← The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
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Support for the show comes from Adobe Express. These days there are a million different ways to reach your customers, but that can also mean a million different pieces of content. It can be overwhelming. Adobe Express can help with templates, brand kits, and generative AI that's safe for business. Your team can create its own content and will always be polished and professional. When everyone can create content themselves, it's easier to get on brand content out in the world faster. Go from cookie cutter to class of its own. Switch to the quick and easy app to create on brand content. Adobe Adobe Express. Learn more@adobe.com Express Business True story I have used Adobe Express and I was shocked how easy it is to use and produce content. Support for the show comes from Neiman Marcus. If you're struggling to think of a truly unique gift for the holidays, then check out Neiman Marcus. It's your home for the most exceptional gifts this season. From the ultimate stocking stuffers to statement bags made for celebration to their legendary fantasy gifts that surpass every expectation, Neiman Marcus has something extraordinary for everyone. And with style advisors to guide you, finding the perfect gift at every price point is effortless. So head to Neiman Marcus for a truly unforgettable holiday. Support for the show comes from upwork Upwork Business plus helps you bring in top quality freelancers fast. It gives you instant access to the top 1% of talent on upwork in fields such as marketing, design, AI and more. That way you're never stuck spinning your wheels when you need a skilled pro and your projects don't stall. Right now, when you spend $1,000 on Upwork Business plus, you'll get $500 in credit. Go to Upwork.comsave now and claim the offer before December 31, 2025. Again, that's Upwork.comsave scale smarter with top talent and $500 in credit terms and conditions apply. Episode 372372 is the country code for Estonia. 1972, HBO began broadcasting so True Story. My son said that he was uncomfortable watching Game of Thrones with me because of all the sex. And I said, well look boss, just turn up the volume so you can't hear us.
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Go Go.
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Welcome to the 372nd episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? It's a big week for me. I'm in New York. I turned 5161 and my new book, Notes on Being a Man is out now. We are number one on Amazon today. We'll see how long that lasts. How did I Get started in books, you might ask. You didn't ask, but I'll tell you. Essentially, 2002, I thought I was going to be rich. My company, Red Envelope, was going public. And I thought, oh, I'm done, I'm rich, what do I want to do? And I'd always wanted to teach. I'd initially thought about possibly getting a PhD. Mom got sick, capitated an MBA, whatever, and gave myself 10 years in the private sector to try and make some money. And then I thought, I'm going to teach someday. So I thought I was done. Red Envelope was supposed to go public. And I thought, okay, there's two things I really want. I want to jet and I want to teach, and I'm going to get both of those things. And then, simply put, things didn't work out that way. I don't know if you heard there was this thing in this around the turn of the millennium where Internet stocks went down a great deal Anyways, that hurt. That hurt me substantially. By the way, there's an enormous lesson I didn't learn until I was well into my 40s called diversification. Just trust me on this one. Ask your financial advisor about diversification. So joined the faculty at NYU and I thought, I really want to be a world class academic. And I asked my marketing department chair, what should I do? And I also talked to the Dean and they said, well, you can either do peer reviewed research. And I'm like. So I got a bunch of these journals, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing. I'm like, this is just bullshit. None of this means anything. No one cares. This is all a bunch of PhDs and a giant circle jerk trying to get citations such that they can get tenure, which is the most inefficient union ever. Too much. Too much. Anyways, so he said, well, you should write a book then. So I wrote my first book in 2015 or 2016 called the The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. And it started out as a love letter. I really, I thought these terms were incredible. I thought their leadership was incredible. And by the time I was done with the research and the book, it sort of turned into a cautionary tale. And the book did really well. And I thought, okay, I like this, I'm good at it. And it creates a certain level of heft that creates sort of the umbrella for credibility when you write a book. Producers on TV shows are usually pretty generous and will bring you on because most of them have written a book and they know just how fucking hard it is and how poorly it pays. I get good money now for my books because they. Well, but a couple interesting things. One, it's cloud cover. Most people don't make their living from books or authors. They make it from speaking fees or it drives consulting revenue or something else. Essentially it takes about. I don't know, it takes me about six months to write a book. I try and put one out every 18 months and it takes another six months for them to. Publishers do strategy or social media. I don't know what the fuck publishers do, quite frankly. They'll give you an editor. Hopefully they don't fuck up the book too badly. I've been pretty fortunate. I've had two really solid editors. But the book publishing business, interestingly, is holding strong. Think about Amazon has wrecked so many businesses or put them out of business by selling $100 worth of retail for $90, at least for the first 20 years in business. But the business that's actually held pretty strongly in terms of the publishers, the retailers, the ecosystem, author's fees, is books, which is sort of ironic given that Amazon has been such a wrecking ball. And just a little bit on writing. I write late at night. I like when the dogs, or it's just me and the dogs, dogs are asleep, kids are asleep. And I'll try and bang out the beginning of a chapter and it creates a bit of an ecosystem. And for us, the newsletter no Mercy of Malice, if it resonates, serves as sort of one or two or three legs of a stool of a chapter. Try and create a narrative arc and then try and piece it all together. And then the real magic happens in editing. And to anybody who's thinking about writing a book, I would say a couple things. One, stop talking about it and just do it. I wish I'd started much earlier and that is have a theme or a positioning. Answer the question, what am I going to say that no one said before and why does it matter? And then put together a brief statement of the positioning of the book, a table of contents, and then write two or three chapters and then go out to some publishers or an agent. My agent, Jim Levine, I think is the best in the business and he essentially saved my book. My book, Notes on Being a Man was originally called the Algebra of Masculinity. I like the idea of algebra of I have algebra of happiness, I have algebra of wealth, and I want to do algebra of masculinity. And I started off, you know, chapter one, testosterone. Talking about the in utero surge and testosterone. Then it happens again at two or three in a boy, and then again at 16 or 17. And I realized I'm not an endocrinologist, I'm not an adolescent psychiatrist, and that I was way out over my skis. And my agent said to me, make this more. Use your personal stories, your successes and your failures to talk about what