Europe, China and the future of open borders in science

Danny Crichton:

Ian and Halldor, thank you so much for joining us.

Ian Curtiss:

Absolutely.

Halldor Hardarson:

Well, thank you for receiving us.

Danny Crichton:

So, I'm really excited about this. So, obviously there's an enormous amount of headlines that are going on in the news on US-China relations, China and EU, European Union relations. We have this big APEC conference underway right now as we're recording this. We'll probably publish in a week or two, so we'll be a little bit off. But for the two of you, you two are both long-term China hands, which I know you both look very, very young, but in reality, you've been focused on China for approaching two decades now, so it's a little bit nuts. But we were just talking about, I guess you first met in 2011 together at Beida University over in Beijing, and this was the pre-Xi era, as he was just coming to power as Chairman of CCP and President of China in 2012. Give us a lay of the land. How did you two meet each other? Before we get into all the big headlines, but how did you two meet each other? What was the environment like back then?

Halldor Hardarson:

I remember it very clearly. I was sitting in this very old ancient computer lab in Peking University trying to log in for something, and the row ahead of me, there was this American guy that was extremely angry. Was pissed off at assistant that didn't work, and that turned out to be a reoccurring theme. [inaudible 00:01:15] systems all over the world, but not the least in our experiences when we were in China, I have to say. I don't know when did you remember me first, Ian? I don think I heard.

Ian Curtiss:

Yeah, I mean, man, it was all such an overwhelming flood of new stuff when I stepped off of the plane into Beijing. One of the key core first memories of Halldor is I remember, I think it was in Pan Wei's class and we were debating human rights and individual liberties and how the state serves individual liberties in different ways and so forth. And Halldor, I don't remember Halldor's, which was almost surely like a really sharp one. Halldor tells the professor something and the professor responds with, "Your country has 300,000 people. That is the population of one district in Beijing. I'm not going to listen to you," was essentially his response to Halldor's very astute observation. I remember just everybody in the room was like, oh, whoa, this is a different perspective, okay.

Halldor Hardarson:

I enjoyed those classes quite a bit, actually. It's very uncommon to get the chance to just debate every week a personality with such a different frame of reference for almost everything, but extremely smart. Really, really deep thinker, but like almost everything, all the assumptions were very different from almost anything that I would ever assume about world. And very often it ended up in being questions about civilization, right? It all boils down to nothing smaller than civilization kind of questions, but I took advantage of that. I really liked it. I really liked being able to talk to these guys. I always said that what I learned most was not necessarily from the curriculum, but from these interactions when you actually get to spar with these intellectuals from one of the best universities in China, talking about the attitude towards international late relations and other stuff that we were learning.

It was totally different world back then also, I have to say. I don't know how you feel Ian, but things, people were a lot more optimistic back in those days about China. And there was almost a given that there was a certain transition happening, things were slowly developing for the better. When it came to the leadership transition that was around the corner, people assumed that that would be a peaceful thing. And it was also under that pretense that I decided to go to China and really be ahead of the curve there and try to study in China and understand how things actually were there.

Ian Curtiss:

No, I mean, I remember in our classes, I forget which class it came up, but one of the professors was referencing local county level elections, four party representatives as an example of progress and change in China and the building momentum towards democracy in China. It was very much a discussion at that point.

What was fascinating to me at that point then was because I remember joining the American Chamber of Commerce after our degree and watching at the chamber how dramatically the tone shifted from 2013 joined in and the overwhelming tone at this time. And I'm curious to hear your take, Halldor, from the EU perspective, but at this point it was overwhelmingly, keep the engines going, everybody's making money, everybody's really happy. All of the policy papers were all the same old thing. Everybody makes more money than is losing, so why rock the boat? Until when I left, it was the business community that confronted the Obama Administration about, if everybody remembers the US-China Bilateral Investment Treaty that was being negotiated, and it was the business community that confronted USTR from and said, "Actually, I don't know if this is a good thing because so much weird stuff happens once firms enter the market." That maybe this kind of concept of a bilateral investment treaty is a bad idea. And yeah, well, here we are now, whatever years later.

