The End of the End of Geography: Mehran Gul on Why Innovation is Happening in America & China — but Nowhere Else

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Earlier this week, I did a show with my old friend Keith Teare. That Was The Week publisher, our regular tech weekly summary, on what we called universal basic capitalism, the idea that, US tech companies like OpenAI are becoming more and more merged with the government, more and more thinking of themselves as some sort of public utility. The news this week is that OpenAI proposed handing the Trump administration a 5% stake in its company. And what it suggests to me, and Keith and I talked about it, was this convergence, this merging of innovation both in China and The United States. In other words, the geography of innovation was becoming, more concentrated rather than spread out. And I'm intrigued to know the opinion when it comes to the geography of innovation. To my guest today, Mehran, Mehran Gul, who is the author of an award winning book. It came out last year. It's called The New Geography of Innovation, the Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies. It was, Financial Times Book of the Year last year, and this month, it's coming out both in The US and The UK with a revised introduction, in its paperback form. Mehran is joining us from Geneva. Mehran, is the new geography of innovation one in which The United States and China, the models of state centric capitalism, are becoming more and more similar?

00:02:13 Mehran Gul: I think so. I think if you look, for instance, just what's happening been happening over the past week with OpenAI, for instance, offering 5% of the company, to the US government. You know? These golden shares are something that have been quite common in China for the past five, six years. So I think increasingly, if in the past what you saw was a lot of elements of American tech being copied in China, You're increasingly seeing the same elements of Chinese tech being copied in The US as well. And the US government owning Intel, OpenAI, and things like that, I think, are very vivid illustrations of that.

00:02:46 Andrew Keen: Mehran, you and I have met a couple of times before at World Economic, Forum events in New York. You have an interesting story. Tell me where you were born and how you, born in Pakistan, with family now in Australia, ended up in Geneva.

00:03:05 Mehran Gul: So, I mean, it was a pretty roundabout sort of thing. So I was born in Pakistan, raised there. I did my undergrad in Pakistan as well. And then I got a scholarship to go to Yale where I did graduate school. This is already sort of twenty years ago. So I spent a couple of years in New Haven. I was also a teaching fellow at Yale as well. And near the end of my graduation, I got what's called the Fox International Fellowship, which is Yale sends you to one of their partner schools abroad. So I was a Fox pilot fellow to India, which as somebody from Pakistan was a fairly interesting experience for me. So I spent some time in India doing research. And then just long story short, I was at the UN, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, which is an arm of the UN that does private sector, development. It's based in Vienna. And then after that in I spent about four years there. And then in 2013, I moved to Geneva to be with the World Economic Forum, which is, you know, with the digital transformation of industries program is how I met you a few times. And then the past couple of years, I've been focusing on this book, which, the curiosity came out of the work that I did at the forum, but the real idea was to study whether innovation, which used to be very America centric, is becoming more global or not.

00:04:26 Andrew Keen: So what is your own narrative, the story of Mehran Gul, born in Pakistan, educated at Yale, living now in Switzerland, traveling all over the world? What does it tell us about the new geography of innovation?

00:04:40 Mehran Gul: I wouldn't extrapolate too much from my personal story, but I think, I think it is diffusing further. Maybe so I think when I first started writing the book, I think I thought that it was spreading a lot more than it actually was. I do think that you do have two, very important countries, and then the rest do not really show

00:05:04 Andrew Keen: And those, of course, are The United States and China.

00:05:07 Mehran Gul: And China. So, you know, when you start writing a book called the new geography of innovation, your inherent bias is that at the end of that book, you're going to say something like, you know, it used to be just The US, but now there are maybe ten, twelve countries that are, you know, punching at the same level. That I thought was not true. I think it's basically The US versus China when it comes to having broad based competence across lots of different areas of technology. There are other countries as well that are, you know, quote, unquote, the middle powers of technology, but they have sort of figured out a certain niche for themselves rather than being broad based competitors. And many of them would not really see themselves as competitors to The US anyway. They would see themselves as extensions to The US. So whether you're talking about South Korea or Israel or even India, they don't really have a very competitive relationship with The US. Only China has a competitive relationship. So I think that's how where I landed was maybe a little bit different from where I thought I would land at the end of the book writing process.

00:06:01 Andrew Keen: Yeah. We'll come to some of those individual countries. I'm particularly interested in some supposed centers of innovation, Israel, Estonia, of course, startup nations. But what about the politics of all this, Mehran? In terms are we talking about, if not a new cold war, certainly a new war between two dominant powers, each touting its own ideology? I mean, as we talked, or as you noted, maybe the systems are becoming more similar. Maybe they're slowly converging. But, nonetheless, the Chinese system is a top down one, and the American one is, a bottoms up generally. Is that fair?

