The Ledger, every show

“The Donald Trump show is the most compelling entertainment, infotainment, spectacle that humanity has ever seen. Since the dawn of time, no living human being has occupied The amount of bandwidth of the human race that Donald Trump does.”

“So at what he does, he is as good as Napoleon was at what he did. Now, I observed that Napoleon also lost at Waterloo and ended in exile, so this is no guarantee that, that it will be what Trump would consider a happy ending to the whole spectacle, but he is a…”

“Trump is sort of the greatest of these, the most globally impactful of this new wave of Putin, Xi Jinping.”

“I don't think China has it in, in it to beat us.”

“And I think increasingly companies are starting to realize that they need their employees to be patriotic. That is the. Your employees need to think it's an evil sin to sell IP to China, and that the, your co-workers will rat you out in a heartbeat if they thi…”

“Israel, I think, may have hoped that it could kind of Bear the weight of being a counter hegemon to Iran. Israel is too small and too alien to the rest of the Middle East to really play that role effectively, I think.”

“All right, yeah, I mean, it is, it's a really interesting time because on the one hand the Pax Americana that we kind of developed after 1945 and then refurbished in 1990 at the end of the Cold War, Is really in crisis, but if you step back a little bit, Ameri…”

“It's like our, the networks that we built up, the way of dealing with the world, the institutionalized relations with Europe, and so on, those are all burning or crumbling, but the United States as a power, it seems to me, is if anything, thanks to the informa…”

“He's now, he's completely trashing the institutional networks that for a very long time were the vessels of American power.”

“He really is a genius, and he's discovered, I think, One of the secrets of power in the contemporary world, which is he's managed to turn fame into power, drama into power, in, and to do it in ways that, that leave him completely free to act.”

“So, you know, if you lie enough, The marginal cost of your 10,000th lie is nothing, while the marginal law of your first, second, or third, the marginal cost is very high. So all of the normal constraints on, on political figures, reputation, reputational, and…”

“I think that one of the impacts of the internet is that people want to be ruled by people again”

“Once you have built this global system, you then do something extremely treacherous, which is you invite everyone else to participate in your system.”

“So after the end of the Cold War, what do we say to Russia and China? Come on in, and just as we said to Germany and Japan in 1945, benefit from the system. Actually, we waited to about 47 to do that, but in any case come on in, benefit, and now both Germany a…”

“I mean, let's imagine China declares a blockade of Taiwan, which could very easily happen.”

“A lot of Chinese energy policy can be understood as trying to avoid the trap of dependence on the global economy. So, you know, they've, they're doing the solar, they're doing as much hydro as they can, and some of our friends in the environmental movement are…”

“If our AI companies, if our tech companies can only benefit from the internal American market, that's actually not enough to generate the revenue and growth that they need, even to stay technologically equal, say to China, much less be ahead and be and be supe…”

“Information technology appropriately deployed, can open up Enough, for another two generations, this wealth creating machine.”

“So I would say that Trump's coalition Is a mix of Jefferson, Jeffersonians and Jacksonians, isolationists and hawks. You could say Vance as the isolationist champion, and in some ways, and Rubio as the hawk.”

“So the much, I think, to the surprise of both the tech world and the political world, they're, they've been driven in on each other. And there's a kind of renationalization of tech and of the economy that we see.”

“The information revolution, I think, enables countries to use their own cultures, languages, and so on as platforms, and Turkey is more Turkish. It's less like Europe now than it was 25 years ago. India is becoming more, I think Japan is becoming more Japanese…”

“So I think the rapid and dynamic technological change across a whole range of Disciplines and technologies is destabilizing the balance of power, and this, I think, does significantly increase the chance both of confrontation and ultimately even of war between…”

“And it's also for us as a, as the power that has the most stuff, we're actually the most vulnerable to technological change because we've got more, we've got so many tanks that the tank becomes useless. That's more of a problem for us than it is for somebody w…”

“They have kept the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea with drones.”

“And we see the Chinese, I think they're trying to get themselves into a position where they could have a soft blockade, where, like, they could give the orders that any ship that wants to go to Taiwan first has to stop at a Chinese port and go through a custom…”

“Because America has been for so long and still, I think, remains the only potential pillar of global stability and organization, the internal incoherence of America faced with all of these changes can't help but undermine any chances of global stability.”

“And I don't, you know, I think history doesn't give us a choice. We stop Iran ourselves, or Iran asserts and maintains hegemony over the oil resources in the Middle East.”

“What you don't want to do is help Ukraine win a war with Russia. What you want is for Russia to feel that if they attack Ukraine, the consequences would be so terrible that it's just not worth doing it. You know, that's anything other than deterrence involves …”

“Automating your foreign policy decision-making process increases deterrence, and so we've turned that over to the AI, and if the AI thinks you're doing this, wham, right? And anything less than that is, no, I'm leaving a human decision point because I might de…”

“Now your tariff is more or less what President Trump wakes up in the morning and thinks it should be.”

“And really, from the time of Louis XIV right up until now, you could sort of argue the dominant theme of Global power politics has been this rise of this English-speaking maritime commercial liberal order and then it's being contested successively by a series …”

“I think the Trump people were not wrong to say, okay, this needed to change, and we're also seeing with the need for supply chain security and so on, you can't simply take your economic policy out of a free trade textbook.”

“I think since the 17th century, the key to power in the modern world is which countries can be most effective at Developing, harnessing, exploiting the power of new technology without blowing up internally because of the social stress and upheavals that new te…”

“India has been pretty successful at developing a tech industry. It's not in the frontier of AI. I think it may get there faster than people think.”

“I would say in American society today, all three of those classes are in total disarray.”

“You have the Gulf states that are very effective in many ways and are using You know, their oil and their money very effectively, but they still can't defend themselves from Iran. They still, without outside help, they cannot stand.”

“Asia's too big for China to eat. Nobody can eat it.”

“I think this means that things like the federal deficit due to entitlement programs are actually solvable, that we're going to have Medicare is going to be less of a drag, and the seniors are gonna get better care.”

“I should say that we stole our global strategy from the British. They stole it from the Dutch, who had been doing this earlier in the 17th century.”

“Step one, Is have an open society at home. You know, think of the Dutch in the 17th century that okay, everybody had these wars of religion... And so, they come up with new ideas for government finance that we still use, the joint stock company, new seagoing t…”

“Our foreign policy arguments are very repetitive. Basically, if something comes up in foreign policy, we'll argue about it in many of the same ways they would have done in George Washington's day. Our views of the country and of foreign policy fairly predictab…”

“The Ukraine war is no longer, you know, a battalion over here shooting at a battalion over there. With these drones, you have this sort of gray kill zone, gray zone, where at most you'd have a couple of soldiers together.”

“So we've gone from, you remember in the nineties, you look like you're just old enough to remember the nineties. They used to talk about the revolution in military affairs. We've shifted now. And so it was like, okay, there's this one thing happening. And once…”

“And the Japanese see would see Chinese control of Taiwan as a direct threat to Japanese independence.”

“And I also believe that we're going to be seeing a cost revolution in health care, that this tech is going to make it easy. People will have, 50 years from now, better health care and cheaper health care than anybody has today.”

“You think about our trade, roughly a third of it is in the hemisphere, a third of it across the Pacific, a third of it across the Atlantic.”

“In 1980, India's GDP was something like 60%, 65% of China's. Today it's about 17% of China's.”