0:08 >> Why would anyone go to war?
0:12 A real war.
0:13 With weapons, ships, and soldiers.
0:17 Over pepper.
0:20 Not gold.
0:21 Not land.
0:23 Not ideology.
0:26 Pepper.
0:26 The thing sitting on the little grinder on your kitchen counter right now.
0:33 I want to take you on a short journey through history.
0:37 Because hidden inside that question is something
0:41 that exactly explains the world we're living in today.
0:46 Every era in human history has had two things in common.
0:52 A resource.
0:53 Something that every civilization needed.
0:57 Something that gave whoever controlled it enormous power.
1:02 And there was always an infrastructure.
1:04 A route, a road, a ceiling, a trade corridor,
1:08 a network through which that resource moved.
1:12 The civilizations that understood both of these two things and acted upon that understanding,
1:18 they rose and dominated the world.
1:21 The civilization that ignored them, they fell.
1:25 Let me show you how this has played out again and again throughout history.
1:32 The Persians were among the first to understand this at a grand scale.
1:36 Around 500 BCE, Emperor Darius the Great built the Royal Road.
1:42 A 2,700 km crescent-shaped highway connecting his empire from the Mediterranean coast all the
1:53 way to the heart of every few kilometers.
1:55 Messages could travel from one end of the empire to the other only one
2:01 week.
2:02 Of course merchants flowed.
2:05 Taxes flowed.
2:06 The version empire became the greatest
2:09 and the largest the ancient world had yet seen.
2:12 Not just because of its armies.
2:14 Because it actually understood the power of connectivity.
2:18 Through a well established infrastructure.
2:22 Later the Greeks learned from this.
2:24 Athens built its power around the port of Piraeus
2:28 and made themselves the connectivity hub for
2:31 that ages resources.
2:33 Grain would come from the Black Sea, olive oil and pottery went out.
2:38 The infrastructure was developed to be able to control the sea lanes.
2:43 Whoever controlled the sea lanes accumulated wealth.
2:47 More wealth meant the ability to build more fleets.
2:50 More fleets meant controlling more sea lanes.
2:54 And then came Rome.
2:57 Rome took the infrastructure game to a totally different level.
3:01 Roads, aqueducts, ports, you name it.
3:05 Control the network and you control whatever moves through it.
3:10 Goods, armies, information, taxes.
3:13 And again.
3:15 More wealth.
3:16 More fleets.
3:17 More control.
3:19 Then in the 7th century CE something astonishing happened.
3:25 From the Arabian Peninsula.
3:27 The early Islamic empire was born.
3:30 It emerged and expanded at a speed that stunned the ancient world.
3:35 Within only few decades the early Islamic empire had absorbed Persia.
3:41 Pushed the Byzantine out of Egypt and the Levant.
3:44 Swept across North Africa
3:46 and reached the Iberian Peninsula on the west
3:49 and the Central Asia on the east.
3:52 Along with this expansion,
3:54 this new emerging civilization sat at the crossroads of the world's most highly valuable
4:00 trade exchange networks.
4:03 With this trade came something even much more powerful.
4:07 A civilization that at its peak did not just use this advantage to accumulate
4:14 wealth and power,
4:15 but actually used it to create institutions of knowledge
4:20 and share it with the rest of the world,
4:22 shaping human knowledge for centuries to come.
4:27 Now, so far, we have seen what happens
4:30 when civilizations understand the power
4:33 and the importance of resources
4:35 and infrastructure.
4:36 Before we move further,
4:38 I just want to take you through some examples of what happens
4:42 when the civilizations see the shift coming
4:45 and then just choose to ignore it.
4:48 >> >> Take Ming China, for example.
4:50 At the early 15th century,
4:53 China had the largest
4:55 and the most sophisticated
4:56 and advanced naval fleet in the entire world.
5:00 Admiral Zheng He was leading voyages across the Indian Ocean, reaching Southeast Asia, India,
5:07 Arabia, and even the eastern coast of Africa.
5:11 And then suddenly out of nowhere,
5:13 the Ming court of China decided to turn inwards.
5:18 The ships were grounded.
5:20 The voyages were canceled.
5:22 The fleet that once controlled the sea lanes was left to rot.
5:28 Within only few decades,
5:30 the same sea lanes
5:31 that were once controlled by China were now actually being controlled by the European
5:36 powers.
5:37 That's what led to what was later known as the century of humiliation.
5:42 The Mughal Empire was another very good example.
5:46 At its peak in 17th century, the Mughal Empire was extremely rich.
5:52 It actually controlled more than 27% of the entire world's economic output,
5:59 more than all of Western Europe combined.
6:02 It was extremely wealthy, culturally rich, and militarily powerful.
6:08 But, it was a land empire.
6:11 In a time where you had to be a sea empire to be able
6:15 to control the infrastructure,
6:17 the Mughal Empire did not have enough interest in naval fleets,
6:23 in sea trade corridors,
6:25 or in the new sea lanes that were being carved across the ocean.