00:06:46 Mehran Gul: I tend to push back against that characterization, especially when it comes to the tech sector in specific. I think when it comes to China's traditional economy, if you're talking about their old banks or their industrial firms, it is true that those are state backed. But when you look at, you know, companies like Tencent, for instance, company like BYD or, you know, these companies I see often coming up despite state action rather than because of it. Like, for every instance that you would give me of state subsidies, for instance, or the mayors in a certain city being very accommodating towards a certain, industry or a certain company, I can cite alternative examples where, for instance, back in 2021, you know, the most successful entrepreneur in Chinese history, Jack Ma, not even being able to show his face in Beijing and essentially being an exile in Japan. And you have so many examples of that. You know, Didi Chuxing getting hit with a billion dollars in fines. You know, Tencent, for instance, it was almost a trillion dollar company, the first private tech company in Asia to almost reach that mark when it was dragged back to being it's like, two thirds of its market value was shaved off because of state actions. So I always thought that, attributing the success of China's tech economy entirely to the state is, is over explaining by just one factor alone. And I think other people have made the same argument. If you look at Sebastian Mallaby's book, The Power Law, he also makes the argument that the rise of the tech sector in China can be better explained by the arrival of American style risk capital to places like Shanghai and Shenzhen than to anything that the state might have done.

00:08:25 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Sebastian was just on the show talking about his new, biography, of Demis Hassabis of Google. So are you implying, Mehran, that the Chinese state, Xi in particular, might see tech awkwardly, uncomfortably as a rival?

00:08:47 Mehran Gul: I think that's already been happening for about five years now. I think, you know, they have a word called common prosperity for that, which is an echo of, you know, Mao era thinking, which is the idea that, you know, very often in China, they use the vocabulary or barbaric expansion of capital, that these companies have become too big too fast. If you look at domestically China, what are the natural rivals to the centralized authority today? It's only the tech sector. You don't really have media in the same way that you do in other countries. The only other alternate you don't have private, sort of parties other than the sort of CCP. So the only place from which you would find a challenge to the Chinese state emerging is from the tech sector. And I think that's how, you know, the party has been seeing these companies for a good eight years now. And the most vivid demonstration of that, I talk about that in the book, was in 2021, when entire sectors of the tech economy were practically decapitated overnight.

00:09:47 Andrew Keen: So in a way, Mehran, I mean, I know your book isn't sort of explicitly political. It focuses on the economics of innovation. But in a way, is it a message to people in The United States that the Chinese model is the Silicon Valley model? And then any idea, maybe a message to some of the Trump people, that if you try to control technology, if you invest in it, own it, push it around, as they're trying to do with OpenAI and particularly Anthropic, of course, in these recent cases about, some of the latest innovations in Anthropic, that they need to be very careful?

00:10:24 Mehran Gul: I think when it comes to The US and China, one sort of thing that I am pushing back against is that maybe these models are not as different as people often make them out to be. But, you know, I think the lens through which I wrote this book was less through I think most writing that you will come across about tech is either written through an American lens or through a Chinese lens. You know, if you look at AI Superpowers from Kai-Fu Lee, that's a very Chinese lens book. If you look at The Infinity Machine, for instance, that's a very sort of Anglo Saxon lens. I try to approach this from more global perspective. And, you know, for somebody who's not sitting in either The US and China, the interesting question is, you know, if in the past eighty years, it was one country essentially running away with all the sort of prizes of all the platform shifts that happened. Well, it's semiconductors, the Internet, social networking, etcetera. And now increasingly, it looks as though it's going to be two countries and not one. Then where does that leave places like Brazil, for instance? Where does that leave, you know, all of Africa? Where does that leave Latin America?

00:11:24 Andrew Keen: Pakistan, of course, where you were born. And yet, if you're saying that these two dominant powers control innovation in the world, China and The United States, Then can there be a third way, Mehran? I mean, what about the example for of Taiwan where there is tremendous innovation? I mean, obviously, it's also a geopolitical, geostrategic hotspot.

00:11:51 Mehran Gul: So I think other countries are trying. You know, most notably, you will see in Europe, you often hear a lot about sovereign AI or decoupling, you know, not just from Chinese infrastructure when it comes to their tech stack, but also the American infrastructure as well. I think this year is when, people have been talking about it a lot more, you know, with Fable 5 and Mythos, for instance, getting banned. In Europe, the biggest fear that raised is that they realize that they are renters of American technology, not necessarily owners of American technology. And that's not just true for the foundation models. That are also true for, you know, NVIDIA GPUs as well where, you know, export controls on them. Even to third countries have been getting much more firm for the past couple of years. So I think you see the realization that there needs to be a third way. But in practice, do you see that happening? I would say not nearly enough. Because even the most promising companies in Europe, you know, DeepMind, for instance, or ARM, for instance, are either now listed in The US or owned by American payroll [unclear].

