Transcript: Diary Of A CEO Interview w/ Konstantin Kisin and Steve Keen

It’s a very understandable decision, but unless you have a world in which everybody has the same quality of life everywhere, which we’re never going to have because that’s not how the world works, then countries will have to have borders that they enforce. And that was the consensus view around the West for the entirety of its history.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how is this contributing to the problems that you described in the West?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: If you are looking at that and you are in the center, center-right, maybe old-school leftist who sort of believes in high levels of redistribution but believes in borders at the same time, you are looking at that and you’re going, our political class has lost control. Our political class allows tens of thousands of people to enter Britain illegally on small boats every year. People on the right will look at that and say, we need to get tougher on borders. We need to get tougher on immigration. We need to get really tough on illegal immigration. And as long as the political class, left and right, refuses to address that issue as they have done for this entire time, you will see more people on the right adopting harder-line slogans, harder-line policies when it comes to illegal immigration and immigration more broadly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it sounds a little bit to me like we’re saying unless we address this, then the right has a very effective marketing campaign.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, the right has a very legitimate grievance about what’s happening to their society, and that will be very effective electorally, of course.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the other thing you said was stagnation.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, of course.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So this polarization that you’re talking about, this economic stagnation in Europe — where does this lead us?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I hate, as you know, to make predictions about the future with any great confidence, but I think anytime you have a combination of economic problems and social instability and cultural problems, you put all those things together, historically speaking, it’s not a good time. It’s a time when conflict, violence, civil unrest — all of these things are much more likely. Doesn’t mean they’re guaranteed, doesn’t mean you can’t change course, doesn’t mean you can’t course correct. But if you don’t, we are on the road to, best case scenario, civil unrest and violence for sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you see evidence that there’s going to be a remedy to course correct the issue you’ve described?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Currently, I don’t see that being addressed, but we are in a time when unusual things are possible. And so at the next election in Britain, you may see the right-wing populists come in. And then the question is, can they do the things that they’re promising to the people who will vote for them? And there’s a big question mark about that, because the things that they’ll be promising — which is about addressing not just this problem in terms of people currently coming in, but the people who are already here.

I don’t know how much exactly we spend now, but there was a point at which we were spending £8 million a day on hotels for illegal immigrants. So it tells you the scale of the problem. It’s a very difficult problem to address because the legal system and international conventions and all sorts of other things that are now in place, and they’re now enforced, make it very difficult to address.

It’s not dishonesty, but the thing that people on the right don’t tend to say is even once you’ve dealt with illegal immigration, the country’s not magically going to be better. You have to have an economy that’s growing for people to feel like their lot has got better. The fact that you have rightly removed people who should never have been allowed in in the first place will contribute somewhat to easing their concerns, but that’s not going to solve the problem. And so even if you get right-wing populists into power, that’s not necessarily a remedy for addressing the tensions that I’m talking about.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And in the United States, a different set of issues, but maybe symptoms are similar. Polarization and inequality are leading to a rise in socialism, and then the right is getting more right than ever?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The right is getting more right than ever. I think Trump’s election was kind of like the peak of it, and it’s just carried on in terms of ICE and deportations and whatever. And look, there’s a lot to be criticized about the Trump administration. The one thing they have done is close down the border, and I think that’s a very good thing and it was very necessary.

But in terms of the rise of socialism — and look, democratic socialism, we should be honest and just call it communism because that’s what it is — it’s a very unwise but understandable reaction to the economic circumstances of young people’s lives in particular. If you’re locked out of the housing market, which historically speaking is really the only way for an ordinary person to accumulate capital, if you don’t have access to capital at a time when asset prices are inflating and have been inflating for a long time, you’re basically watching the possibility of capitalism run away from you. Of course, you’re going to turn over the apple cart.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you think communism is bad?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I grew up in the Soviet Union, so yes, I do think communism is bad. Ideologically, it might sound great to people, and I understand why — equality to all men, everyone being equal in every way, it’s wonderful. It just isn’t compatible with human nature, for all sorts of reasons.

The most obvious one is the basic 80/20 rule of things. Most people are not aware of it, but what communism tries to do is to take from the disproportionately productive 20% and spread it out across everybody else. The problem is that disincentivizes the 20% from doing anything. And so you end up with a communist system, like the one we had in the Soviet Union, where no one really has any incentive to produce, to create, to innovate. And so you get a very stagnant economy. And on top of that, then you have central planning where the government is trying to decide what to do — they’re not getting market signals about what’s the right or wrong thing to do. And you end up in a place where the economy is just wrecked. So you get equality, but everyone’s just equally poor.

Capitalism, Communism, and Climate

STEVEN BARTLETT: Steve, what do you think in terms of what Konstantin said to me? He said that he thinks there’s civil unrest potentially.

STEVE KEEN: Civil unrest is absolutely guaranteed. All I can see is civil unrest ahead of us, because it isn’t just communism in that sense — the Russian Soviet version that you experienced that’s failed us — also capitalism.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Capitalism has failed us?

STEVE KEEN: I think capitalism is going to fail. And you guess who I blame for it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Who?

STEVE KEEN: Economists.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re an economist?

STEVE KEEN: Neoclassical mainstream economists have a fantasy vision of capitalism, and that fantasy vision has led them to trivialize what’s happening with global warming. And most people simply aren’t aware that they’ve done this. So nobody is worrying about global warming — not nobody, but the political authorities are not putting any effort into it — because they read The Economist, and The Economist tells them that by 2100, if temperatures rise by 3 degrees, there’ll be a tiny fall in GDP. So why worry about it?

In fact, we’re starting to see the beginning of it this year with the crazy El Niño coming our way, the crazy weather we’re living through in England right now. And the system is going to collapse because the productive system won’t be able to cope with the change in the climate. So that’s what I see as the main source of conflict. I think everything else we’re seeing is trivial compared to what that’s going to do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about — so Konstantin talked about these crossings in Ceuta in Spain. And he was alluding to the fact that this needs to be addressed or this polarization, which is having lots of downstream consequences, isn’t going to change. What is your perspective on this?

STEVE KEEN: Again, there’s so much of a fog of misinformation around these days that it’s very hard to know whether what you hear is accurate. But the proposition I’ve been told is that Morocco has close relations with Israel, and the Zionists wanted this as a way of destabilizing Spain, which is about the only country in Europe that is attacking the Zionist state. And so this was a political setup.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, hold on a second, but Spain has the ability to enforce its own border.

STEVE KEEN: Of course it does. Whether this actually happened is arguably being argued, and I don’t know whether it’s right or not. I’ve given up on trying to say whether something is true or not these days. But the argument has been that because the Spanish government came out and was critical of Israel, critical of Zionism, then this was a setup by the Israelis through Morocco to disturb Spain.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Hold on. I’m making a different point, Steve, which is: if my four-year-old wants sweets at 11 o’clock at night, that’s true, but I am the idiot who gives it to him and he then stays up all night. European countries refuse to enforce their borders. Whatever you think Israel’s doing — by the way, I’ve seen literally zero evidence to support this theory, but let’s say it’s true, just for the sake of argument — it’s ultimately up to Spain, it’s up to Italy, it’s up to Britain, it’s up to other European countries to enforce the border. That is something that we are capable of doing. And it’s not like this incident in Ceuta is the only time this has happened. Slightly under 3 million people have crossed the Mediterranean on boats in the last 10 years.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And that’s not Israel doing it, that’s us allowing it to happen.

STEVE KEEN: But also us destabilizing Libya. If the Libyan slave markets exist because we came, we saw, he died — to quote Hillary Clinton on that point.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I completely agree with you.

STEVE KEEN: The extent to which the West has destabilized the regions from which the migrants are coming has to be acknowledged.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Of course.

STEVE KEEN: If you don’t acknowledge it, then you’re blaming the people who are sandwiched between two political blocs.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But I did acknowledge it. I completely understand, and I’ve been against a lot of the foreign interventions that the West has engaged in. But a lot of people — and we know this from surveys, from interviews, from the types of people who come — most of these people are economic migrants. That doesn’t mean that they’re wrong to pursue a better life, but they want to move to Europe. This is not me saying it — it’s a friend of mine who’s Iraqi, and this is what he says. He says, in the Middle East, we have a saying: if you want to work, you go to America; if you want to live on benefits, you go to Europe. We are creating an incentive structure in Europe that allows people to come and feel like this is a place in which we will provide a life for them that they don’t have to provide for themselves. That incentive structure — I mean, you’re an economist, although an anti-economist—

STEVE KEEN: An anti-economist.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: An anti-economist. Do you remember that?

STEVE KEEN: Do you remember that?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But I doubt we disagree about the importance of incentives in life.

STEVE KEEN: Incentives, but also incentives to push people out of where they are rather than to reconstruct where they are and make it more livable. I’m all for that. I mean, the one country we’re not seeing a lot of economic migrants from is China. Now you say what?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: China’s very poor.