Halldor Hardarson:

Yeah. Well, what I did right after picking university was that I started working for projects for the European Union and one of the projects that I ended up leading for almost more than a decade actually in the end, was on innovation, research, and science, right? And I remember really distinctly in 2015 at the early Horizon 2020 research framework program from the European Union, which is now finished, we had our DG of research and innovation coming to China, which is the hat of the innovation policy in the European Union. He comes and we have this big event that the Chinese academia of sciences sort of welcoming China into the research framework program. The main slogan of Horizon 2020 was, "Open to the world," and the idea was back in those days that it would be a great benefit for the whole global system of science to include China, and which arguably it is.

But that was also undoubtable in those days that just Chinese science was not very significant. It was really growing, but there was not a lot of significant contributions yet, and it was not the case that it ended up being maybe five or six years later where the top of in the world in publications and all of these different things, they were actually spending only a fraction of what Europe and the US were spending on science. They were also not getting super good results, but absolutely extremely promising.

Whole idea behind the European Union to begin with, that's like whole operation, reaching out your arms towards a country, especially in what we then assumed would be a non-competitive arena, like basic science, sort of building up the basic knowledge of all humans and for the good of all humanity and whatever would be great, especially when it came to tackling global challenges. Some of the biggest challenges on the planet were in China, and you were not going to solve things like climate change or anything like that without working with the Chinese. That was the tone in 2015, very early on in my career with the European Union, this is how we were talking to them. I wouldn't say that we were absolutely totally open.

It was not the same case that before Horizon 2020, we used to actually fund science in China. Can you imagine that up until 2013, we were just actually send money to China for research? But you have to understand that it's not that long time ago, but it was literally a developing country as far as we would understand it. It was a 10th of the spending on science in Europe, and you would really want to build up the infrastructure for science and stuff like that. That is the sort of world that I remember entering and was then going to change quite drastically in the end as things went on. And I did experience it all, I experienced it from totally open to very bitter rivalry almost. So, that was really interesting to go through.

Danny Crichton:

I'm curious, Halldor, I mean, obviously coming from Iceland to the original point of your Beida class, coming from a country of 300,000 into a country of 1.3 billion, how has that transitioned? Because when I think of Reykjavik, it's a gorgeous place, beautiful, incredible food, but it's not Beijing. What was that transition like? Was that an attractive feature to get out and move into China versus somewhere else or the rest of the EU? What originally brought you there?

Halldor Hardarson:

In 2006, I took the Trans-Siberian actually. I mean, I went to China as a 20-year-old just looking for adventures. Absolutely, no, nothing behind it except for it was very far away and nobody knew anything about it, so I wanted to go there. And it was also, I have to say, I miss those times because we had the privilege of living in a super open world. I mean, I could cross Russia to after China or whatever, there was no limitations, now you can't even fly over Russia to get back to China if you wanted to fly there. And there had been this super stable, at least 15 years of super stability in the world and everybody was comfortable with where things were heading, at least that was the feeling, and you could go anywhere and you could flash your credit card and get things done. And yeah, I don't know.

Danny Crichton:

I feel like you're a unique entity here because I feel like for folks who worked on the cooperation beat and both of you were, like I said, in different domains but overlapping business and science technology between Ian and Halldor. You were on this focus of connecting two cultures together. Obviously, different histories, different backgrounds, always a little bit of friction and a schism there, but it lasted for a very, very long time, but it was petering it out in the early years of the Xi Jinping, we'll call it administration. And then obviously as Trump comes to power in America and as the dynamic really, really I think changes as you transition from the Obama years into the Trump years and how at least America perceives China and the EU arguably is catching up now.

You went all the way to 2024 through zero COVID and all kinds of different dynamics. How was that experience? Was this a burning building but it's slow and you sort of realized like, oh, the smoke is getting into more rooms, but it's okay in here, or was it something that was gradually then all at once for you?

Halldor Hardarson:

The COVID was definitely a canary in the coal mine about what was actually happening in China, because a lot of the developments that we would experience during COVID for me really reveal the true colors of the system there, and for better and for the worse. Like when the Chinese really want to stand together to do a certain thing, they have extremely effective culture to do so. They have institutions within their political system that can be activated on a moment's notice to really mobilize huge initiatives like this. And it was extremely educational for me to be there throughout COVID. I know that people in the West were really relatively unhappy with the extent that the governments were going in trying to keep the infection under control, but in China, it went way beyond anything you could imagine. There was a couple of times where I woke up and my door was locked from the outside because I had been quarantined without being let know what was going on.