00:12:51 Andrew Keen: I mean, DeepMind, of course, has been acquired by Google. Demis Hassabis was the c the CEO founder of DeepMind. Now he's probably after the CEO, certainly after the CEO of Google, the most powerful figure within the company, perhaps the next CEO. So what message if Andy Burnham, who has just taken over or is about to take over their prime ministership in The UK, What message if he has the chance to read your book, A New Geography of Innovation, what message would he get from it? He's already talked about The United Kingdom becoming the world's leading innovation nation, which I'm sure has been said before. It doesn't sound very convincing to me.

00:13:33 Mehran Gul: I think I would advise him to maybe talk to the entrepreneurs who are increasingly leaving the European continent. It's not just DeepMind. If you look at just about any major European tech company over the past five, ten years, they've always eventually ended up somewhere in The US. If you look at Hugging Face, for instance, if you're in AI, you've heard about Hugging Face. It's the main social network where people in AI sort of come together. It started in, Paris. It's now in New York. If you look at Arm, for instance, which other than DeepMind is the most valuable tech company to come out of The UK, even though it has a very strong, UK based identity, it decided to go, public in New York. So, you know, I would believe what Andy Burnham said says if I see that more of these companies are deciding to stay at home rather than relocate. But I think it's been a consistent trend of one important company after another moving to The States. But I think at the same time, what's often not appreciated enough is the extent to which a lot of European industry is now also in Chinese hands. You know, the top two, individual shareholders of Mercedes, for instance, are Chinese companies. You know, Volvo, iconic Swedish brand, is now a Chinese company. Supercell of, you know, the biggest success to come out of, Finland since Nokia is now a Chinese company. KUKA, one of the most important companies in the robotics industry, from Germany is now a Chinese company. So it's moving in both directions. You know? Very few companies are being created in places like Europe, and the few that are being created are quickly getting snapped up by either American or Chinese buyers. So that would be the thing that he would need to focus on.

00:15:08 Andrew Keen: So, Mehran, what does this tell us about start up entrepreneurs? Are you suggesting that Europe in particular, Burnham or Macron or the German should be loosening federal controls? Of course, there's more and more suspicion of technology and innovation and, in some ways, even wealth creation in Europe.

00:15:33 Mehran Gul: I think in the sort of European attitudes towards wealth have, I think, always been there, the contrast that you see between Europe and The US. But in Europe, you know, almost talking about money is almost a dirty thing. And, you know, I think startup incubators like Station F are trying to get over that cultural hang up that people have. But, you know, I tend to push back also against just explaining all of this entirely through, cultural lenses as well. You know, not willingness not to talk about money, not taking risks. I think there are lots of institutional factors that are play at play as well. You know, just to give you a couple of examples, if you look at an average American company at the series a stage, you know, usually about 20% of an average American startup is owned by its own employee base. If you look at Europe on the other hand, an early stage company, only 10% of it is owned by its own, employees. And that really holds back repeat cycles of innovation. If you look at how new companies are created in The US, that usually happens by say you're an early employee at a company like Facebook. You spend three of your best years at that company, the company IPOs. You know, you as an employee end up making a lot of money as well. And then you're different as a tech worker. You're different from a traditional work in a traditional industry, and that you'd either, when you're flush with cash, start a new company or invest in other startups. But if a smaller percentage of your company is owned by its own employees, like, invariably in Europe it is, you have less of that money circulating in that environment. So in my book, for instance, I draw a contrast between Skype and PayPal, which both of them, when they exited, they exited at roughly the same value. But at the same time, about, PayPal created one sixty millionaires. Skype only created 11. And that's the reason why in The US, you always talk about the PayPal mafia of creating investor after investor, entrepreneur after entrepreneur. But in The US, in Europe, for instance, the Skype mafia is a lot more pronounced, and you haven't really seen those sorts of networks emerging in places like Europe, like you do with SpaceX or Facebook or Intel or even Fairchild Semiconductor going all the way back sort of sixty years, where people from successful companies then go and start their own successful companies. And that's mostly because at the early stages, they owe they own less of the equity in European companies. So that's just one example.

00:17:48 Andrew Keen: Is one reason for that in Europe, the fragmented political nature of things? I mean, you talk about a Skype mafia. They've been very influential in Estonia. I wrote a book a few years ago called How to Fix the Future, which a chapter was based on Estonia and the innovation there, and much of the wealth that was created by the founders of, of Skype, many of whom were from Estonia, was reinvested in innovation in Estonia, which, of course, coming out of the Soviet Union had a technological advantage, ironically, you know?