6:30 And so, a trading company, the British East India Company,
6:36 came in to fill the vacuum.
6:38 Not an army, a corporation.
6:42 And by the time the Mughals understood what was happening,
6:45 it was just too late.
6:48 And then there were the great Ottomans.
6:50 For centuries, the Ottoman Empire was the most sophisticated state in the whole world.
6:56 It was a literal bridge between the East and the West.
7:00 But then, when the Industrial Revolution came in and transformed Europe's economy and military,
7:06 the Ottomans were not fast enough to respond.
7:10 By the time they tried to recover, it was just extremely late.
7:15 Three of your world's most powerful civilizations made one common mistake.
7:22 They all failed to recognize the power of the resources
7:27 and infrastructure of that age,
7:29 and act upon that recognition.
7:32 Basically, they were all caught sleeping.
7:36 This is not ancient history.
7:38 It's a pattern that repeats itself, and it's actually repeating right now.
7:44 That's what we call imperial hubris.
7:48 Now, let's go back to the question I asked you at the beginning.
7:51 Why would anyone go to war over pepper?
7:56 Simply because it was the valuable resource of that age.
8:01 In the medieval world, spices were everything.
8:05 They preserved food, allowing armies to be fed on long campaigns.
8:10 They were the medicine of the time.
8:12 The pharmacies of medieval Europe were basically spice shops.
8:16 They were the internet of their times, carrying cultural exchange, economic power,
8:21 and political influence across continents.
8:24 At that time, whoever controlled spice routes, you would control food security, military readiness,
8:31 economic growth, and ultimately, the cultural fabric of civilization all at once.
8:38 That's why wars were fought over pepper.
8:41 Actually, in the 15th century,
8:43 the spice trade was the most profitable business on Earth.
8:47 It was controlled by a chain of Muslim merchants, Arab traders,
8:52 and the city of Venice,
8:53 who were all located between the spice islands in Southeast Asia
8:57 and the hungry markets of Europe. 1 lb of pepper in 15th century London
9:04 would cost a skilled worker more than 2 days wages.
9:09 Nutmeg was worth more than its weight in gold.
9:13 When the Ottomans in 1453 took over Constantinople,
9:17 they actually ended up closing the most direct overland route to Europe.
9:24 Europeans were in huge trouble.
9:26 They basically look at this disruption and they did not only see a problem.
9:32 They actually saw an opportunity.
9:34 They asked themselves, "What
9:37 if we could bypass the middleman entirely
9:40 and go directly to the source?"
9:42 So, the European search for a new route became extremely urgent.
9:46 The Portuguese went south across the coast of Africa.
9:50 The Spanish went west.
9:52 When Columbus sailed in 1492,
9:55 he did not sail because he was looking for a new world.
9:59 He sailed because he was looking for a shortcut to the spices of Asia.
10:04 What he ended up finding, however, was something entirely different.
10:08 What Spain ended up finding changed everything again.
10:12 The resource was not only spices anymore.
10:16 It was gold and silver in amounts that no one had ever seen before.
10:22 From the mines of Potosi in modern-day Bolivia,
10:26 a flood of silver poured into Europe.
10:29 Spain became the wealthiest empire overnight.
10:35 New resource, new rules, new power.
10:41 Then in 1498, when Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Africa
10:45 and basically managed to find a direct way to India,
10:48 Portugal finally had its direct way to the spices of Asia.
10:53 And by doing so, they made the old trading network almost irrelevant overnight.
10:59 Now, let's move forward to the 18th century.
11:02 We had a new resource, coal.
11:04 By the 19th century,
11:06 Britain was mining 2/3 of the world's entire coal mines.
11:10 When the steam engine arrived,
11:12 Britain had the fuel to be able to power it on a level
11:16 that no other nation was able to match.
11:19 Then we had another resource, oil.
11:22 And with it came the 20th century with all its wars, alliances,
11:26 and instabilities that unfortunately were all familiar with.
11:31 Again, new resource, new infrastructure, new power.
11:35 Then something very interesting happened.
11:38 The internet.
11:40 Many people in the 1990s thought about the internet
11:44 as just a faster way to send letters.
11:47 What it turned out to be was the new infrastructure.
11:52 The new sea lane that transforms the new world's resources, information and data.
12:00 Today, more than 95% of the entire world's data going between continents actually goes
12:09 through undersea fiber optic cables on the ocean floor.
12:13 The pattern did not change.
12:16 We are still talking about sea lanes.
12:18 Only the sea lanes have moved from the ocean surface to the ocean's floor.
12:25 Now, let's talk about the new big thing in our time today.
12:32 AI.
12:33 Those AI assistants that make us all feel like an Iron Man's Tony Stark
12:37 talking to his Jarvis are becoming more
12:39 and more a very important
12:41 and irreplaceable part of our lives.