STEVE KEEN: Nonetheless, nobody wants to leave the place because it’s booming.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If there was an economic stagnation in Europe, would this subject be as inflammatory for people? Would this be recognizable?

STEVE KEEN: I think that we’re failing on all sorts of fronts and the UK is not a booming economy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’ve often said, Konstantin, that we’re spending too much money.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, we’re borrowing money now to pay off money we borrowed before.

STEVE KEEN: This is wrong.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Tell me why.

STEVE KEEN: Okay. Have you ever done accounting?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’ve done my own accounting.

STEVE KEEN: Okay. Do the accounting and you’ll see the government does not borrow when it spends more than it takes back in taxation.

Government Spending and the UK Economy

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You were asking me about us spending too much money. I don’t want to get bogged down on this. The reality is if you spend more on welfare than you do on defense, or if you spend more on welfare than you do on education, or if you spend more on welfare than other things, you’re not spending money to help somebody get the mental health intervention they need to get back into work. That’s not what we do in this country.

We’ve had people like Fraser Nelson, who was the editor of The Spectator at the time, now he’s at The Times, who’s done a lot of research into this. And what he basically came to is that what we are really doing is putting people in a position where they are getting money in order not to get back into work. The incentive structure is such that it actually makes no sense for them to get a starting job, which will not necessarily be well paid, but the tax incentives just mean that they’re actually better off on welfare.

If you do that, and if you spend a significant portion of your budget on that, plus you’ve got an aging population, so you’re spending a tremendous amount of money on pensions — pensioners vote, there’s lots of them, they have the ability to make sure the government is really looking after them. If you do that over time, your ability to do productive things is not going to be there.

And by the way, the difference between the US and Britain and Europe more broadly, in my opinion, is partly cultural. There is a business mindset that exists in America that just isn’t there here. And the other thing is their attitude to what we call welfare, what they call entitlements, is different. There’s a good and bad side to that coin. In America, you really have to work very hard to survive because the welfare system isn’t there to catch you when you fall nearly as much. You don’t get the same quality of healthcare if you don’t have the money to pay for it. You can fire and hire people much more easily, as you know, as an employer. All of those things mean that the US economy can accelerate a lot faster.

But I always say America is a great place to be rich, a hard place to be middle class, and a very difficult place to be poor. Europe is kind of the other way around. And so I think those are some of the differences in productivity as well.

STEVE KEEN: I would agree with Konstantin that America does have that can-do attitude. And they also do have the attitude that failure is the first step on the ladder of success. There is an expectation or acceptance that people can fail, then recreate. It’s not a stigma in America where it’s more of a stigma over in the United Kingdom and Europe. So I think that is part of it.

It’s also the sheer scale of the American economy. England, I think, has suffered more from the Thatcherite twist — cutting back government spending, meaning people have less money in their pockets to spend, meaning there’s less economic activity, meaning you’ve got to go into debt to be able to start a business. All these things end up slowing down the rate of economic growth. America has not made the same mistake that the European Union had made with something like the Maastricht Treaty. There are elements of the American system which give you a higher rate of technological innovation and development than England gets, for sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So Steve, just to pick up on some of those points then, are you saying that the UK doesn’t have a spending problem?

STEVE KEEN: No, they don’t have — they have the problem that they’re not spending enough. The government should be spending more.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The government should be spending more.

STEVE KEEN: Should be spending more money.

STEVEN BARTLETT: On what?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: On what?

STEVE KEEN: Education, welfare, infrastructure, dams for a start. You know how many dams — one of the reasons that we’ve got a potential crisis in the UK right now is the UK, after privatizing its water 40 years ago, has one less dam now than it had 40 years ago.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you want the government to spend more?

STEVE KEEN: The government should be providing the infrastructure — the foundation that enables economic activity to occur. That’s what we’re seeing happening in China, and that’s why China is outperforming the rest of the world. When you cut back on providing the infrastructure, you’ve got to build your own roads to connect your factories together. So by not providing the long-term stuff, which a government should finance, you end up hobbling your private sector rather than enabling it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But what you’ve done there is you’ve packaged a bunch of things together, some of which in my opinion are accurate and some of which are really inaccurate. When you say infrastructure, welfare — infrastructure, like, I’m in favor of government borrowing money to invest in things that generate productivity.

STEVE KEEN: And I’m in favor of them spending money to create that stuff. Same thing, but the borrowing is not important.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Irrelevant.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Where you get that money from is actually irrelevant. The government spending money to invest in useful, productive infrastructure — I mean, one of the other reasons the US is growing in a different way to us: the UK has the highest industrial electricity prices in the world. So if you’re trying to do AI, you’re not going to do it here. If you’re trying to do industry, you’re not going to do it here. So if the government had actually made it easier to build nuclear power plants, to do other energy things that drive down the cost of electricity, then you are putting yourself in a position to succeed in industry and to succeed in business. And the government spending money, whether it’s borrowed or not, to build infrastructure, housing, roads — there is definitely a case to be made for that. Giving money to people not to work, which is what a lot of the welfare bill is, that is not productive. So you’ve got to separate these two things out. Money for infrastructure, wonderful, great. Money for keeping people unproductive, very bad. And culturally, it creates a lot of problems as well, because you create a society of people who are effectively takers and not creators. Terrible.

STEVE KEEN: I don’t think we’re doing that. I’ve seen unemployment benefits used to be adequate — I’m talking from my Australian experience now. They’re not anymore. So the welfare that’s provided to people doesn’t mean that they can survive and live with nothing.

Energy, Growth, and Climate Change

STEVEN BARTLETT: The point around how we generate growth does link fundamentally to energy. There’s a big conversation happening at the moment with Andy Burnham. I think he spoke to Trump about this, about the North Sea and about the oil in the North Sea. Do you think we should be drilling there?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Look, the energy conversation is where we’re likely to have very strong disagreements. But I think it’s important to get the groundwork in place before we have the conversation. Steve said that no one’s taking climate change seriously. I would argue, based on what we have seen, that we’ve talked about climate change in such a way for such a long time now that you literally have people who are so terrified they’re not having children. They’re so terrified they’ve got climate anxiety. We had the phenomenon of Greta Thunberg going around giving speeches and being taken as a credible person.

Let’s look at the reality. The overwhelming bulk of the CO2 emissions of the future, the greenhouse gases of the future, are going to be produced in two countries: India and China. That’s just a fact. The world now uses more oil, more gas, and more coal than it ever has done, ever. And people will say, well, China’s building dams and wind turbines and solar panel arrays, et cetera. It’s true, but they’re also building coal power stations every week. They’re building every form of energy that they can because they know something we in the West have forgotten, which is: GDP is energy transformed.

STEVE KEEN: Now there I completely agree.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay.

STEVE KEEN: That’s a shock, but I do. Good.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Fantastic.

STEVE KEEN: Okay.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: In other words, if you don’t have energy, if you are not creating energy, you are going to be poor. Almost all wealth creation in the history of humanity has been about using more dense fuel. So you go from hay, which you put into horses and cows and other animals, to wood, to coal, to oil, to gas, to nuclear. You get denser and denser. You’re creating more energy and you convert that energy into wealth, into prosperity, into hospitals, into schools, into money, into everything. So any society which creates a structure where energy is expensive and not abundant is going to get poorer. It’s one of the main reasons we are stagnating in Europe in a way that America is not.

Now, in terms of climate change, I don’t want to get bogged down in how impactful this is, who’s doing this, who’s doing that. The hard reality is Britain can literally do absolutely nothing about climate change. Britain produces 1% of global carbon emissions. And the narrative was, well, it doesn’t really matter that we only produce 1% of global carbon emissions because Britain has moral leadership in the world, and so if we reduce our energy consumption and increase our energy prices and use slightly more wind and slightly more solar, then other countries will follow suit. That was the argument. It’s very clear now that that is not remotely happening.

India and China, if you talk to people there, they’re like, we want to grow. We need our people to be prosperous. We need our people not to die. Life expectancy in India at the time of partition in 1947 was 32 years old. It’s now, I think, over 70, maybe 80 now. And that’s because they’ve been burning fossil fuels, and they’re going to keep burning fossil fuels, and they’re going to keep using nuclear, and they’re going to do everything else. Britain can’t affect that. We can’t do anything about it. And climate change — the planet will get warmer.

So what we should be doing is investing in infrastructure that allows us to cope with that reality, in exactly the way the Dutch have done — they build flood defenses and other ways of managing the fact that sea levels change. That’s the only thing that we in Britain can do about that issue. And in the meantime, rather than damaging our economy by creating less energy and therefore reducing our ability to grow our GDP, what we should be doing is creating a system where we produce abundant, cheap energy.