you've gotten right and what you've gotten right as a man or trying to become a man. And that was just such an easier framing for me, rather than trying to pretend that I'm an expert on any of these things, which I'm not. But writing books, I find is if you want to be a thought leader, an academic, or someone who's taken seriously in the media, there's just a level of heft and appreciation for it because hands down, it's the hardest thing I do. When you flip open your laptop and you write a chapter called Google and try to say something about Google that no one said before that they can't find in a magazine article for free, it's pretty challenging. But it's also like anything in life, the hardest things are the most rewarding. And at the end of a book, when I've written something that I think feels right at that moment, you have this feeling of satisfaction and power that at that moment you know more about that specific topic than almost anyone in the world for a good 15 or 30 minutes, if you've researched it well and you spend a lot of time trying to review your ideas and make them compelling and easy to understand. Anyways, the other thing that's really interesting and sort of depressing about writing books is similar to every other business you try to start, and that is publishers. Now, look at one thing. Unless you're just one of these writers that always sells a ton of books and you're just a genius with written prose, they look at your social media following. And that is as my social media following has grown, so have my book sales. That's the bottom line. So if you want to start before you start writing a book, if you want your book to sell a lot, you need to start building your social footprint. And it's sort of pathetic to say, but that's kind of the whole shooting match right now. And I believe the first thing your agent and publishers will look at if they're thinking about signing up your book and the size of the advance is based on how big your social following is. And if you look at this week's bestsellers, Peter Attia, Andrew Huberman big podcast platforms, big social media following so it is one exceptionally hard, exceptionally rewarding. And unfortunately, it's become all about your social media following. And I thought that was gonna be more insightful than it was.
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All right.
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In today's episode, we speak with Fareed Zakaria, an author, host of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN and columnist for the Washington Post. We discussed with Fareed rebuilding America's alliances, confronting its moral and economic decay, and how the idolatry of money has replaced virtue. I first ran across Fareed. I've been an enormous fanboy of Fareed. I find that he has what I would describe as a beautiful mind. I think key to a society or a democracy is an objective truth. But the operative term there is objective because who is the arbiter of truth? And I find that he just goes after data and logic and it is sometimes difficult to understand where he stands politically. And I love that. I love people where you can't guess their political leanings because their work comes across as so objective and they're sort of willing to piss off both sides. And I have known Freid now for a good five years, met him during COVID and just get so much reward out of him. And also, quite frankly, his interviews and podcasts have been some of our most downloaded in the history of the pod. So with that, just a note that we recorded this conversation with Freed on Monday. So if there's any news that shifted since then, please forgive us. Ladies and gentlemen, Fareed Zakaria. Fareed, where does this podcast find you in New York? So we were talking off mic, my book was 375th on Amazon and then I went on Fareed Zakaria and immediately jumped to like 90th. So Fareed is a kingmaker in addition to all the other things you do. So thanks for having me on Fareed.
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It was a huge pleasure. Your segment did fantastically for us. And I do think one of the things I'm very proud of with our show is we have pretty good numbers. But most importantly, we have attentive audience of people who like to listen to smart people like you and buy books. I can't promise you they read the books, but they do buy the books.
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Well, I mean, that's unusual. A lot of programs get smart people. Very few get people who buy books anymore. I read this crazy stat that 1% of people buy 99% of the books anyways. And I know you have a new book or have a book out. I wanted to get to kick things off. It feels as if as disappointed as people are in Trump's administration so far. And as unpopular as he is, there's a lot of evidence showing that if the election were held again today, he would still win, and that it's difficult to find a group of people who are less popular than the current administration. But we found one, and that's Democrats. It definitely feels, and I say this as a progressive, it definitely feels we're lost in the wilderness, really looking for a North Star, if. And maybe they have. If the Democratic National Committee brought you in and said, what is our North Star? What do you think we need to do to find our center of gravity at the Democratic Party, what would your advice be?
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It's a great question, Scott, because you really are hitting on something that's very, very important. Because it's not just the Democrats. If you look around the world, the left everywhere is in ruins. Look at France, the Socialist Party of France, one of the great left of center parties in the world, all destroyed. You look in Germany, the German Social Democrats, again, one of the original great social democratic parties, in ruins. You look at Italy, the Democrats, the left of center that ran the country for most of the last 70 years, in ruins. So what is happening? Why is it that the left is facing this, you know, this kind of. Of collapse? Well, I mean, one of the things I try to argue in my book, the Age of Revolutions, is that we are going through a huge backlash against 30 years of globalization and technological change and cultural changes. But what's fascinating about these phenomena, and I go back hundreds of years in history, is that when they happen, when people feel this sense of existential anxiety about the world they're in, they tend to move right culturally, not left economically. So when they feel like my world is disappearing, they search for those people who say, I'm gonna make it all better. I'm gonna take you back. I'm gonna give you tradition and religion and the way things were. And that's what the right does. It's a politics of cultural nostalgia. The left says, we've got three more government programs for you. We've got free healthcare, we've got free daycare, we've got free childcare. And it turns out that people at that moment, they're not looking for another government program. They're angry. They're feeling like their world has been turned upside down. The right is much better at addressing what is fundamentally a kind of cultural anxiety than the left, which tends to always wanna solve these problems by saying, hey, we're gonna throw more money at you. Give you one simple Example, Joe Biden spent more money on red America than any Democrat has in the last 50 years. All his bills, infrastructure, IRA, everything was targeted almost at spending money in red counties. I think by one estimate, 80% of Biden's spending plans went to red counties. They voted more against the Democrats, more against Kamala Harris, more against the left in 2024 than they had in 2020 after $2 trillion was spent on them.
