Your response just proves his point. All of that paperwork, all of those contracts- that assumes you can trust the government to fairly enforce the law.

In a society where corruption rules, you have no reason to spend time and money on any of that because you know you’re one bribe away from it all being kindling for your next bonfire.

So yes, in areas with high corruption they don’t bother. They either just set aside some cash to pay off whatever official they need to if things go sideways, or they hire the local judge’s son to an empty position of power so that they can win anything that goes to “court”. That’s not a sign of high trust, that’s an acknowledgment there’s no point in bothering.

The framing of "low trust" vs "high trust" is useful but another important distinction when conducting business in different jurisdictions is whether *institutions* or *counterparties* are more trustworthy.

If institutions such as courts are trustworthy (in that they will impartially adjudicate contracts and help you enforce their terms) then you are able to work with a wider spectrum of counterparties who you do not yet trust. You just have to document and hedge against the risk via contracts and insurance, as you point out.

If institutions such as courts are absent, corrupt, or otherwise captured then you must ensure that you only interact with counterparties that you can trust or have direct leverage over. Perhaps ones with which you share personal or reputational connections.

Western Europe is a low trust environment compared to the beacons in (cultural) East Asia, like Singapore. I can leave my kid with an iPad in her hand here without fear of it being nicked, like in London.

But business wise, western Europe is still relatively high trust. I suggest you read more about this.

As the US transitions into a high corruption / low trust environment, business investment disappears.

Trump tried to solicit bribes from anthropic, retaliated by violating the DoW contracts when they didn’t pay, and then somehow forced Dario to publicly apologize for bringing the matter to light. Do you really think this is how the US will win at AI?

Look at the car industry, where the corruption and coercion started earlier. For some reason, Trump used ICE to illegally detain a bunch of Kia engineers. They announced they’re not going to add more trimlines to their EV lines in the US.

Honda announced they’re canceling planes to build three new model lines in Ohio.

The macro statistics are dire. Pre-Biden, US factory investment was $80B per year. Trump wiped $30B off that number in 2025. Biden got it up to $240B, so Trump “only” wiped out 10-15%, but, because he was starting from a high number, the damage is equivalent to 35% of all factory investment that existed when he last left office!

The rate at which industrial production is fleeing the US is increasing. This year, the loss will probably be greater than the entire 2018 US factory investment base.

There are similar trends happening in tech and academia. There’s not much left once that happens. (Insurance, banking and marketing, mostly.)

> Look at how business works in the rich west works. Everything is formalized with contracts, risk is portioned out and offloaded to every party under the sun.

Sounds like formalized corruption to me.