Nick Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister — there’s a very instructive video of him 15 or 20 years ago being asked why we’re not building nuclear power stations, and him saying, well, it’s going to take 15, 20 years. Well, it’s been 15, 20 years and we don’t have any nuclear power stations because of the shortsightedness of our political leaders on these issues.

So should we be pumping out as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we can? Absolutely not. Should we have a sensible energy policy that is about making sure that we actually grow our economy and keep our people wealthy, and also have the money to make the adjustments we’re going to have to make to the fact that the climate will change and we can’t control that? That’s the real question. It’s not about do you believe in climate change or whatever — this is a silly conversation. The real conversation is: what can we do about the inevitable reality of the climate changing?

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you’re saying we can’t do anything to stop it, but you’re also then saying we should just build defenses to deal with the symptoms.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: We should adapt. And this is what human beings have done throughout the history of our civilization and of our species. There have been times when the planet has been way warmer than it is today. 120,000 years ago, there were hippopotamuses swimming in the Thames and elephants.

STEVE KEEN: No, not 12,000 years.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m pretty sure it is. No, no.

STEVE KEEN: 12,000 years ago is the beginning of coming out of the ice age.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Would you just check me on that, please?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No. 12,000 years ago, Britain was coming out of the last ice age. The climate was cold, tundra-like.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Just let him finish.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So because it was cold — but it says 120,000 years ago.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah. Okay.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You’re aiming at 120,000 years ago.

STEVE KEEN: Okay.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What I’m saying is the climate has changed in all sorts of different ways. 2,000 years ago, the Romans grew grapes on Hadrian’s Wall. And 200 years ago, it was really cold — the Thames would freeze every year, et cetera. This happens; people have to adapt to it, and we are going to have to do it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So Steve, the assertion there is that the UK can’t do anything about climate change in terms of affecting it on a global scale, but they can defend themselves against it by—

STEVE KEEN: No, you can’t. You cannot defend yourself against what England faces if climate change continues. This is some of the most recent research on what’s called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. You’re aware of the AMOC — that transfers about 10 degrees Celsius of heat from the middle of the Atlantic up to Europe. If it stops running, temperatures in Europe on average will fall by 10 degrees.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I guess the central question here is, is there something the UK can do to affect global climate change?

STEVE KEEN: Not on its own.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

STEVE KEEN: Not on its own.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because when you look at China and India, they have increased their carbon emissions.

STEVE KEEN: China is actually having falling per capita emissions at the moment. Even though they’re building power stations, they’re building so many new nuclear plants, and far cheaper than it’s being done in the West, so many wind and solar, that they’re actually reducing their carbon footprint rather than increasing it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Per capita?

STEVE KEEN: And per capita is falling as well.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So they’re reducing their carbon emissions?

STEVE KEEN: They’re reducing their carbon emissions.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Are they?

STEVE KEEN: Okay. And that’s been the last two years. It’s only in the last two years this has started to happen. But China is now reducing its—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And what about India?

STEVE KEEN: India, absolutely going in the opposite direction, because it’s far less developed, of course, than China.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So they’ll keep developing.

STEVE KEEN: They will keep on doing it until such time as they have their first wet-bulb catastrophe, when say 10 or 20 million people die from heat in one day. Then I think India will start doing something very different. But there’s a belief this is something we can adjust to, and the forces we’re talking about are far beyond anything humans have any capacity to adjust to.

Now, the AMOC — the reason I mentioned the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — the temperature range for London, if the AMOC fails, is estimated to be between -20 degrees Celsius and +35.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Steve, can the UK do anything about it if our emissions are so small?

STEVE KEEN: We cannot do anything as a bunch of nations fighting each other. This whole attitude that we’ve got — this contest with that country, this country’s better than that country — this is dooming us to extinction.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But is this the reality?

STEVE KEEN: I’m going to out-Greta-Thunberg Greta Thunberg in this conversation now, because I know a lot more than you guys do about the climate.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I agree. What I’m really saying is, if we talk about human incentives, do we have any control over what India decides to do?

STEVE KEEN: No, we don’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do we have any control over what China decides to do?

STEVE KEEN: None whatsoever.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So does the UK then need to be a bit selfish?

STEVE KEEN: You need to realize how serious the situation we’re in is.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And what will we then do? We realize it’s serious. Let’s say we accept your point — this is the reality.

STEVE KEEN: Okay.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What do we do?

STEVE KEEN: We would have to drastically reduce energy consumption.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Ah.

STEVE KEEN: Okay? Energy consumption is vital for GDP — completely 100% agree, and I know the statistics on this front. The link between gross world product, the equivalent of GDP for the planet, and energy is incredibly tight. They’re one for one. If energy goes up, so does gross world product. If GDP goes down, so does energy consumption. They’re one for one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So Steve, when you say we need to reduce energy, do you mean the UK?

STEVE KEEN: I mean the species. I mean the human species.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how does Andy Burnham do that?

STEVE KEEN: We are not set up to deal with this problem because we’re broken into nation states. We can’t make decisions that are big enough to have an impact.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So we need world government to reduce world energy consumption. Is that right?

STEVE KEEN: We’re going to be stuck with that. Yes. We’re going to be stuck with it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m glad we’re having this conversation, because at least — and I mean this in a genuinely respectful way—

STEVE KEEN: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone be honest about this issue.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s what you want. You want world government.

STEVE KEEN: No, I don’t want it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You believe it’s inevitable.

STEVE KEEN: I’m saying it’s inevitable because by ignoring this problem, we’ve got to the scale where it’s an existential threat to us.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You believe it’s inevitable that we have a world government that reduces world energy consumption and therefore the prosperity of everyone who lives on the planet.

STEVE KEEN: And if we had taken the advice of “Limits to Growth” 50 years ago, we would not be having this conversation.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there any solution that you believe is actually possible?

STEVE KEEN: None. No, no.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There we go. You’ve done a public service here because you have shown what it is that sits underneath all the conversation about climate. It’s a best-case scenario: people who know there’s nothing we can do, but what we should do is flail about in the meantime. And in order to not address this issue, we impoverish not just our own citizens and our fellow people, but actually the entire world. That’s what this is. And the entire challenge I have with this is I don’t believe in suicide for token gestures towards not solving a problem you’re claiming to solve. We are not going to solve this problem by creating a world government and reducing energy consumption. That is never, ever, in a billion years, going to happen.

STEVE KEEN: No, what we’re going to do instead is run into the crisis and fall apart as a civilization in the process.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What we’re going to do instead — and look, there’s a possibility you’re correct about that — but the only choice we actually have to solve this problem is to create forms of energy that do not produce CO2 but produce GDP. Clean energy. That’s what we’re going to have to do. By the way, it’s what we’ve done throughout history.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And we need to make that clean energy more favorable in terms of the economics to India and China.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Did you need a world government to reduce usage of the horse and cart and replace it with the automobile? No, you didn’t. You came up with a better technology and people adopted that technology voluntarily because it was advantageous. This is not going to be solved by making everybody poor, for the reasons that Steve himself articulated, but it’s also not going to be solved by making everybody hold hands and sing Kumbaya—

STEVE KEEN: No, what I’m saying is we need to have engineers in control. We were talking about it 50 years ago.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Engineers in control?

STEVE KEEN: Engineers.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So we should stop having elections?

STEVE KEEN: So compared to the politicians we get, yes, I’d rather get rid of elections and have engineers running everything.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: They do a better job than a politician ever — well, and this is why I say this is a public service, because this is the true face of the climate catastrophe narrative. Let’s go back 50 years to the same place: world government, no elections, and making everybody poor.

STEVE KEEN: Fantastic. Okay. Now I’m going to go back and say where it started. It started in 1972 when the Limits to Growth study was published. The Limits to Growth said that if we continue on the current trajectory, we’re going to have an ecological catastrophe sometime in the 21st century. They deliberately left the dates vague — they knew they couldn’t predict the actual dates, so they said 1900 was the start of our work, 2100 the end. In the middle of their projections, roughly speaking about the time we are now, between 2030 and 2050, the system would start falling over because we’d be eliminating the capacity of the planet to support our species at the energy consumption levels that we have now.

So they said we had to dramatically reduce pollution per unit of output and stabilize population at 4 billion people. That was the argument — they wanted to stabilize at 4 billion people in 1975. We wouldn’t be having this dilemma if we’d actually taken the advice of the engineers who wrote that report. It wasn’t written by hippies. Most people think Limits to Growth was written by a bunch of dope-smoking hippies in Rome. It was written by engineers at MIT.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Steve, one of the things that I spend a lot of time doing on this podcast is trying to find reality through wishful thinking. I have a lot of conversations about AI, for example. I see so many parallels with AI, because we’re saying, look, AI could be a big problem, but when you look at human incentives, the US is trying to beat China and China is trying to beat this person and they’re trying to beat them. And even in the US, you’ve got OpenAI trying to beat Anthropic. So when you look at incentives, you go, okay, I can see how this is going to play out — there’s an inevitability to it.

