Competition and Development Patterns in Global Contexts

Nick is an entrepreneur and journalist. He was the founder of Gawker Media, the publisher of Gizmodo, and the editor of Valleywag. He began his career as a journalist with the Financial Times — as a derivatives and tech correspondent — and later founded a Silicon Valley news aggregator called Moreover Technologies. He’s now working on Maze.com, which hosts a network map of near-future timelines.

For two clips of our convo — on the growing global dominance of China, and the Chinese outcompeting Elon Musk — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: raised in Hampstead in the lower-middle class; a Jewish mom who fled the Communists in Hungary; growing up on sci-fi; Asimov’s Foundation; attending Oxford like his father; game theory; being a young reporter in London, Hungary, Romania, and Singapore; pioneering the internet in the ‘90s; Foundation parallels with Singapore; Lee Kuan Yew; Chinese pragmatism; Taiwan; EVs in China; Musk’s companies; tech theft between the US and China; DOGE and Trump reigning in Musk; Peter Thiel; Andy Grove; Uber’s Travis Kalanick; Kara Swisher; Oculus’ Palmer Luckey; how Silicon Valley is PR obsessed; Zuckerberg; David Sacks and crypto; Andreessen; drones; Ukraine; Thatcher; housing crisis in the UK; Orbán; the German Greens; Russian expansionism; the Poles and nukes; Trump’s tariffs; Tucker’s interview with Putin; the growing US-Europe rift; Greenland; AI and DeepSeek; and Nick’s predictions as a futurist.

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