ExorbitantPrivilege
ExorbitantPrivilege Podcast
Exorbitant Chat, Episode 6: Pippa Malmgren
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Exorbitant Chat, Episode 6: Pippa Malmgren

Pippa talks with me about the dollar's "assemblage of trust", Hot Wars in Cold Places, Cold Wars in Hot Places, Huawei and the West's core values, the benefits of 'messy' systems, and love.

Philippa "PippaMalmgren is an American technology entrepreneur and economist. She served as Special Assistant to the President of the United States, George W. Bush, for Economic Policy on the National Economic Council and is a former member of the U.S. President's Working Group on Financial Markets (aka the Plunge Protection Team) and The President's Working Group on Corporate Governance. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, The Institute for International Strategic Security and the Royal Geographical Society.

Transcript below.

Some key moments:

(Among other things)

  • Inflation is the traditional form of American default,

  • Look at a map. Whose systems do you trust? US, UK, Singapore (maybe),

  • Re-integration of Russia and China is essential, and a test to our values,

  • The Hot War in Cold Places, and the Cold War in Hot Places,

  • The limits of autocratic creativity,

  • The importance of love.

Meyrick Chapman 

Hello and welcome to Exorbitant Chat today I'm making I'm reacquainting myself with Pippa Malmgren, American technology entrepreneur and economist. And we used to work together. Oh I can't even think of the number of years now, I'm afraid. It was a few years ago, let's call it that. Pippa is served as Special Assistant to the President of the United States, George W. Bush. She worked for the economic policy on the National Economic Council, and is a former member of the US President's Working Group on Financial Markets and the president's Working Group on corporate governance. She's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, which I admire very much. Chatham House, the Institute for International Strategic Security and the Royal Geographical Society. So thank you for joining me, Pippa. It's great.

Pippa Malmgren 

Oh, thank you for having me. And yes, let's not think about how many years ago we worked in the same place.

Meyrick Chapman 

You know, this my substack is called ExorbitantPrivilege. So it probably won't surprise you that I want to talk about dollar. And in particular, de-dollarization. My son actually pinged me today and said that all of the US media or a lot of the US media is obsessed with de-dollarization, at the moment. And to some extent, I think we can point to American policymakers and politicians as having brought this upon themselves, perhaps they were reckless, even aggressive. But there isn't really an alternative to the dollar as far as I can see. And I also I would I'm particularly want to sort of point to the de-dollarization, as being led not by China and Russia, which is gets a lot of coverage. But in fact, the most consequential efforts of de-dollarization, may actually be coming from the United States itself, whether through sanctions, the inflation Reduction Act, efforts to reduce dependence on China. All of these have taken come center stage really in the last well, since President Trump was there, but actually have taken on a sharper edge in the last few years. And to the extent that what might have been termed protectionism, and withdrawal from the world is now a bipartisan approach to the international order. And it's it's kind of wrapping up progressivism into this quasi-nationalist clothes. So that seems to me, we seem to be missing something here.