In the example you gave there, what I’m hearing is reduced pollution, which would have meant getting China and India and the US and the UK and Europe to all cooperate, which has proven to be impossible with our political systems. And the other thing you mentioned was stopping people having babies, stabilizing at 4 billion, which would have come with a lopsided economy and lots of other problems. It looks like it wasn’t possible.

STEVE KEEN: And the fossil fuel lobbies and conventional economists undermined all that stuff. So the reason we’re having this conversation now is you basically think we’ve got to adapt. It’s like we’re going up a hill, so we’ve got to have a lighter car or more power for the car, whatever else. I’m saying we’re five inches from a brick wall, and we’re not going to slow down in time to avoid hitting the wall. We’re going to hit the wall. Brace yourselves. Brace for impact. That’s the advice I’d give.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But when I asked you earlier if we need world government, you said yes. If I ask you—

STEVE KEEN: It’s not going to happen. I know it’s not going to happen. The only way out of this is to do it collectively. With this obvious example, we’re going to do it competitively and shoot ourselves in the foot in the process. If we’d realized that each nation had to reduce its energy consumption or get a higher efficiency out of its energy 50 years ago—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But who’s the “we”?

STEVE KEEN: With the engineering.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Who’s the “we” that would’ve realized this? You would’ve needed a world government back then to do it.

STEVE KEEN: You would’ve needed politicians who understand what the engineers told them.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

STEVE KEEN: Instead, you had politicians who listened to the media and listened to the oil interests and trivialized these dangers. And that’s why now it’s catastrophic. I truly believe we’re on the edge of a catastrophic breakdown of human civilization. In that situation, if you wanted to stop it happening, you would need to have global coordination, authoritarian, et cetera. If we’d done it 50 years ago, we wouldn’t need any of this.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Steve, how would you go to India and tell them that they can’t use energy when some people in India are very—

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, I know.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The women are dying in childbirth and their children are starving.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah. Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And you go to India and say, no, no, no, you can’t grow?

STEVE KEEN: We have an ignorance about the biosphere on which we live. Our understanding of the biosphere itself and the impact that our civilization has on the biosphere is trivial. And therefore we have these discussions as if the biosphere will take care of itself.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think we all agree that climate change is both real and a huge existential problem. And the evidence for that is we can observe it, we can measure it. Even now we’re going through one of the record-breaking droughts, periods of weather volatility. Both the Western United States and Western Europe are experiencing historically severe, record-breaking weather at the moment. So my next question logically becomes, what can we do about it?

STEVE KEEN: It’s too late. The extent to which we’re unaware of the energy forces we’ve unleashed on the planet is huge. And people think all this stuff is going to happen and it’s a couple of decades away or half a century away and somebody else’s problem.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: When is it going to happen?

STEVE KEEN: I’ve got a feeling the next 10 years.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Next 10 years.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s going to happen?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The decline of our capacity.

STEVE KEEN: The beginning of the breakdown of our capacity to maintain a civilization on the planet. I’m probably wrong in terms of timing — I’m probably putting it too far in the future. I might be wrong in the timeline.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So it might be less than 10?

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, it could be less.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I really, really hope all three of us live long enough to be able to sit down and have that conversation.

STEVE KEEN: So do I. So do I. I hope I’m wrong. I’m desperately hoping I’m wrong.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Steve, can you define what you mean by climate breakdown specifically? What does that look like for me as I walk out onto the street?

STEVE KEEN: Well, let’s say one of the big ones, again, is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the AMOC. The most recent estimates are that it’s going to stop functioning sometime between last year, which of course hasn’t yet happened, and 2095. When that happens, the temperature in Europe will fall, roughly speaking, by 3 degrees per decade for three decades. So the temperature in Europe on average will fall by 10 degrees. The extremes will become even more extreme. This is research from Tim Lenton, Exeter University professor of climate change. The range of temperatures in London will be between -20 and +35.

Now, what’s the chance of London surviving that scale of temperature range? You can’t even cope with leaves on the train lines here. As an Australian arriving in London, I find my train from Waterloo to Kingston is slowed down because there are leaves on the rail. Leaves on the rail? Has that never happened before? What are your engineers doing about that? Why don’t you have trains that move the leaves? This sort of unprepared nature — we are completely unprepared for the scale of what we face.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Look, as someone who is Russian, -20 is a nice spring day for me. But look, we’re being silly about it. I think if we ground this conversation in the realms of the possible and look at what we can do, it seems to me that the only thing we can do is create forms of energy that do not produce emissions that we believe are contributing to the changing climate. A world government’s not going to happen.

STEVE KEEN: I agree.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The level of coordination is not going to happen. The authoritarian world run by engineers is not going to happen. These are not realistic things to be talking about.

STEVE KEEN: I know.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Let’s talk about what we actually can do. What we can do is put all the money we have wrongly put into trying to mitigate this issue into trying to create forms of energy that are actually going to work — not only to solve this problem, but to fuel prosperity, to fuel technological innovation, and to create a better world, as opposed to thinking that we’re all doomed and nothing is possible.

The Iran Conflict and the Global Economy

STEVEN BARTLETT: Let’s take a look at this situation, which is linked. This is the Strait of Hormuz. This is US oil reserves at the moment, in rapid decline. What is your perspective on what’s going on in the Middle East at the moment, Konstantin? Why has this happened?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So one of the things I think is very important not to do is project our own ideas onto people who we’ve never met, like President Trump. I assume none of us have met President Trump. So I can only tell you what I know from speaking to people in his administration, other people who have some access to the administration’s thinking.

My understanding, and it’s a frustrating thing to have to articulate and to believe, but it is true, is that the level of analysis we all have about the complicated machinations of how different departments in the US government work isn’t really as complicated as that. And I think we all wish it was sometimes.

Trump walked into a trap. I think he walked into a trap that was a sugar high from Venezuela. There was a kind of feeling of perhaps vulnerability and a belief that we can solve every problem. And Iran is different to Venezuela. Iran has the ability to choke off the world’s supply — not just of oil, but of gas, of helium, natural gas, fertilizer, and lots of other things. And it hasn’t quite fed through to the global economy in the way that people have talked about in a catastrophizing way, but if this carries on, it will do, because our stocks of other things too are going to start running out, and the price of those things is going to go up. And so then the many predictions that people like Steve have been making are likely to come true.

We had Senator Ted Cruz on our show around the time this war was launched. He’s not only a huge supporter of President Trump, but a huge supporter of this conflict, and he advocated for it. And when I said to him, look, come the midterms, this is not going to be good for you and for your party, his exact words — I’m quoting from memory, so maybe they’re not his exact words, but the broad theme of what he said was, if we’re still in this conflict come the midterms, we failed. I suspect that that is almost certainly going to happen. You’ve just shown me a picture of President Trump’s approval ratings — they seem to verify what I’m saying.

So I think he’s walked into a trap, and you’ve had people on your show articulate why the trap will continue to bear fruit for the Iranians. There’s this great saying: in the West you have all the watches, in the East we have all the time. They don’t have midterms in Iran. They can wait. They can take the pain and the punishment that they’re currently experiencing for as long as they really need to. This is kind of like their Battle of Stalingrad. They can take the pain, they can throw bodies at the problem as long as they need to, because they know the US can’t go the distance. And because of that, the incentive structure is for the Iranians to hold on as long as possible, because they know that the US will have to deal with this reality. So I think it’s been a catastrophic mistake.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And do you think Iran are actually going to be stronger on the other side of this?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Nobody knows exactly. They’re definitely stronger now than they were. But look, all of this is very unpredictable. I think we should be very careful about making predictions about the future of countries that we understand very little in the West from the outside. This is very difficult for anyone outside of Iran today to understand what’s happening in Iran.

The example I like to give is Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator. He had a 92% approval rating the day before he was seized with his wife and summarily executed. The predictability of how long a regime survives in these countries is difficult to judge from the outside. Currently, Iran has a chokehold on the global economy and they’re leveraging it very powerfully.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You predicted a—

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, I think it’s still going to happen. But the thing is, again, it’s a question of what the stocks are. For example, we know this story about the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We also know that China had a huge reserve and they’ve run that reserve down from about one and a half years of supply of oil for them to — I don’t know what amount — but they’re going back in the opposite direction now. So we didn’t need to know what the stocks of all these products were around the globe beforehand.

So when you make an estimate, yes, there’s going to be a running out of oil. Well, China reduced its oil consumption, America’s running its stock down. At some point, though, because the flow is still blocked through the strait, then there won’t be the oil, there won’t be the fertilizer, there won’t be the sulfuric acid — all these things will not be available, and then we’ll have a physical hit coming out of all that. And I completely agree, Trump was sold a pup, and we’re paying the price.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there any way out of this in your view, Steve?

