don’t know how it resolves itself, but as far as you’re concerned, the only assets that are worth having in the future are hard assets. Keep that in mind. If it comes out of the ground, whether you grow it or you dig it out, it’s valuable.

We’re headed into that situation. And when you talk about things like rare earths or gold, I mean, the housewives in India now control more gold than the Bank of England. And bricks, bricks is hoarding gold in general.

Russia, China. But, of course, as Bernanke said, why do banks keep gold in reserve? Oh, well, it’s a tradition. This is what has brought us to this point.

So we’re at the end of a 30‑year cycle. Now, some people say it was a 70‑year cycle. But if I go back to 1991, look at where we were, where we stood, how healthy we were.

We still had a manufacturing base today. China has a larger manufacturing base than the United States and Europe put together. You know, we have no surge capacity in terms of our military power.

That means that if you suddenly need a lot of ammunition, you suddenly need new weapons, rockets, missiles, so forth, you can’t get them. So we’re in a difficult position. And this new president is going to face all of this.

And it’s not going to be easy. And it would be interesting to see what happens. And I would not hazard a guess on what that is.

Yeah, I want to pull on that. Thank you, everybody. And so if America, therefore, finds itself in a world where everybody else has evolved and changed and they have not or failed to register that change, therefore, still living in a bit of fiction of the past, right, that we are the hegemon and nobody can challenge us.

But from a technological standpoint, that’s not the case anymore. And that’s effectively what you’re saying, Colonel McGregor. That paints a bit of a dire outlook for, you know, an American bull, right, if you’re long American power.

Is there ‑‑ what would be the counterpoint to that? If you were to look at like a George Friedman analysis who would say that we’re going through growing pains in the West. This is very typical of an empire as it matures. It’s got to grow into the next thing.

The world’s changed. It’s got to change, too, but it lags. But the future and America’s best days are still ahead of them.

Any thoughts on George’s analysis and that thesis from anybody on the panel? Well, I would say one thing right off the bat. You know, we tend to think in linear terms in the United States. In other words, history is progressive.

It’s a steady line that just goes up and up and up. But if you go to Asia, things tend to be circular or cyclical. We’re in a different cycle right now.

We haven’t come to terms with it because we’re living with this linear equation. So I think that needs to be borne in mind. And if you’re ‑‑ you’re talking about the United States.

If you’re smart right now, you cut your losses everywhere in the world if you’re an American. You get out. You get out of all of these places.

You come home. And, of course, everybody says, oh, that’s not possible. The world will collapse without us.

Certainly did very well for about 5,000 years without us. So I don’t see much evidence for that. But that’s the argument.

But it’s a self‑licking ice cream cone. It’s a mountain of cash for contractors, politicians, corruption, deceit. It’s all bound up together.

But you retrench. You get out. You get out.

You get out. You get out. You get out.

You get out. You get out. You get out.

You get out. You get out. You get out.

You get out. You get out. You get out.

You get out. You get out. Just the beginning.

We may go through some lame governments until finally you end up with somebody who says enough is enough. Guard your borders. Close your borders.

Redefine citizenship. Who are we is a question that’s being asked everywhere. We’re asking that in the United States.

Nationalism in the United States is rising, but not in favor of fighting people overseas. And the funny thing is you mentioned China, the China threat, which I’ve never subscribed to in terms of a military problem. They can build as many service ships as they want.

It’s a big waste of money. Things are going to be sunk. But the point is, if you guard your borders, you control immigration.

You don’t have to fight wars overseas. If you end sanctions, stop bullying people. We bribe, bully, or bomb you into submission.

People have said no more. It’s over. Moscow said no.

Iran is saying no. And China is standing right behind and saying no. And India is now saying no.

This has got to stop. So I don’t see a world in the future filled with wars. I see most of the world as being focused on prosperity internally, building and improving.

And I think that will eventually happen in the United States. Eventually we will say no more. That’s it.

And we’ve got far more problems in this western hemisphere that desperately need our attention than anything overseas. And this lie that Russia is, you know, a Hitlerite state or a Stalinist state, it’s all nonsense, needs to go away. This war in Ukraine never needed to happen.

All they had to have was a plebiscite. Plebiscite. The Russians live there, want to vote themselves into Russia, so be it.

We’ve got to get on with life. This is stupid. And I think there’s a small group of people that have hijacked governments in the west that have profited enormously from this tragedy.

They too are going to go away. So we’ll see what President Trump does. But if he doesn’t cut his losses, get out, retrench, cut spending, if he doesn’t do those things, he’s going to be in a lot of trouble very quickly.

And then finally, remember I said, we are a nation with military power that was ideally suited to 1980, maybe even 1975. Today, it isn’t. And we don’t, the world doesn’t want us in their backyard, contrary to popular belief.