Pippa Malmgren 

Well, let me start with where the missing bit begins. And because this is a really critical point, I was there, I was working in the White House. And I was sitting with a bunch of Congressmen trying to explain if they continued spending the way they were spending. So to put it in perspective, this is back in 2001. That if they continued spending on the current trajectory, that we were going to end up with a current account deficit problem of epic proportions. And one of the members leans forward and says, "You economists, you're always talking about the current account deficit, what is the current account deficit?" And I'm thinking, oh, gosh, I've got, you know, members of Congress, and they just don't get this. So I said, "Okay. What it means is we the American public, we spend more than we earn, and we borrow money from principally the Chinese to fund the spending gap." And they look at each other and one of them leans over and says, Pippa, there's not a single member of my district borrowing any money from the Chinese. And he's not wrong, right? Like He's not wrong, and yet he is totally not understanding that America spends more than it earns, and it is totally dependent on the graciousness of strangers to do this. So it's weird. It's, uh, you know, I'm American, I'm very proud to be American. But I've lived all over the world. And you know, Americans are they've kind of heard there are other countries around the world, but it's like, kind of like a rumor, right? Like, for a lot of Americans, there isn't anything beyond the coastline. Right? Beyond the ocean is this kind of magical fairy land that is interesting, but not really relevant. So this is where you begin. This is where you begin. And so when we talk about, you know, the policies and it's not like it's super deliberate, it's it starts with an unawareness, of the true dependency. And so they do things all the time that jeopardize the dollar word, and they have no idea that that's what they're doing. And to the point of your title of your podcast, there is a certain American arrogance as well, which just presumes that it's our way or the highway. And we can do whatever we want. Of course, the rest of the world will buy our, you know, pieces of paper, whatever they are bonds or dollars. And to be fair, you know, you know that I've written a lot about the social contract being the fundamental relationship between government and citizens. And money sits at the heart of that social contract. And so when you get into massive debt problem, you have limited ways to default on that social contract. One of them is you say, well, we're just never going to pay you back to the foreigners. That's not really the American way. One is you say would definitely have to pay you back was going to be a little later. That's the way the Greeks defaulted on their debt. Right. It's still a total default from a bondholder perspective, but it sounds nicer. One way is you inflate. And usually, you totally deny that you're doing this, which is what we do, we're like we would hard plate but we do all the things that create inflation, record low interest rates, throw record sums of money in the system, oh, but we would never inflate, but you're effectively defaulting on the citizen. Or the other one is you say to the citizens, all the promises I've made you I'm not going to fulfill. So I told you, you can retire at 60. Now, it's going to be like 92, right? And so all of these ways of, of dealing with the dollar problem, are fundamentally vote losers. And so everybody always opts for the least obvious one, which is inflation. And so when we inflate which in America, we have done, like, how do we pay for the American Revolution? Answer, a massive inflation? How do we pay for the Civil War, the Great Civil War, answer a massive inflation? How do we pay for Vietnam and the Great Society, period, massive inflation? How do we pay for the banking crisis? Here we are in an inflation. What is amazing, is the whole rest of the world continues buying our bonds, even though we repeatedly default on them through inflation. And that is the exorbitant privilege. That is the extraordinary position the United States has that even though we do this over and over and over again, the whole rest of the world that we don't even acknowledge, is there still trust us?

Meyrick Chapman 

Yeah. Yeah. That sort of leads nicely on to a kind of counter argument, which is, yeah, the US has a need for foreigners’ money. But equally, the foreigners seem to need American bits of paper. So, you know, they may be deeply annoyed at some level with how America is behaving. But you look at the current account deficit, that's a that's a bilateral agreement, in which the rest of the world is agreeing to take dollars or dollar assets, in return for giving Americans some stuff, some all all manner of stuff. So I wonder whether, you know, this is because America still defines the "destination society" of the world. It is still from the Second World War onwards; it is the place that people feel encapsulates the best life for for them. And that therefore they are prepared to buy the buy these pieces of paper, because they trust what the dollar represents.

Pippa Malmgren 

I think there's more to it as well. It's also they're unwilling. For example, we look at China today, they are unwilling to take the steps that would be necessary for their currencies to replace the dollar. So we can talk about de-dollarization. But nobody is going into the yuan because it's not convertible. Right. If you want that to really replace the dollar, you're going to agree to remove capital controls, and have full genuine convertibility. But nobody ever wants to do that because that is super hard. It basically is a wave of transparency that reveals what the leadership are all about. And since they don't want to do that, so you know, in America, we may not like what we see with our leaders. But in the main there are exceptions, but in the main there's a transparency to it. Where and again, that may be ugly, but you can see what's going on. In many of these other places. You have no idea it's all behind closed doors. It's these deals. And so again, when we talk about de-dollarization. I'm like to what? Right? So this is why everybody loves using the dollar because there's a reliability. There's a understanding of how the game works. Now, do we manipulate the game create new pieces of paper, you know, invent new rules? Yeah, all the time. But at least there's like a legal infrastructure that people feel have some reliability as do the British, by the way, right? People trust British Common Law. And therefore, they're drawn to these locations, because it's like trying to play a monopoly game. And you want to be in a place where everybody knows the rules, and they're enforced, then versus some other similar board game, but nobody knows the rules. The rules keep changing. And so that's why again, I'm like, well, we can talk about de-dollarization. But where are we going to? I don't see the alternative.