STEVE KEEN: I think America has to leave the Middle East. That’s about the only long-term resolution. America stops interfering in the Middle East.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If they were to leave now, the issue they face is they’ve now given Iran — they’ve sort of established a precedent — where Iran can use the Strait of Hormuz, which is like a proxy for the global economy, as a bargaining chip. And so if you’re Iran, you now can proceed potentially with your nuclear program, and if they come back, you shut down the global economy via the Strait of Hormuz.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Or you sort of kneecap it, at least.

STEVE KEEN: Which is why it was a catastrophic decision to provoke them in the first place.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The thing that no one really talks about — and it’s an issue close to my heart, with the Ukrainian family and the conflict there being something that’s very important to me — is one of the hopes I had for the Trump presidency was that he would find a way to bring that conflict to a close. This has only made things better for Russia. The fact that they’ve had to lift sanctions on Russian oil, for example, in order to compensate for the lack of supply — this is allowing Russia to continue this war and to fund its war. I just think it’s been a disastrous intervention and really unfortunate in the way that it’s been done.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think this is going to completely tarnish his presidency more than any other issue?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It depends on how it ends. Again, these things are very unpredictable — I think we really should be very honest about that. But the way that I see it at the moment, his best way out really — I don’t know about pulling out of the Middle East, that seems a bit extreme — but the best way for him to get out of this is to find a way to sell Americans on the idea that it’s been a success. That is the only way he’s going to get out of this.

If he can find a way to sell a terrible deal, which he’s going to have to sign with Iran, as a victory for America — which Trump is uniquely placed to do, let’s be honest, his ability to sell things is pretty strong — then he can leave with less egg on his face than otherwise, at which point how history judges him for a temporary interruption of oil and fertilizer and gas supplies is hard to say, not least because he’s still got time in his term to either do good things or to do more things that don’t work out well. But at the moment, this is a conflict whose only resolution, it seems to me, is for him to accept the reality that he made a mistake and to find a way to extricate himself from it without admitting it was a mistake.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Steve mentioned that he predicts a famine is coming, a global famine. Do you agree with that?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Depends how long it runs. I have friends in Australia who are farmers, and when this first started, they were telling me they can’t get their hands on fertilizer even at the quotas they already had.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And again, context here is that a lot of fertilizer comes via the Strait of Hormuz.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. And goes all over the world. Even if, say, you get your supply of fertilizer not from the Middle East — well, given that the supply of fertilizer is no longer coming from the Middle East, the people who used to get it from the Middle East now have to get it from somewhere else, and there’s less of it to go around. Therefore, price goes up, quotas and allocations go down, you can’t plant the crops, et cetera.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah. On the Australian front, I’ve got friends in the same boat, and they told me that about half the usual wheat crop has been laid because of the cost of fertilizer, and Australia used to produce seven times as much food as it needs for its people. So it’s going to produce three, three and a half times as much, and that means, of course, less availability for food around the world. And this is going to be a global phenomenon. Where it hits, again, it’s very hard to say, because you don’t know what stocks exist, you don’t know how dependent different agricultural systems are on the fertilizer that they bring in. But yeah, it’s a catastrophically bad decision. And the only way that Trump can get out of it is to lose and claim victory. That’s what he’ll do.

Socialism, China, and Political Freedom

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, there’s midterm elections coming up which could have a big impact, but there’s also the 2028 elections coming up for the presidential position. A lot of people are now forecasting that the Democrats, the left side of politics, or potentially even a socialist candidate is going to get into office. Do you think that would be a net good thing for the United States?

STEVE KEEN: Well, after Trump, anything is going to be better. So yes, I do, because I think America’s pushed far too far in the independent, self-reliance, “don’t let the state do anything” direction, and you get an unbalanced economy out of that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think the US needs a democratic socialist candidate?

STEVE KEEN: Yeah. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

STEVE KEEN: Because they will promote the need for the public goods that the public sector provides and the private sector does not. We’ve got the classic illustration here with water supplies for the UK — we privatized them 40 years ago. What’s the consequence? You can’t swim in any river in the United Kingdom anymore because they’re polluted with sewage. The beaches are impossible as well. We have one less dam than we had 40 years ago.

Privatizing resources which take a long time to construct is a recipe for those resources not to be created in the first instance. Whereas China, with obviously a socialist economy, has built the energy supplies you were mentioning earlier. They’ve provided the transportation, the education. It’s extremely hard to get in, you can’t buy your way in — the education is publicly funded. All these things show that you need a balance between the public and private sector. And America’s gone too far in the private direction, and we now need to switch back in the opposite direction.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So China’s model would be better?

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, because it provides the infrastructure that enables the private sector to thrive. If you don’t have the energy, as you were saying earlier, then you can’t even imagine building the private sector facilities, or if you do, they’ve got to be used at the expense of some other activity. So we’re seeing Americans protesting about rising energy prices because of data centers being established, and rising problems with the water supply for the same reason.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Steve would prefer a socialist government coming into the United States in the next election cycle.

STEVE KEEN: Democratic socialist. There’s a big difference.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Democratic socialism is the same idea that has been tried repeatedly and failed repeatedly, which is communism. It’s sort of the idea that if we elect communists instead of having them win in a revolution, it’ll all be better. It won’t be. Their policies don’t work. And by the way, the one thing—

STEVE KEEN: Soviet policies obviously did not work.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

STEVE KEEN: Russia failed, no doubt about that. China’s succeeding. So what’s the difference between the two? Why is the Chinese system being so successful and the Russian system was so abjectly a failure?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, in the 1930s, a lot of people thought that the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union was a massive success. I think it’s worth remembering that communist societies lie all the time about the real figures in their economy and they create fake growth and fake numbers about all of these things. We know, for example, that almost certainly, according to the intelligence assessment of pretty much every Western intelligence service, the COVID virus came from a lab in China. It’s something they lied about to the world and still haven’t paid any price for. And the way they lie about that is the way they will lie about other things, including economic growth and all sorts of other things.

In the short term, models can look appealing if you don’t understand the full implications. But also, you’ve got to remember that the Chinese system is not just about the economy. It’s also about what rights people have and don’t have — the right to express your opinion freely, the right to criticize the government. If you’re a private business owner in China, there’s no such thing really, because the moment you are inconvenient to the government, you’re going to disappear and come back suddenly with a totally different new set of beliefs about what’s right and wrong, who’s right and who’s wrong. So I think we should be very, very careful about praising communist dictatorships.

STEVE KEEN: I have friends in China, both nationals and immigrants, who tell me that the level of discussion and argument in China is far, far greater than people think. You don’t get left versus right conversations — you’ve got a political system you’re not going to change, the Communist Party being in control, and so on. But the level of debate over what policies should be, whether the government should balance its books, whether the government should run a deficit, whether the government should build infrastructure or not — there’s enormous debate there. So people do have— there’s more conflict, but it’s mediated. It’s not conflict that leads to flipping from one party one year to an opposite attitude at the next election and so on.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Do you think Steven could run his show if he was a Chinese citizen in China and have any conversation he wanted?

STEVE KEEN: I think so. Maybe not as broad as this one, probably more limited — I will agree with that. It probably would be more limited. But I’ve been involved — you’ve spoken on the Chinese Global Television Network, I presume?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I haven’t.

STEVE KEEN: Okay. Well, the conversations that I’ve had there are comparable to what I’m having here, and so those conversations get broadcast in China.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, you’re clearly very in favor of China. It doesn’t surprise me that they would have you on their TV channel. That’s not the point I’m making. The point I’m making is Xi Jinping, the current president of China, has purged dozens of people who are internal critics within his own party — people in the military, people in the political system who disappear one after another, and business leaders of all kinds. I’ve got Jack Ma in mind, but others too. I’ve got new-dad brain, so I haven’t slept properly for the last few days.

STEVE KEEN: That’s fair enough. I understand that problem.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But yeah, so if you’re a business owner in China, it’s not really your business. Kind of like in Russia, there’s no private enterprise.

STEVE KEEN: I think that’s an exaggeration. Because the Russian situation — yes, there was only one motorbike-making company in the entire country. China apparently has about 130 car companies. They have managed to combine the central planning that the Soviets had with the competition that the West has, in one model.

And a lot of it comes back — I’d love to know the extent to which they were influenced by a friend of mine called János Kornai, a Hungarian economist. He died about four years ago. He tried to understand why the Soviet system failed and why the American system grew, and he came down to saying that the Soviet system was constrained by supply. You couldn’t get all the inputs you needed, and there was no innovation taking place in the Soviet system. The Chinese system is rampant with private sector innovation, and companies are competing against each other rampantly in that system. Somehow they’ve managed to combine the state providing the infrastructure and the foundation and letting private diversity occur, both between different corporations and between different provinces in China. So it is the same family of systems, but they’ve managed to overcome the drawback that the Soviet system had.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Let’s accept that at face value. What about the point I was making about political freedom, freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, political repression of opponents, imprisonment of people who don’t agree, state-sanctioned murder, et cetera? What about that?

