Conversation with Fareed Zakaria — Revolutions & Global Affairs

Fareed Zakaria, the host of CNN’s flagship international affairs show, Fareed Zakaria GPS, joins Scott to discuss his latest book, “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.” We hear why the Industrial Revolution was the most transformative in our nation’s history, and get an update on geopolitics as a whole. Follow Fareed on X, @FareedZakaria. Follow the podcast across socials @profgpod: Instagram Threads X Reddit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:56Scott Galloway?

  Episode 294. I-294 is an interstate highway located in the northeastern part of Illinois. In 1994, the show Friends premiered on NBC. True story. My wife tried to humiliate me by telling all of her friends that I had a tiny dick. Wasn't she surprised when they all disagreed? Go, go, go!

• 1:23Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 294th episode of the Prop G Pod. The dog is traversing the Nile River. That's right, going down the Nile, stopping. Totally freaked out about the Nile crocodile. I've been watching all these YouTube videos. Those, those bitches are, they, they don't play around. I am fascinated. My TikTok algorithm is essentially Great Danes, economists, ridiculously hot people talking about social justice, and some unwitting animal heading up to a watering hole looking for just a light afternoon refreshment of water. And wham, the croc comes in.

• 1:58Scott Galloway?

  Oh my God, I can't get enough of that shit. And I know how it ends every time, but I keep watching it. Anyways, I'm going down the Nile. Cultural trip. Somebody should know about the dog. I hate anything cultural. Broadway, museums, I hate all that shit. The most cultural thing I'll do is I'll watch like Aliens and IMAX. That for me is the equivalent of a museum visit. Anyways, but I've decided I want to do a trip where my kids see something historical. So we're going down the Nile on one of these flat river boats, which I'm actually kind of excited about. Anyways, here we are, headed to the Nile next week. So in the meantime, please enjoy our conversation with Total Gangster and number one most viewed podcast is, last time we did this, his video got over a million, like 1.2 million views.

• 2:43Scott Galloway?

  Anyways, the inimitable Fareed Zakaria. We hear all about his new book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.

• 2:54Scott Galloway?

  Fareed, where does this podcast find you?

• 2:56Fareed Zakaria?

  I'm in New York at my, at my house.

• 2:58Scott Galloway?

  Oh, nice. So let's bust right into it. Your new book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, walks the reader through pivotal revolutions that have shaped world history. The economic revolution, the French revolution, the industrial revolution, and for present day revolutions, globalization, technology, identity, and geopolitics. Let's start with the past revolutions. Stack rank them in order of how they changed the trajectory of history. What, if you were going to write a book on one of them, which one would it be?

• 3:26Fareed Zakaria?

  It would be the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution changed the world. You can see this in a very simple graph. If you look at a graph of per capita income, average income of human beings in the world over the last 2,000 years, it's basically a flat line for 1,750 of those years. And then sometime around the 18th century, it starts to go up. And then it's like a hockey stick graph. It just goes way up. We go roughly speaking from a couple hundred dollars per capita income per person to 5,000, 6,000, 7,000. And that dramatic rise is basically because of the industrial revolution.

• 4:08Fareed Zakaria?

  So if you ask yourself, what is the single thing that has changed the course of human history? The most discontinuous feature of human life? It is the industrial revolution where finally human beings were able to get themselves out of poverty, out of real grinding medieval poverty. And Almost on a sustained basis, keep raising their standards of living for 250 years.

• 4:33Scott Galloway?

  But hasn't technology, the technology revolution, sort of hockey-sticked the hockey stick? And that is, what happened in those previous, you know, the previous century has gone parabolic, I think, in the last 50 years, no? The microprocessor, vaccines, internal combustion engines, hasn't even gotten more parabolic in the last four or five decades?

• 4:57Fareed Zakaria?

