YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Frankopan

lines on the record: 51
first: 2021-12-17
most recent: 2021-12-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Is beneficial? Why would you put more money into, for example, West Africa? The Obama administration gutted USAID to the continent of Africa as a whole, that Bush had been ironically been quite good on. Trump collapsed that even more. And so we have these kind of isolation states that provides vacuums that when the Chinese arrive in Kazakhstan or in Malaysia and say, we'll build stuff, we'll help fund it. You work out whether you want it and whether you'll pay for some or all of it. They're the only show in town. And I think we should probably think through, is that a bad thing? And if so, why? And what are we going to do about it above all?”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said we're going to put people on furlough for the next year and take on £300 billion worth, maybe £400 billion worth of debt. And he said, so you do have the money magically to pay people to sit at home. So either stop telling us what to do in a kind of colonial way, don't trust the Chinese, they'll indebt you. Will you put your money where your mouth is, or stop telling us how to run our own country and also presupposes that we're stupid and that we in Africa are not able to make decisions because we're taken in by the Chinese checkbook? And so I think that we have failed to engage with other parts of the world. And these massive populations, these massive resources that we should be allocating, and we oversimplify. So in a lot of those cases, there's been chat for the last five years about how the United States are going to build a Belt and Road and a Blue Dot network. Now it's called the Build Back Better Network. And there's lots of manuals and documents that get produced, but it's always about cash. Are you willing to put money into upgrading other parts of the world? And can you do that in a way that is selective and”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's partly that, but it's those connections. I think that sort of the story that Charlie is trying to tell is to say, in the past, the West enslaved, that's part of the subtext. We, on the other hand, sent caravans of camels, and we only here to trade. We don't care what faiths you have. We don't care what you look like. We won't treat you the same way as your colonizers or former colonizers. And that's quite a powerful message when they turn up. And so a friend of mine who's a finance minister”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the Silk Roads on its own a name that will work? And actually saying it's a new history of the world is really important to show that it's about these connections. It's not just about great buildings in Samakand and people think, God, I'd love to go there one day. And can you recommend somewhere to stay, which is what people used to used?”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the ground yet. It's not a colonization, but it presents threats. But exactly which threats, where, to whom and why, all of those, you need to look at individual countries, individual projects, and I think requires a proper detailed answer. So, I mean, it's like most things in life, there's the kind of the smart ass couple of sentences, there's a kind of two-page executive summary, and then there's proper work that goes on around it. And part of the problem is that we're rattled by in China. And for lots of very good reasons, but it means that what we want is, is China good or is it bad? And that maybe is not the most helpful way to be looking at the Belt and Road, just for what it's worth. All it does is it provides a narrative. It's quite a clever, bit like the title of my book, which I owe my wife, by the way, endless cups of coffee and champagne helping come up with. We were sitting around thinking, how do I write?”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a better way because they're not enslaving people They're not putting people in shackles and shipping them across the Atlant”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do we prepare for an ad foreign policy Afghanistan, add Iraq through to education, through to the, there wasn't a kind of golden age where the British Empire worked seamlessly and worked on a pin and made good decisions, it's complicated to get things right and it's much easier to get things wrong. And usually people get lots of things wrong. But it's what you learn from it, ideally not to repeat those same mistakes.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're taking a historian's view, we all think back and go, go, well, wasn't Thatcherism and whatever, but the 20th century from a British perspective was one catastrophic decision after another, you know, empire gone, that was part of the cost of the war and legacy, but Suez, Iran. What was it that the Foreign Office got right in the 20th century? What was it that the economists got right apart from freeing up markets, privatizing utilities, we now realize that Holy shit that means that poor people in Britain have energy poverty because they can't pay for their gas bills over the course of sudden two week surge in prices where our friend Mr Putin decides to divert gas to not fill up his own tanks and send it towards China and to maybe think that there's a bit of political pressure to put on us, that that privatization that made a lot of people rich suddenly turns out that there's a downside to it? So we've got lots and lots of things wrong. And I think that they're kind of the cool sheet of...”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I bet it creates other ones. So it's trying to stay ahead of some of those megatrends. And I do think it's slightly banging the same drum again. I think here in Britain and the Western economies, and it's not just because we're democracies, it's that we don't plan, partly because with Brexit, we didn't know from one week to the next were we going to leave, were we going to leave on this date or that date what's going to happen with the fish? Can you sell sausages in Northern Ireland? So it's really important to have those kind of discussions. Like I said, I'm involved in some about what is it, what's the world and the UK going to look like in 2050, assuming no wars and nuclear disasters? And what would we need as a set of strategic resources, skills, and how do you plan ahead and try to at least have some sort of plan, which it's very conspicuous that that just hasn't been thought through. It's like we've been on a boat without anybody on the bridge for 30 years. No one steering. And now suddenly we're in the middle of a storm.