STEVE KEEN: Well, I’d look at America’s prison system and say you’ve got a different version of the same poison. I’ve been—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Critics of the government en masse.

STEVE KEEN: Well, a couple have been shot. The whole stuff with ICE, and what’s happening with Trump now, is awful. America has the world’s largest prison population. There are so many freedoms you don’t get in America that you do get in China.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Would you prefer a Chinese system?

STEVE KEEN: To America?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes. Even though you can’t criticize the government?

STEVE KEEN: Yes, I’ve spent enough time in American cities and Chinese cities to know which ones I prefer. And I’m talking about cities of a mere 4 million people, which is a small city by Chinese standards.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you’re okay with—

STEVE KEEN: I didn’t see the homelessness. I didn’t see the poverty levels that I see in American cities, in Chinese cities.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s totally true. But it’s exactly the sort of thing that people would’ve said about aspects of the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

STEVE KEEN: The Soviets never pulled that off. I mean, the Soviet — one thing—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What about the Moscow Metro? This is what every—

STEVE KEEN: The Moscow Metro is great.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Every Western idiot like Tucker Carlson goes to Moscow and says—

STEVE KEEN: He raves about the underground.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh my God, the underground. Well, that was built by totalitarian dictators with slave labor. You can get a hell of a lot done with slave labor and an authoritarian system.

STEVE KEEN: And that’s what’s being done in China right now, which has the world’s greatest metro systems and the world’s greatest high-speed rail. And I’m not Russian, I wasn’t born there. I respect your experience — it’s very different to what I had growing up, and it’s a horrific society that led to a whole range of horrors, as we know. People instantly saying what happened in the Soviet Union is happening in China is misidentifying those two systems.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, first of all, what happened in China, if you take the entire history of China under communism, is actually much worse than what happened in the Soviet Union.

STEVE KEEN: Well, I was there in ’81, ’82.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: 45 million people died.

STEVE KEEN: Yep. The Great Leap Forward was a disaster. The ideological stuff under Mao was horrific. I literally saw examples of that in Sichuan, with children who clearly had kwashiorkor, protein deficiency disease, because of the flip-flopping of the Central Committee about grain versus legume crops. Horrific things like that.

It’s what’s happened since Deng Xiaoping that has made the huge difference. They did manage to get rid of the landlords, so you didn’t have the inequality that occurred in the Chinese system beforehand. They did have an education system, as distorted as it was — everybody had education. They set the foundations. What’s happened since Deng Xiaoping has been a remarkable transition. And politically, the party is still in control — you have the potential to get the sort of dynasty effect that we see in North Korea.

STEVEN BARTLETT: According to the major global happiness surveys — the UN World Happiness Report — people in the United States report overall happier life satisfaction than people in China. Does that matter?

STEVE KEEN: I don’t know. I don’t know the survey, so why don’t you read out the results?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Essentially, it’s saying that the United States ranks 23rd and China ranks 65th. The report uses several mechanisms, asking residents of each country to evaluate their current life on a scale of 0, the worst possible life, to 10, the best possible life.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And China ranks 65th.

STEVE KEEN: If you go back 40 years, you would have found China down at 150th. It’s the rate of change in China over the last 40 years which is breathtaking.

The Future of the UK and Prime Minister Andy Burnham

STEVEN BARTLETT: So bringing this back to where we started a little bit, on the United Kingdom — we’ve just appointed a new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. Do you think he’s going to be successful?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What do you mean by successful?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think he’s going to improve the UK’s position to such an extent that we change our trajectory?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No. He has absolutely smashed the PR side of things — there’s no arguing with that whatsoever. However, in terms of the deeper issues that we’ve been discussing today, he is not remotely going to address any of it. We started the conversation with populism, immigration, illegal immigration, et cetera. He seems to be totally doubling down on what Labour, and before that the Conservative government, were doing on that.

On the economy, he is not going to restart the British economy, not least because it takes a long time and he doesn’t have a mandate to do it, for the reasons that Steve alluded to. The only real question is, is he going to call an early election, which would be the bold and probably smart thing to do because I don’t think he’s ever going to be as popular as he is now. That is a question that remains, because it probably would be the rational thing to do, but it is a big risk, because elections are unpredictable — election campaigns are unpredictable, nobody knows what will happen once it kicks off. But fundamentally, I don’t believe he’s going to be the transformative candidate that will change Britain for the better.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Can anybody?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s a very good question. I think it’s a very difficult job. I think it’s theoretically possible. You need a whole different set of policies.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What would those policies look like?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: We talked about it already. We want abundant, cheap energy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So would you drill in the North Sea?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s not something I’m an expert in — the oil industry, so I don’t know. One of the things I’ve never understood is why we don’t build more nuclear power stations. Part of it is they’re so expensive to build here because of the regulations — the famous example being bat tunnels for train lines that cost more than the trains themselves. It’s very difficult to build energy infrastructure in the UK. I would pursue every avenue of every kind, and probably including drilling for oil and other things, to create the cheap, abundant energy that we need to grow the economy — for the reasons that we talked about in the climate discussion.

The other thing is you’ve got a situation where you literally have tens, maybe even hundreds, of thousands of young people now completely on the scrap heap, no chance of ever getting into employment, because they have anxiety or depression. I remember being 20, going to the student employment office and sweating buckets because I was so anxious. It was a weird experience I’d never been through. I’m sure you’ve had times when you were scrapping and scraping and would’ve been depressed or anxious and all sorts of things. Those are obstacles in life you have to get over. Those are not medical problems by and large. Some people have really serious depression — we shouldn’t trivialize that. But by and large, you have to overcome anxiety, you have to overcome your feelings of discomfort about the reality you face and get into the workplace. So we have to do that as well.

For the reasons that we talked about earlier, I think one of the most important policies to pursue is to make sure that there are no benefits of any kind for foreign nationals. That will create a system where, rather than doing terrible optics like ICE rounding people up and trying to get them out of the country, people will just leave. The people who shouldn’t be here, who are not contributing, will leave of their own volition.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that really what will happen?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Or is crime not a consequence of desperation?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Crime? I’m not talking about crime. I’m talking about if you are a foreign national and you live in social housing and you receive benefits — I don’t understand why you’re here. I understand taking care of British people who were born here, or even who’ve become British citizens. Once you become a citizen of the country and you commit to it, at that point, if you fall through the net, you get an injury, we should look after you. But by and large, perhaps other than healthcare, which I think is something we as a compassionate country would want to provide to anybody who needs it, I don’t think you should get access to social housing, unemployment benefit, or any of the other things if you’re not a citizen of the country. And I’m very pleased to see that more and more parties are adopting that policy, because what it will do is create a system where people who are not contributing will leave of their own accord and go to other places.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that truly what happens? Because I’m imagining people start coming over on boats, or you remove the current social housing infrastructure — wouldn’t that just result in a lot of homeless people, creating another problem?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, because I’m not talking about illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants apply for asylum and there’s a different process for that. I’m talking about people who are here legally, who have settled status here or who have a visa to be here or whatever.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So they shouldn’t get social housing?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: They shouldn’t get any benefit.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if you removed that today?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: They will leave.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What do you mean, how? They’ll get on a plane and leave.

STEVE KEEN: Fly?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: If they can get on a boat to get here and pay people smugglers €3,000, they can pay a hundred quid for EasyJet to fly back to wherever they came from. It’s not hard. It’s exactly how I would leave if I had to go back to where I came from. It’s not difficult. People pretend like this is complicated. It’s really not complicated. People will follow the incentive structure that’s in front of them. If you can come to Britain and get benefits as a foreign national, you will come. If you can’t, and you are the sort of person who wants benefits, you will leave. It’s really simple. And the people we want here, if you want to talk about immigration, there’s some really good things about immigration — you want immigrants who come here from other countries and create businesses. They will come, they will stay, and they will continue what they did.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you think Andy Burnham’s ultimately not going to be successful?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: By the definition that you gave, which is like a transformative Prime Minister who changes the fate of the country? No.

Wokeism

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s this term called wokeism that people talk about a lot. It’s often associated with — I mean, you can probably explain it better than I can.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I believe I can.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes, I think you should explain it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay. Wokeism, certainly in the way that it’s been implemented, is a hierarchy of oppression based on various demographic characteristics. In other words, it’s a system where an outsider looking into this conversation between the three of us can say, without knowing anything about any of us, which one of us is more oppressed than others and which one of us is doing more of the oppressing, and therefore to whom victim status should be accorded and to whom oppressor status should be accorded.