Meyrick Chapman 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think this is something which I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about, Oh, I'd say increasingly thinking about which is that there's a legal civic and societal apparatus that accompanies the dollar system. So yeah, we can talk about the trade, investment, reserve status, that gets most of the attention in the financial press and the discussion. But really, it's contract law, dispute resolution, common rules that go with that system, that is really the benefit. And when you look at a rule rules based system, then you look at Russia and China, the alternatives and you think, Well, no, really, really not really not something that you really want to trust a Chinese court to adjudicate for you. So

Pippa Malmgren 

I would go by the way on this a little bit further, there's a French philosopher called Gilles Deleuze, and he talked about assemblages an assemblage. So whenever you're trying to isolate the power of something, and I've recently wrote an article on my substack column about, you know, in geopolitics and in military history, what were the things what was the the killer app that allowed the winning of a war or the creation of an empire at some stage and I talked about the invention of the metal stirrup, being the key to how Genghis Khan rolled over all of Central Asia and into Western Europe in a hurry. And it's so simple by making that stirrup metal, the warriors could wear armor, and have their hands free, and they were magnificent archers, so they could shoot either sitting front facing or back facing. Okay, great. But who thinks the stirrup right is the key? It's the assemblage of what went around it the all of have the sort of societal norms, the policies, the way they were comfortable being nomads, going after sedentary agrarian folks. So we have to think about what's the assemblage around the dollar. And it's all the things you say, plus, I would add a fear of what's abroad, an unwillingness to trust something outside the system. Bitcoin is a very interesting example of the public beginning to get more comfortable with something that's outside of the rule system, which is one reason it's such a challenge for policymakers. And I think that's how we should think about this. What's the assemblage of many different things; of social contracts, of habits that allow people to feel the confidence that the whole system works?

Meyrick Chapman 

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true. And I don't think it gets enough coverage, frankly. But maybe this time, I mean, but if we will certainly miss it, if it goes away.

Pippa Malmgren 

By the way, on this point, also, it's very interesting at this time in history, since Hong Kong is no longer available to the world as a legal center or a financial services center, because now it's one country, one system, and people even the Chinese are not trusting, doing contracts, you know, if you do a deal, is Beijing going to know? Yeah, they are. And do you have capital controls? Yes, you do. So the whole international community looked at the Global Map and went, Okay, where are we going to put our money, and you really have limited options. One is Dubai, or the Middle East, and there are some that will go that way. And they're trying to build that as a Financial Services Center, but there are a lot of reasons why people are not too comfortable with that. Then there's still London and everyone said "Oh but Brexit is gonna ruin it and the money will leave the city but nobody wants to put A complicated derivatives transactions or contracts into a French Napoleonic legal code environment, for example, or a German legal system they don't speak the language of and are not familiar with. So then they just look at the map and what's left. You got the United States, you got the United Kingdom, maybe you have Singapore, Singapore is controversial. Is it? Is it also going the way of Hong Kong or not is like an open question. So it's an interesting that we all go. We're making terrible policies in the US in the UK that challenge the markets and yet, what's the alternative?

Meyrick Chapman 

Yeah, yeah, I think that's very, very, very interesting question. We're not quite at the end of that one, yet. I was, uh, I think, an article you wrote recently on your substack, which was talking about China and Russia and reintegrate reintegrating them into the world, the global system? What, in other words, I suppose you could sum this up by saying, what's going to come after the Ukraine war? And have we reached? Have we still not reached a place where it's possible? Are they still within the global system? Or have we now fractured that system into at least two incompatible systems, which they will trade with each other? But really, they're not? They're not really going to be great friends ever again.