You know, I do feel like you ended there on a positive note with some steps forward, right, that could, that are possible. Just a quick note, before the afternoon session, we’re going to get a whole bunch more chairs in the speaker hall. So thank you to all of you who are standing in the back.

Appreciate you all. Dr. Pascal, I want to hand it over to you because your focus is on conflict resolution, diplomacy, and international relations. So the picture that Colonel McGregor painted is sort of bleak, but what would you have to see from an international standpoint from our leaders, what would you have to see shift, right, for us to correct course and dodge the biggest threat that you see that you mentioned earlier? Well, maybe I can also pick up on the optimism here, because like not everything is doom and gloom.

And you’re absolutely right. I would underwrite all of what Colonel McGregor said. The good news is that the world is shifting.

And actually, if we’re here, like in the West, we tend to think that everything is threatening. China is threatening. Russia is threatening.

Why do we think that? Because for the first time, they are actually competitors. If you look at what happens with BRICS that are getting together, often this is especially mainstream media framed as a big alliance against us. That’s not true.

BRICS isn’t trying to be an anti-West. BRICS is simply trying to be not the West. And actually, you know, West versus the rest is just leaving the West behind.

They’re just going ahead anyway. And the good news is they are actually, they’re not, I mean, BRICS is nothing geared against us. It’s something that we can actually interact with.

So in terms of political change, what I would hope for is that our governments recognize that this is a huge potential to interact with. And then the big change is that these institutions that are now being built are not created anymore by the West. They’re not under our direct control.

They are not the IMF. They’re not the World Bank. They don’t give us economic leverage over other people’s economies.

And it forces us to interact with these economies on those economies’ terms. But this is possible. And in large parts of the world, there’s a lot of optimism.

Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia, all of these nations, they know they’re growing. They have a big population. They have thriving sectors and increasingly thriving sectors.

They now create their own markets. Something that we’re going to see probably relevant to you is that some African countries are going to start saying, like, hey, we have all of these resources. We have zero commodity markets here.

Let’s change that. Let’s have some commodity markets over here. And we can engage with that.

Yes, it’s going to change the game, but not necessarily to disadvantage of us and the others. But thriving together is something that’s possible. And I think it will come.

The question is, do we want to engage with it or not? You know, when I think about that and the rising of the East, the worst thing that can happen to any entity is a lack of competition. If you’re solidly in first place with no threats, you will get lazy. You will stop innovating.

You will stop improving. The best thing that can happen to any of us is that we get challenged, right? And we’re put on notice that we better start moving or something bad is going to happen. I think it’s worth pointing out.

And I’ve spent some time in Northeast Asia. I’m not familiar with Southeast Asia. But in all of my travels and business dealings, no one in Asia is interested in a war.

No one. The only people that are talking about war in Asia are Americans. It’s annoying.

You know, the Chinese now have a hotline that goes down to Ho Chi Minh City. If there are two groups of people in Asia that don’t care for each other, they’re Chinese and Vietnamese. They have serious disputes, reach back hundreds of years, but even more recently, they don’t want a war.

So whenever they come up with disputes, whether it’s fishermen at sea or drilling for oil or anything else, they solve it. We need to step out of these regional disputes. Because the world is regionalizing.

And in the various regions of the world, there are leading powers. And that’s just not surprising. For almost 1,000 years, the leading powers in the Middle East were Persia and the Turks.

Whatever variety of Turk you want, Seljuk, Ottoman, doesn’t make any difference. We don’t belong there. We’ve got to get out of this business.

When we go into places, we disrupt the natural dynamic. You know, we create inequalities between powers. We strengthen one, we harm another.

And remember that Americans are very much like the British. We are preeminently a maritime aerospace power, which means that we come in, and when we don’t like it anymore, we float away or fly away. And we leave carnage in our wake.

That’s the problem right now. Dr. Pippa, I want to come back to you. A couple things that were just shared.

One was that America is more suited for a war of the 1980s or 70s. You mentioned that the real war today is the technological frontier. Those things are obviously directly related.

And if my assumption is correct and my lived experience is that challenges make us better and threats make us better, you know, how, first of all, where does the United States land in that technological frontier right now? And do they have the resources and the expertise and human capital to become competitive if they are not? Let’s see. Let’s try again with my voice. It’s a little better now.

So we live in an era of restructuring. All major economies are under the burden of massive debt. China is.

Europe is. The United States is. The question is how will each restructure their economies, particularly in light of these extraordinary advances in science and innovation? In China right now we have an internal fight between Xi Jinping, who prefers the total control, we should be more like North Korea, everybody line up and lock step approach, versus, pardon me, the Shanghai crowd who say, why are we talking about war, to your point? Let’s go back to making money.

And so I think the Shanghai crowd is going to win that argument. It may take time. It may be subtle.

