The End of the End of Geography: Mehran Gul on Why Innovation is Happening in America & China — but Nowhere Else

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. Earlier this week, I did a show with my old friend, Keith Tier. That was the week publisher, our regular Tech Weekly Summary on what we called Universal Basic Capitalism, the idea that US tech companies like OpenAI are becoming more and more merged with the government, more and more thinking of themselves as some sort of public utility. The news this week is that OpenAI proposed handing the Trump administration a 5% stake in its company. What it suggests to me, and Keith and I talked about it, was this convergence, this merging of innovation both in China and the United States. In other words, the geography of innovation was becoming more concentrated rather than spread out. And I'm intrigued to know the opinion when it comes to the geography of innovation. To my guest today, Mehran Gul, who is the author of an award-winning book. It came out last year. It's called The New Geography of Innovation, The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies.
It was Financial Times Book of the Year last year. And this month, it's coming out both in the US and the UK with a revised introduction in its paperback form. Mehran is joining us from Geneva. Mehran, is the new geography of innovation one in which the United States and China, the models of state-centric capitalism, are becoming more and more similar?

**Mehran Gul** (2:12)
I think so. I think if you look, for instance, just what's been happening over the past week with OpenAI, for instance, offering 5% of the company to the US government. These golden shares are something that have been quite common in China for the past five, six years. I think increasingly, if in the past, what you saw was a lot of elements of American tech being copied in China, you're increasingly seeing the same elements of Chinese tech being copied in the US as well, and the US government owning Intel, OpenAI and things like that, I think are very vivid illustrations of that.

**Andrew Keen** (2:45)
Mehran, you and I have met a couple of times before at World Economic Forum events in New York. You have an interesting story. Tell me where you were born and how you, born in Pakistan with family now in Australia, ended up in Geneva.

**Mehran Gul** (3:03)
I mean, it was a pretty roundabout sort of thing. I was born in Pakistan, raised there. I did my undergrad in Pakistan as well. Then I got a scholarship to go to Yale, where I did graduate school. This is already sort of 20 years ago. I spent a couple of years in New Haven. I was also a teaching fellow at Yale as well. Near the end of my graduation, I got what's called the Fox International Fellowship, which is Yale sends you one of their partner schools abroad.
I was a Fox Fellow to India, which as somebody from Pakistan was a fairly interesting experience for me. I spent some time in India doing research.
Then just long story short, I was at the UN, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, which is an arm of the UN that does private sector development. It's based in Vienna. Then after that, I spent about four years there. Then in 2013, I moved to Geneva to be with the World Economic Forum, which is with the Digital Transformation of Industries Program, is how I met you a few times. Then the past couple of years, I've been focusing on this book, which the curiosity came out of the work that I did at the forum. But the real idea was to study whether innovation, which used to be very America centric, is becoming more global or not.

**Andrew Keen** (4:24)
What is your own narrative, the story of Mehran Gul, born in Pakistan, educated at Yale, living now in Switzerland, traveling all over the world? What does it tell us about the new geography of innovation?

**Mehran Gul** (4:39)
I wouldn't extrapolate too much from my personal story, but I think it is diffusing further. Maybe, so I think when I first started writing the book, I think I thought that it was spreading a lot more than it actually was. I do think that you do have two very important countries, and then the rest do not really show.

**Andrew Keen** (5:02)
Those, of course, are the United States and China.

**Mehran Gul** (5:07)
When you start writing a book called The New Geography of Innovation, your inherent bias is that at the end of that book, you're going to say something like, it used to be just the US, but now there are maybe 10, 12 countries that are punching at the same level. That I thought was not true. I think it's basically the US versus China when it comes to having broad-based competence across lots of different areas of technology. There are other countries as well that are, quote-unquote, the middle powers of technology, but they have figured out a certain niche for themselves rather than being broad-based competitors. Many of them would not really see themselves as competitors to the US anyway. They would see themselves as extensions to the US. Whether you're talking about South Korea or Israel or even India, they don't really have a very competitive relationship with the US. Only China has a competitive relationship.