Pippa Malmgren 

So I think this is such a fundamental question. And it's really interesting, how it's even hard to talk about it. Because if you, I, if I am critical of how the US has handled things, it sounds like I'm not patriotic, etc. But, you know, my father worked for four presidents. And I learned a lot from him about negotiation, and how to handle deeply conflicting interests. And he was working at the height of the Cold War, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, you know, seriously heavy diplomacy needs at that time. And I think we have a similar situation today. So you can't just go in and go, I'm right, you're wrong. And if you disagree with me, you're either stupid or evil, which, frankly, describes how most people have conversations these days, right? People are very certain. And certainty is such a killer. So I think we should start asking questions like this. If we really believe in the post war economic order, and let's understand what that really means. That really means the rules of the game are there's a level playing fields, and everybody can innovate and create. And if you make some cool thing, you can sell it to the world. And you can have a better standard of living in a higher income and a better life as a result. Great. Everybody could buy into that. And we leveled the playing field, by forgiving Germany, and actually extending credit to get them back on their feet. Because we realize that when you do war reparations, and you hold people to account and make them pay forever, for their mistakes, you end up at war again. So we came to this conclusion, and we built this extraordinary thing. And then China goes great. Okay, we want to join, we'll come into the WTO. And then they build their first global brand. And what is it Huawei, and the first thing that happens is they get shut down, they get told no, no. Is Huawei effectively as state controlled spying mechanism? Probably yes. But it's nonetheless, their first effort to create a global brand. And their view is you said the rules of the game where if I made a cool thing, I could sell it to everybody. And now you're saying I can't sell it to everybody? And so we have to be very clear, what are the reasons you can't sell it to everybody? And what would have been okay, if it had been cotton candy, right, no national security threat? And then what would we have said, Okay, if you're really good at that, and you actually sell so much cotton candy, that your economy becomes wealthier and bigger than ours? And we're cool with that? Because that's fair and square? Or would we have said, we're not cool with that? Because it may be fair and square, but we don't want to be smaller. We like being the biggest player. And so I think we need to reflect in the West. What are our core values? What are our core philosophy about how this game is structured? And what are we content to live with? And we turned out to be not so content with the idea that basically all the jobs went to China that a whole manufacturing sector moved to China. We got real uncomfortable with that. So okay, we have limits on the freedom of the system to allocate as it will. And I think that in the West, we can't sit here going no, no, we believed in these rules, except when they don't suit us, because if we do that, then no one else has confidence in the rules of the game either.

Meyrick Chapman 

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there is a we seem to be moving in a into a place where it's just impossible to talk to one another. Hopefully, we haven't stepped over that mark completely. But a slight tangent, there's a there's a theme that runs through your work, which I want to talk about, which is that modern warfare being switched now, from the potential peacemaking into straight head on conflict, you make the point that modern warfare is really a total, it's total war is just that it's not total killing?

Pippa Malmgren 

Yeah, so I may borrow that.

Meyrick Chapman 

Sure. You've written a lot about how things have changed. And your your phrase for this is Hot Wars in Cold Places. So places where we don't really look, we don't really know, we don't want to be there. Individually, but that's where the conflict is taking place. But there's another, Ukraine is different. Ukraine is like going back to World War One, this is this is not a new type of warfare, this is a really old, familiar, horrible type of warfare. So we're just gonna get, you're gonna get both, or is one going to win out.?