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Encourage people to have children lay on a bit of free alcohol and some good music on a Friday night. And that would probably be more effective than telling them that you don't worry about the cost when an 11-year-old wants to buy a pony. But maybe I'm old-fashioned. But the Chinese, what they're trying to do is to say we recognize there's a demographic blip some of the projections by 2060 put China's population at 700 million, so almost halving where things are now. That solves some problems, energy, protein consumption, food, but we're being listened to.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you applied to Oxbridge, there are about 20,000 applications for 3,000 places. Tricky odds and lots of concern about are you discriminated against because this or that or whatever? We said we try and do the best we can. We try and use a lot of contextual data. We try and do that merit and it's always going to be hard. And lots of fantastic kids don't get lucky enough to get in and they'll come through anyway. In China for 3,000 places at Tsinghua, there are 9.2 million applicants. So the pressure to get your kids on that conveyor belt. So the Chinese government this summer said we are banning any form of afterclub after school club. We're banning private tutoring. We're banning any form of nonsate learning and curriculum. We're going to try and level up. We're going to try and stop it so that you've got a competitive advantage because that we think will make it easier to have children. My own view for what it's worth is that if you want to stop people having children or if you want”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Codom, it's all to do, actually Sebast is a very smart question asking about fertility levels and population sizes. And China, as everybody will know, quite early talking about China, people talk about the demographic, the pyramid. There are too many people getting older and not enough young people being born. That's partly a product of sort of badly thought through policies of one child policy that was loosened a couple of years ago to two-child policy has now been loosened to a three-child policy to try to encourage more Chinese people to have kids. So the Chinese are now quite anti-condom because they want people to have children and have done that in a kind of joint, we would call it joint-up government by saying, why are people not having children? And the single thing that you'll hear from, they don't really do focus groups in China, but it's bloody expensive. And if I've got kids, I've got to send them to after school clubs, they have little tutors to help them get into the best universities. And I tell my own children.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The United States last year was sofas and furniture because people were saying, well, I've got another six months locked in watching Netflix, I'm going to upgrade my sofa. And the price to pay for everyone, upgrading their laptops and all the soft stuff that we've all been doing because the government's been paying us to sit at home has meant that Chinese manufacturing has boomed. And that's good for the economy, but the energy to keep the factories open has gone up. So energy consumption has risen.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no eyes, no ears inside the Politburo, so it's all speculation and has everything with academics or with history, some people's judgment is going to be better than others. But the knowledge you're shooting in the blind, so it can be highly speculative and almost not worth guessing. In terms of the pandemic, well, they do, well, they already have done better. China's economy, China's exports last year went up by 19%. So China's balanced payments, its foreign reserves have boomed and soared. And so from that point of view, it's been a boom to the extent that it's overheated China's economy. So there's an energy crisis. Energy consumption has gone up. Manufacturing has gone up to respond to not just PPE, but everyone sitting at home have been buying sofas. So the single largest item of volume of goods traded across from China to”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People's lives for political ideology, but they're extremely brittle. So the Soviet Union collapsed more or less overnight. The Berlin Wall likewise, the CIA analysis completely missed that. So democracies are very resilient because we allow and we force people to accept when they've got things wrong and then we don't always learn from their mistakes, but we try and be transparent. We don't always do that as well as we could do, but that is the single best thing about the democracy is that when shit it's the family, excuse my language, there's a kind of process of investigation to work out how that was allowed to happen. And then we repeat the same mistake a few things in.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But ironically, the key element of democracy is it provides stability because you can handle bumps much more easily. So autocratic regimes are extremely brittle under pressure. And those pressures happen with pandemics typically not just with this one, but over history, that autocracies are brittle when it comes to climatic events, and they're brittle with any kind of military and foreign pressure because the sudden knee-jerk reaction is that no one wants to make decisions because they're worried about their own position and number one always decides. So the decision-making process gets slowed down. People in Wuhan don't tell Beijing what's really happening. People in Beijing try and bluff it out and that then gets stopped and by the next thing you know what could have been contained at least within Hinan Province, possibly within Wuhan itself becomes a global problem. So autocracies and totalitarian regimes, again, as you know from Stalin, are very stable. You can sacrifice the economy, you can sacrifice literally”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Costs. So, one could make the argument that that's what all governments should be trying to do and try to be stable, trying to be meritocratic and not preserve elites. And, you know, I think that we're definitely lost in the woods here about how we should not just respond to what other people are doing, but to work out how we should also do that ourselves. Inequality in this country and in the US is profound.