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So I want to put forward a thesis, and I really am asking this for illumination, not for confirmation, but as a hammer. Everything I see is a nail. But my thesis around this pivot from blue to red is largely explained or at least partially explained by the struggles of young people and specifically young men. If you look at the groups that went furthest from the left to the right, it was one, Latinos, two people under the age of 40 who are just less wealthy than people our age and are angry about it. Maybe they're not good at math, but they can do math. And then the third group I found most interesting that pivoted hardest from blue to red were women aged 45 to 64. And my thesis is that's their mothers. And there's still a lot of women, I think, in the west who will vote for who they perceive as being in the best interests of their husbands and sons. And you don't care much about territorial sovereignty or social programs or transgender rights when your son isn't doing well. That a lot of this move towards a strong man or the chaos candidate, and Trump does represent, I call it chaos, some people would say represent change. That a lot of it can be reverse engineered to young people's struggles and specifically the struggles of young men. Where do I have that, that right and where do I have that wrong?
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B
Oh, I think you're entirely right. The funny thing is these things all work together, right? Like economic anxiety translates into cultural anxiety translates into a desire to kind of burn the house down. But to just clarify, in a way, if you look at and say to yourself, well, it's all about income inequality or something, well, you know, Sweden has very little income inequality, right? This is one of the countries that has the most advanced social safety nets in the world. They have a huge right wing populism problem. If you say, well, it's because we lost our manufacturing base, well, Germany preserved its manufacturing base. They've got a right wing populism problem. You say it's about we haven't looked after our workers enough. France coddles its workers more than any country in the world, and they have a right wing populism problem. So there's something going on. And you're right to focus in on this sense of like, you know, helplessness. My world has disappeared, my prospects look bleak. And what happened, I think in the phenomenon you're describing, as I see it, the women, as you say, in a sense, voted more again for nostalgia for tradition, for a return to some kind of more traditional, settled way of life. The young men was really interesting. As far as I can tell. It's young Hispanic and young black men, as you say, moving right. What's happening there is the Democrats are saying to them, vote for us because of your identity, because of your race, your ethnicity. The Republicans are saying, vote for us because of your social and educational class. You are non college educated folk. And the Democrats are a party of elitists who believe in transgender rights and, and all this woke ideology. We're simple, traditional, we're the party of common sense. I thought one of Trump's geniuses in the last Republican convention was to put Hulk Hogan on and have him tear his shirt out. A lot of us looked at that and thought, what is this weirdness? Right? What Trump was signaling to young men particularly, I think young, non college educated men is the Democrats are the party of unisex bathrooms. We're the party of Hulk Hogan. Who do you feel more comfortable with? So there's a lot of that. Again, Trump knows how to play these cultural notes so much better than Democrats do. And you can see, again, I come back to culture just because I think it's economics translating into culture. Because if you look at pure economics, the right wing populism in Europe, for example, it's happening in Sweden. Sweden, they don't have an income inequality problem, it's happening in Germany. They don't have a loss of manufacturing based problem. Right. So there's something deeper going on here than just economics.
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We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from. Startups move fast and with AI, they're shipping even faster and attracting enterprise buyers sooner. But big deals bring even bigger security and compliance requirements. A SOC 2 isn't always enough. The right kind of security can make a deal or break it. But most founders and engineers can't afford to take time away from building their company to focus on that. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta's AI and automation make it easy for your company to get big deal ready in days. And Vanta says they continuously monitor your compliance, so future deals are never blocked. Plus, Vanta scales with you, backed by support that's there when you need it every step of the way. With AI changing regulations and buyers expectations, Vanta knows what's needed and when. And they've built the fastest, easiest path to get you there. That's why serious startups get secure early with Vanta. Get started@vanta.com profg that's V A N-T A.com profg vanta.com profgu Support for the show comes from Grunds Even when you do your best to eat right, it's tough to get all the nutrition you need from diet alone. That's why you need to know about Grunds. Grunds isn't a multivitamin, a green scummy or a prebiotic. It's all of those things and then some at a fraction of the price. And bonus, it tastes great. All Gruens Daily Gummy snack packs are vegan nut gluten, dairy free with no artificial flavors or flavor colors. And they're packed with more than 20 vitamins and minerals made with more than 60 nutrient dense ingredients and whole food. Grunt's ingredients are backed by over 35,000 research publications and the flavor tastes just like sweet, tart green apple candy. And for a limited time you can try their Gruni Smith Apple flavor just in time for fall. It's got all the same snackable, packable full body benefits you've come to expect, but this time these taste like you're walking through an apple orchard and a cable knit sweater. Warm apple cider in hand, grab your limited edition Grooney Smith Apple Gruns, available only through October. Stock up because they will sell out up to 52% off when you go to Grunsgruns Co and use the code. Propg support for Profg comes from Chime. It's no secret that managing your money can be stressful. Overdraft fees, missed payments and the constant worry about saving more can add on undue pressure. When life life already feels full, Chime says it can help ease that stress by giving you simple tools to take control of your finances one step at a time. With Chime, your money moves faster for you. You can open a checking account with no monthly or maintenance fees, set up direct deposit, and even get paid up to two days early. Plus, Chime offers fee free overdraft coverage of up to 200. Chime says it's already spotted members more than $30 billion and with more than 47,000 fee free ATMs. That's more than the top three national banks combined they say you'll have your money wherever you go. It's all designed to help you stress less, save more and make your money work harder for you. You can work on your financial goals through Chime today. You can open an account in 2 minutes@chime.com propg that's chime.com prop g Chime feels like progress. Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services and debit card provided by the Bancorp Bank NA or Stride Bank NA members FDIC Spot me eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Time timing depends on submission of payment file Fees apply at out of network ATMs. Bank ranking and number of ATMs according to U.S. news and World Report 2023 Chime checking account required. So this isn't an outrageous thesis or scenario, but when we have talk show hosts who are now the Secretary of Defense or refuse to call it Secretary of War, I want you to imagine that Fareed gets a call and says it's time to serve the country that's been so good to you, the United States. And you're going to be Secretary of State. And the first thing I need you to do is to brief the President on the state of the world. Looking at say different countries as stocks or as assets that have gone up in value and down in value. Where do you think the balance of power lies? Who's accreted power in the last 10 years? Who ceded it? And what would be the two or three most important things you would recommend that the US does to recapture or strengthen its position globally?