Pippa Malmgren 

So just a backup, to be clear. So I've written we're in a hot war in cold places, which includes space, and the open oceans and the Arctic, the Pacific. So these are places you can't see, there are no journalists. And yet, kinetic events are occurring, like satellites in space being used against each other. Russians blowing up their own satellites to create debris fields to deny us access to certain orbits, the cutting of the internet cables around the world. And we keep seeing this in all these different locations. And then we're also in a Cold War in Hot Places. We're in a cold war in Africa, where President Putin's private army, (or what was his private army, they're now in a bit of a conflict now with the President), the Wagner group operate and control things like Libyan oil fields, and they face off against Western groups of militaries, the US. And we're also in a cold war, in my opinion, really in the Pacific. And there's a kind of racing to get control of certain islands, China and the US in particular. So we're in a hot war in cold places, we're in a cold war on hot places, but also, the thing that makes this war, different from World War One and World War Two is it's principally an invisible war. And I say that back to the point you raised, it's what China and Russia call unrestricted or total warfare, which means everything is a weapon. So, you know, when, when, what is Ukraine about? It's about many things, but there's a lot of layers to this, but one of them is that physical location allowed a very sudden jump in oil and gas prices and food prices, and what has created more damage to civilians in the West? Compare what you could do with tanks, versus a very sharply higher set of food prices and energy prices. Answer: obviously, the weaponization of these commodities has been a much more powerful hit to the west than anything you could do with a tank or an aircraft carrier or any other kinetic weapon. So we don't think of it as warfare, but it is, and it's redefined the rules of Yeah, what are the rules, right, we would we would never weaponize food. Well, it's happening. So let's then go to Ukraine itself, which you're right. It is like both World War One and World War Two. It's, you know, in the trenches, and it's hand to hand and it's a lot of bloodshed. But the way I see it, is that it's almost like a magic trick. Where you say, look over here, look over here. There's bloodshed and terrible disaster here. Don't look over here where I I'm doing things that are much more profoundly impactful for a strategic outcome. Don't notice that I'm cutting the internet cables that connect all satellites to Earth and without which your weapons guidance systems don't work. Don't look over here at the alliance between China and Russia. Don't look at what we're doing in Africa. Just you guys stay focused on Ukraine. So it's almost like, you know, a kind of gang warfare and, and somebody picks a kind of small weak target and starts pummeling them. And our sympathy for that, that person, in this case, the person of Ukraine, is, you know, our human empathy takes us to that place, and it takes all the airtime and sucks all the oxygen out of policymaking. And nobody can step back and say, Whoa, what's the bigger strategy? And has China actually been behind this whole thing from the start? This isn't really Russia at all. Maybe this is. So I just finished on this, I've been describing it as a little bit like two guys in a bar. And, you know, the Russian and the Chinese and the Russians says, I hate these Americans, and I hate NATO, and I want to throw a punch. And the Chinese guy says you should do that. And then the Russian throws the punch, and we have this big bloody mess. And the moment the Russian says, Now I'm ready to go nuclear China says no, no, no, we're not gonna go there, but the throwing the punch has given China extraordinary insight, extraordinary intelligence as to how we respond, the public reaction, the movement of personnel and capabilities. Like, if you wanted to be an, if you thought you might be in a war with the United States, this is the most perfect way to find out all about what we're prepared for and not prepared for. And so I think Russia is already effectively a kind of vassal state of China. And so we're not negotiating with Putin. We're negotiating with Xi. And that strategy is so much bigger than Ukraine, which is not to say Ukraine is unimportant in no way am I saying that? I'm just saying, this is multi multi dimensional chess. And both the Russians and Chinese are very good at that. And Americans, we have our individuals who are very good at that, but it's not our typical way of thinking.

Meyrick Chapman 

Yeah. Yeah. Very, very interesting comments. And I'd like to talk about Africa. You've written about Africa, you've written about the Sahel, Algeria-Moroccan standoff. And actually, recently, it looks like the US is actually making some reasonable pushback, I'm thinking in particular, I don't know the details too well, but the Central African Republic looks as if it's come onside for the Americans, presumably, because they received a lot of goodies to do that. But that was a place where Wagner was involved, I think, and is no longer involved. So, you know, this multi dimensional chess that you mentioned, is not necessarily all one sided. But it does feel like that's an exception. I just wonder whether it's the beginning of a new push by America to impress foreigners, particularly in Africa, because it looks like Africa is that's the resource destination for China.

