Do you realize that we don’t understand globalization? Globalization increases Extremistan. That’s one problem with this Tom Friedman guy—he [the bestselling author of The World Is Flat, which argues the advantages of globalization in the internet age] didn’t seem to understand the very simple dynamics that globalization forces redundancy out of the system. And whenever you don’t have redundancy, you have Extremistan. Things are way too efficient, so the smallest mistake blows up. We depend so much on the internet. Tomorrow, if there’s a problem in Bangalore, we’re toast for a long time, you see?

I’m on a committee at the Pentagon, [the Highland Forum, a study group on risk] and one of the founders of the internet is on it and all these people understand that we need more redundancy in the system to avoid a second crisis that may come from the internet, because we don’t understand it.

And to think of it, the Internet was founded to provide redundancy in case of an emergency.

Life’s awesome