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Living go up. And if you can keep delivering economic growth and more hospitals get built, new roads, and you think your kids will have a better life than you've had, then it's quite a logical thing to keep lending your, probably not your vote, but lending support to the people in charge. And one of the things in China, for example, is the question about whether there is any internal criticism of China. And if so, what does it look like? Where does it take place? How is it mopped up? Because a lot of platforms in China allow lots of criticism and lots of discussion. So it's not just all shut down. It's about key sensitivity points around individuals and the types of criticism that get mopped up and are considered to be a threat. So letting some steam out of the system exists because otherwise it all builds up and becomes too much. But all these dates, and particularly ones we mentioned, Erdogan, through the whole way through, including in face like Philippines and Indonesia, are really about providing stability all”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Possibly who is stitched up by Bob Woodward, but there's been no denial from the US military that those kind of fragilities, so we look like we're highly unstable. Brexit, you know, apart from sucking all the air out of the system, left us singularly unprepared to deal with things at the worst possible moment. And in terms of where we are now with a pandemic to deal with too, having compression on supply chains, on the economics, the energies insufficiencies and so on. So I think that it's partly that authoritarian and unprogressive regimes have worked out how to retain power and to do it in a way that has uplifted the general population standards of living. Most people in the world, slightly unfashionable thing to say, most people in the world can live under whatever kind of conditions as long as there is a semblance of meritocracy, as long as you have some form of religious and freedom of expression. But that doesn't have to be a profound one. But above all, that your standards are”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think the conservativism is probably a red herring insofar as what it's really about is regime stability and regime survival. The views that help enforce that or protect, as the priesthood, it almost doesn't matter. If the Iranian leadership tomorrow said everyone has to wear jeans and wear t-shirts, otherwise you're going to get locked up in prison. It's all the same process. What the beliefs are, in a way, are less important than how small groups of people retain power and don't let anybody else in. How do you shut people out? And I think one of the things we've struggled with in this kind of world that we think we understood quite well and then suddenly about three years ago, we hit the panic button going, oh my God, China's suddenly in our rear view mirror. We don't know where it came from. It's a massive threat, let's deal with it.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is great. So I don't want to input into what anybody else writes and works about, but I think that those skills gaps and skill shortages and skills reward is a problem. That's, by the way, one of the reasons why young women don't go into science, because the bar for academic achievement, places at universities is much, much lower. So last year, only 1,500 young girls or girls did computer science GCSE because it's perceived as being much riskier and harder to get into the small number of places that offer that as a university degree. So much easier to do history or Latin or geography because loads more people do it. You're more likely to get a good grade, you're more likely to get to a good university, you're more likely to get at least a two-one, and you're more likely to therefore get a good job. And that's not how a functional intelligence society should work. You should work out how do you reward and encourage people to do more adventurous things, and particularly with skills gaps in sciences and gender. That goes across all diversities too.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a little nudge can do quite a lot to start to think that what is it an 18 year old that we have, both of us, what should they know about? And they should know something about AI. They should know about machine learning. They should know about robotics, about genomics, linguistics. They should know about how this is going to influence and change the way that we look at the world around us rather than only knowing how many wives Henry VIII had or whether in fact we've overrated that Henry VIII was not just a bad husband but also a sheer king which is the kind of the new orthodoxy”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of science, a lot of genomic stuff is the kind of real breakthrough area. And you can't just hop on and read what other people have written and just put it in a footnote. You've got to understand what are the parameters where you might be wrong about movements of people, linguistics. It's absolutely fascinating. I mean, Madagascan languages are all based on Malay, right? And when someone says that, you go, great, but what bits aren't? How did it get there? How did it change? How did it evolve? And I think that those hard skills require investment. And so the big problem in this country is we've got the private sector that can afford to fund those kinds of investments, although very few young people take them. They'll pick German and French rather than things that look harder. And we could calibrate that quite quick, quite easily. I mean, my view is if you want to study Arabic, Chinese, Russian at university, government give you a free scholarship for it. And if you want to study the French Revolution, maybe you don't. Or there are all sorts of ways in which you can...”