12:45 And just like in the 16th century,
12:48 pepper was not just a seasoning option on a kitchen counter,
12:52 AI today is definitely not just a software tool.
12:57 In its essence, AI is a system
13:01 that processes the world's most valuable resources today,
13:05 information and intelligence.
13:08 Today, AI is involved in almost everything.
13:12 It controls food security, new precision agriculture.
13:16 It impacts military power with almost every major military in the world today racing
13:23 to integrate AI into autonomous systems.
13:27 It is restructuring finance, medicine, governance, and education.
13:32 Today, AI is the new resource
13:36 and infrastructure of this age
13:38 that every single civilization is racing to control.
13:42 Actually, one of the key agenda points in the recent May meeting between President
13:48 Xi and President Trump,
13:49 just about a month ago,
13:50 was actually about how to divide the AI cake without going to war.
13:56 History teaches us what happens
13:59 when the infrastructure of an age is controlled by too few,
14:04 without checks, without balances, without wisdom.
14:10 The monopoly of the spice routes produced centuries produced literally centuries of extraction, slavery,
14:20 and colonial suffering.
14:22 The monopoly of oil produced wars and instabilities that we're still living through today.
14:30 Every single time one power held the choke points of an age,
14:35 the entire world had to pay a very heavy price.
14:39 If we do not move fast today,
14:42 AI could be added to this tragic list of monopolies.
14:47 Let me show you how.
14:48 This is actually what happens when you type a question into an AI assistant.
14:53 Your request travels to a massive data center.
15:00 That massive data center operates on one of only four available cloud platforms.
15:05 The specialized chips required to operate
15:08 that data center are actually almost all produced by only one company.
15:14 The AI model that processes your request is designed by handful organizations
15:20 that are almost all located in only two countries.
15:24 However, there is still hope.
15:28 Because the window is not yet closed.
15:31 The infrastructure of AI is not yet fixed.
15:35 The world's largest, youngest, and most dynamic populations are not just passive consumers.
15:42 They are users, thinkers, builders,
15:46 and they have whatever it takes to be able to be shapers of this
15:52 industry.
15:52 Countries like Turkey, sitting at the crossroads between Europe, Asia,
15:57 and the Middle East with a thriving tech industry.
16:00 Nations like Pakistan and Indonesia with hundreds of millions of young people with a
16:06 very fastly growing digital ecosystem.
16:09 Malaysia, quietly positioning itself as the AI infrastructure hub of Southeast Asia.
16:16 Nigeria, a thriving startup scene with a demographic wave that's positioning it to be
16:21 one of the most consequential countries by 2050.
16:25 Just like history shows us what happens
16:29 when the world's resources
16:30 and infrastructure are controlled by too few just to accumulate wealth
16:35 and power,
16:36 history actually as well gives us a brilliant example of what happens
16:42 when the civilization in charge decides to use this advantage with wisdom.
16:49 Baghdad in the 9th century.
16:53 In the 9th century Baghdad, under the Abbasid caliphs,
16:58 it was actually what one historian called the Cambridge, Oxford,
17:03 and MIT of its age all at once.
17:06 The House of Wisdom, Baytul Hikma, gathered scholars from all over the world.
17:14 Muslims, Christians, Jews, Greeks, Persians,
17:19 they all came together to translate the original scripts of ancient civilizations into Arabic.
17:26 And then build upon them to create breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, medicine,
17:32 and philosophy.
17:34 Those same texts were later translated into Latin to build the foundation for the
17:40 European Renaissance.
17:42 Here is the lesson of Baytul Hikma.
17:44 When you control the infrastructure, when you control the sea lanes, you accumulate wealth.
17:52 When you accumulate wealth,
17:54 you can choose to build institutions of knowledge
17:59 and share it with the rest of the world.
18:02 Because when you do so, you don't only rise,
18:06 you lift the entire world with you.
18:09 The lesson was never about who invented the original texts.
18:14 The lesson was about who had the wisdom, the ambition,
18:20 and the right cause to be able to harness this knowledge
18:24 and create a beneficial opportunity for the entire world.
18:30 Every era in human history has had to master its sea.
18:36 The periods of greatest human progress were not the ones where one civilization took
18:42 over just to accumulate wealth
18:44 and power.
18:45 They were the ones where the civilization in charge understood their responsibility.
18:51 They built the ships and sailed, not to conquer, but to connect,
18:58 not to hoard, but to share.
19:01 Today, we are at a critical moment of history whether AI becomes another tool
19:09 of division and concentration,
19:11 or whether it becomes another house of wisdom, open, shared, and generative.
19:18 This is the question that is on the table today.
19:21 And I believe this time we can get the answer right.
19:26 But it will take people who understand what this moment is about.
19:33 People who actually have studied enough history to be able to see the pattern.
19:40 People who want to make this world a better place to live in,
19:45 not only for themselves, but for everyone.
19:48 Thank you.
19:48 >>