At one time, a very business-wise very uncomfortable time for me. I was just locked in my apartment. Also, not being able to going back and forth between China and Europe was a big hassle for me for the longest time, and then in the end I bit the apple as you say, and decided to just do it anyway, but every time I did in the end was four or five times, I had to do three weeks of quarantine in Xi'an, every single time, which is a part of my life that I've just shelved away. Those are 15 weeks of solitude that I should probably write magic realism novel about one day.

But also because of the topic of my expertise and so on, it was also super revealing because one of the big things that I'd been working on at that point was this network of European researchers that are in China. So one of the things that European Union was super keen on understanding and supporting was the build up, understanding of who is doing what in China and where, and we have these European scientists that are working in Chinese academia all over the place. The idea was to support one of the fundamental ideas behind the European Union was mobility, in this case researchers' mobility. So, researchers are coming to China and Chinese researchers are coming to Europe and so on. But COVID was a bit of a slap in the face of the ideal mobility, not only there, but everywhere. Like researchers left China for a Chinese New Year's break in 2020, and a lot of them never came back, these European researchers.

So, I had just finished the year before doing a big survey on all of my researchers coming this week because we had these big networks in China, and so I had this really lovely ground, how do you say, data about the community right before COVID in September 2019. And so I went immediately afterward and I worked with a couple of other colleagues to set up a survey on the researchers community there. And immediately in March, we found out like 75% of the European scientists in China were locked out of China. This is clearly bad for China, you would've think. China's trying to attract these researchers, right? They're not sneaking into China, they're being attracted to China, and it took decades to build up that of the Chinese institutions were trying to internationalize and trying to get in these researchers for a long, long time. A lot of people put in blood, tears and sweat to do that, and then three quarters just gone overnight.

And you would've thought you would do anything to keep them because there was not a lot of mobility in Europe and the US either, but if people lived there and were working there, they were allowed to go back, that was the rule of thumb. That was not what happened in China. So I did a survey in April, I did another survey in August that year. And then afterward I was like, okay, now COVID is over. It wasn't, there was three more years of COVID ahead of us, but I was also wondering, is this all about COVID? What's going on here? So in the end, I also surveyed our researchers again in 2022, 2023, and then again this year. I just really wanted to see what was going on.

And my main hypothesis right now is that COVID had just sort of accelerated a development but was actually happening behind the scenes was something a lot more cynical. And we had the situation that when China finally opened again in 2023, there was less than half of the European researchers that there used to be before. Fine. But now this year, I do my survey once more and I find out there's been no renewal. There's only a small fraction of the PhD in postdocs, these early career researchers that used to be in 2019. So basically, there's no renewal, there's no young researchers coming into China anymore. So, what happened? People, if you would ask the scientists in China, they would say the European scientists, they would say COVID happened, but I don't know about you guys, but COVID is ancient history by now and people not coming has very little to do with what happened four or five years ago. There's something else going on here, so that's really remarkable in my opinion.

Danny Crichton:

When you think about the... You particularly focus on science, and so the US has had for decades now, a US-China science and technology agreement, is designed to increase cooperation, trade. There was a very controversial part of the NIH program which funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology that has now been [inaudible 00:16:04]. Regardless of the actual work that was undertaken, this was a widely considered part of the scientific enterprise, which was connecting labs together. China was funding massive new universities. It's really moved up the league tables, ranking charts for research across the board. Australia Policy Studies Institute has reported that in many cases, dozens of different fields, China's now number one over the last couple of years. And so cooperation and circulation of these ideas is helpful to US universities and EU universities, etc, but it really does feel like the world has changed. That this idea that there's sort of a flat scientific community with no walls and no barriers, that all the data can kind of flow all around the world in sort of a global kumbaya has moved on to a world of walls and barriers and borders. How are you seeing it from the European Union perspective? Because I think we covered the US perspective, which is pretty negative these days, but I'm curious because the EU feels like it's in this, it's obviously in the west and this sort of freedom and democracy world. But at the same time, deep ties economically across industry manufacturing with China. How do you see the EU balancing between the two sides?