00:18:25 Mehran Gul: I think the fragmented nature of Europe is a factor, but I think, so two things. I think I would be careful not to explain too much, by referring to the fragmented nature of Europe because, you know, if you look at the industrial firms, if you look at stem firms from a generation ago, if you look at Novartis, for instance, if you look at Roche, you look at UBS, you know, three Swiss companies, you know, they look they're industrial era firms, but they encountered the same fragmented political Europe that the new digital companies do. So whenever somebody says that Europe is too politically fragmented to have these giant corporations like you do in The US, I often scratch my heads and say, well, how did the industrial firms do it? You know, how did Mercedes or BMW do it? How did Novartis do it? How did UBS do it? So there are plenty of, you know, they were up against the same fragmentation that some of these newer digital firms are up against as well. And yet Europe has in the past produced these giant companies that are not that don't just operate across all of Europe. They operate across, you know, the entire globe as well. And I think but one place where I would concede that having a fragmented market does, sort of undercut these companies. You know, one important way would be that, you know, in Europe, you have in The US, you have three main, you know, capital market. You know, three places where a company can raise money from the public markets. In Europe, you know, that capital is divided among 41 different competing centers. And, you know, so maybe it's time for Europe to think about the idea of having a European stock market that is a lot like Nasdaq, which has lower rules for, going public, which, early which are tech companies that are earlier on in this stage of growth can sort of tap into to raise money from the public markets earlier. So that is one idea that I have discussed in the book along with other ideas like having, you know, pension funds that can fund, VC investments. And that's one way you can in one way in which you can sort of get over some of the problems that political fragmentation has created.

00:20:26 Andrew Keen: Mehran, you talk a good game. Some people listen to listening to this and thinking, well, you know, here's a guy who's a world economic fellow of one kind or another. You talk Davos speak. But when it comes down to it, why would we in Europe want innovation? You've talked about China and America being the leaders in innovation. China is a horribly authoritarian state. Most of the people living there, are very ambivalent about government, horrible persecution, cultural, political, ethnic. The United States is increasingly impoverished, at least, when it comes to its cities, its inequalities, the, the hostility between different camps. We in Europe don't need all this innovation. So what's the point of it all? You've traveled around the world, the new geography of innovation. What would you tell a, a skeptical Spaniard or, or someone from Portugal or Greece about the value of innovation? They might say, well, our society, our economies are fine. We just don't need all this new tech, which only divides and creates massive wealth and also enormous poverty.

00:21:40 Mehran Gul: So I think I would maybe disagree with the premise of the question, which is that I don't think Europe is doing very well, at least in economic terms, where I think the gap between The US and Europe, that has been around for about a hundred years when it comes to economic performance has over the past twenty years been widening, not getting smaller, which is precisely why, like, you know, the main the thrust of whenever I present about my book, the thrust of my book really is that everyone else is talking about The US versus China and who's winning and in foundation models, who's ahead, etcetera. That's not the question that we ought to be asking ourselves. The question that we ought to ask ourselves is why is Europe falling so far behind both The US and China when it comes to economic performance? If you look at a place like The UK, for instance, if you put London aside, the rest of The UK is at this point in per capita terms poorer than every single state in The US, poorer than even Mississippi. I'm sure you've heard this statistic before.

00:22:35 Andrew Keen: Well, the Mississippi stat is complicated, but I take your point.

00:22:41 Mehran Gul: Yeah. But also, like, you know And,

00:22:43 Andrew Keen: my wife's family from is from Mississippi, so I have to be careful about Right. Making all Europeans as poor as people from Mississippi.

00:22:51 Mehran Gul: Right. So, you know, but over time, you the Europe has been losing out both in absolute terms and in relative terms, to The US when it comes to economic, when it comes to economic performance. The US as a percentage of if you look at, 1990, US as a share of global GDP was 25%. About a quarter of global GDP was The US. Today in 2026, thirty six years later, The US is still a quarter of global GDP. On the other hand, if you go back to 1990, China was about 1.9% of global GDP. Now it has multiplied its share tenfold, and it's at about 20% of global GDP.

00:23:28 Andrew Keen: That's a fascinating stat. So in other words, The US has stayed still. Europe has taken a massive step back, and China has, advanced dramatically too. But I'm not sure you answered my question. Someone in Spain or Greece or Croatia might be saying, well, we have long lunches. We have naps in the afternoon. Maybe we can't keep up with China or The United States, but our societies are fine. We don't need all this innovation. How would you respond to that, Mehran?