  So, you know, the data does not show economic growth going parabolic in that way. As you know, you've seen some optics of productivity and you've seen rises in, you know, in certainly the US, for example, has done very well over the last 30 years. But part of it is, I think, that that was starting from such a low base. You know, you're starting with people who are barely having one meal a day. So I think you haven't seen quite that in the data, but I agree with you, and that's part of what I try to explain in the book, that the nature of the digital revolution, if we can just call it that for a moment, is that it has created a whole new economy and a whole new mental, you know, world for us.

• 5:42Fareed Zakaria?

  Mark Andreessen's famous blog post where he talks about software eating the world gets it exactly right. The world used to be run, it was a world of atoms. And what happened is the digital revolution came and it created a world of bits and bytes that now control those atoms. So actually, the internal combustion engine is kind of irrelevant now. What a car is becoming is software on wheels, and it's the software that controls that. And now what's going to happen is you're going to have AI that controls the software, and those things become paramount. And the point I'm trying to make in the book is not so much about the economic effect, it's the sort of social and psychological consequences of these changes, which you

• 6:26Fareed Zakaria?

  know and care a lot about. It is mind-blowing in every way to think about that. You know, human beings have never had the power to multiply their minds the way that AI is going to be able to allow them to do. What does that do to our conceptions of who we are as human beings?

• 6:43Scott Galloway?

  And what does history tell us about, there's a lot of catastrophizing around AI, and I can't, I'm trying to sort through how much of this techno narcissism, where people like to think that the singular, the single point of failure that's gonna, or success that's gonna destroy or save humanity, or if we should really be worried about it. As you look through history and these revolutions, if we're going through an AI revolution, what can we learn from the past revolutions?

• 7:08Fareed Zakaria?

  I share your skepticism that, that it's gonna like end human existence, it's gonna extinguish the, the universe. That stuff has always struck me as, you know, kind of catastrophizing, and you can see how it has the potential, but, you know, human beings at the end of the day, I had to put it in simple terms, you can pull the plug, you can create a kill switch, you can create, for example, a simple break between the ability of AI and AI, or operated machines to access energy. At the end of the day, they need energy to run. And so, you know, now you could say, those kill switches become increasingly expensive if you're running your whole society and your whole economy and your whole cities

• 7:52Fareed Zakaria?

  on AI, and then you suddenly say the only, you know, the, the break is going to be that you lose the access to energy. Well, maybe you, you then lose access to the AI that's running everything, you know, your planes, your traffic lights, everything like that. But there is a kill switch. The effect, I think, that is most likely to happen is exactly what's happened with this digital revolution, but on steroids. Because I do think that that, that piece of this is new. Until now, we have always been able to use technology as a tool. You know, the industrial revolution was fundamentally an energy revolution. We were able to make machines that could do the work of thousands of humans, thousands

• 8:32Fareed Zakaria?

  of horses, that's why we talk about horsepower. It was about replacing horses, and a steam engine by the end could replace thousands of horses. It would do, was able to do the work. So the AI revolution, I think, allows you to replace minds. It allows you to replace thousands of minds, because one computer, one AI program can do what thousands of minds used to do. That is mind blowing. And that's the part I, I'm fascinated by in terms of the potential of what it can do in terms of solving problems like disease and global warming. But it's also kind of scary. We, we are entering uncharted waters.

• 9:11Scott Galloway?

  So some revolutions cause tremendous productivity, some revolutions end in world war. When now do politics, when you look at examining these different revolutions and looking at the state of American politics, or let me go broader, the state of geopolitics in 2024, what lessons from history do you glean and what does it say about the situation we're in right now?

• 9:32Fareed Zakaria?

  So the central argument of the book is every time you have these massive changes in technology and economics, propelling some societies forward dramatically, you get two things happen, you get an identity and a political revolution. The identity revolution, because you start to think of yourself differently, you know, that starts with the Dutch, the Dutch become the richest country in Europe, but most importantly, they start to think of themselves differently. They're no longer part of the Spanish Empire, they're Dutch, they break away, they're no longer part of the Catholic world, they're Protestant, they break away. And those identity revolutions create a political revolution, that's point one. And point two is you always have a backlash.

