George Friedman, Transcript about War and our so-called "IT" Inventors01.10.25

After him, they (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg...) invented to marketing those digital Inventions. In reality, those Digital Inventions are the result from nameless military engineers.

Jul 7, 2017 from a Youtube Transcript
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hi is global war coming of
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course there's never been a century that didn't have a global war in the 20th
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century you know about uh 19th centuries Napoleon
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Wars 18th century was the Seven Years
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War we can go back and back and back and back but if you don't think there's a
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global war coming then you're saying that the 21st century is going to be the first
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century in which there isn't a global war and I will bet against you any
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amount you want in fact global war all war is
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sitting with you right now it's sitting in your pocket I present to you the
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iPhone you've seen this it carries such superb tools on it as YouTube and Tinder
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and all the essentials and you guys are so cool that
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you know that this represents the future and makes you completely different
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because well you're cool let's talk about
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it the foundation of this phone is a
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microchip the microchip was developed to guide us intercontinental
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ballistic missiles uh against Soviet targets it had to have a small computer
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in it it had to be very light it had to be very accurate
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and the microchip was the
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solution and all of the weapons that we use during the Cold War the threatening
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annihilation of humanity was built on the microchip and you now use it
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today because it's cool but that's what it
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is take a look at the other thing you have a camera in your phone the digital camera
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that was developed by the US national reconnaissance office for spy
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satellites problem we had was that if you took regular pictures with
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film how do you get them to Earth so you had to have a way to take
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pictures of targets of various sorts that didn't require you to
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drop a Kodak film pack down to the Earth because that's what they did at the
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beginning and they had to develop some sort of way to take
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pictures that could get back to Earth fast just the way you send selfies to your mother or
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something and that was the digital camera it was driven by something called
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the CCD which I remember the name once but I can't remember what it's about
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and what it did was it took digital pictures that could be beam
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back to Earth to Target people your innocent little
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camera had its birth in spy satellites there's GPS you
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love it you walk around the street looking at it instead of the traffic you get killed it's a cool device
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GPS was invented by the United States Air Force was
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called navstar to guide cruise missiles to their targets and toow army units Precision in
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their land navigation in other words it was invented to let soldiers know where they
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were okay and it's the most dangerous thing you have in your device because if
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you don't get hit by a car you're going to crash yours while you're staring at it so it has a violent nature built
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in now all this is designed to get to the place where all Humanity lives which
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is the internet the Internet was developed by the fense advanced research project
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agency to move classified data from one
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one secret lab to the other so something in oakd Tennessee the
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labs there we moved to Los Alamos and that would be moved to Brook
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Haven National Laboratories what were they doing in these Laboratories doing research on nuclear
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Wars because that was the big story
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then it was developed with only one thing in mind to make research
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more efficient and when you get on the
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internet all the protocols you get and all the cool stuff that get you around
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were developed by American scientists who are deeply involved in
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the Cold War now you then have the cell phone
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which most of you don't use anymore because you irritate me by sending me text messages instead of picking up the
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phone okay the cell phone was first deployed in 1985 by the United States
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Army and was used for the first time in Operation Desert
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War and it was entirely invented to facilitate military
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communication bottom line is there is nothing in this phone or if you're a religious atic in
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the Android there was nothing in this that
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was not created for war so you think about war as a distant
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thing you think about war as something that doesn't really have to do with you
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and then you pick up this phone and every bit of it is drenched in
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war in fear of war and everything else now the American are
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peculiar in the United States government they're not allowed to have
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patents basic rule is if the US government invented it and it's not
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secret it's yours for the taking it's an odd rule but it works for
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us it means that everything we do in preparing for Wars designing aircraft
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everything else ultimately
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comes down to being available so Steve
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Jobs who is so cool invented
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nothing he took other people's inventions from the government put them together and the only thing he invented
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was marketing and that was that was pretty cool
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Bill Gates invented
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nothing MS DOS was a program he bought from someone that had originally been
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developed for the Air Force Zuckerberg invented even
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less your whole generation lives in a fantasy of creativity
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the basic tools that guide your life that permeate you were developed by
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Warriors or scientists of Warriors it got to
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you and a bunch of really smart marketing guys put them
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together and convince you they were Geniuses the real geniuses made $50,000
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a year and retired poor the marketing guys they made the
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money the reason I'm starting with this is to make it clear to you how
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intimately your life is involved with war Leon trosy the famous communist that
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we all dislike used to say you may not be interested in war but war is interested in
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you and what he meant by that was the fantasy that you can decide to avoid
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Wars wars are among the most ubiquitous things in human
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life Wars are constant they're going on now they will go on for a long
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time people don't like Wars it doesn't matter what you
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like and one of the most important things this generation must grasp is
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that history doesn't give a damn what you like or don't like you may be
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Millennial but you bleed from a bullet just the same as anybody
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else your life is built on the things that came out of World War II what came out of World War
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II two things
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multilateralism the belief that we should all belong to the European Union
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or the United Nations or the IMF or the World Bank and second the belief in
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technocracy World War II was won by the biggest technocrat of all Dwight
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isenhower he had never heard a shot fired anger but he knew how to organize 15
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million men to wage war
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and out of that came a culture of experts the belief that experts can
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guide our society and make it effective and
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healthy okay and so we surround ourselves with
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people who know who are experts okay and in 2008 all of these
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experts proved well they're not quite that experts but this also led to the love of
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Technology because World War II was won by
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technology by radar by radios by b29 bombers by nuclear
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weapons and we believed Americans and Europeans alike in the sanctity of Technology
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but not only that we decided to make it a virgin again very hard thing to
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do how do you make it a virgin again all of these Technologies came out of global
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war we will pretend that it's no longer connected to
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it we will pretend that war has nothing to do with us and the point I'm making
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to you is is that you live every
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day with the product of war that every part of your
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life is bound up with this and the only reason you don't think of it is you
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don't know that and you think that if you don't know that it won't be
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true well it is will there be more
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Wars wars occur when some nations rise and some Nations
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fall World War II started with the rise of Germany after 1871 and
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unification the rise of Japan which suddenly became the Great Eastern power and the most important rise the rise of
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the United States in 1865 we finished a civil war 600,000
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de 35 years later the United States produced half the manufactured goods in
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the world in other words Wars don't
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you oddly enough they can enable you and this world had to make a place
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for the United States and there were the British Empire there was the French Empire there
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were all of these European entities that felt that they had an
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inherent right to dominate the world and here came Germany here came Japan
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and above all here came the United States and remade the
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world okay and if IID asked people in 1935 do you want a World War they would
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have said no they would have voted that way it didn't matter what they
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wanted it happened and between World War I and World War II over 100 million people
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died lies are crushed and it wasn't any poll that you could take that
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would count today you have rising and falling
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Powers the United States Remains the dominant power 25% of the world's
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economy is under the control of the United States the United States controls all
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the oceans of of the world it means we get to invade people and they can't invade us which is an American I'm
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definitely in favor of but no power in the history of the world has ever controlled all of the
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oceans so that simultaneously we are engaged in a crisis in
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Korea we're fighting in the Middle East and we're deploying forces in
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Poland Romania and so on we have a very strange
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president and it doesn't matter because presidents come and go and power
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stays however stupid Donald Trump is the United States remains 25% of the world's
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economy the only Power able to project Force anywhere in the world for good
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reasons or bad the United States remains in control
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of the sea dominant in space and we will even survive Donald
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Trump there are powers that are right declining Russia Russia is Saudi
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Arabia speaking Russian they depend on oil exports oil
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export prices cannot be controlled by the Russians at $50 a barrel they can't run
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the country so they will invade Syria for no apparent reason to look good see we
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invaded somebody good now you have Aleppo congratulations what are you going to do
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with it China is a declining country it once grewed 15% it now claims to grow at 6
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and a half% but it is a country that is extraordinarily
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poor the thin strand of China that we think of as wonderful China isn't part
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of China it sells its goods to the United States and Europe and the
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Europeans have screwed up so they're stagnating they can't buy all those
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goods and the Americans will screw up because we always do eventually and then we can stop buying their goods and every
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one of these people depend not on their own genius but on the willingness to people to buy their
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products who are the countries that are emerging in
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Japan it's actually didn't never went away it's the third largest power in the world by far a better Navy than China
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has China PR notwithstanding the only people who want the Chinese Navy great
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is the US Navy because the Chinese Navy is great they get more budget so they
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pretend that it's really very powerful um Japan is the Great East
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Asian power turkey if anybody's going to
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settle the Arab world is the Turks because that's the only people who ever did settle them during the Ottoman
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Empire and they're back and there's chaos in Turkey as they try to reconcile
