I don't know, Richard. I don't know who's playing that elevator music as you and I were coming out of here, but better than the James Bond theme tune.
Oh, yeah, we could have done that for you. Subtle, subtle intro.
Speaking of that, everybody wants to know who is the next James Bond. I know you know, Sir Richard Moore. Let's go spill the beans here.
I wish I... I have no idea. I've no idea.
Who do you like? I know I'd like that guy in Slow Horses. You like him? Yeah. What's his name? God, I've forgotten. I can't remember his name. Jack, maybe? Thank you. Lowden. Jack Lowden. Jack Lowden, that's the one. Revealing my preference to Slow Horses. I know, I know Gary is pushing him.
Just has to be somebody who's young enough to play the role, isn't it? There's nothing worse than, you know, somebody my age at the end of their tenure tottering around as James Bond barely able to do the...
Like Roger Moore at age 58. Exactly. All right, so let's start with the heat map. Tell me what keeps you up at night.
Nothing keeps me up at night, but there's the thing, I guess, that I observe and I worry a bit about is the fact that we have this concatenation of different crises at the moment. Iran, Ukraine, both risking turning into sort of chronic crises that last for years. We don't seem to have the attention span to think through the rise of China and think through what our strategy is going to be on that collectively as a united bunch of Western countries. And then we have this massively disruptive technology in our midst in the form of AI, and it's just the combination of all those things. And I worry, particularly, about democratic governments and, indeed, businesses in the Western world's ability to hold all of that in their head and make the sort of decisions that they need to do.
So, one of the things you're doing now is that the name of the firm is Sixth Street. It's an investment firm, right? That's your capital.
It's a private markets investment company. I'm doing a classic portfolio career, and about 30% of my time is with Sixth Street.
Okay, so take us into the room there for a second. Tell us your thoughts, like when you're talking to investment people about AI, what your concerns are based on your life experience.
So, I'm trying to navigate that way between, you know, people tend to be very binary, don't they, a bit about this. It's either all upside and you're a doom monger if you question it, or it's the looming apocalypse. And I'm not in either camp, but I mean, clearly, I can see that there are huge advantages coming. You can see, just take medicine, therapeutics, vaccination, all of that type of stuff. You can see the huge benefits it'll bring. Of course, I can see that. I can see the efficiency gains that are going to come out of it. But, you know, I guess because of my former profession, I tend to focus on some of the risks around this. And at the moment, those risks, in my view, are not being properly managed. You know, until we get to a situation where we have some agreed standards, some agreed regulation around this, then we are probably carrying some risks that we shouldn't be carrying. My colleague at Sixth Street, Marty Chavez, uses the... Everyone has their own example of what they try and compare it with, and we all accept that AI is sui generis and has its own particular elements. But if you look back to the invention of electricity, you know, there was a period early on where everything that could go wrong went wrong. You know, a stock burned down, people got electrocuted, and then, you know, you get standards introduced, you get regulation around it, and then you benefit from it. So I'd like to see us doing more of that. At the moment, on cybersecurity in particular, the cyber attackers have the edge. And we're starting to see that with, you know, supermarkets being impacted by the...
They're using agents to help them, right?
Yeah, absolutely. And this astonishing heist by the North Koreans on Binance. I mean, it's just stunning, isn't it?
6. What was it? 6.3, 6.3 billion. They feel like they've clawed back now a little over 3 billion. So the losses will be between two and two and a half to three billion. I want to go to human intelligence for a second because, you know, that's what people talk about, that's what people read about in their spy novels, that's what, you know... Yeah, obviously, you've recruited people, you've trained people. When you think of satellite technology today, AI, cyber, the NSA's ability to get into people's telephones, etc., how important is human intelligence compared to what it was maybe 50 years ago?
I think it's still vital because while humans remain in the loop, and while humans continue to make their flawed decisions, sometimes driven by ideology, sometimes driven by prejudice, sometimes driven by reasoning, having somebody up close and able to interpret the intent of an adversary or a terrorist is still vital. So, I mean, it's massively different from when I joined. I mean, I joined MI6 in 1987. I learned to type on a manual typewriter. You know, things have clearly moved on, and technology is a huge part of human intelligence, it has to be said, and quite a significant proportion of people who work for MI6 are brilliant technologists. So it's not that, you know, NSA, GCHQ do the tech over there and we just do the humans without technology. The two are pretty fused. But, you know, humans and understanding intent is still, I think, critical.
It's critical in business, isn't it? You need to understand what your business rival is planning. Yes, but I think in your space as it relates to intelligence, you've gotten a lot of information from the technology, right? You're able to also, I mean, people put stuff on social media, even, you know, people's wives or... Yeah. Sure, there's a lot out there. There's a lot out there that you can gather without having to do... Totally. Leave your home.
