I think the future of humanity in space will be determined by the answer to a question and that question is what will happen first the first human born in space or the first combat fatality in space and we're working very hard to make sure it's the former you you need to prepare for it to to be the latter.
We outsourced the manufacturing of the technology that we invented. Now, we depend on other countries, including our greatest strategic adversaries, to make all of the hardware that runs our businesses, powers our economy, and protects our national security. That's insane.
If you allow a nuclear state to win a war against a non-nuclear state and you give in to nuclear blackmail and you keep saying as the Trump people do say, "Oh no, we're afraid of escalation, etc." Then you're encouraging that scenario and encouraging middle powers around the world to build nuclear weapons to defend themselves against the Russas and the China.
Russia is systematically destroying the Ukrainian economy. Um it's making people's lives very hard. It's destroying their livelihoods. And I should add that this is our fault if we're Americans because it's American policy to deny Ukraine the missile defense that it needs.
Funding the Ukrainians, helping the Ukrainians to defend themselves is a lot easier than actually trying to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. And so you've been basically handed by history, if you're the US, you've been handed by history a way to deter such an attack by showing, as you say, exactly, by showing how difficult it is to actually carry out offensive operations in the 21st century against a technologically savvy adversary. We've been given that chance. And I'm afraid that what we've been doing is throwing that chance away in the last year and a half under the Trump people and thereby unduly encouraging the Chinese um and making the scenario that you're talking about more likely.
If I'm she, I'm going to flood the market with cheap AI and watch Open AI and Enthropic announce a slowdown in growth, which will absolutely freak out the market and probably thrust the US, if not the entire West, into a recession.
Globalization was always going to fail. The global demographic picture was evolving in the direction where there just weren't going to be enough young people to do the consuming that would make trade possible. And the idea that the United States would continue to hold up the ceiling in a post-Cold War world when there was no agreement as to who the bad guy was, that was always going to fail.
The problem is, Haiti hasn't had a functional government or police force in five years. That's left entire communities vulnerable to horrific violence, which hasn't stopped since the G.S.F. arrived.
If this conflict lasts for let's just pick a number, a month, that's enough to probably break the economic models of most of East Asia. And if we have the physical assets that produce the crude take significant damage, then East Asia's gone and it never comes back, with China being the first one to go down, because they just don't have sufficient alternatives from anywhere else.
We are certainly looking at the end of Europe Inc. as a major manufacturing presence in the world. At the same time, we're looking at the end of China, Inc. as a major manufacturing presence in the world. And either of those issues would be a globe-spanning catastrophe impacts. And to have them both at the same time, at the same time, we have a global energy crisis.
One PAC-3 missile costs $4 million, one Shahed costs $40 to $50,000. The United States can make about 700 PAC-3 interceptors in a year. The Iranians can make about 700 Shaheds in a week. So, we are literally days away from there being no interceptors.
So you have an individual controlling a company and essentially he has supranational capabilities. And what we discovered is that when you outsource that capability to an individual, you're at the mercy of their whims.
one stat that just floored me is that in 2025, SpaceX launched about 80% of the things in orbit, 80%. And its next closest competitor was not Jeff Bezos. It was the government of China. So you have an individual controlling a company. And essentially, he has supranational capabilities.
if you are taking one of these Arctic routes, you can save as much as 40 percent of the time it would take you to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And depending on the price of oil, that's a heck of a lot of money. It's also about safety, increasingly, you know, with other routes being subject to terror or climate change.
If they'd got control of the Iranian oil fields and the straight of Hormuz they would have won the cold war and the US already had contingency plans in place to deal with just this eventuality And those plans were nuclear. So hanging over this story is the potential fear of a nuclear confrontation.
And we discussed how Cloudflare looks at its role in war zones like Ukraine and how the threat of a splintering internet — or one that's just more restrictive and more aggressively under attack from bad actors — could undo the last 40 years of progress. None of this is theoretical for people like Matthew — seriously, he's personally under sanction by the Russian government.
The interesting thing about America is that it's not just the United States government, it's American society. And American society has this quality that when it gets knocked down, it gets back up. The American system is actually designed to be inefficient in some ways, because the founders were more afraid of tyranny than they were of inefficiency.
Impunity is the exercise of power without accountability or responsibility. And when we look at the death toll of civilians in conflict around the world, you can see that this is an age of impunity.
What we saw was China received the full force of American economic coercion, and for the first time, could completely turn that force back against the U.S. and get the U.S. to back down. President Xi wasn't just playing his cards. He was playing the player, as we might say in poker, and he figured out Trump's number.
The United States is the only great power in history that has never had to worry about invasion across its land borders from another great power. Mexico and Canada are not threatening to invade. This gives Americans a kind of strategic luxury that no other great power has ever had.
And so these two very smart real estate guys, not knowing the history, not knowing the complexities, they can parachute in and they can make peace because they're smart and they're quick and they're not burdened by all the baggage of the past.
It's not that war causes interest rates to go up. It's war causes energy shortages which causes inflation and inflation bleeds into everything. So pain at the pump turns into I need a raise for this. I need to raise prices on food. I need to raise prices on all sorts of things. Energy is of course a key input into everything.
This revolution is being led by China. That is the key difference. China is at the forefront of this cluster of new technologies that promise to fundamentally reshape the way industry, commerce and actually our daily lives around the world will change and evolve over time.
Israel has demolished every Muslim village along our route, pushing out thousands of people who used to live here. But amid the destruction, a few Christian communities like the village of Debel have been allowed to stay.