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't bet on it. Having said that, the more, I guess if one washes out the politics and everyone here will have 52% and 48% will have a different view on that. And that's not my job to reheat any of those kind of arguments. But one could take a step back and go this little rock in the North Atlantic for the last few hundred years has significantly outperformed at the expense of other people's lives. No question about that when it came to transatlantic. But in today's world, all built on the legacy of that, no harm in reminding. But we significantly outperform at universities. We significantly outperform in specific sectors, including finance. We had a great response to pandemic fantastic Kate Bingham, if she's here. I know she's here at Cliveton at the moment. You're welcome, AstraZeneca, that's from my university. That's why...”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they had two, right? We only had one in Britain, although apparently Theresa May, her first press conference when she became Prime Minister, she said Britain's brightest days lie ahead of us, which is a historian I found quite interesting.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The railways, and trust me anyway, and then I'd have a day looking at archaeological sites on the Black Sea in places like Varna and Burgas, and then we'd take the overnight train back to Sofia and spend a day in the mountains. And I did that for two or three weeks. And, you know, first evening I sat there with my blank page, started writing up Bulgarian vocab and grammar and etc. And some guy came over and was very chatty, you know, wanted to talk, had a beer with me. And he said, why are the hell you learning this? I said, I'm so interested in the early history of the first Bulgarian Empire, everyone here knows that the first Bulgarian Empire is more exciting than the second Bulgarian Empire.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, I did. And I worked out that the best way to do it was to get a sleeper from Sofia through to the Black Sea coast, which cost me £2.50 in a first class compartment on my own, crisp linen sheets just like not quite as nice as Clifton, but almost.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fair enough, but it's going to be quite a lonely trip because I'm pretty sure none of my friends are going to want to come with me to spend time in the, although it's great, you know.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can't engage in other parts of the world if you don't have any language skills. And that is the single greatest weak point. If you can't speak any other language other than English and you're only dealing with, I mean, I remember spending some time in Bulgaria. I went to do PhD. I was good on languages and I had quite old school PhD supervisor who in my first year he said went through the language I spoke and I thought when I get to Swedish and Danish he's going to be impressed. He wasn't. And then he said, you know, great, you're Russian's obviously good. Have you got Bulgarian? So I said, no. And he said, well, you won't find that very hard because it's the closest to old Church Lavonic. And he said, well, you should go to Bulgaria and pick it up and spend a couple of weeks in Romania and pick that up as well. And I remember going back to my college thinking, okay, well.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With what's happening, and I think the more the better, the more great books, the roster of people speaking this weekend, it's like being the kind of classic one of those albums where everyone is a winner, everybody walking around here today. They're all geniuses and what they're working on, books of profound authority with great detailed knowledge and imparted in a way that people want to read, you know, which is not necessarily how all academic history gets written. But I think it's great that people work on whatever topics they want rather than prescribing it. I think it's that from a starting point.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brexit is genuinely not even a footnote compared to the stuff that is going on in the world that is significantly more important. And it's not just a China story. That story is places that you know as well, like Pakistan and India, which have combined population of one and a half billion. When you start to cluster up the countries that I work on getting through now into Southeast Asia as well, you know, you're 70% of the world's population live east of Istanbul add in West Africa that is the other significant region we should be focusing on and we're well above 75% and so it's great that we admire ourselves in the mirror and think very hard about history but maybe we need to also move beyond that kind of history that we look at and then”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's terrifying because we're quite thoughtful about how we think about other things. We're quite thoughtful about thrashing out Brexit and we spent five years obsessed just on fish and all the rest of it. Which is it is not unimportant but in the grand scheme of the sweep of history”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2050 in time for the next whatever Olympics is going to be then. But if you don't plan ahead, it's very difficult and it's expensive to put things in place because you're always second guessing. So I think that some of my best friends work on Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic, one of the wonderful degrees at Cambridge, but there are more students today at Cambridge studying Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic than there are studying Chinese, right? So I don't want to have any funding cut from my colleagues working on Anglo-Saxon northern Celtic. But it would tell me that we are completely strategically, economically, politically, militarily across the board, completely unprepared to make any sensible kind of decision about China, whether it's about the history, whether it's about business, whether it's about supply chains. If you're a young person to say, should I go and work in Shanghai tomorrow? Should I go and invest in real estate, in whatever? It might as well blindfold yourself and throw a dart at donkey's boss.