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secular and religious but there was chaos in the United States during the Civil War chaos sometimes destroys you and
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sometimes makes you a lot stronger and in this
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region Poland which you laugh but when I first
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said Japan people laughed and then I said turkey and they laughed they're not laughing don't laugh about Poland why
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Russia is in Decline Germany exports 50% of its
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GDP half of its economy depends on its customers
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buying and right now its biggest customer is the United States and we have a crazy president who
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doesn't like Merkel and he's capable of anything when you're as big as the
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United States you can make stupid moves and get away with
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it with all this rising and falling you think there won't be War
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well the world is filled with war right now you may disapprove of it there may
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be a poll that says it should stop but it won't Merkel by the way said after being
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insulted by Trump well we've had enough we're going to defend
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ourselves thank God finally why she thought the United
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States would be offended at the thought of not having to defend Germany is not clear but how does Germany exporting 50%
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of its GDP survive 10% % loss in exports is a 5%
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loss in GDP which to put it in technical terms
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means they're screwed so what you have here is a
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declining power Russia a declining power
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Germany and a country in the Middle that's not doing too bad
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Poland and that's how you figure who's going to be there now is Russia going to go quietly into that good
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night I think not is Germany going to say oh well you
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know we'll be unemployed again 30% no that's not Germany
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style is Hungary going to be once more as in all of its
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history caught in a great conflict that it has no control
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over yeah you're only 10 million people and nobody cares about you
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is Hungary going to wind up on the wrong side of the war well we've had a perfect
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record so
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far and this is your lies will you live your life out till the end of the
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century as many of you might without War without death without
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suffering you're living in a fantasy world that's not how the human condition
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works before World War I everybody thought Europe could not have a war
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because of interdependence the Germans and the French traded so much with each other
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man called Norman Angel wrote a book saying the great illusion that there could be a
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war he was a very smart guy he was dead Rong I wish he'd been like 21 in the
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trenches dead dead wrong but he didn't get to go the warning that I have to you is
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that war lurks in your life everywhere the output of the war and you
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can pretend this is an innocent harmless tool but every piece of it was designed
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to kill or to help killing it's just true
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it also means that you're going to have to face the fact that the odds
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are since it's been 70 years since the last systemic
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War that's not going to be another 70 years before the next one could happen
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but again I'll bet you it won't most of
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you you'll excuse me I'm old and cranky and most of you are self-absorbed and
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belief that the life that you lead is up to you your grandparents may have thought the same
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thing it wasn't their lives were shaped by events
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you think you shape your lives you think that when you buy an iPhone you are in control of your
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life this is this Cold War
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weapon combined and you use it every day and you don't know
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it you don't care about it and the problem not of your generation but of my
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generation the Boomers and of every generation is we think we're different no you're not you're just kids
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and you fantasize then you grow up and something
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completely out of control happens to you and reshapes your life it would be better if you were
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prepared pred for it if you were aware of it if you understood the strange statements that are made by leaders
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actually could not just change your life but end it you would be able to confront this
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much better because what will happen is when it starts and it will somehow some way you
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will be stunned you will say it doesn't have anything to do with you you will say I
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didn't want it I'm a millennial I get to choose I'm a
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boomer I didn't get to choose my father grew up in Hungary in the 1920s and 30s and he didn't
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decide on World War II it is important to understand how
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deeply intertwined your life is with war of the past and how War can come and
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visit you regardless of whether you want it the confidence of Youth is dangerous
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it is dangerous because it lives an illusion of powerfulness of making decisions and of
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determining your future most of us all of us are caught
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in webs we never expected to be there and the best you can do is anticipate
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them and the reason you won't is you prefer the illusion of
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power and it's not there I hope I've not upset you too much
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you know what I throw anything to me but it basically means life sucks and then you
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die okay I'm
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done take a seat yeah actually true just
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here so uh your your 10 minut
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who that is possibly the most perfect music for George's presentation uh
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you're you're you're 10 million people nobody cares about you but brabar Budapest cares about you and we want to hear from you so this is your chance to
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ask some questions so George you you have a unique uh vision of the world um
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you have why do you say it's Unique well I I just think it's you guys haven't heard it it was it's interesting you
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know you're asking the question of war huh what is it good for well it seems to be good for iPhone Innovation and to a
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degree is war good for Innovation yeah you got an iPhone on you like
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it our next question George please turn around face the I have to turn around you turn every
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time you're going to be spinning one way from the other I want an automated CH we I we didn't get that far I don't know
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what battle invents maybe in a tank somewhere there's a nice autom CH okay