Halldor Hardarson:

First of all, it's interesting you mentioned the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Virology in Wuhan, because I've been there. I went there in 2015, '16, couple of years before it opened, I think it was like they were still building it up. And I did not recognize it or hear about it back then as a collaborative entity with American Labs, although that does not surprise me. It was an international venture, but it was the defense consulate in Wuhan that took us there because the friends were in particular institute, Pasteur, was one of the main founders of that institute, and it all sounds so cynical right now.

But I remember in January 2020 when the outbreak was starting, I was in Taiwan with my girlfriend and I had just had all of my wisdom tooth removed, so I was drugged out of my mind laying in bed and she was telling me, "No, the world is going to the hell in a hand basket," as they say, and I was like, "Yeah, yeah, sure, whatever. I don't know what's going on." And then suddenly I sort of realized and she's like, oh, this Wuhan outbreak and whatever, and I was like, oh darling, baby, this is fine. This is fine. They have this amazing virology institute there, it's great.

I was like, but then later I was our for several weeks I was like, how good forethought was that to fund that in particular? Because the whole idea behind that institute was that after SARS, the Chinese did not have anything that was classified as a P-4 institute in China. So they were not really equipped to study the viruses and stuff like that, and we were like, oh, but if there will be another epidemic like this, we would rather that they do it in the same way, so let's give them the infrastructure to be able to do that.

So the international community, the friends seems like the Americans as well or whatever, donated the technology to them, and I thought it was extremely good example of how this is supposed to work. Until I started hearing everybody talking about that institute as potential source for, I mean, it is extremely weird coincidence and I am not going to be the one to say if that is where it actually came from. I don't know. Who knows? Maybe, maybe. I mean, I was just not that cynical.So, but I love that example because it really demonstrates if you are really optimistic about how to deal with the world, that's what it means. Right? We help each other build up the infrastructure so we can deal with these things a lot better. On the other hand, there are people, they're pretty sure that that technology was maybe the cost for the whole calamity.

Anyway, you were asking about the European attitudes towards it. Like I described earlier, the liberal world order is very, very, goes really deep in the DNA of the European Union per se, but that has been changing. I mean, I don't think China is the main reason. The big thing that happened was the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. That's really is changing European attitudes towards what it means to be European and European Union or whatever.

But even before that, and even in my job working with them on this sort of science and innovation policy, we immediately in 2019, the attitudes were getting extremely cynical, much more cynical than before. The big thing, the big few things was like, we should probably not be working with them on things where we are competing directly, like 5G was the big thing back then. It was hard because some countries were having really good collaborations and other countries were very much against it, so that's how the European Union works. Right? There's no one policy, and so people would debate all of that.

There was also countries that were just saying, "China is becoming really good at certain things. We should maybe start to stop having this colonial attitudes where we are here handing over this infrastructure and helping them out or whatever, and maybe more think about it between peers versus like, yeah, sure, we can teach you certain things, but what can we learn from you? What are things that we can take out of this relationship? That was really new, nobody ever talked like that before. That was a totally new type of attitude. And then down the line when especially after 2022, the attitude started to really, really center on the idea of risk and the idea of de-risking our relationship with China. That's the word that the Europeans love to use, at least like last year that was what everybody used using. So the Americans used to use the word decoupling, and the Europeans talked about de-risking, which indicates that you still want to work together but you just don't want to be responsible about it or whatever.

The practical effect was that in Horizon Europe, which is the next framework program after Horizon 2020, we basically weren't targeting Chinese participation in any area anymore, except for in agriculture, and less food agriculture, biology, mostly agriculture, and then on climate change. And so, global challenges and whatever, which was not the sexy topics that the Chinese wanted to work on, but they left those sort of branches out there, we can still work on that. I believe that they are working on that still, the Europeans wanted to de-risk the relationship, but I don't think people really want to stop working with China, not overall, not everywhere at least.

Ian Curtiss:

What I love about this is, it's such a great case study of returning to the civilizational discussions of our Beida degree. It's a great case study of realism versus liberalism, and liberalism can only exist in a system where the rules are completely clear and enforced equally across everyone. Only then can everybody agree like, oh, let's just get along, because these are the rules that we've all agreed upon. But when you think about the Chinese perspective about science sharing and international trade and stuff, what they would always say to us was, "Well, the liberal world order is just industrial policy as written by the United States government," meaning open borders allows the better US products to get into everybody's economies, and it means that IP protection is really just the wealthy country's way to enforce or keep their advantage in some sort of technology and so forth.