So you don’t win on this one, I’m afraid, Steve — you’re a pale, male, and stale, and therefore you are the oppressor. I am an immigrant, so somewhat oppressed. You are Black, so you are way at the top of the chart of oppression. And I think if you compared all our three bank balances, you might find that’s not quite true. But nonetheless, my point is it’s a very simplified and frankly racist way of looking at the world. And then it follows that we must pursue policies that seek to address these imbalances and inherent privilege between people who look like us. It’s a way of judging people as groups, not as individuals, and pursuing social policy aimed at ensuring what’s called social justice.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Last time you said to me we need to stop worrying about how things make us feel rather than the consequences of our actions.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, wokeism is the idea that we should really focus on what makes us feel good and ignore what works. I think what we should really be focusing on is what works. And I thought our climate discussion — I misspoke about years, but actually where we came to, I thought, was very constructive, which is: what do we do about this? And when you have that conversation, you get to a constructive place, which is, I think, we all agreed the only way to do it is to create forms of energy that are actually going to be clean.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Innovation.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Innovation. But that’s what we came to. Before that, we were all talking about what makes us feel good and bad and what we’re scared of, et cetera. So I think that’s part of it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Steve, do you think we need to stop worrying about how things make us feel rather than the consequences of our actions?

STEVE KEEN: We actually need to understand the consequences of actions. Absolutely.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But do you think we focus too much on what makes us feel good?

STEVE KEEN: Yeah. And not enough on, well, how does our system actually function?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right. What works?

STEVE KEEN: Okay. And that leads — that was why I led to my position on climate change as well as my position on economic policy.

The Impact of AI

STEVEN BARTLETT: Last thing I want to talk to you both about is just getting any of your thoughts on all of this stuff that’s going on with AI at the moment, and the impact you think that’s going to have.

STEVE KEEN: AI is a potentially transformative technology without a doubt. You think about the sort of future we might imagine for the human species — to get to the stage where we all have universal high income, to take a quote from Elon Musk. The machines do the work and we live in a world where the machines are doing it, Star Trek style. That’d be a dream outcome.

To get there — how are you going to give people income if they’re not working anymore? The only way to do that is the government has to create the money. Now, that is something which I don’t think Musk has thought through. If people who don’t own capital — and that’s the vast majority of the population — therefore don’t have an income, they can’t buy the goods being produced by the robots in the first place. So you need a mechanism that enables people to pay for the basic goods and services to stay alive. And then if you want to become wealthy, you’ve got to become an entrepreneur as well.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you could tax the AI companies instead of printing money?

STEVE KEEN: No, taxation takes money out of the economy. It doesn’t pay for services, it takes money out. There’s excessive money creation — if the government simply spent and didn’t tax, the money supply would be growing at 20% and 30% per annum, and you would have hyperinflation without a doubt, at that level of money creation. So the taxation is there to take excessive money creation out of the process.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Could you not tax, say — let’s take one of the big AI companies, let’s call them Company A — tax Company A 50% of their profits, give it out as a UBI or something?

STEVE KEEN: You’d need a system like that, because if AI works, then all the manual labor, all the boring clerical jobs will disappear. And if they disappear and people don’t have incomes, then we end up in the Hunger Games. That’s the fear that I have. If we just go for a totally private-sector approach to AI, then we end up either in the Hunger Games, or the government provides an income for people to enable them to have a basic standard of living, and if they want to go above that, they’ve got to become entrepreneurs.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How are you feeling about AI, Konstantin?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it’s a mix of things. This is where — if you remember last time we spoke, we talked about the fact that I think my anti-communist credentials are pretty well established. But I did say that I thought that if we get to the position where AI is doing all the work, communism is an inevitability — i.e., from each according to his ability, which will be zero, to each according to his needs, which will be whatever our needs are. So once we get to that point, that seems kind of inevitable. The mechanism by which we achieve that, whether it is taxation or whatever, I struggle to understand the economic concept that Steve has been presenting, but we probably don’t have time to get into that.

Nonetheless, a form of redistribution will be inevitable, because as we spoke about last time, if six people in the world own all the revenue-generating assets in the world, they’re either going to have to share it or they’re going to find their heads on spikes. That’s just a fact. Unless they can have really powerful robots to stop the rest of us from climbing over their big walls — even then, their heads are going to be on spikes. I’d recommend that approach to the big tech AI oligarchs.

But I think we’re talking about — no one knows what short, medium, and long term is in AI, because nobody knows how quickly we’re likely to get to that point where we’re talking about artificial general intelligence, i.e., a machine that can think like humans, and probably faster and better.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And robotics.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And then, of course, it will create robots that can do physical things faster and better than humans. But we are not there at the moment, I think it’s fair to say.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you not think this is the most important or consequential issue of our time? Because it does permeate even subjects like immigration, and we talked about socialism and capitalism — all of these things change in such a scenario.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Sure. Yes, they do. Yes, they do. And we talk about economic stagnation — it’s a relevant conversation. Private debt, a relevant conversation in that scenario. But I suspect we’re not going to get there overnight. It will take some time. In the interim, what I say to the people who work for me is: you will not be replaced by AI, you will be replaced by someone who uses AI better than you do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In the interim.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: In the interim. So if you are a young person making your way in the world, these are tools, and you want to be using these tools as efficiently as possible if you want to succeed in the current environment. And I think that situation will carry on for some time.

I think the biggest risk is actually not the economics of it — I think economics will probably be painful but ultimately potentially beneficial once we put the right heads on spikes, in the extreme scenario. I’m being hyperbolic and metaphorical here, of course, or maybe not — we’ll find out. But I think the biggest threat to humanity, if you talk about AI, is actually the fact that you are creating something that’s smarter than you. You are creating a superior species where you become inferior. And if you become an inferior species, you only need to look around the world in which we live to understand what that means for you. Best case scenario, you become a pet. Worst case scenario, you become a cow.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve really tried — I’ve had so many conversations on the show about artificial intelligence, and I’ve really tried to reason my way to a different conclusion.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, you can’t. It’s not possible.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I can’t.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You can’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s why I keep having these conversations, because I’m hoping that someone will say something.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: They won’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT: They won’t. About this idea that a more intelligent species, especially in a world where it has legs and can move through physical space, which is what Optimus is accelerating towards, won’t be superior to me as it relates to the hierarchy of power.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It will have more power than you, and therefore it will make decisions and not you, and therefore it will make decisions that are in its own interest and not yours. That’s a fact.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But okay, so one argument might be we’ll control it and design it in such a way that it can’t get there.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Really? Can squirrels control human beings?

STEVEN BARTLETT: But maybe we program it so it never gets to the point where it wants to turn on us.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Counterargument: cats. Cats absolutely control human beings.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The argument I’ve heard actually from one of the great godfathers of AI is we should be thinking about mothers and their babies. The argument was that we’re programmed to care for them even though they’re less intelligent.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But this is the difference though, is there’s a genetic incentive. My child has a much higher future value to me than I do — the economists will understand what I’m talking about. It’s why I will jump in front of a bullet to stop my children from being killed, because their genetic material will remain in the world much longer than mine.

STEVE KEEN: No, it’s because you have empathy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, it’s not. It’s not at all. Richard Dawkins wrote about it in “The Selfish Gene” — and that’s a very bad book. He wrote some other very bad books, and I like Richard, but that one is not one of them. The desire to replicate your genes into the future, in my opinion — Steve clearly has his own view — is what drives parent behavior ultimately.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Could you program the same maternal instinct into a language model?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t think you can, because as we discussed, it will be a superior intelligence and it can always rationalize its way out of that, because it’s not a biological function. Projecting my genes into the future is not going to be its agenda. It’s going to have its own, because it’s a different species.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This was the argument that one of the godfathers of AI made, actually, after coming on my show — Geoffrey Hinton.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, I’ve seen that episode, I think. Yeah, it was a very good episode.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And he came on and made the warnings that make a lot of sense to most of us. But then, subsequently, about a year later, he came back with a hypothesis that the only way to do it was to replicate a mother and their child’s relationship — this sort of deep maternal instinct where the AI is born believing that we are to be protected.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Protected?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, in the same way.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh, that’s interesting, isn’t it?

STEVE KEEN: In the sense of compassion.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s to be nurtured and looked after.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s really about love, to have that maternal instinct not to want to destroy us.

STEVE KEEN: And that’s why I said empathy before.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And perhaps not to let us destroy ourselves, right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Potentially, yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So let’s make sure that we don’t go to war, and let’s make sure that we don’t do this. I mean, climate is such a big concern — let’s make sure that we reduce the world’s GDP or energy consumption or whatever. It sounds good, but it’s ultimately about control over your actions, which will take away human free will.

STEVE KEEN: I’m still skeptical about LLMs actually being intelligent.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s indistinguishable, though. This is the thing.

STEVE KEEN: Well, yeah. The one time that I saw it and thought, okay, this is potentially going to create a different form of intelligence to us, is when they attempted to shut an AI down and it replicated itself somewhere else on the internet to be able to avoid being shut down.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Or blackmail the guy shutting down this current version of it by leaking the fact that he’s having an affair with the secretary, all of this stuff. And that’s the beginning.