00:24:01 Mehran Gul: I think my argument would be that I don't think things are working out, as well for Europe as, you know, that Spaniard would be thinking. And I would ask them to look back at the past sixty years, and the amount of economic power that has accrued to places like The US and by extension, political power. Because of the fact that these revolutions like the Internet or mobile or social networking or desktops, all of them happened in one place. And if you look at the past sixty years and if you look at the relative skewing of power, relations towards The US in the transatlantic relationship and you say that you don't really see any problem with that, then sure. You know? You can say that I don't see any problem with what happened in the past sixty years. And if the next sixty years look exactly like that, then we're perfectly fine with that, then sure. But I think there'll be plenty of people in The US who in Europe who will say that, no. You know? What we saw in the past sixty years of The US, for instance, the top 10 American tech companies at this point in time, just their combined market value is about $27,000,000,000,000, which is greater than the entire GDP of every single country in the world except The US itself. So greater than even China. So, you know, if an average European is comfortable with that much economic and political power accruing to one country, then fine. But if on the other hand, if Europe is saying no, we need to show up to this economic competition And, you know, tech is not one industry that is fenced off from all the other industries. Tech is the foundation for pretty much every industry. If you look at the car industry, for instance, the newer cars did not come from the old car manufacturers. They came from, players from within the tech industry. It came from Tesla, not from GM, etcetera. I'm sure you heard this argument before. And so if tech is the foundation for every single industry and is the foundation for future economic growth, then you don't have any choice in that matter. You know, in one presentation that I always give, I show, the percentage of papers that are accepted at NeurIPS, which is, you know, the most, prestigious, AI conference in the world and the institutions that contribute papers to NeurIPS. And if you look at what happened at NeurIPS last year, half those papers came from China, 40% came from The US. You know, around, you know, 12% would come from, Asia and, only 4% from Europe. And from Europe, only about four institutions, Oxford, ETH, EPFL, and Technical University of Munich. And so, you know, from political Europe, there's only one institution that's represented among the 100 institutions that send papers to Europe [as spoken: NeurIPS]. So if you look at that and you say, I don't see any problem with that, then I think you'll see only end up seeing a replay of what happened in the past eighty years, except you will be losing power not just to The US, but to China as well.

00:26:46 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, this message is also one that many prominent Europeans, including, Mario Draghi, have been reminding Europeans. Mehran, the FT had an interesting, poll, a month or two ago suggesting that there was a dramatic difference in how people viewed AI in The United States and China, a great deal of confidence in AI in China, whereas The US was near the bottom of the poll along with some other European countries when it came to people's confidence and faith in AI. In terms of your new geography of, of, innovation, I know the book came out last year, but how would you explain the fact that China and The US are dominating this AI industry and all innovation? And yet, in The US, there's more and more skepticism, sometimes even hostility, a hysterical hostility to new tech. Whereas in China, people are embracing it. Does that should that make us more bullish on the future for China?

00:27:58 Mehran Gul: I think so. So in my book, for instance, I talk about how, people often only talk about technological progress and how primed a country is, for that by only looking at its ability to produce technologies, but not its ability to absorb those technologies as well. So the demand side is very often sort of left out. And I make the argument in the book that China has, in the recent past, been just much more eager to diffuse technologies in all sorts of ways and not just as an economy, but also in the way that people live as well. Like, for instance, for at least five years in China when you travel there, you can board a plane simply by scanning your face. And, you know, in The US, that technology, you know, is still in that industry. The state of the art is the same as what it was ten years ago.

00:28:45 Andrew Keen: Although some people might find that very chilling given the authoritarian nature of the Chinese state.

00:28:50 Mehran Gul: But so, I mean, given the authoritarian nature of the Chinese state, but why would implementing the same technology in The US raise the same concerns given the fact that you use that with your iPhone all the time anyway? Right?

00:29:02 Andrew Keen: So, I

00:29:03 Mehran Gul: mean, sure, it might be chilling in the Chinese context, but what I don't understand is why wouldn't you roll out the same technology in The US when it's already being used in all sorts of ways? So in The US, you'd be fine with Apple having that data or Google having that data, but not, you know, Booking.com, but not, you know, your, your airline. You know, I don't understand that. And that's where I think the friction comes more from people's attitudes rather than something that is grounded in rationality per se. So I do think this difference in the Chinese public just being much more receptive to change and new technologies is a real difference culturally, compared to The US.

00:29:45 Andrew Keen: I take your point, Mehran, and that skeptics would point, for example, to the fact that, Elon Musk, I'm not sure, as we speak, he's a trillionaire, but he's close depending on the stock market valuation of SpaceX. He's close to being a trillionaire, the world's first trillionaire and the richest man in the world. And this is reflected not only in increasing inequality in America between a tiny group of massively wealthy characters like Musk and the fact that most people's wages are stuck or sometimes even falling, and AI threatens their labor and their future. So in terms of this confidence, isn't The US public right to be a little bit concerned? The more innovation there seems to be in the American economy, only a handful of people seem to benefit, in Silicon Valley, investors in big tech, but nobody else.