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So the balance of power I think is pretty clear that China has gained ground and we have lost ground. You can see this for example, that economist had a study of Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia, probably the most pivotal part part of the world because it is at the heart of the contest in Asia and economically it's deeply tied to China. Right. China is the dominant market in many ways. They have to get on with China. And yet in security terms, Southeast Asia has always been very close to the U.S. singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam. What has happened over the last few years, really year, but it's been a longer term trend is they have all moved closer to China and that is because the tariffs have played have wreaked havoc on our alliances. Because rather than building up and helping our allies, we're punishing them. Because what ends up happening is Trump uses the leverage he has to punish people. We have leverage with our allies cuz they're the ones we trade the most with. So they're the Ones, of course, with whom we have the most trade, and they're the ones Trump says I can squeeze more. So I would say the fundamental thing that the United States needs to understand is we are in a contest for global influence, power, for technology, platforms, for the future of technology with China. China is the first real peer competitor the United States has had, perhaps ever, because the Soviet Union was never really a peer competitor, economically and technologically. So the question is, how do we engage in this competition? We have one great superpower, and you've talked about this a lot, Scott. You understand it very well. We have about 50 countries that are among the richest, most advanced countries in the world that want to ally with us, that believe in our values, that believe the United States is a great kind of ringleader. If we can strengthen that alliance and create a kind of ecosystem, we can match and beat China in everything, even in rare earths, even in critical minerals. Because we have Europe, we have Australia, we have Japan, we have India, we have Israel, we have this extraordinary ecosystem. You know how many treaty allies China has? One. North Korea, and let's throw in Russia as a de facto ally. So we've got 50 odd countries and they're the richest countries in the world and they've got these two decrepit countries. Right. That should be the way we think about this. Instead, what Trump is doing, and this is really the central flaw of Trump's foreign policies, he's turned on our allies so that the Canadians are asking themselves, how do we think about our future for the next 30 years? Distancing ourselves from America? The Europeans are thinking, how do we think of, of our future for the next 30 years? Developing independent alternate strategies towards China, Russia, India. The Australians are worried we're going to abandon them on this nuclear submarine deal. So that's the fundamental mistake, which is to not realize the Allies are the greatest force multiplier. The United States has the greatest peacetime alliance in history, almost every other alliance in history, Scott. And ends when the war, the contest for which it was created, ends. We created an alliance system during the Cold War. We won the Cold War and the alliance system grew rather than shrinking.
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Yeah, it's just I'm reminded what Churchill said, the only thing worse than fighting with your allies is fighting without them. I mean, it seems like the prosperity is so enormous that we decided to engage in self sabotage. I want to use this as a bridge. You wrote this great op ed. I think it was in the Washington Post saying that we can't beat China by becoming more like China. We beat them by becoming more like the US Say more so, you know.
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One of the fascinating things about the last 10 or 15 years is that people have all kind of been talking about how the US made this terrible mistake. It thought that China was going to become more like America and in fact it didn't. You know, it stated dictatorship. It's state lenness. That's a fair critique. But what's ironic is the US is becoming more like China. We are adopting state control of the economy, we're adopting the idea of industrial policy and restricting trade, and most importantly, we are politicizing the economy so that the administration gets to pick who are the technology leaders who get special treatment. Okay, you ban chips, but if, if Jensen Huang comes to you in the White House and makes a case, and by the way, maybe it makes a donation to your ballroom, you will allow him to sell the chips, but you take a 15% cut. This is all entirely the opposite of the way the United States economy is meant to run. I grew up in an India where that was how the economy ran. The politics was more important than economics. The market was less important as a signal setter than what was happening in the corridors of power. And when I came to America, what I loved about the United States is the market was not run by politicians, it was run by the market, by businessmen, by entrepreneurs, by investors. And we are politicizing the economy to an extent to which it is going to breed corruption, it is going to breed inefficiency, and most importantly, we don't play this game well, that's China's game. If the game is going to be who can better absorb pain, restrict critical minerals, put in export bans, the Chinese will beat us every time because they have no rule of law, they have no courts, they have no elections to worry about. In terms of inflicting pain. Xi Jinping doesn't care if the stock market goes down 20%. Right? So, so we're sort of weirdly playing their game where what we should do is out innovate them, out compete them and we have all the tools at our disposal. But we're engaging, as you said, in a kind of weird self sabotage.