Pippa Malmgren 

And also was an important part of the world for the US, given its demographics, given its resources, given its strategic importance. And China has been much more proactive about establishing both commercial and strategic presence throughout Africa, and building infrastructure to facilitate their presence. So the US is a little late to the game on this. But yes, and if you look at a map of you know, where our US Special Operations, officials, forces, and where our Putin's private army, they're all in, you literally, it's like a checkerboard right. One side has and the other side as the others and they face off against each other. So what's happening now is because the war in Ukraine has turned out to be catastrophic for the Russian side, in multiple ways. loss of life, loss of face loss, of money, like so many different losses have been incurred. What's happening is the private army is turning on Putin himself and saying he shouldn't be the boss. We should be the boss. And so there's an internecine warfare and internal fratricide starting to occur. And that also helps explain the sudden change in the position of countries in the center of Africa, as they see, the gang that had been the gang they've been dealing with, is suddenly being threatened by another gang. And you know, you're making your bets on who's gonna be the survivor who's gonna win this thing. So, you know, and that's why in the end, this is one reason President Putin complains a lot that the West is trying to break Russia up. And you know, one reply would be, but you're doing such a good job of it yourself, you practically don't need any help or I mean, you've pushed the country to a point of, of real pain and catastrophe. So where do all these other nations go? Do they go with China to go with the United States? Right now, there's a basically fight on and what China and the US are saying to everybody is, whose side are you on? And so we said that to Australia, Australia made a decision, our commerce may be tied to China, but our defense policy is tied to the US. So we're going with the Americans, and they've diverted their commercial strategy away from China, towards the US, which from an investor point of view and a market economic analysis point of view, it's very important this shift. You know, other countries are making their mind up. Lots of countries in Africa are up in the air. Do we go with the Americans? Or do we go with the Chinese? It's it's an open, open fight now.

Meyrick Chapman 

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's super interesting, but kind of scary. Yeah, I talking about China's development goals, which were published at the 20th Party Congress in October last year. And if you look down those list of goals, there's technology, especially AI, quantum computing, biotechnology, I mean, this sounds as if we should be, we are facing a true geostrategic rival who has clear destination of where they want to be and how they're going to get there. But is that really true? Do we need to be that fearful? These ambitions really have to take account of what the CCP itself, the Chinese Communist Party itself, wants and what it wants above all else, is to remain in power. So if you take AI, for instance, is it even possible assuming we can actually get general AI? Which is an open question yet, still, but assuming we head in that direction? Already, I think the Baidu equivalent of ChatGPT has been shut down because it was giving nasty answers about the CCP and the government. So is it even possible for the CCP to allow these ambitions to come to fruition?

Pippa Malmgren 

This is a really wonderful question. Because for decades, we've had this assumption that China was better because they could just impose orders on the society, they could just build these highways and build these railway links, build these ports, and everyone said, wow, wouldn't it be better to be like them, democracies are a pain, everybody's got to vote. They've all got an opinion and look at the condition of the American railway system versus China. And I have always pushed back against that saying, but what they're doing is allocating capital. And normally, governments are very bad at allocating capital. And we started to get a sense of that when we realized that all these new cities with 10 million population had these buildings, but no elevators in them and no humans living in them. And you realize that this was a kind of political strategy for creating flows of cash to the right people. And it was tied in with corruption and the basically, it may look great, but the lights are not on, right. It's not working. In the West we're messy. We we were messy, crazy. We gotta coordinate with each other. We got a lot of Lone Ranger's. People are creative. We don't put big constraints on their creativity. And as a result, we have what we broadly termed Silicon Valley. We have this collection of super brilliant people with crazy ideas and the ability for capital to fund it. And a lot of the time, it doesn't work. It's like, you know, startups have a 96% failure rate. Every once in a while you get a unicorn that changes the face of history. But overall, the winners are better than the impact is bigger than the losers, so messy, but actually more creative and more effective. And I think that when we put these two systems together, the West has always been in a better position. Now, could we devote more of our time and energy to getting a better railway network in place? Yeah. And if you notice, most of the constraint has nothing to do with the capacity to build the right thing. It's to do with politics refusing to allow change, right, so but I think in the end, you know, the capacity for China to innovate in these cutting edge spaces, like quantum is going to be limited by the a lack of creativity. And I don't think you can say to people, okay, I want you have to abide by the party line, you can't hang out with people who have an alternative opinion, if your brother has an alternative opinion, your social credit score is gonna go down, you have to toe the party line. Oh, but when you're at work, I want you to be really, really creative. You no. It, this is not how humans are constructed. So they may make some good progress, but I think they'll hit a creativity while and then to cut them off from the global Internet, where they've got this great digital wall and they can't access the cutting edge of innovation, how are you going to beat the cutting edge, if you don't even know what the cutting edge is? Maybe we end up with two totally different economies and China innovates within its own context, and in the West, we do the same. And that seems to be where we are right now. But if I had to bet on those two models, I'm still betting on the messy creativity of the West, more consistently producing livable human outcomes, effective human outcomes, the Chinese system, they may be able to get everybody to march in lockstep kind of North Korean style, but I don't think it gets them to the destination they think it will. And so I don't know if that's a philosophical position. But But that's where I stand,