And COVID was such this critical moment that opened people's eyes, changed their perspectives, whatever, however you want to describe it, of, oh wow, maybe politics is involved in so much more than we thought, which this is one thing that I think is so interesting about the communist ideology out of China is, there's such realists in an international relations sense. And it's almost such a convenient overlap with Marxism and so forth in that everything is politics and therefore power can come from anywhere, and that's something that's been so interesting to watch, as the rest of the world.

And I think one thing that I'll note that I think is interesting is the EU as a concept is created post-liberal world order creation, and so it's almost guaranteed that the EU's system and bureaucratic culture and so forth would all take these things along with them as long as they could, until it was almost too much to. COVID being the example that you laid out, too clear that they couldn't keep pushing this kind of concept of, or really assumption of the way the world works.

Halldor Hardarson:

Yeah. I could go very philosophical on this and I would love to, I'm not sure if this is the right venue for that, but yeah. I think honestly, a concept that really I think helps for me to just understand the differences here is that you have a traditional land power and you have then these sort of a mercantile naval powers. And so you have the British Empire and then the American world order later on and so on. And these powers, they thrive on trade, but countries like China and Russia, they don't feel safe relying on that alone. We do. I'm also from a small island with a huge moat around us or whatever when we have extremely high GDP purely from trade, right? And we were like, why don't we just all get along and just do that? And that's the easy thing to say when you're on that end of that stick, you know? But they don't really feel us if they are.

What's really sad though, is that I think I'm really, really sad about how things are going these days, because I feel like at the beginning of the 20th century with the two world wars, we were really heading towards a cliff. The international order was extremely precarious and we were not really sure how to go about it, and in the end, we ended up with very wise people that had experienced a lot of things, building institutions that worked out really well. And it definitely worked out for the US and the Western world order. Part of those institutions are things like the European Union has definitely worked out for Europe as well, but it also worked out really well for China. You mean the Chinese economic growth was never more than exactly when they decided to participate in that world trading system. When they decided to be open to that, then it worked really, really well for them as well. So, it's really sad when people start tearing that down.

The big hesitation I have towards China, I don't want to have any bad feelings towards China. I have a lot of friends there, I have a lot of connections there, but my big hesitation towards that, it is their system almost designed to tear down these institutions, no matter what they're saying, because sometimes today, these days they're pretending that they are here to guard those institutions, that's not really what they're about. That being said, the US administration these days are not doing their best keeping those institutions and maintaining them, international institutions. I have regrets on both sides of that aisle here. I really, really wish that people would be more careful. I would normally not call myself a conservative, but when it comes to keeping these institutions, I'm a very, very conservative type of person. I want to make sure that we don't tear down things that took generations to build and we all really benefited from. I don't know, this was my personal little thing outside of my expertise.

Danny Crichton:

Look, a lot of institutions are buckling. Many of these institutions were made in the post-war era, and a generation of those people who built those institutions maintained them for a long period of time, are passing away. Right? They're passing into history. Think of the United Nations comes out Treaty of San Francisco in the late 1940s. You had early leaders like Dag Hammarskjöld who built those institutions up and made them what they are today.

But today, you look at the United Nations and I mean, just in the last couple of weeks because of UNGA, the United Nations General Assembly was here in New York. There's a spate of articles that it's the 80th anniversary, the UN has never been in a worse position. Its budget is a mess partly because of the United States is underfunding it and is not paying its bills. But it also feels like it's an institution that's draft, that it just doesn't represent... Not only is it just US and China, but you also have Japan's not a part of it, India's not on the P-5. And so is the institution even reflective of the world as it is today compared to what it was 80 years ago?

I think we're seeing that kind of pressure across the board, and it comes from two places. One is in some cases the institutions are out of sync. I wouldn't say out of date, but out of sync. So, power has shifted economically, militarily, whatever the case may be, and so they're just not reflective of the new balance of power. And then in other cases, as I said, I think there is a new generation of folks who are coming up who just don't have experience with World War I, World War II, or the Cultural Revolution.