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So you brought up something. I'm going to put forward another thesis and have you respond to it. And that is between the US and Europe, about $50 trillion economy. Russia is 2 trillion. They should be. If we get into kind of a confrontation or a war and the US and Europe decide to be on one side together, you'd logically think that Russia should be A gnat running up against a windshield. It should just be a splat and over soon. And yet it's not. And my thesis is that Russia has a core competence that we don't have. While Europe has refused to put a single boot on the ground, a million men perish or injured, and yet they continue to fight the war. If AWS goes out for a day in the US and people lose their Netflix, they freak out. Here isn't one of the problems in going to solutions? One, do you agree with that? And two, going to solutions, Quite frankly, hasn't America just become fat and happy and not used to sacrificing or believing that we can go to wars and cut taxes and that we might want to wave our hands and talk about the injustice of what's happening in Ukraine, but we aren't really willing to do what the Chinese and Russians are willing to do, and that is have really significant sacrifice if we become fat and happy.
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B
Yes, in a word, I think you have it exactly right with Ukraine, which is this is an existential challenge, because it's an existential challenge to the idea of a kind of liberal rules based world that the United States and Europe have created. Russia is trying to desperately to break that world and it's trying to break it at this point that it has enormous leverage because it is right next door to Ukraine and as you say, because it is willing to suffer pain. And our solution to it has been, oh, let's sanction them. Putin doesn't care about sanctions, he doesn't care about the welfare of his people. If he did, he'd be running a completely different country. What he cares about is Russia's imperial power, the imperial might of the Russian state. And he's got enough petrodollars to fund that for time immemorial. The place where he would feel the pain is on the battlefield. And that's why, to my mind, we're in this kind of crazy situation in Ukraine, where we do agree, for the most part, it's existential. We do agree that Russia is trying to do this. We do agree that we want to win, but then we don't do what it would take to win. If you've decided you're in the fight, there are only two options. You're going to win or you're going to lose. Losing with moderation, you get no prizes. Losing with restraint, you get no prizes, so you might as well win. And if we were to give Ukraine all the weapons in the world they need, I would argue some air support or Things like that. If the Europeans were to put boots on the ground, this would be over. The Russians have lost. I mean, if you think about what Russia has lost compared to say, for example, during the Cold War, they lost. I forget the number of troops in Afghanistan, but I think it was in the range of 20,000, 25,000 or something like that. They've lost 2 or 300,000. In Ukraine, there may be 300,000 injured, 500,000 young men fled the country. Putin can't keep this up forever. Economically he can, because he's turned it into a fortress, militarized economy. But you have mothers whose children are dying, and that is the pressure point. And with Trump, you're not quite sure why, but for some reason, he's never been willing to put real pressure on Russia.
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A
We talk a lot about the importance of the soccer mom in Wisconsin. Because of our electoral structure. There's just a small number of people who have a disproportionate amount of impact on our elections. The quote, unquote, swing voter. And I would argue that the new swing voters globally that are, you know, could look east, could look west are the kingdom of Saudi Arabia because of their economic power, and also India. And it feels again, in the biggest own goal in history or recent history, is that we have thrust India into the arms of Xi and Putin. That image of seeing Xi, Putin and Modi looking like they were brothers, I thought was the most chilling geopolitical image I'd seen in a while. Talk a little bit about the relationship between a. Do you agree? And talk about a little bit about the relationship between the US And India. And what do you think? India, how they perceive America and their new kind of strength in relationships and any advice you would have for the State Department as it relates to India.
- [35:14]
B
So this is a real extraordinary transformation that has taken place in the last year in India. If you polled a year ago and asked just countries, forget about the governments attitudes towards America. India was usually among the top three most pro American countries in the world. The top three, top five. It was up there with Poland, Israel. And this is astonishing because India's government through the entire Cold War, was siding with the Soviet Union. Right? So Indians have a very strong natural affinity and, and inclination towards America. They admire America. All Indian businesses admire America. Young Indians want to come to America for education. There's nothing more glamorous in India than saying that you have a degree from an American college and things like that. So there's a huge amount of cultural power and attraction that the US has it's flipped. It's flipped because of a real sense that, that Trump is trying systematically and consciously to screw India. India has the highest tariffs in the world now laid on it. So you look at that and you say, why are you doing this to us? And then Trump went out of his way to favor Pakistan. So there's a kind of weird element to it all. And what's strange about it is this has been one of America's great foreign policy successes and it's totally bipartisan. So at the end of the Cold War, the United States starts to woo India to become part of the kind of American, if you will, sphere of influence, our ecosystem. It's a democracy. 10% of the country speaks English. It's all these connections to the West. Clinton begins it massively successful state visitors. George Bush, probably Republican, makes the most important shift, which is he accepts that India is a nuclear power and stops sanctioning it. Obama makes the pivot to Asia, which in large part is a strengthening of the relationship with India. In Trump 1.0, he continues that process and again, somewhat inexplicably, he's turned on India and, and undone for administration's work, bipartisan 25 year project of bringing India closer to the United States. And to underscore your point, Scott, there is only one country in the world that has the scale to replace China. If you're trying to create a non Chinese ecosystem, if you want to make, you know, massive amounts of consumer electronics or iPhones, only India has the scale to be able to do that. If you want to make massive amounts of pharmaceuticals, only India has the ability to do that. If you wanted, you know, for the next pandemic, you don't want to be reliant on China because many of these things we're talking about are low margin goods where you need to make them in massive scale, that's not going to be done in Texas or California. That's not even going to be done in Europe. Only India can play the role of the next China with regard to that kind of manufacturing. It can be crucial in processing of critical minerals like railroads because India has lower environmental concerns. So with all that being, that's the prize to screw it up. And the strange thing is I still have not heard a coherent reason why this has happened. You know, why does India have the highest tariffs in the world? It makes no sense. The US And India trade is not even that great. So you're trying to look for a reason. And unfortunately we're living in a court. And so you're just trying to understand was the emperor in a bad mood that day?