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yes so thank you for the opportunity and my question is that uh if a global war is coming then how do you see the role
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of uh multinational organizations in it especially NATO um and uh considering uh
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president Donald Trump's stance on it and even your uh editorial about NATO's
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uh obsoleteness what is NATO it is a military organization
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you can't have a military organization without a military this is we studied this very
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carefully military organization has militaries in them the issue here is not whether the
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United States will leave NATO it's whether Europe will join because right now from the American
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point of view the European National strategy is to condemn the Americans for being
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Reckless and demand that they come okay that's fine fine we'll come
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but who are we fighting so we've had a war for 15 years in the Middle East Wise unwise our
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people are dying NATO is nothing to
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that so the [Music] question you can ask him why he pressed
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the button there okay yes I have to ask George are we already at War so we've
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seen we've seen the sort of warfare fought on the battlefield but are we seeing lawfare or perhaps even news fair
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is the manipulation of our news by other countries potentially an act of War Act
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of war is when I put a bullet in your head okay great this is the act of war and you
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have to understand the world is filled with violence just not in Budapest
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yet we have a new question yeah thank you for your insightful thoughts uh if there is a third world war then what
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will be the tools that it will be fought with nuclear weapons or cyber I don't know but they'll be designed to kill
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people sure what about what about cyber War George to her question do you think
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the war will be fought not on the battlefield but on the web what about cyber War I don't know what cyber war is
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my next question now that I was standing right I I actually realized that I I read about
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your books on Wikipedia I just realized I I read about your books on Wikipedia and they seem
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very interesting but what I wanted to ask is who are your favorite philosophers
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Hegel cool why Hegel Hegel designs history
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showing its predictability showing its agonies showing its moral
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Dimension he addresses the reality of human life and he deals with Generations
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rather indifferently is it generation to deal with the millennial
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generation what's the best strategy to survive a global war arm
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yourself with what ah that becomes an interesting discussion we should have a discussion
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of what you want to arm yourself with who's your enemy uh here he's going to ask a question right so you in
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particular were pretty good at uh escaping war and I don't think that you're seriously I mean you're seriously
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concerned but you're probably pretty good at avoiding you know bombs falling on your head and people shooting you yes
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I'm isn't that right my son my daughter isn't that a good enough skill to have
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shouldn't we just you know all learn how to run away from war yes but if you're all running away from war they can find
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you I have not escaped war in my my father did my children my daughter was
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an intelligence officer in Iraq and she fought for several years in Iraq my son
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is an Air Force inventing some of these things he he does that in the United
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States being in the military is not an uncommon thing it is not something that poor people do it's a
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life and my family's life from my father's survival was bound up with it
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but it was not only and he the heart of his he wasn't smart he was
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lucky so if you want to run away from it you can't outrun a bullet some of you will survive some of
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you won't everybody is not wiped out but in terms of my life it begins in
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the wake of World War II passes through
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the struggle against the Soviet Union for my children passes into the
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islamist wars um Europe has had a wonderful
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time having in the first half of the 20th century killed 20% of its
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population it declared well thank God that's over but is
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it thank you and our final question yes final question
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here where do you predict the next major Civil War and if your reply is going to
32:27
be really quick than two Civil Wars majors and is it possible in a major
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Western Country I don't see any possibility in
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an asor Western Country but in 1850 nobody would have predicted the Civil War in the United
32:44
States Civil Wars are very hard to predict because they are driven by
32:49
issues not only of interest but of passion and so on so I mean it is said
32:57
that there's a chance of another civil war in the Balkans and that if such a civil war in
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the Balkans happened it might spread to include other countries in Central Europe I don't know I do know there's a
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massive civil war going on in the Islamic world and I do know the Europeans are dying from it not many so
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I'm sure that in a room like this filled with people no one would think of planting of bam but other than
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that uh the point is small Civil Wars go on
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everywhere large Civil Wars stay a long
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time do you think we'll ever see war from Corporation to Corporation between corporations not between nation states
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corporations are read by leaders who have two goals to stay alive
33:49
and make money it is possible to make money without killing people or more important without being killed
33:56
yourself than thank you uh what if the new global war won't be fot against the country but
34:02
against terrorism and there are no not always clear battlefields uh on terrorism yeah I mean that is always a
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huge problem which is that if you have a subnational group it's a problem so in
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1848 in Europe there was massive uprisings I think you learned of them in school no maybe
34:23
not for sure the 1848 risings were sub National they they were not
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States the best way to deal with one is to kill them all and this is what
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happened in 1848 the Mass Slaughter the United States is trying
34:41
not to kill everyone in the end it may wind up doing it unintentionally this is the United States did you ever see South
34:48
Park Team America yeah remember how accidentally
34:53
we blew up the Eiffel Tower we didn't mean it we were just there that's the United States so how do you deal with
35:00
these wars not well not permanently but with the only thing that war has which
35:06
is violence thank you joking aside in all
35:11
seriousness George that was an incredible presentation and please join me in thanking uh George for his
35:20
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
35:26
insights o [Music]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwnPgscg0vU

Anonymous

George Friedman, Transcript about War and our so-called "IT" Inventors01.10.25

Information Epoch 1778990806