Stephen Bartlett: These conversations aren't always easy, but nonetheless, they are important. So, every single year, Professor Ian Bremmer, who's one of the world's leading political scientists, produces this risk report, and it highlights the top 10 biggest risks that everybody should be thinking about. And today, he's going to talk to me about the three that matter the most. So, he predicts that a US political revolution is on its way. the US has become the biggest driver of geopolitical uncertainty in the world and in my view Trump will fail.

Stephen Bartlett: And he also says that the other thing everybody needs to be talking about and aware of is what's really playing out with AI behind the scenes.

Ian Bremmer: They created a model which is so powerful that they couldn't release it because it would have been an immediate systemic risk to the global economy and our security and artificial intelligence is eating its users. and we can talk about that.

Stephen Bartlett: And lastly, I want to end on a point of optimism. Can we take this craziness and turn it into a utopia with realistic solutions? Ian Bremer, what is this document that I have in front of me here?

Ian Bremmer: This is our top risk report. We put it out at the beginning of every year. try to help people around the world understand the risk environment globally.

Stephen Bartlett: So for the last 30 years your firm has been trying to understand the world to help make better decisions based on the big picture of what's happening geopolitically. The 2026 one appears to be pretty prophetic because a lot of things that you list as the top risks are playing out before our eyes. For anyone that hasn't read this report, what are the most important subjects?

Ian Bremmer: I think that there are three that are really big. Um, the first is that the United States has become the biggest driver of risk, the biggest driver of geopolitical uncertainty in the world. And we see that with the tariffs. We see that with Venezuela. We see it with Greenland. We see it with Iran. I mean, if there was that level of uncertainty in a smaller political system, and that happens all the time, we wouldn't care as much because the global impact would not matter. But everyone out there is affected by even small changes in the United States. Suddenly, big changes in the United States.

Ian Bremmer: The Americans are saying, "We no longer want to play by the rules that we set up historically. We don't want the free trade system that we put together. We don't want to be the global policeman that is paying for the collective security. We don't want the open borders that used to welcome so many people from around the world. We want a very different set of rules. It's the American system is not being challenged by the Chinese saying we don't want the Americans themselves and the leadership are saying we refuse to be the leader that we used to be. That's but it's the most important without any question.

Stephen Bartlett: And what's the second one?

Ian Bremmer: The second one is the big question of how the second most powerful country in the world is responding to all of that. Now we in the top risks piece talked about overpowered. Overpowered being the global energy dynamic. How China has been working to build the most effective electric vehicles all over the world at scale and the batteries all over the world at scale and the critical minerals in rare earths for decades now. not just having access so they can exploit them, but also so that they can reprocess them.

Stephen Bartlett: For anyone that doesn't know what critical minerals are, and how important they are to our everyday lives, could you give us some color there?

Ian Bremmer: Sure. We're talking about all of these things that you take out of the ground, whether it's lithium, antimony, which is in every device, in your car battery, it's in your missile systems and your advanced weaponry that keeps you safe at home or allows you to go to war against somebody. I mean, you can't have an advanced economy without critical minerals and rare earths. and the Chinese have been investing at scale globally in that capability for decades now, thinking long term. And a lot of the rest of us have not been thinking long term. We're like just in time, globalization. How do we make the most money now for our next quarterly return? And that reality is making China not a better economy today, but it's setting them up for a much stronger long-term trajectory.

Ian Bremmer: As countries are saying the Americans are less predictable and we're more vulnerable to their sudden changes in decisions. Many more countries are saying well we want to hedge and do more with the Chinese and those decisions really matter.

Stephen Bartlett: If this continues, if this direction of travel continues, what happens next in terms of global order? What is the big picture here? Why would he do this after saying that he was the president that was going to stop all the wars?

Ian Bremmer: Trump had plans to take out Maduro. Trump goes in to Venezuela, right? It is the most successful military operation you can possibly imagine. Not a single American serviceman or woman is killed. They go in, they take Maduro out. They bring him to a jail in Brooklyn. Extraordinary. And so, you've got a new government that is has a different trajectory. I talked to leaders all over South America. They all think this was a success. This is enormously popular among the populations in those countries because they care about security.

Ian Bremmer: Trump is hugely feeling great, successful, and now he's like, I can do that in Iran. I can do it even bigger. That's the first reason. Second reason, the Iranians... Iran talked big did not hit the Americans. So Trump is thinking to himself, "This is going to be awesome cuz I'm going to go in. I'm going to pull Venezuela in Iran. And I know they don't want to fight me. I kill the Supreme Leader, 86 years old. He's going to die anyway. Then the rest of the Iranian leadership, they're going to want to work with me just like they did in Venezuela.