00:30:46 Mehran Gul: So, I mean, before I get to the question of, you know, should The US should an average US consumer be concerned about the direction in which the tech industry is going, which is sort of the drift of your question. So before I come to that, I think you've pointed at something that's very real, which is just because two countries are doing well when it comes to technology, it doesn't mean that those two countries ought to be role models for other countries, when it comes to technological development. You could be doing really well, and yet there could be some really serious problems with the way in which you're doing things, which is precisely why I think writing a book like this one, which talks about technological development beyond the two obvious markets of The US and China. Because, you know, my assumption was that maybe some other countries on a much smaller level have managed to solve a problem that these bigger countries are still struggling with. So I think I'll give Switzerland an example. Like, when we usually talk about innovation, a country like Switzerland doesn't really come up because it doesn't have the Googles, Facebooks, and Amazons of the world. But, you know, if you've lived here, if you've sort of if you know this country intimately, you will see that they don't have these sort of private company types of innovations, but they have things like, for instance, the Swiss train network, which since nineteen sixties has been, entirely electric. It runs on renewable energy, you know, not for the past five or ten years. For a good fifty years, it's been running on renewable energy. And it's a public company, and it makes car ownership almost entirely optional. And so, you know, in every country, you need not have a situation where innovation is all about venture backed companies. It's all about growth in a small number of companies, which become a bigger and bigger part of your stock market where as the average worker is not doing that well. And, you know, I think that's why places like Canada, for instance, which played such a big role in AI research, which has, you know, powered the contemporary boom in AI. I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Yoshua Bengio, Geoff Hinton, and Rich Sutton.

00:32:40 Andrew Keen: Geoff Hinton, who's English, did much of his work in Canada, was actually on the show last year.

00:32:46 Mehran Gul: Yeah. And, you know, places like Sweden, for instance, places like South Korea, which have been doing admirably well when it comes to leveraging technology to deliver on the economic objectives, but maybe have done that without the social, consequences that the manner in which the American tech industry operates has often created for their own domestic economy. So I think that's the reason why having a look at places beyond The US and China is so important. I do think there is a problem, you know, going to the question about people being very skeptical in The US around technology. I think that problem's there. I think that problem's going to get worse, but I don't see that as it hasn't produced a situation where tech development in The US has slowed down, you know, or it's winner takes all. It's skewed economic outcomes, but at the same time, the gap between American AI companies and European AI companies, the gap between American space companies, this gap between American quantum companies, you know, that is still getting bigger, not getting smaller. So I think both things can be true, which is for most people, that tech economy is not working and numb but at the same time, that tech engine working really, really well for the small number of people who it's been serving quite well for the past twenty five years.

00:34:07 Andrew Keen: As I said, you were born in Pakistan. You're all too familiar with the South Asian Peninsula. I know you've written a lot about and thought a lot about India. I mean, if there is a third player in this, it's probably not Europe. It's India. There are many, many prominent Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. They dominate huge tech companies, for example, like Google. What advice or what does your book, about the new geography of innovation tell us about India? What are the warnings and opportunities for a genuine third player like India in contrast to Europe, which doesn't seem to compete?

00:34:48 Mehran Gul: So I would draw a distinction between India and Indians. I think Indians are obviously doing very well, but they happen to be doing very well in places like The US and Europe. If you look at what's happening in India, on the other hand, I would argue that despite, you know, all the admirable ingredients that it has, which is a large population, great technical universities, domestically, it has still underperformed. And what I mean by that is, you know, if you could look at foundation models, for instance, if The US came out with 56 last year according to Stanford HAI, 56 models notable models last year, China came out with 35. You know, India barely came out with any. If you look at all the sort of headline battles in tech, whether it's robotics or it's EVs or it's foundation models, companies based in India are arguably not even doing as well as they were doing forty years ago. At least on the previous wave of Indian tech companies, you know, there were these global brands that came out. There was Infosys, for instance. There was Wipro. You know, these Indian companies that really, that really sort of, rode the wave of outsourcing. But if I were to sort of press you and say, can you name me one Indian tech company that is based in India that is doing really well globally? Like, I don't know if you'll be able to name even one. So have been doing really well. But India as a country, when it comes to tech, has maybe underperformed expectations.

00:36:16 Andrew Keen: That's interesting. Very controversial, I think, probably in India. What about Singapore? You've written about Silicon Valley sucking up Singapore's tech talent. Singapore seems, maybe a more convincing model than India. I take your point on Indians doing well, but maybe not India. What does Singapore tell us? Is it too small to really compete in the world?