We can't simply outsource our security, our industrial capability, and our understanding of these technologies to other countries. then act surprised when the strategic environment changes around us.
The really revolutionary thing about America is not Silicon Valley. It's the combination of the Protestant ethic, the work ethic, the moral framework, and the technological dynamism. You get God and Gold and Silicon all working together, and that's what makes it so powerful.
Walter lays out the five step playbook that carried the Dutch, then the British, then America to global leadership, and why the same pattern keeps beating centralized continental powers.
I think at the time when Trump and she met in May, I think I was saying that I thought China was now the senior partner in this relationship and uh you know that was somewhat controversial at the time. Some people contacted me to say that that was not the case. I think that's even more the case now than uh at that time.
The interesting thing about the United States is that it has this capacity for self-renewal that keeps surprising people. Every generation, people think America is finished, and every generation, America comes back stronger than before.
And apparently they're not above cheating, stealing, and lying to get their way around the protective barriers that protect either um an AI model or a piece of critical infrastructure etc like that.
The knowledge has now been democratized where whether it's a activist, an e-crime actor, a nation state, they're they're all now equivalent because of agentic technology. And we called it the rise of the agent state — meaning that now postnation state, the apex predator is now the agent state.
Al-Qaeda redefined terrorism for our generation, but there was this earlier wave that you described, the time when any flight anywhere in the world could potentially be hijacked by people demanding all kinds of things. And this was an era that, in many ways, kind of created templates for the terrorism that we came to know later on.
It seems like everyday Taiwanese people don't have the same uh sense of uh battle preparedness and and bellacosity when it comes to uh mainland China as the Ukrainians do towards uh Russia. Maybe I'm misreading this. Uh, but I when I go to Taiwan, I I and even mainland China, I don't sense, you know, this degree of urgency that, you know, one would have sensed in the in the years leading up to the Russia Ukraine crisis.
Because the relationship was one born of war, there were almost 100 years passed before president of the United States went to Mexico City. And so, the relationship is still very much defined by the repercussions and the consequences of that war.
when you look historically at operations that have focused on using air power, whether that's aircraft or missiles, to try to change the behavior of another state, that there's a lot of debate and little evidence that air power alone normally produces a durable political outcome and the one that the attacking state is looking to achieve, in part because a lot of nations have a deeper interest in the situation than the U.S. does.
Everything in Russia is a vertical of power leading up to Putin... Putin is scared of his own society. He's scared of that mobilization. In Ukraine, people had to step up because the state was... didn't have the capacity... and yet Ukraine keeps going. Yes, with support, because it's crowdsourced. It's networked. There's flattened hierarchies.
We are, in some ways, beholden right now to the Chinese factory in order to produce the munitions that we need to defend American interests from China. That's the exquisite problem that we've found ourselves in after generations of building more and more reliance on Chinese supply.
And suddenly Ukraine isn't a victim, it's a provider of security. And And And it's a provider of security despite the fact that the US cut off supplies to Ukraine.
Everything in Russia is a vertical of power leading up to Putin. And I think in the way that Ann has just laid out what's happening in Ukraine, in this case, strong society is beating out strong state. And there's a lesson in that.
It's almost like a child's idea of how power works. It's a you know a kind of elementary school vision of how you project power. You just bomb stuff and then you win. That is not how the United States became uh the world's most influential country and it's not how we achieve how we achieved good outcomes in the past.
Ideology doesn't matter. I mean the Chinese are communists and the Russians are nationalists and the Iranians have a theocracy. You know what binds all of them is rather their dislike of and fear of the language of the liberal world. In other words, the language of rights, the language of rule of law, the language of separation of powers.
Suddenly Ukraine isn't a victim, it's a provider of security. And And And it's a provider of security despite the fact that the US cut off supplies to Ukraine. I I believe hoping that you that meant that Ukraine would surrender.
You know what binds all of them is rather their dislike of and fear of the language of the liberal world. In other words, the language of rights, the language of rule of law, the language of separation of powers. You know, all of these are states that are seeking to create a kind of total environment where the regime or the leader or the ruling party controls all media, all conversation, um makes all the decisions, uh controls the court system.
Ceuta is a multicultural peninsula with a large Muslim population. Many of them are of Moroccan descent. Even residents who are concerned about the sudden influx of migrants still shouted away the far-right activists.
Most discourses about Israel or Palestine are morality plays of good guys vs bad guys. Egyptian-born Hussein Aboubakr Mansour takes a different approach, seeing the conflict as a self-reproducing system of political and economic extraction where Arab regimes, opposition movements, rival states, Western academics, NGOs, and Gulf monarchies like Qatar all convert Palestinian victimhood into their own forms of power, money, and meaning.
I've always believed the number one application of AI should be to improve human health. That is a great message. Very different from the SpaceX S1. The number one application of AI is soft power of the entire galaxy.
I think if I had to pick just one thing, there's sort of an old idea in economics called the resource curse, where countries that have a lot of natural resources — a lot of oil, for example — tend not to develop as fast as countries that have to innovate their way to prosperity. And I believe there's something analogous happening with intelligence. The countries and the people that have the most access to intelligence are going to have to innovate their way to prosperity, and that's going to be the biggest driver of abundance.
Most discourses about Israel or Palestine are morality plays of good guys vs bad guys... seeing the conflict as a self-reproducing system of political and economic extraction where Arab regimes, opposition movements, rival states, Western academics, NGOs, and Gulf monarchies like Qatar all convert Palestinian victimhood into their own forms of power, money, and meaning.
3mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