Quite right. And AI can help you sift through that much more speedily and more efficiently. That's all true. But there will still be things, particularly in closed societies, in tightly controlled places like Beijing or Moscow, where you will not be able to do that just by, you know, interrogating the data. You need somebody helping you from the inside.
Right. You know, I spoke at this event last night, and somebody asked me a question about Iran, and I asked the audience, I said, 'Everybody know here what the Mosaic Defense Doctrine is?' And nobody raised their hand. Nobody knew what it was. And you know what it is, the Mosaic Defense Doctrine, right? The decentralized command control decisions that were made by the Iranians. They always expected a decapitation strike, and so they implemented it after the war. Why do you think the Americans in the intelligence community that were briefing the president, who told them what they would do in the aftermath of the war, why do you think we still made that decision to go to war, recognizing, as you do, as a former MI6 person, you would have been in that room saying, 'Okay, this is what they're going to do.'
Look, I wasn't there, so I don't... I honestly mean, clearly I don't understand quite how they came to the decision-making that they did on it. And I'm sure they had understood that the Iranians had made this decision that I think particularly after the shorter bombing campaign, whatever it was last June.
Right. So, June of 2025 when we dropped the bunker buster bombs, the Iranians said, 'Okay, get ready. He's going...
And I remember somebody, you know, senior in one of the Gulf states saying to me, you know, that their understanding was that the Iranians had devolved some of the responsibility recognizing that there might be some kind of decapitation strike. And by the way, the Iranians have always given quite a lot of local autonomy to commanders on the spot to make the decisions. Sometimes that's quite scary because they are faced with what they faced, you know, they've got their own ideological prism to look through and they sometimes... the risk of escalation around that.
Yeah, some are radical, some are secular. So you're going to get a mixed bag of response.
So I don't know quite what drove that decision-making. I mean, it's important to remind ourselves that, you know, Iran is a pretty pernicious actor in the Middle East and it's, you know, spent 50 years trying to undermine its neighbors. It has flirted with weapons of mass destruction and as we saw in January, its willingness to massacre its own citizens. So there's no doubt at all that Iran is a malign actor and that we needed to find ways of dealing with that malignancy in the Middle East. But clearly what we're seeing at the moment is that you can apply military pressure. And by the way, I think the US Navy is quietly doing a pretty damn good job of getting crude oil out through the strait, of suppressing Iranian efforts around the strait to control it. And they've been pretty good at enforcing a blockade. So there, you know, there is pressure being applied, but I think, you know, one of the issues when this all kicked off in February was that probably the only people who thought that some kind of regime change was realistic were the Iranian regime. I mean, it probably contributed when you have your leaders killed on the first day of the military conflict. And therefore they went for it in a way that perhaps they hadn't done before. You know, they attacked their neighbors and critically, of course, they closed the Strait of Hormuz. And we are seeing played out, as we've seen separately in Ukraine, perhaps there it's the good guys who are the smaller party, but both in Ukraine, in Iran, indeed in the struggle between the Houthis and the other Yemeni authorities and the Saudis at the moment, asymmetrical means mean that you can keep the fight going. Particularly if you have a very high pain threshold, and that appears to be where Iran is.
So, you know, when the president speaks about it, President Trump, he believes that the blockade, in combination with the sanctions, is crippling the economy there. There's 60 to 70% inflation, very high unemployment. There's suggestions being made by the president that the IRGC, the security people, are not being paid. Yet we all know, because it's public information, that they're getting help from the Russians and the Chinese in terms of making those payments. And so, where do you stand in terms of looking at the Iranian economy and saying, 'Can it hold itself together without a collapse and some type of revolution?' Are we going to be in this quagmire, or is this something that can get resolved?
It's clearly... the Iranian economy is clearly under huge pressure. You cannot possibly... but, you know, you have to be given the circumstances they find themselves in. But trying to predict the point at which, you know, the tipping point is reached on this is just, I mean, it's very, very difficult. So I don't know. As you rightly point out, there are some... there are some ability to relieve the pressure point. They've got a very large land border. So the fact that you choke off what they're able to get out through the strait takes a lot of it out. But of course, there are land borders, and you're quite right. There are people prepared to buy and use that smuggled oil if they get it out, and China in particular.
But you made a point a few minutes ago where they have a higher threshold of pain likely than most people here in the West. Is that fair?
I think so. They could last... they could last a lot longer than all of us originally...
They don't care about their own population. It's a bit like Putin sending tens of thousands of Russians to die or be wounded on the front in Ukraine every month. He just doesn't really care. He's lost 1% of his population. 1.4 million men have been killed in that war. It's astonishing.
I think CSIS, the Washington, D.C. think tank, puts it at about 450,000 dead. When you think that is eight times the amount of people that the US lost in Vietnam.
Yeah. It's just an astonishing figure.