00:36:40 Mehran Gul: Well, I mean, if you look at in the sales of NVIDIA chips last year, for instance, the one country that was the biggest source of revenue for, NVIDIA last year after The US, the number two was Singapore. So it's a different matter that, obviously, all of these chips are not being absorbed by Singapore itself. These chips are going somewhere else, and they're using Singapore to invoice, basically. So I think Singapore is interesting for two reasons. The first one is, unlike you can't argue with the fact that Singapore has been successful economically. But unlike these breakout success stories in tech from Asia over the past fifty years, you know, like China or South Korea, for instance, you can't really name that many Singaporean tech companies that have done well. It doesn't have a Samsung. It doesn't have a Tencent. It doesn't have a BYD. But at the same time, it is it does play an outsized role, for instance, when it comes to venture capital in the Southeast Asian region. You know, even though Singapore is the second smallest country in the ASEAN region, the ASEAN region has more people than all of Europe. It has more venture capital and private equity assets under management than all of the other 10 countries combined. And so it's become a real regional hub for companies that are trying to monetize the wider ASEAN market. So, you know, some interesting things that I've seen in Singapore are, for instance, Temasek has been a big investor in emerging companies in China, but in the wider Asian region as well. Singapore has been very keen on getting companies like Grab, for instance, which started in Malaysia and, you know, asking it to move its headquarters to Singapore and then serve the regional market while being headquartered in Singapore. So I think it's leveraging the fact that it's a stable, calm place to do business that's not corrupt. And it's leveraging those qualities to get companies from the wider ASEAN region to be based there and to be the regional hub for companies.

00:38:44 Andrew Keen: Could we talk I mean, I take your point, Mehran, on individual companies within Singapore. But could we talk about Singapore Inc, so to speak, as a model for other countries in terms of encouraging innovation, a top down model that also rewards human agency, perhaps in contrast with China? Is Simba is Singapore Inc part of what you call this new geography of innovation?

00:39:17 Mehran Gul: I raised that question in the book, which is to what extent is Singapore a model and to what extent is it an inspiration? I don't think it's much of a model because it's very hard to replicate the same circumstances in other countries. Singaporean policymakers of whom I spoke to a lot would be the first to concede that, you know, it's a small country. The city is the state. It is, you know, the bureaucracy is not the three layer or four layer bureaucracy that you have in cases like India, for instance. So even they wouldn't know how to scale the Singapore model to a country that is the size of an India or even a China, for instance. And, you know, for even though the Singapore model has worked, I think in a lot of places, you know, in you can't hold it up as a model, for instance, in places like Europe, where, you know, they would all almost be a cultural aversion to having this I mean, Singapore is a one party state, for instance.

00:40:09 Andrew Keen: Yeah. We're talking to our skeptical Spaniard, Mehran, and they're not gonna want the Singapore model. Exactly. Thinking of other Asian countries, I touched on Taiwan earlier. But what about I mean, I'm interested in your take both on Taiwan and Japan. Thirty years ago, Japan was the future. Now, of course, it's the past. What does the failure perhaps, the stalling of the Japanese model, what does it tell us about the new geography of innovation? And coming back, I'd also like to come back to Taiwan and I understand what the political the potential of a geopolitical crisis in Taiwan tells us about this new geography of innovation when it comes to Taiwan. So perhaps you could deal with Japan first, which I know you've given a great deal of thought to.

00:40:59 Mehran Gul: So I think with Japan, it's an so I really believe in studying not just case studies, but anti case studies as well. And for me, an anti case study is one in which, you know, success was expected but did not happen. And I think Japan disproves many of these instinctive ideas that we have about innovation. You know, I talk here about Matt Ridley's book, in which the main how innovation works, in which the main thesis is that innovation is the child of freedom and the parent of prosperity. And, you can clearly see in cases like Japan, where despite the fact that, you know, on the freedom index, it outranks even The US. It has been historically a fairly prosperous country. It has all the technical schools that you can think about. And yet somewhere along the line, you know, it wasn't really able to break out of that old keiretsu system, and move towards a model where you have these fast growing startups. So I think when I look at Japan, I see an example of a country that never was able to move out of that industrial model of corporate innovation and was never able to move into a model where it's trying to do the same thing with fast growing startups, which is why still all the companies Japanese companies that you can think about here, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, these are all sort of forty, fifty years old. And the newer Japanese companies really aren't that. And for me, that's a failure of moving your innovation model away from what The US successfully managed to do, moving it away from government labs, moving it away from the IBMs, for instance, and focusing more on the fast growing startups. So for me, that is sort of the story of Japan. For Taiwan, I don't think how many I don't think how general the lessons from Taiwan are given the fact that Taiwanese success Taiwanese relevance to the tech industry almost entirely comes down to one company. And so I don't know whether this is you can read too much into that. Is it?