I mean, what's interesting is the [inaudible 00:28:58] experiences of the 20th century were spread widely. Lots of people suffered in lots of countries, lots of people came together and said, "We don't want to suffer like that again. If not for us and for our children, if not for our children, then our grandchildren." And unfortunately, 80 years means we are turning over to new groups of folks who don't have those same experiences and understand that the sacrifices that came part and parcel with experience and said, "We should never do that again."

Now, I don't know if that changes. Does the war between Russia and Ukraine, the war with Israel around the Middle East, Taiwan increasingly getting tight and tighter, the Philippines and China. Are these experiences going to create a new generation of folks who said, "God, we're doing it all over again. We're getting closer to the brink and we won't get as lucky as we did last time." My hope is we will learn from experience and we'll learn from close calls that we won't go all the way over the cliff. I'm sort of reminded of Ian's China electric vehicle game that you could drive really fast an electric vehicle on the side of the cliff, and all it takes is a little jiggle on that steering wheel and you're going off.

Ian Curtiss:

I think that's the interesting thing about, to tie this back, Danny, to current events, these ongoing negotiations and the big promises that administrations are giving their constituents about outcomes of... And this is in the US-China sense of American administrations promising their constituents some big outcome and change with their negotiations with China and so forth. But the negotiations just keep getting really disappointing. If anything, my prediction for the ongoing negotiations is, shocker, a lot of people are going to be disappointed again because there are things going on in the world, to your point, that no single administration can change. It's like, okay, yes, the leader of the free world, the American president might be the most powerful person on the planet, but they're still only representing 350 million-ish people out of six billion. In terms of global economic growth, we're just not the most powerful economic growth engine, relatively speaking. And so, just the lever just isn't there, there's just not the ability to control outcomes like American constituents expect.

And so, dealing with China and dealing with issues like the tech controls and export controls and the future of US-China competition and so forth, I think that's one thing that's going to be really interesting is people understanding and experiencing these close calls is, oh wow, we just can't push through winning everything anymore. The American system just can't win everything at this stage in history. So therefore, maybe we do want more systems, global systems to limit the outcomes of when somebody else wins. Right? That's kind of the traditional game theory approach to political systems, is you want to mitigate the downsides. And so for a long time, I think the Americans have had less of this downside risk, and as a result, there's a lack of appreciation for the system that existed.

Danny Crichton:

Look, I mean, the other part of game theory is when you have two superpowers and everyone else is in the middle, and whether the EU, the EU is in the middle, Iceland is certainly in the middle. And then Canada, I mean, just yesterday as we're recording this, Canada is saying out loud that they may allow Chinese electric vehicles into the Canada market, which would be the first time that this fortress North America, Mexico, the US, and Canada have a complete block on Chinese parts, on Chinese cars coming through the continent. Canada is now saying, "Look, if you're just going to tear off the hell out of us, it's going to wreck our industry anyway. We might as well get the cheap Chinese vehicles in the first place anyway, actually benefit consumers." And I mean, that is a canary in the coal mine of saying, "Look, if you're going to be Canada, the only way to balance against the American power that you're dealing with right now is to say, 'well, China, come on over here. We're a little bit more for business.' Now, America, how much do you like that?"

And I think we're starting to see that in the European Union as well, where they're looking at these anti-coercion measures. We saw this with the Dutch case with Nexperia in the last few weeks. There's additional forcing functions going on on both sides, but the only way to balance between two powers is to balance between two powers, and you have to negotiate on both sides. Unfortunately, we're increasingly telling our friends and allies and saying, "Go negotiate with us," as opposed to being like, "We're a nice cocoon. We're happy over here. It'll always be safe. Don't negotiate with us and you'll be okay." We will end up with a worse deal if people actually negotiate that effectively, and I think the European Union is starting to figure that out. But my hope is, is that you still have cooperation, still a robust system, etc.

Let's end on a positive note, because I feel like everything here has been, we've had this crescendo down all the way through this episode. You started back in 2011 in China. It was a pretty optimistic, positive time that democratic elections in Wukan Village elections. That feels like distant history. What are we happy for? I mean, Ian, you have a Kickstart and Halldor, you have a new startup that you've joined at one of Iceland's most great, but why don't you give us a little pitch? Ian, you just had a huge success milestone for you outside of your risk gaming work here.

Ian Curtiss:

Yeah, thanks, Danny. Yeah, that's right. So part of a passion project is getting some B2C games out there in the similar spirit of getting people to simulate and experience systems outside of the ones they're used to. And so, just funded a Kickstarter board game, Iberia Kings and Amirs, all about Medieval Spain and the complexities of the religious identities at that time. So, good, light topic, but the game is really about how politics is so nuanced on the ground. And the stories we tell about historical periods oftentimes don't reflect the human experience of what actually happened at the time. So, it ends up being a quite lighthearted experience, and the weight that people bring to it is their own, not actually the game itself.

Danny Crichton:

Well, congratulations on that on Kickstart. And Halldor, you've switched over. So you had this extraordinarily long career in China building of cooperation in science and technology world, but now you work at one of Iceland's most successful startups. What are you working on today?

Halldor Hardarson:

Yeah, I work for a company that is doing tissue regeneration and tissue repair in the medical field, it's called Kerecis. It's really, really cool, people should look into it. And I think that goes a little bit to the core of my fundamental belief about the world, which is just, I don't know if Ian remembers, but just ever since I was very young, I just really, really thought technology is going to save us all. Literally, I'm almost a Marxist when it comes to that. You know how Marx believes that basically all of these superstructures or these economic institutions and these systems we have in the world today, is almost all of them are just results of the economic realities that are there, and they're all based just on the technologies. That's what it all boils down to in the end. And when those change, all of the other things are going to be outdated.

And while people are like... There are certain parts of the world where they're still fighting over land, right? And meanwhile, we are heading into a reality very soon where land is not going to matter that much anymore or any of these sort of things. And I know that we still have resource squeeze and people are fighting about semiconductors and whatever because it underpins all of the rest of it, but I love just focusing on what's possible. And I think we're getting into a world where a lot of things are possible.

I would have never, ever thought when I was growing up, I grew up in a small fishing village here in Iceland, I would've never thought that the most valuable of the caught fish that we're catching in the future would not be the fish itself, the meat of it, but actually the skin. Like the company that I work for right now, it takes that skin and it uses it to regenerate tissue, and it sells it for thousands and thousands of dollars, these little pieces. We're entering now an era where incredible things are going to be possible, amazing things. [inaudible 00:36:40] Xi Jinping and Putin when they're meeting, they're asking each other, "Are you going to be 150?" "No, I'm going to be 180 years old," or whatever. They know what's up. There are incredible things around the corner and I think people are really pushing the boundaries everywhere.

So, what I might maybe want to leave this conversation with asking is, we talk about collaborating with China in science and research, or not collaborating with them. But I guess what we should ask ourselves is, can we put the responsibility on them a little bit? Ask them, "If you want to collaborate with us on the future, on building this future, could you please contribute here?" So China has been extremely good at, I don't want to say copying, perfecting maybe, some certain things, right? Then making really good, building up really good industries around a lot of ton of things. Right now, I'm speaking into a Dutch on the microphone like DGI, right? Amazing company, when it comes to drones and stuff, they're really great. I'm sure the Russians love them and in Ukraine, it goes to all of that. But they're really, really good at that.

But in the European Union, not that I speak for the European Union, but in the European Union, it has really irritated people for a really long time, is that they put almost no, in China that is, they put almost no investment into basic research, fundamental research, to really, really do the breakthroughs that are needed. European Union does quite a bit of that, like 30 to 40% of all basic research in the world is funded by European countries, I think 5% of it's funded by China. So, one of the big asks for a long time is like, maybe you could be asking for this. Please contribute here. You know what I mean? And then we can talk about the rest of it. This is where I would like to bring the conversation.

Instead of talking about for tits for tats and all of that and blah, blah, blah. It's like if we are serious about these sort of things and we think there are global challenges we want to tackle together, we should not be afraid to ask a lot of each other. And if people are not able to contribute as much as they take, then you need to be be a little bit selfish while you rebalance those sort of things. I totally think that's necessary.

Danny Crichton:

Well, I will say around the office here, we talk about going from impossible to inevitable, and I don't know if it's inevitable we will solve all these problems, but I do know inevitably that this podcast episode has to come to a conclusion. So on that note, Ian, Halldor, thank you so much for joining us this week.

Halldor Hardarson:

Thank you so much.

Ian Curtiss:

[inaudible 00:39:19], thank you.

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