Meyrick Chapman 

I guess time will tell we are not at the end of that this journey. It's one, one thing, which I was very inspired by a post you put on, I think it was the first of January, in which you asked, What if all our wishes can come true? In fact, I think you were quoting, you were quoting Keynes, I think, yes. And that everybody was preoccupied by loss, not by possibility. And what struck me was, for all for all of your writings about the possibilities of technology and the messiness of creation, that actually what you are advocating, in the end was the benefits of social interaction, or you call it love, but we can call it, you know, we can call it effective relationships, which I suppose you've just highlighted how effective relationships in China may be circumscribed compared to elsewhere. But we're not perfect either. But it was really struck me that for somebody who writes so much about technology, you are homing back in only the human element.

Pippa Malmgren 

Well, we are all human in the end. And technology is an amazing thing. It solves many problems, it creates a lot of problems. But this idea that technology alone is the answer has never really worked. And what I was trying to get at, and it's so interesting, you know, for all my writing about the world economy, and you know, I get into all these different subjects, because economics gives you a free pass to enter any sector, right and explore what is the economy of the sector or the impact of the sector. But I realize, you know, in the end, this creativity, this innovation, where does it stem from? Where does it come from? And I've, I've concluded it, you know, it's a desire, it's a drive to create a different world. And this name for this process of world creation is cosmopoesis, which is a word I found in a dictionary just being a nerdy girl. I just think it's fun to look through dictionaries. I never heard a human use this word. But I realize this word is very important and magical. So JRR Tolkien created a world and we've all been in that world. And we know like it's a three dimensional real place with real characters that we inhabit, even when we're not in the book, but equally Steve Jobs created a world where he said I don't make computers, I create a world where bright people don't have to think about computers. Right and this world creation, what drives it at its core, it is love. It is a it is a love of a thing. It is a love of an outcome. And it's a love of your family, and you want to be a success so that you can support them. And frankly, having worked with a lot of startups, now, the people who are driven by genuine love have a better future, or a genuine love of the people they think their business is going to affect always do better than the ones who were like I'm in it for the money. There's just no comparison. You know, if life is a quest, when the hard times come, wanting to be rich is not gonna sustain you, but a generous heart that has a vision that can sustain you through a lot of pain. Yeah, that's why I thought I gotta write about this because especially again, at this moment in history, where people are preoccupied with scarcity, you know, any dinner party you go to that opens with someone saying there are too many people on the planet. We don't have enough stuff. And I'm like, is that really true? Because technology is now giving us abundance? It is giving us ubiquity. And what if we're all planning for a worst case scenario, where there isn't enough, when in fact, we're entering a time when we have abundance and ubiquity? Right? Like, why are you planning for only one outcome? We should be thinking through lots of different possibilities. Right? And there are many worlds we can create in the future. So why not? Consider the chance that technology actually works and love is real, and you can build a world tomorrow that encompasses both.

Meyrick Chapman 

That's That's great. You may have noticed within the video that my granddaughter just walked in, so yeah, that was kind of appropriate. She didn't stay long, but she did pop her head around.

Pippa Malmgren 

She's lovely.

Meyrick Chapman 

Pippa, this has been really great and really interesting. I know you're, you have such a depth of knowledge in all sorts of areas that it's fascinating to talk to you and you highly recommend your substack and whatever else you do, I think it's super interesting. So thank you very much

Pippa Malmgren 

Thank you so much. Great to talk to you

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ExorbitantPrivilege
ExorbitantPrivilege Podcast
Global dollar: reserves, finance, consumption and donuts.
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Meyrick Chapman