Ian Bremmer: And then the most important reason is that unlike Trump's first term where he had people around him that were patriotic first and foremost to the country and when they had disagreements with Trump, they let him know... This time around, Trump has some really good advisers... but what they all share is that they are first and foremost loyal to the president and they will not tell him. They won't push back. And what he hears from them is shaded towards how brilliant he is. And that makes him think that he will be more successful even when the military thinks this is a horrible idea.

Stephen Bartlett: And what actually happened?

Ian Bremmer: That did not happen. What happened is the Iranian leadership was taken out. The response was immediately what they call this mosaic situation where they decentralized the military decision-making to local commanders. This regime is still very much functioning. You have 21 hours of talks. The Iranians feel like they have more leverage right now than the United States thinks they do.

Stephen Bartlett: I've also seen him say if just the American people were a little more patient, we can take the oil. What does he mean by taking the oil?

Ian Bremmer: Take the oil is control the export facility on Kharg Island. It is responsible for 90% of the export of Iranian oil. Sentcom say that you can take Kharg Island with 12 to 15,000 men relatively comfortably. If the Americans take it, suddenly the Americans have far more leverage over the Iranian economy. I think that the likelihood that Trump is ultimately going to make that order is well below 50%.

Stephen Bartlett: As a European, I guess... it appears on a global stage that that perception has changed. The US are talking to us like a lap dog. what did the country do wrong?

Ian Bremmer: But it is certainly true that over the last 30 years, there have been two really big geopolitical shifts. In terms of power shift, you've got the rise of China... And then you have the decline of American allies. Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea. These are countries most of which are contracting demographically. They've not been investing in their own defense. They've not been investing in their own technology.

Ian Bremmer: Europe believed that the world after the wall came down in 1989... was just going to be peaceful, that everyone was going to have a system like the Europeans did. So, they didn't need to invest in defense. And they were completely wrong. China did not suddenly align with the United States and Europe. China is a consolidated dictatorship.

Stephen Bartlett: One of them was that in this particular device, the European Union demand that the battery can be taken out and put back in again. And what this actually means... is that the devices are no longer waterproof. So he goes, "I don't think what the Europeans don't realize is we just don't need their market anymore."

Ian Bremmer: So there are three systems out there. One system, the United States system, most power in the hands of the private sector... drives an enormous amount of growth and wealth. The problem is that lots of average Americans do not benefit from it. The Chinese system where the state actually captures the private sector... drives an enormous amount of growth over the long term, but the people have no say. Then you have the Europeans... very oriented towards the social contract... but we can't afford them because our system is so heavily regulated and so anti-entrepreneurial that we don't drive the growth.

Stephen Bartlett: Let's talk about AI. Anthropic released a new AI model, which they say is so capable that it presents the world with a really fundamental security risk... they couldn't release it?

Ian Bremmer: This risk is real because it needs to be deployed immediately to find these bugs and to patch them before other people have those tools. Imagine if the Russians have that capacity, what they would do with it. If the Iranians today had that capacity, what they would do with it. Technology is changing the world so fast, and it turns out that the biggest way it's changing our security and the economy is AI.

Stephen Bartlett: I'm playing it for those of you that are looking at the screen at the moment. What's happening is a company has paid these Indian workers to wear cameras on their heads to watch their hands. To train the AI so that the AI can do that job in the future... to remove the workers from those jobs.

Ian Bremmer: That wave of populism is coming absolutely in 2028. And AI is a very big piece of that. I want three types of governance. First, I want to make sure that the United States and China start to have AI arms control conversations. Second thing we need is an AI stability board like the financial stability board. The third thing we need is we have to have an ability to fund AI for people that otherwise would not be able to take advantage of it. We can't allow humanity to develop that way.

Stephen Bartlett: Are you worried about artificial general intelligence?

Ian Bremmer: I'm not worried about artificial general intelligence. I'm worried about human beings becoming more computer-like. When you spend all of your time on your smartphone, that is a computer programming a human being. As soon as it gets intermediated by algorithms, as soon as you get programmed into a lane, we become much more inhuman. That's why I hate prediction markets. The idea that we're going to instead of looking at our political institutions as things that we built that serve us, instead we create a casino out of them.

Stephen Bartlett: It's funny when you sit in this position... and you know that having a conversation with someone that half my audience don't agree with is going to cause real anger.

Ian Bremmer: Independence is a responsibility because there are so many people that are not in your position or my position... we have an obligation to be out there and above the 50% of people that are going to hate you for whatever it is. It's about never pulling back and saying, "Oh, no, that might irritate someone, so I'm not going to say it." That's what mainstream media does, and that's why they're in trouble. The more that we can do to resist the algorithm, the better we'll be as a planet, the better we'll be as a species.