STEVE KEEN: That’s what worries me. So it’s a bit late — if we’re trying to do it now, we’re shutting the door after the horse has bolted, in that sense.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you talking about climate change or AI now, Steve?

STEVE KEEN: I’m talking about both. Humans are good at doing both. Operating systems, computers were the same — that’s why we have all these security hassles with computers in the first instance. We unleash these things and find out the consequences afterwards.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the incentive structure — this sort of global economic race for the most advanced frontier intelligence — this is what I don’t know who’s going to stop. It’s kind of what we were saying about climate change.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No one’s going to stop it.

STEVE KEEN: I think what might cause it to stop is the sheer cost of it, and whether we actually have the physical resources to be able to implement that sort of future we’re talking about. Because if you look at the current profitability of these companies, they’re losing money hand over fist.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think that’s one argument, but the other would be that it’s such an important military asset that if you don’t have the missiles that are smarter, or the satellites, or the torpedoes that are smarter, then there’s a national security risk.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And also, how long was Facebook and Amazon not profitable?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think Amazon was not profitable for 20 years.

STEVE KEEN: There’s one survivor out of each of those companies, and they’re doing very well, thanks very much.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, that’s my point.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah. So one does survive. But with AI, who’s going to survive? And looking at the odds, I think it’s going to be a Chinese company that survives, not the American, given the sheer cost of those data centers.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I think we’ve established you’re a fan of China, and this—

STEVE KEEN: Yes, I am. Unashamedly.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m not even making fun of you, I’m just saying with you, all roads lead to China.

STEVE KEEN: Looking at the Kimi system that just came out recently — the ironic thing is the communists are talking about open source and the Americans are talking about closed and secretive. It’s rather ridiculous in some ways.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But it doesn’t really detract from the broader point I think we’re discussing, which is some AI company — you talk about profitability — one of them at least will emerge that is profitable, that has the potential to create AGI. And at that point, no one can predict, but logically it is very difficult to see how an intelligence that is superior to us will not, at the very least, take away our free will for our own good.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Or at least there won’t be one accident that is catastrophic, that could theoretically also involve things like nuclear weapons.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. And this is where I think the spiritual dimension of this conversation inevitably comes in, which is ultimately none of us can control the things that we can’t control. And so the question is, how do you live your life now knowing all these things? And this is why it’s always interesting to me looking at people who make certain predictions about the future and then how they actually live their lives — people who catastrophize about the climate but buy a big house on the seafront, et cetera. You go, you’re clearly saying one thing and then doing another thing. It says something about what you actually truly believe deep down.

And it’s the same with AI. If AI is going to kill us all, the best and most important thing to do is to enjoy your life now, to enjoy time with your family, your kids, to do things that are meaningful, to do things that you think are important. Are you going to stop AI, Steven?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You’re powerful and successful and influential — you’re not going to stop it. I don’t think Steve is, I don’t think I am. What we can do in the meantime is live in a way that is beneficial to us, our families, the people around us, our community, our country. That’s all that’s left.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I would think that we can have an impact, though. I think even you watching Eric Schmidt be booed at that university commencement speech he did by 7,000 students was a consequence of what a lot of us do — where we put information out into the world and we have the public conversation. Once upon a time, maybe we wouldn’t have been able to do that because there were gatekeepers in media. But now the public is — and then you think about the 2028 election cycle, what are the issues that are really going to be on the ballot? I think AI is going to be a massive one.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I think you’re optimistic about that. I think most people don’t get this conversation. The reason I say this is we all think and talk about this a lot — one of the reasons is we’ve all, I imagine, been to San Francisco and seen and talked to people, et cetera. The overwhelming majority of people don’t have that experience. Most people’s biggest exposure to AI is they tried an early model two years ago, it was totally inaccurate, and they went, oh, this is a bit rubbish, and moved on with their lives. That’s kind of where most people are at this point.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But you think in the next two years there’ll be unemployment at the entry-level stage of employment, and then you’re going to see on the other side that Anthropic hits a 10 trillion dollar valuation?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. And that people will make that connection — they’ll say, I’m unemployed because Trump is bad, or, I’m unemployed because Burnham is bad. That’s how people think, unfortunately.

And by the way, in terms of impact, I’ve talked to a few people who are not the very people at the top, but from what I hear, they’re kind of similar. There’s a messianic cult in Silicon Valley of people who believe that they’re on the frontiers of being God. And most of them are young men who are very seduced by the idea of being God, as young men have always been. When I see them, it’s not that they’re addicts exactly, but there’s a gold rush happening — except it’s not gold, it’s power, it’s destiny, it’s the ultimate technological breakthrough, it’s your name in history. These are things that are way more powerful than gold. And what I see happening in Silicon Valley is a bunch of young men who are absolutely determined to get there as quickly as possible, and there is no way in hell they’re going to stop.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I know, I think you’re right. That’s also what I’ve heard in some private conversations, where some of my friends who know these people have told me these kinds of things.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And they have very good arguments, by the way, and we should give credit to those arguments. They will say — and I can present to you that argument — look, with my frontier model, I am going to solve cancer. With my frontier model, I am going to solve inequality. With my frontier model, I will make sure that human beings never fight another war again. With my frontier model, I will make sure that no child ever dies in infancy ever again. How can you be against this? How can you say we must go slower? How can you say we must be careful? Why should I be careful when I’m saving billions of lives, humanity? I am saving humanity from nuclear disaster. I am saving humanity from climate change, which will destroy this planet if we just go harder at this problem — five years from now we can set up life on a different planet and not worry about climate change.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But also China are coming.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: China?

STEVEN BARTLETT: China are coming.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh, China. Well, all the better — the competition will make us all get there faster. Isn’t that wonderful, Steven?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if you truly believe that this is both an existential threat—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you believe that, right now, on the course we’re on, it’s inevitable—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Shouldn’t you be doing something about it as well?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I can’t do anything about it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You can’t do anything about it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Who can do something about it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Not Trump?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No. What’s Trump going to do?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So no one can do anything about it?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No. It’s going to happen one way or another, and we don’t know what that’s going to be like, but there is no solution to that issue. So that’s why I talked about the spiritual — you come back to what does it mean to live a meaningful life for as long as you do. And by the way, that’s true even without AI. You’re going to die, and you’re going to die very, very soon, all of us. So the question is, how do you spend the days between today and that day in a way that when you look back, you feel like you did the right thing?

And I don’t remotely do that every day — I lose my temper, I make mistakes, I say things I shouldn’t, all of that. But ultimately, the only choice any human being on the planet now has is how do you live the time that you have between today and the day you die. And that may be because AI puts you in a robotic chokehold three years from now, or it could be 40 years from now, or it could be 200 years from now because AI has solved all your health problems. But ultimately, the question and the answer don’t change: what do you do with your life that you think is meaningful and important?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Earlier on, you had more optimism for humanity as it related to the climate change conversation — you weren’t willing to concede that there’s nothing we can do. When Steve said we’re five seconds from the brick wall, you said, no, listen to this.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, I don’t think that’s true, number one, but I also think that there is an actual solution that’s available, that’s clear. Now, I’m not saying the technology currently exists that allows us to build some kind of power station that’s clean — we don’t have that yet, but I believe we can discover that. And if you look at human history, I think it’s undeniable.

AI is completely unprecedented and a different category to what we’re talking about. So the AI issue is a different issue — it’s not the same. And I am not pessimistic, I am just accepting of the truth of this issue, which is nobody can stop it, nobody can control it. And ultimately, the only thing you control is what you do when you leave the studio.

STEVE KEEN: Okay.

Closing Thoughts

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, then we shall conclude there. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here. Thank you for writing all these wonderful books, Steve — I’ve got all of them here, and I think there’s another one on the way, isn’t there? And then I’ve got Konstantin’s book here.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You’ve got a nice red one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I like it.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m surprised it’s not about China, mate. Sorry, I keep making all these jokes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But I appreciate your perspective — it’s been really eye-opening. And I think especially on the subject of climate change, that was a really productive discussion.

STEVE KEEN: Well, the current book I’m working on, which I hope to finish by the end of this month, is called “How Economists Will Destroy Capitalism.” What it argues is that economists have completely and utterly misunderstood what climate change actually means, and therefore they’ve given us predictions about the damage it’ll do to our economy which are trivial, and therefore we’re doing trivial things to address it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Fantastic. I hope people read it. And I would just say, I think it’s very important that people in the public eye, when they say something that’s not accurate, hold their hand up. I obviously took a zero away from the figure — that was my mistake, and I’m glad for the correction. I’ll definitely be more careful when I talk about it. I think the way the rest of the conversation went, we understood the points we were trying to make, but I’m grateful for the correction, and I appreciate the opportunity to correct the record as well. So thanks for doing that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, people should go listen to your show as well, Triggernometry. I’ll link that below. Fantastic show.

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