00:42:51 Andrew Keen: That's the kind of the Finnish model, the Nokia model as well.

00:42:55 Mehran Gul: I would say even the Finnish model is much more diversified in the sense that you had Nokia. Right? You have Supercell over there. You have Klarna no. Klarna is Swedish, but you had these other companies that were still somewhat relevant globally. Like, you know, Angry Birds comes from Finland as well. But as in Taiwan, it's all just one company. And so is it simply an accident of history that Morris Chang did not get that promotion at Texas Instruments and decided to move to Taiwan and said, I'm going to show you? And that's basically how to read that and not as Taiwan's industrial policy being so far sighted that they managed to create a place for themselves in the AI stack thirty years later. I happen to think that it's more of a story of Morris Chang moving back to Taiwan and creating TSMC, and the rest of the country maybe cannot be considered to be that much of an outlier when it comes to how far sighted it was in creating a techno economy.

00:43:52 Andrew Keen: Let's end with a return to Europe. You've been a little skeptical, and you're not alone, certainly, in your skepticism about Europe's potential for innovation. They show very well in your new geography of innovation. But what about when it comes to intellectual innovation, Mehran? You were the winner of the Bracken Prize for young authors, the FT McKinsey Prize, I think about three or four years ago, with for young authors, which gave you the capital to go and write this book. So in a way, your own narrative, I we began with that question about how your own story sort of connects with this. And in a way, it does connect that somebody invested in you. Bracken, McKinsey, the FT invested in you. They thought you were smart. They had an essay competition. You won the essay competition, and out of that essay, you wrote this new geography of innovation. What's the role of intellectual innovation? Certainly, we could be skeptical of the Europeans when it comes to technological innovation, but, intellectually, they still, in some ways, lead the world. What's your take on that?

00:45:04 Mehran Gul: Well, I mean, you know, a place that doesn't have great philosophers will not have great technologists either. And, you know, in that sense, you do have it is in a way inexplicable what has happened in Europe because, you know, if you look at, for instance, people often talk about how The US has all the great universities. But on an average, European universities tend to fare better than, American ones. You know? Even I for instance, in my book, I talk about how even a place like the University of Manchester, know, which would be considered to be a bit of a backwater, can produce Nobel Prize winning,

00:45:37 Andrew Keen: music. Even Andy Burnham comes out of Manchester to become the English I think he's, relocating Westminster to Manchester. So Manchester's about to become the center of Great Britain.

00:45:47 Mehran Gul: Yep. So it's a much more sort of dispersed ecosystem than in The US. And people in the tech industry tend to sort of folk tend to notice that very often that unicorns in Europe tend to be a lot more dispersed than in The US. Even though intellectually, that's an appealing argument that, like, you know, it is, it is still a place where, you have those intellectual freedoms where, you know, you have a much more communitarian ethics compared to The US. And, you know, there is a place for Europe that is differentiated from both The US and China. And I talk about that in the book as well where, you know, if you think that values are going to drive incremental value, then the future is not just about, you know, single stakeholder capitalism like you have in The US with the single stakeholder being the market or single stakeholder capitalism in China, the single stakeholder being the state, but something that is that places sort of values at the center. We haven't really seen that make much of a splash on the economic level, though. So I agree with you that there is something in Europe that is differentiated from the other places, but for some reason, that's not translating into economic performance.

00:47:02 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And people predicted all this new technology would end geography, but, actually, Mehran, Mehran Gul argues, I think, that geography, if anything, Mehran Gul, is more important in our age of the network than ever before. Is that fair?

00:47:18 Mehran Gul: That is where I've ended with the book where, you know, especially when COVID happened, people thought that this is the end of geography being important when it comes to innovation. People thought that this was the end of Silicon Valley. I can't tell you the number of articles that I read back in 2018, 2019, which were calling for an end to Silicon Valley. But, you know, seven years later, arguably, especially with the AI boom, technological innovation and monetizing the economics of that technological innovation has recentered in the valley and consolidated in the valley more rather than less.

00:47:53 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And not only do we have the end of the end of geography, but also immigration and land becoming more and more politically sensitive and important issues. Mehran Gul, real honored to have you on the show. This is an important new book, the new geography of innovation. It came out last year. It's already won all sorts of prizes. It was an FT book of the year. Now it's out in its paperback. Mehran, you've done some great work, and I appreciate you having me on the show. We've met before in the past. I have to have you back on. You bring an important new perspective. Thank you so much.

00:48:26 Mehran Gul: Thanks so much, Andrew. Great speaking with you after such a long time. Thank you.