- [39:14]
A
We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. We say this all the time on our show, but it bears repeating. Running a small business isn't just a full time job. It's about a dozen full time jobs that you rarely, if ever get to clock out of. At least until you get to the point where you can start hiring the dream team. And if you've made it that far, you already know there's no time to mess around. That's where LinkedIn Jobs comes in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post to your job for free, share with your network and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. And LinkedIn's new AI feature can even help you write job descriptions and then quickly get it in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. And if you decide you want to go the extra mile to find the perfect candidate, LinkedIn says that promoted jobs get three times the number of qualified applicants. It's all these little things that let you find help fast without compromising on quality, which add up to you finally having extra time in the day for, I don't know, relaxing or knowing my listeners. You'll probably use that extra time to expand your empire even further. Post your job for free@LinkedIn.com Prof. That's LinkedIn.com Prof. To post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from Adobe Express. With social media, email and a growing variety of online ads, there are more touch points than ever between your business and its customers. Adobe Express is here to make sure your smallest touch point is as polished, impactful and on brand as the biggest. The brand kits in Express make following design rules a breeze. Templates for flyers, banners, emails, social posts and more have all the professional quality Adobe is known for. And generative AI that's safe for business gives everyone the ability to make images, rewrite texts and produce effects. Using simple text prompts. You can create campaigns, resize ads with a click, and even translate content automatically. Work that used to take weeks now takes minutes or even seconds. Adobe Express also makes collaboration, approval and sharing easier so any team can become a well oiled content machine. And if you're leading your team, you can monitor it all from your admin console. That means you have one centralized place where you can ensure that every asset is right and that everyone is synced. Go from fragmented to business friendly Switch to the quick and easy app App to create on brand content Adobe Express learn more@adobe.com Express Business True story I've actually used Adobe Express and I was genuinely impressed with how easy it is to create professional content that you can immediately push out. Support for the show comes from Better Help with the weather getting colder, it's a lot easier to stay inside, turn on the tv and ignore the rest of the world for a while. But when you're all alone and isolated during these short, dark days, it's very easy to get down on yourself. Human connection is important and this November, BetterHelp wants you to reach out. Make a coffee date with an old friend, write a letter to a distant family member, and take steps to connect with a licensed therapist with BetterHelp. Just fill out a short questionnaire to help identify your needs and Preferences and BetterHelp's industry leading matching process will put you in touch with a qualified therapist. And if you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. Reaching out is one of those funny things where at first it feels like a chore and then once you've done it, you often think to yourself, why didn't I do this sooner this month? Don't wait to reach out. Whether you're checking in on a friend or reaching out to a therapist yourself, BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. You can get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com propg that's betterhelp.com propg we're back with more from Fareed Zakaria. So try and put us in the head of the current administration's decision to strike Venezuelan boats allegedly carrying drugs. Do you see this as an attempt to try and secure additional energy supplies? As performative masculinity? Distraction from Epstein? I can at least make an argument for some, if not most of the things he does. Even if you don't agree with them, this to me just seems so. Such a non sequitur. An anomaly. What do you think is in the heads of Hegseth, Rubio and Trump striking these boats?
- [43:44]
B
Look, you're trying to explain something that doesn't make a lot of sense because actually the vast majority of the drugs are not coming on Venezuelan boats. Like the state rationale doesn't quite make sense. Maduro is a bad guy. It's a bad regime. They've done terrible things to their people. But why are we doing this? Why now? Part of it, I think, is that Hexit and Vance and that whole core MAGA contingency really do believe that the United States has been spending its military power too much in the kind of distant corners of the world and it should be retreating to a kind of fortress America. And that our hemisphere, It's a very 19th century kind of conception, our hemisphere is where should we should be? We should be primarily engaged. So, okay, that means that, okay, you gotta find some issue or problem in the Americas. So you look at Venezuela, they're the bad guys. I think the oil part is an important part of it. My understanding is that one of the things that the Trump administration has been trying to do with Venezuela is say to Maduro, if you will make a special deal with us on energy, we will relax. So part of this is the stick which is meant to get Maduro to agree to do some kind of energy deal, which would mean that he would have to, in a fence, cancel his energy deals with Russia and China and other players. Apparently he has not been willing to do that. And so there's part of what's going on here. I've also heard one final part to this is that Marco Rubio has been looking for a portfolio as Secretary of State because most of what the Secretary of State does is currently being done by Trump's former real estate partner, Steve Witkoff. Steve Witkoff is the real Secretary of State. So Marco Rubio is looking for things to do and one of them is he's a big Venezuela hawk. He always has been, to be fair to him. So it's a strange collection of reasons. You just always wonder with this kind of thing, have they thought through the fact that you could end up with some kind of igniting a civil war in Venezuela if a part of the regime collapses, as we've learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, it doesn't mean you get liberal democracy and your Thomas Jefferson candidate comes and takes control. What you end up with is the remnants of the old regime fight back, there's a new government in place. The place that goes through a multi year civil war. I'm not sure that's great for the United States.