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we sort of there are lots of things. I mean, I think that there's strategy and strategic planning which has a military and a geopolitical element to it. And then there's economic growth, where in a globalized system, China is part of our supply chains. I mean, for example, of the 200 suppliers that Apple has, 88% of them are in Asia, and about half of those are in China. To say, well, let's decouple, which is there's a lot of noise right now in Washington about supply chains, the congestion in ports, the sort of breakdown of the things that are going to get much, much worse in the coming weeks and months, that maybe we should reshore and Apple should be building their iPhones in Texas, which is great, but it takes years. It takes us 25 years to build a nuclear reactor. And do you think, well, that's great if we're going to have nuclear energy that we'll have that by 2020?”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, quite possibly. I mean, I'm not quite sure what to pick out there. I mean, yes, a lot depends what you think it is that China's doing. I mean, you talk about slowing down. I mean, we over-insert ourselves in the West into what we think Chinese strategic thinking is. We assume that most decisions are based around reactions to what goes on in the world outside. China on its own is somewhere between 1.2 and 1.4 billion people of a population. French Dick Smith at Cambridge University's professor of demographics reminds us that China's population might be wrong by between 10 and 15.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, I think we've got to work through what are the strategic stress points of which there are lots, but we don't evaluate properly because our base knowledge is, I'd say, somewhere between zero and minimal.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About when I started writing about Uyghurs and Xinjiang and internment camps four years ago and there was no interest at all across politicians, across media, across anything, until about a year ago where suddenly it became quite a visible story in the press and we talked a lot about, there's a lot about saying maybe we should sanction China, boycott the Olympic Games and so on. But even in the UK, our imports from Xinjiang went up by 190% last year. So the cotton that's been made and the Nike trainers that have been made and very questionable humanitarian conditions, if not worse, you know, we say one thing and we do another. So in terms of China, its velocity, what's it going to try to do, it's a huge, big question. But the more important one, I guess, from our point of view is how does that affect us? Is China getting richer and stronger? I mean, the Prime Minister of Singapore put it very well. He said people tell me, actually, we're worried about China. And the way I see it is the richer China gets more good for them and more good for us.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But China still is in the process of growing. And if you take one could take lots of different views, and in fact, I've been on an aircraft carrier this week talking about exactly how one tries to assess what kind of threat China poses and what kind of military, strategic, and all the joining all the dots, how one tries to understand what we're looking at. But, you know, one of the thing I suppose is that China is going through an adolescence of having quite clumsy muscles. It sort of doesn't quite know what it wants. It knows it doesn't want to be told what to do by the grown-ups in the room or by the United States or by the UK telling to behave more like us. So there's a bit of push in the system. And equally, we're not quite clear what it is that we want China to do. So is the problem that we don't want China to grow or we don't want China to behave in the way that they're behaving? In which case, which bits? And there are lots of these kinds of elements, I think, that we have to think carefully.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“towards the middle of middle developed countries. So we get thrown by seeing Bentleys in Shanghai and wonderful Chanel sores in China. But there are millions of things in there.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think one can't model fragility, Franz Ferdinand being shot in the streets of Sarajevo, if you'd said soon after that that we're going to have a world in the next four years where every single European country, which at that time more or less every single one had an empire, every single one is going to lose it in the course of the next four years. Britain is going to go from being the biggest creditor nation in the world to being the biggest debtor nation in the course of four years. No one would believe you. So single sort of black swan or fragility events are hard to think through how those play out. So what might happen is the variables are almost unlimited. I think what's more sobering is that we think of China as being on top, but China is not a rich country. It's got enormous economy on a sort of PPP basis. It's bigger than the US. But the average income in China is about $10,000, which is a kind of getting...”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, if there's an American warship that gets targeted while we're talking, it might not last till this afternoon.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, your stuff on Jerusalem tackles that so well about you can't just believe everything you read. But these stories are being told for a reason.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In writing in England, you've got to somehow connect that to events all over the world. So it's highly faddish. And in fact, it then gets watered down because the key thing is not the gathering information. It's how you analyze. How do you link more than anyone? It's reading these complicated sources. How do you understand the transmission, the authorship? What are the kind of questions you should ask as a professional skill set of a historian learning how to read is one of the key things and why the literature festival like this is so important, it's not the Clinton History Festival because it's the writing element that's the crucial thing, handling complex literary materials requires sophistication of readership and that's a skill we undersell to historians in particular because we think well people a thousand years ago were all credulous they all believed in God they did what monks and priests told them to do rather than thinking were they really that stupid and we're so smart today or maybe people were when maybe we're overshaped by what survives of the literature and