Elon Musk: prediction

Transcript context

…The whole thing. Yeah. So that Athens and Sparta is a classic case. The thing about the Greek is they really wrote down a lot of stuff. They loved writing. There are lots of interesting things that happened in many parts of the world, but people didn’t write down, so we don’t know what happened or they didn’t really write in detail. They just would say, “We had a battle and we won.” And what? Can you add a bit more? The Greeks, they really wrote a lot. They were very articulate on… They just love writing. And we have a bunch of that writing as preserved. So we know what led up to the Peloponnesian War between the Spartanand Athenian Alliance, and we know that they saw it coming. Spartans didn’t write… They also weren’t very verbose by their nature, but they did write, but they weren’t very verbose. They were [inaudible 00:21:23]. But the Athenians and the other Greeks wrote a line, and Spartan was really kind of like the leader of Greece. But Athens grew stronger and stronger with each passing year. And everyone’s like, “Well, that’s inevitable that there’s going to be a clash between Athens and Sparta. Well, how do we avoid that? ” And actually they saw it coming and they still could not avoid it. So at some point, if one group, one civilization or country or whatever exceeds another sort of like the United States has been the biggest kid on the block since I think around 1890 from an economic standpoint. So the United States has been the most powerful economic engine in the world longer than anyone’s been alive. And the foundation of war is economics. So now we have a situation in the case of China where the economy is likely to be two, perhaps three times larger than that of the US. So imagine you’re the biggest kid on the block for as long as anyone can remember, and suddenly a kid comes along who’s twice your size. So we see it coming, how is it possible to stop? Let me throw something out there, just intermixing of cultures understanding there does seem to be a giant cultural gap in understanding of each other. And you’re an interesting case study because you are an American, obviously you’ve done a lot of incredible manufacture here in the United States, but you also work with China.…

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