- [46:32]
A
It feels as if, or again, another thesis is that Trump is able to kind of run these red lines or color outside the lines as long as the market keeps going up. And the thesis is that what's replaced the importance or value placed on character, fidelity, patriotism, decency has been replaced with if you make a lot of money, everything's forgiven. And as long as the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are up and to the right, that whoever's in the office can pretty much do whatever they Want and America, it feels like to me, has become a giant bet on AI. We're almost our entire economic growth is based on investments and the market increases in value in AI. One, do you think there is something to the notion that we have a moral failing around the idolatry of the dollar and how do we restore more substantive values in America? And two, just very curious to get your take on AI and what, what potential it represents to the upside and the downside.
- [47:42]
B
Yeah, that's a bunch of very important questions. So, on AI, look, I feel like it's above my pay grade to know whether or not when we get to AGI, it's going to be a complete transformation of the world as we know it. And all what I can say is it's pretty clear that we are in a kind of arms race on AI and that that part of the reason these hyperscalers are spending is they don't want to let the other guy win because it's a kind of strange situation. Each of them has their own definition of what it means to get to general intelligence. So it's like a shifting goal. It's a vague, incoherent goal. The goalpost is your own, but you have to spend. You have to spend. You have to spend because otherwise Google will win, or Microsoft will win, or OpenAI will win, or Anthropic will win. So they're all engaging in this crazy race, and it feels to me like it's not entirely clear that people understand how you would get a return on that investment. And unlike a lot of these other booms in the past, you think of the railroad boom, the telecom boom, the infrastructure you're building is not going to last for 100 years because 60% of the cost of building these data centers are the chips. And the chips get obsolete every three to four years. So you're going to need a massive cash infusion every three to four years. So the whole thing feels very heady.
- [49:13]
A
And.
- [49:17]
B
It seems like you could easily get up one morning and say, wait a minute, we're spending trillions and we're expecting only tens of billions of dollars of profit out of this. But it's possible that AI is so transformative that the normal rules don't apply. The most interesting thing to me about AI that you can see is that the Chinese are approaching it quite differently. They are going for not this race for AGI, they're really going for a much more targeted, applied AI. How do we transform these various industries and businesses using AI? So it's much More practical. And in one particular area, they seem to be ahead, which is they're trying to do real world AI that is not large language models, but using robots. So, you know, this is a point that Fei Fei Li at Stanford, the great computer scientist, always makes that human beings perceive the world not through language, but through their eyes, ears, you know, and that if robots could sense the world that way, they would be incredibly powerful. And Chinese AI is very focused on trying to get these marine robots in AI so that you can automate factories on a scale and with productivity levels that would be just mind boggling. So it's a very practical way of approaching AI. I suspect we are ahead, but I wonder whether this Chinese approach is very ingenious in terms of being able to produce a kind of return on investment and actual transformation of processes, crucial processes within the economy. And your final point, which I just want to comment on because I really agree with it, is this question of the idolatry of money which then makes you ignore lots of other important characteristics that we have for thousands of years thought were important, like honesty, bravery, courage, decency, kindness. I think that I saw this happen in my lifetime. We're about the same age, Scott, so I want to toss this back to you and ask if you agree. So when I came to America in the early 80s, what I was struck by was it was still a world in which, of course, businessmen were admired enormously and people thought that rich people were great and all that. Which, by the way, I thought was wonderful coming from a quasi socialist country, which was India in the Sevent. But there was enormous respect for novelists, you know, people like Norman Mailer and Tom Wolf were huge figures in the America I came to. There was enormous respect for academics, people who were philosophers, people who were, you know, humanists. Elie Wiesel, I remember, once came to college when I was there and it was a huge event and there was a real sense in which there was a richness of society that honored different kinds of people for different skills that they had. The 80s boom on wall street began to change that, and then the tech boom just completely obliterated it. And now we only worship rich people. And we think that rich people are philosophers, are prophets, they know everything about everything. Peter Thiel is not just a good investor, he's also brilliant about theology and philosophy. And that's true of all these people. We look at what their work habits are, they study. We want to know, do they eat a banana in the morning? Because it must be that if Jeff Bezos Eats a banana in the morning. That must be the path to his wealth. There's a kind of almost crazy idolatry that we're in right now.
- [53:13]
A
Oh, it's the example that running through my mind was Principal Yukelson when I was in sixth grade. This big, handsome man used to drive up in his 240Z, which was the coolest car in the world. And he was a big man, and he used to work out with us and play sports with us. He was our principal, and he used to show up and talk about how wonderful our teacher was, and he was just kind, and he used to hug people. We all wanted to be this guy. We all wanted to be this man of service, of generosity, of affection. And now I think their heroes are Elon Musk. It just feels as if we have the wrong role models along those lines. Fareed, I know you have kids. What advice would you have for dads? Feels like the two of us, Fareed, quite frankly, we have a debt. We've recognized so much prosperity, an unfair amount of prosperity being our age and being men in the United States. And that prosperity has not trickled down to younger generations. And young men are really struggling. What do you do as a father, and what do you think we can do as a society to try and restore the same type of prosperity, opportunity, mental wellness that we have registered so much of and that young people, specifically young men, seem to be in such short supply of?