that's more important and”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, although we're priests of our own, you know, we're the priest that holds what I think you should be reading about. And here's why we should learn about Jerusalem or about the Silk Road. So I think one has to take that all with a slight pinch of salt. The difference is that you have to buy my books rather than I have a budget of $860 billion a year, which you have if you're in the Department of Defense. And so I think that idea about what should we controls? I mean, it's one of the interesting responses, I guess, to Silk Rates having been so successful is that People say, well, how come we didn't do this before and look at the world that's joined up? And now all history should be like this. Now you can't write a book that doesn't throw in, so it's got lots of people trawling through Wikipedia to find out who are the Abbasids, rephrase it and chop it up a little bit, and then throw them into a story of whichever period you want. So I think that now the pressure is to globalize everything. And editors saying to writers, you know, you can't write just about an English person.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things it's partly that we are fascinated and fearful about things coming to an end, but I think that there's also a way in which that power gets exploited by the creation of structures that enable people to control society. I think it's a very important element. And that runs across the Quranic tradition that runs across the Judaic traditions and the importance of rabbis, not just intellectual scholars, but as guides, and priests in all religions. So I think there is something fundamental in us as human beings in trying to engage with what that disaster looked like, and particularly natural disaster, because famine and floods and climatic events are all sort of part of that cycle where either God is punishing us or we're not responding well enough to the challenges in front of us, and that there are consequences because we have these terrible scenes that follow.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's not just a Christian thing. I mean, the Indic religions, Mesopotamian, Akkadian, Sumerian, and Babylonian, it's all about the end of a cycle typically of a cycle of either reincarnation or of kind of your time is limited, you're doomed. And therefore, it's a profoundly important question from a human point of view. What happens to us afterwards? So I suppose on one level, those ideas that doom is going to become accelerated is a source of fascination and fear. If you were taking a structural approach, you'd say people who exploit that are the priesthood. And it doesn't have to be a priesthood to do with faith. And the priesthood today who preaching catastrophe, Thucydides traps, the confrontation of China and the United States, there are lots of them in the State Department and in the Department of Defense in Washington who talk like priests and they have powers of priests because their position rests on an authority to make sense of the world. So I think it's too”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe Dunkirk. But the battle marathon in 490 BC between the Greeks and the Persians that somehow the English think this is fundamental to the English way of how we've conceptualized the world. And I think that those conceptualizations are really important. And I'm sure we'll talk about the contemporary world too. But I think that that lack of knowledge about other parts of the world is profound. And it's both dangerous because we don't understand the world, but it's also reckless that young people are brought up learning the same stuff that you and I did for O-level and A-level, you know, where there's no texture about what the rest of the world is going on. And when we do open up and look at other people, we look at chapters that self-edit. We look at the slave trade, which is sets up, we should only look at Africa within a context of how Europeans engage and in a negative way, which we'll talk about this evening. But, you know, other parts of the world, it's like shooting in the dark. And I think we should...”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I just, I've just been in Athens to do something, and so I'm working on Greece and its orientation eastward is something that I've worked on for a long time. And as a Byzantineist at Oxford, that's part of my day job. And I came across Macaulay writing in the early 19th century saying that the single most important event in English history was the Battle of Marathon, which is quite something. I mean, you think, we say battle of dot, dot, dot. A lot of people would say Hastings, right? I guess some people might vote for Bosworth.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Four of us Arabic in a year up to kind of A level sands. So by the time I went to university, I went there, I studied Russian for my part one because I just wanted to find out these other parts of the world. I didn't imagine it would come together and trying to say maybe we should write about history that's not just about other people, that maybe we should write about history that explains how we're connected to these kinds of”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to talk about the end of the world was that we grew up in a world where we were certain that nuclear war would kill us all. It was just a question of when that would happen. There was bound to be either a miscalculation or an unwarranted escalation between the US and USSR and that someone was going to fire a naked nuclear device and that we were doomed. So it wasn't quite a program that I was guaranteed to die before we were old and happy or unhappy. That very polarized world was something that I really wanted to understand why and as you, a great historian of Russian history, once you start to look at different peoples in different ways and really immerse yourself, you just get a very different set of questions. So I mean, even when I was a teenage boy, I was obsessed by Russian literature. I was very lucky that was a school where I could learn Russian. And then even lucky that my Russian teacher had been in naval intelligence and had taught himself Arabic.”
2021-12-17 · Intelligence Squared · End of days or a new world order? With Peter Frankopan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT