Jules van Binsbergen

speaker

478 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 13 Aug

Jules van Binsbergen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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All Else Equal: Making Better Decisions · Rerun: Ep68 “Is It Better to Overestimate or Underestimate Your Enemies?” with H.R. McMaster · 1 Jul 2026 podcast

If you think about the demographic disaster that they're heading towards with currently 1.4 billion people.

And by the end of the century, according to the UN, there will be 620 million people left in China.

You really need to wonder whether in the long term that economic powerhouse that we're so worried about, whether they will still be that powerhouse.

say, compared to India, which already is equally large as China and is not expected to decline in population.

So I do think that some dynamic forward thought here is also very important and not focus too much on what is right in front of people right now, but think a little deeper.

HR, there are always two explanations, right, for when things don't work.

One of them is that it's intentional.

One of them is that people just don't understand it well.

But there seems to be a clear tradeoff here when we think about what we call type one and type two errors, right?

How bad is it if you overestimate it and therefore you did too much or you did too little because you underestimated it?

Don't you think that generally the payoff is very asymmetric in the sense that if we would underestimate our enemy, the penalties and the bad stuff that could happen from that are so much worse than overestimating something that we tend to just overestimate generally, particularly for these types of scenarios?

So, HR, we're seeing, I think, right now that a lot of wars have proxies involved.

I think that there are actually a lot of proxy wars going on right now that we're even unwilling to acknowledge as such.

In some sense, the United States has been supporting Ukraine for quite a while.

And so has Europe.

They've been giving Ukraine weapons.

And so I don't think any of these parties want to be officially directly in war with Russia.

And yet, in some sense, we are.

This idea of doing war through proxies, is that a relatively new development or has that always been a strategy that historically has been used?

And what are the circumstances in which we should see this and in which we would see more of this than in other circumstances?

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