- [54:40]
B
So I think at a societal level, this is something you've talked about, but I 100% agree with it. There has been a huge transfer of wealth from the young to the old in almost every Western society, but in particular in the United states, we spend $4 for every person over 65 compared to $1 for every person under 18. And it's because insidiously, I don't think anyone consciously did this, but we know old people vote, and by the way, people under 18 don't vote at all. And people who are between 18 and 30 vote very little. So we have the whole reward system, the economic reward system of this massive federal government and all geared towards subsidizing the old, the elderly, penalizing the young. And we have to try and change that. But at a personal level, look, it's a huge challenge. I think that we need to think more about ourselves, all of us, and I really mean all of us, and particularly parents as role models, and ask ourselves, what is the impact we want to leave on the world? And most important in that is not what you say it's what you do. So what I've been very conscious of is I have one son who's an amazing kid. I have always tried to just show him in what I did that I had these values that I believed in. That our friends were the kind of people who embodied those values. That the things we talked about when we honored something, when we disapproved of something, was that and you gotta walk the walk. You can't just say it's. Children are very good at picking up hypocrisy and they will discount anything you say if your actions are not aligned with that. And so in my own small way, I've tried to do that. But I think you're absolutely right. We talked on my show about this. One of the things Charlie Kirk got right was he understood that young men felt they needed a sense of purpose, they needed a sense of higher purpose and he was willing to give it to them. And I don't agree with a lot of the things he believed in, but I think he got that right. He said, get out of the bars and embrace your Bibles, be a provider, make sure that you're kind and decent to women. There was a kind of old fashioned set of moral claims, but he was giving purpose to young men who need purpose. They need to feel that they are special and important and that they have power but also responsibilities. So if you can do that. Look, as I said, I think I lucked out with my son, who's amazing. But it's hard work and it's ongoing.
- [57:30]
A
If there was one economic or social policy magic wand test that you could immediately implement in the United States, what would it be?
- [57:39]
B
Gosh, that is a great challenge. I think what I would do is in some significant way provide young people with capital. This could be a left and right policy. Provide young people with capital so they feel invested in the society, they feel invested in the success of the society. They understand how to save, make it something that incentivizes saving and things like that. We basically need to think more long term. We need to be able to, to find a way to understand the time horizon of markets and democracy is very short term and the game we're in is a very long term game.
- [58:25]
A
And last question here, advice to your 25 year old self. What did you get right? What did you get wrong?
- [58:31]
B
I think what I got right was that I was able to find a way to do the thing I loved in a way that was good for my career. In other words, it wasn't just that I followed my passion, it's that I found a way to tailor my passion to something where there was a career there. You know, like I was able to say, you know, if I do it this way and if I work for these magazines and if I go on tv, I'll be able to do the things I love and make a living doing it. That's number one. Number number two, I think what I got right was focus on family and close friends. Really particularly you and I are in this world, Scott, where a lot of people want to be your friend. And I have never made the mistake of thinking that because somebody wants to be my friend, because I have a television show, they're really my friends. You know, that I have a very acute sense of if all this went away, my college buddies, the people who, you know, I've known for 30 or 40 years, they would stay with me, we would still be friends. But a lot of the glamour and the, you know, a lot of the kind of celebrity friends that I, that or the acquaintances I have, that would all go away. And that's just fine with me. I enjoy the ride. But I also know, you know, what my true north is. I think what I probably. I think what I got wrong is I didn't do enough things when I was on the way up that were giving back or that were even just fundamentally of interest to me. I was a little too caught up with success, success, success. And I might get success. I don't mean financial success. I mean just always moving up and making sure that this was a kind of career wise, the right thing to do. I think I should have done more things that were both interesting, that would have an impact on society. I should have had a broader definition of my success. In a way, I was too insecure and anxious. Climbing the ladder. I should have realized, you know what, you'll be fine. Climbing the ladder. You might as well stop and smell the roses and help a person across the street along the way. I now do it, but I didn't do it when I was in my, my 20s and 30s.
- [60:53]
A
How do you just summarize the last 30 years of my life? Stop and smell the roses and be kind and have different definitions of success. Fareed Zakaria is a journalist, author and political commentator. He hosts Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN and is a columnist for the Washington Post. I don't say that. I don't think I've said this. Maybe two people. I think you are a beautiful mind. I just, I tune in every Sunday and you are literally one of the only shows where I will stop it, rewind it such that I can parrot your comments because I find you're such an incisive thinker and really, I just enjoy you have been able to do something I'm not able to do. You are able to puncture through your emotions and the politics to just the truth. I think you're a tremendous inspiration for young men and a literally a lighthouse in a storm of political anxiety and biases that it is so hard to see the forest for the trees. Very much appreciate you, appreciate your work and appreciate you coming on.
- [62:00]
B
As that wonderful Jewish saying goes. Scott, from your lips to God's ears. Thank you so much. I'm humbled, but I'll take it.
- [62:12]
A
This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our assistant producer is Laura Gennaire. Drew Burrows is our Technical Director. Thank you for listening to the ProPG pod from ProPG Media. 300 sensors over a million data points per second. How does F1 update their fans with every stat in real time? AWS is how, from fastest laps to strategy calls, AWS puts fans in the pit. It's not just racing, it's data driven innovation at 200 miles per hour. AWS is how leading businesses power next level innovation.
- [63:00]
B
What do walking 10,000 steps every day, eating five servings of fruits and veggies and getting eight hours of sleep have in common? They're all healthy choices. But do all healthier choices really pay off with prescription plans from CVS Caremark? They do. Their plan designs give your members more choice, which gives your members more ways to get on, stay on and manage their meds. And that helps your business control your costs because healthier members are better for business. Go to CMK Co Access to learn more about helping your members stay adhering. That's CMK coacss. What do walking 10,000 steps every day, eating five servings of fruits and veggies and getting eight hours of sleep have in common? They're all healthy choices. But do all healthier choices really pay off with prescription plans from CVS Caremark? They do. Their plan designs give your members more choice, which gives your members more ways to get on, stay on and manage their meds. And that helps your business control your costs because healthier members are better for business. Go to CMK co Access to learn more about helping your members stay adherent. That's CMK coacss.