We may not see that. But I think that ultimately the 1.6 billion Chinese people would like to have a better future. And I agree with your assessment that any scenario for the future, there is no concept of winning against a Russia or a China.

We have to create a world where the population of these nations can look forward to a better future. Simple. That’s the Marshall Plan thinking.

And I think we need more of that largesse type thinking, particularly at a moment in history where the innovations are, they deliver the promise of, they’re delivering on the promise of abundance. Now, that abundance has immense meaning for this audience, because you guys are into commodities. And we have to understand that we’re in a revolution right now.

Instead of digging things out of the ground, we are now able through supercomputing, through quantum chips, to literally create new materials atom by atom by atom. We are going to completely transform how things are made in the coming years. And that knowledge, that capacity is evenly distributed worldwide.

The Americans have no monopoly on brilliance and neither do the Chinese. So I see a world where we have small groups of people who are innovating at record speed, backed by record computational power. Governments get in their way.

Which governments will most get in the way of the innovators? I would say China is number one, because they’ll only support the innovation that Xi Jinping wants. I think in the U.S., we have an extraordinary entrepreneurial economy. And the worst government gets, the more young people are saying, I’ll just build my own future.

I will create my own company. Now, with AI and supercomputing, I think that we are seeing the rise of a technocracy. And frankly, I would be so blunt as to say, Donald Trump may reign as president of the United States, but we have a group of technocrats who now rule over the United States.

And they are about to bring restructuring to the U.S. government, to the U.S. economy. And I think we shouldn’t underestimate the positive impact that that will bring. The positive impact that that will bring.

The positive impact that that will bring. So I go back to the basic question. When you look forward, which nations are capable of innovating the fastest? And I would still bet that the American economy has the greatest capacity.

We are very good at accepting a problem is there, addressing it, removing it, and overcoming it. Our government is lousy at this, but our people are good at this. I think the Chinese are excellent at this, but they are not allowed to under the current regime.

I think Europeans have a really hard time with all of this. So, again, I hear you. I just moved back to Washington after 40 years overseas.

You know, all my foreign friends, particularly military officers, they ask me, what do they think of Australia or Canada or my country, Britain, in Washington? And I say, you know, the idea that there are other countries is still an unproved rumor to most Americans. Thank you for that. And, you know, what that got me thinking about was the Shanghai method.

Let’s get back to good business. Let’s get back to making money. And in order for that to be the case, we have to step back from fallacy.

You know, I opened up today’s show with a bit of a dark journey through some of our past with the intention of sharing that it’s economics that drives change. It’s not subsidies. It’s not tax incentives.

It’s not a politician at a podium. It would be cool if it was that easy, but we only really shift for one reason and one reason only, and that’s economic incentives. So to your point, you know, the government’s there to get in the way.

The entrepreneurs will save the world. I see a shift in political sentiment, however, that is more favorable to the entrepreneur right now. That is a step back.

And Colonel McGregor mentioned this as well. You know, we’re stepping back from some of the fallacy of the last 10 years. What do you think? Well, totally.

And if we think about, you know, what was the thing that pierced the Iron Curtain and began the end of that era of history, it wasn’t a bullet. It wasn’t firepower. It was blue jeans and rock and roll.

Right on. Right? It’s culture. It’s commerce.

Commerce. And if we want to get to a reconciliation with Russia, with China, culture and commerce play an enormous role. And that is not our governments.

That is us. That is us. And the more business proceeds and says there’s work to be done, the more governments can’t remain in conflict environments.

You know, I just pointed out something that’s important. Armies do not innovate. Corporations do not innovate.

People innovate. And I would go a step further. Everyone’s talking about economics.

Human capital is everything. How intelligent, how well educated, how skilled, how capable is your population? That’s the real measure of your where you’re headed. In the United States, we are in bad shape.

Simply because we have a terrible educational system and no immigration system. Those things are killing us. Education has to be a path to employment.

I don’t know what it’s like here in Canada. But in the United States, you look around at the dinner table in the evening and you see in any family at least a son or a daughter or both who have gone to all sorts of universities and acquired degrees and can’t get a job. It’s a huge problem.

We’re really in a desperate situation where we need profound change across every sector in the United States in order to be competitive. Pascal, I’ll give you the final word. I just want to emphasize this.

Us is absolutely right. And it’s essential. And as much as we might love investing in gold or commodities, the value in exchange of these things, the reason why we think it will have value tomorrow is because we will believe somebody will want to buy it, right? So we need other people around.

The value of gold ultimately rests in the fact that we are a society. So we need to keep society alive, well, healthy, and a lot of people out there. If we start decimating our own massively, we’re going to undercut all of that interest.

I appreciate that. It’s time for blue jeans and rock and roll, ladies and gentlemen. Can you please give my panel a phenomenal round of applause? Thank you so much.