 Would you please be so kind to introduce yourself to the audience of the Nexus Institute? Where do you come from? What is your background? Thanks so much, Robert. It's a pleasure to be here with you. I am an American philosopher. My degrees are from Stanford and from Harvard, where I work with people like John Laws, Robert Moseley, Tim Scanlon. The great days of Harvard philosophy. My career has been in Britain. And I am now the Chair of Philosophy and Law at the King's College London School of Law. Being here at the heartland of Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley, will that be part of the problem or part of the solution when it comes down to how to save the world? Humanity is moving from its old problems to its new. The old problems were prices of ignorance. We didn't understand the world well enough to manipulate it. It's all about problems. 300 years ago, we didn't understand the plague. Wiped out of third half cities all over the world. Now we understand those kinds of problems. Ignorance no longer plagues us. Our new problems are not prices of ignorance. They're prices of our own invention. Computers are so powerful, so present, so sacred, we could hardly keep anything from them anymore. Our weapons are so mighty, so devastating, they threaten even life on the Earth. Even climate change is a crisis of invention. Isn't it poignant, all of these machines that we built, all these people living longer, even better, traveling more to see the world, to see each other? Isn't it poignant that our inventions are avalanching into this mortal nature that might really be problems for our grandchildren? Those are the crises of our invention. The hard things about the new crisis are the ads, so tightly wound up with the ads. How can we keep all the blessings of our technology and our industry but not of weapon? A very real weapon. How does that relate to the title of this new book of you which I read with great pleasure, Blood Hire? It's a strange thing about our world. Natural resources which should be a blessing are still in the place's first. There's one statistic, just to sum it up, you can think of all the progress that the developing world has made in the last generation in China, India, even Africa is doing so much better than except, except the countries that have oil. Countries that have oil are no richer, no freer, and no more peaceful than even in 19th century. That's shocking. You can think of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia. All these countries are cursed by oil. And that's because of one very old, very bad rule from the past that we just haven't performed. The rule that basically says for oil, right next right. Whoever can control oil by force these days, our law says we'll buy it for them. So, when Gaddafi took over Libya in a coup a long time ago, the world started buying Libya's oil from the devil. And then years later when rebel groups took over those same wells for the Gaddafi, it became bigger for all of us to buy Libya's oil from the rebels. The rule says whoever has the most guns will get a huge amount of money from the world. And that money gives them absolute power. Money comes in with no stings attached. It never has to be paid back, and of course the power is not available to the people of the country who have to watch while their resources are sold out. That money comes in. If it goes to rebels or armed groups, they can use it to buy more weapons. If it goes to an authoritarian, the authoritarian can use it to buy the muscle and the oil that he needs to stay in power. And if it's the Saudis who get the world's money for oil, then they can use that money to spread their extreme intolerant version of Islam around the world. And that's the version of Islam that we now see mutate into jihadi violence. It's not only in the Middle East and Asia, but also in Europe Is this also the explanation how it is possible that on the one hand Saudi Arabia is the fertile ground for so much extremism spreading all over the world in the form of Isis and other monsters. At the same time, it's now April 2016 President Obama is paying his respects again to the king of Saudi Arabia instead of standing up as he could stand up against Mr. Putin or Gaddafi or whatever. In the short term, it always makes sense to do business as usual. In the short term, it always makes sense to try to make an alliance with the authoritarian regime. How's that done? How's that strategy worked in the past 40 years? How did it work with Bashar al-Adha? How did it work with Gaddafi? How did it work with Saddam? How did it work with Bashir, Sudan, Bashar, and Syria? How is it working to try to keep the absolute power of oil in check by making alliances? But look, you just told us that you have studied the path with the greatest professors there. Obama also was a student in the Harvard Law School. Why is it that you understand something he apparently doesn't understand? John Rawls said, politician looks to the next election. The statesman looks to the next generation. The philosopher looks to the permanent conditions of humanity and how they can be made better. Politicians always have to look to the short term. It's up to us as philosophers and as citizens to look to the long-term interests of our humanity and the world's hope. Do we find out the clue for what will save the world? Yes. Tell us. The clue to saving the world is a depth of perception. It is seen from both eyes and minds. So, the world is a terrible place compared to what it should be. I know I'm violent, I'm extremism, I'm language, but the world is a much better place than it was. We really are living better than we were even 60 years ago. The world is richer, human lives are longer, fewer women die, childbirth, literacy rates are as it's ever been or democracies in the world than ever. And, shocking as it seems, there's a real time recorded human history. Both of these things are true. The world is terrible compared to what it should be, but it's better than it was than the learning from the ways the world has got better and give us solutions for the problems to come through. And forget us to keep faith with our ancestors who struggled so hard to overcome their challenges which were at least as hard as they were.