• 10:13Fareed Zakaria?

  And what we are living through right now is the backlash to one of the most dramatic, perhaps the most dramatic revolutions that we've had. As you said, these four revolutions, taking place almost simultaneously, economics with globalization, technology with information, identity and geopolitics, all happening. So we are living through the backlash, the cultural backlash to all of this. How we navigate that backlash is going to determine where we end up here. You know, are we going to get overwhelmed by it? Are we going to sort of accept the Trumps and Brexits and Viktor Orban's of the world who say, "Stop the train, I want to get off." The real backlash, in a sense, comes from Russia and China, and Iran, to a certain

• 10:58Fareed Zakaria?

  extent, where they're all saying, "We don't want any of this world. We, you know, we believe that this Western modernity, Western liberal democracy is ruining the world, the Western liberal order is corrupt." And they're fighting back. And if, for example, Russia wins in Ukraine... What will that do to that liberal international order that's rested on the premise that you can't you can't just take another country's territory by force? So I don't think that there is a future out there that I can predict for you because it depends on our actions. But the lesson I drew from it is you aren't going to be able to move forward. You are not going, you know, the forces of progress and acceleration and individual

• 11:41Fareed Zakaria?

  liberty don't win by themselves. You know, it's all going to happen naturally. You can't be fatalistic about this and say, oh, time is on our side. You know, Steve Pinker tells me it's all going to work out in the end. No, you got to fight for it. You've got to really get in there and fight back the forces of reaction and counterrevolution.

• 12:00Scott Galloway?

  You write in the book that throughout history, there's often a pattern of great power rivalry in which an agrarian land power is pitted against a maritime trading power. Is this still the case today? It sounds like you're describing the tension between China and the US. Say more about that.

• 12:19Fareed Zakaria?

  Yes, both Russia and China in some ways are fundamentally land powers, though China has a very large coast and, you know, kind of functions in both ways. And they're both launching this very spirited campaign. It's not just a geopolitical balancing. One of the things that I realized when reading more and more of what Putin and Xi are saying, it's a cultural balancing. They really believe that these ideas of Western liberal democracy are destabilizing their societies, destabilizing their basis for power. You know, Putin goes on these rants about how, you know, the United States is turning

• 12:59Fareed Zakaria?

  into this sexual fantasy land of trans rights and gay rights. You know, he came out one day in favor of J K Rowling against the people who were canceling her. Xi Jinping talks a lot about how he wants women back in the kitchen, you know, assuming their traditional roles. So there's a lot here that's about cultural reaction and cultural counterrevolution. But the geopolitical piece of it is very important because they regard the liberal international order that the US has set up and run as one where they don't get to do whatever they want, right? There are constraints, there are rules, there are norms, and they're

• 13:39Fareed Zakaria?

  gonna push, they're gonna keep pushing, and we have to figure out, do we have the willpower to fight back? We have the capacity. Scott, if you looked at the Cold War, the coalition against, a raid against the Soviet Union comprised, say, by 1970, it was about probably forty percent of GDP, of global GDP. Today, the coalition that is supporting Ukraine against Russia is sixty percent of global GDP. If you throw in India and a few others on the fence, you'd get to about seventy percent of global GDP. The question is, do we have the willpower, the staying power? And most importantly in that regard is, does

• 14:20Fareed Zakaria?

  the leader of the West, of the free world, have that staying power? And do we want to fight that? Do we understand the stakes? And the problem I have with Trump on international affairs is I really don't think he understands the stakes, that we are up against this challenge of, is this order that we've built since 1945, that's unique in human history, you know? Before that, it's like the jungle of realpolitik for thousands of years. And then we set up this system where you have a much, it's the longest period of great power peace in human history. Greatest explosion of global economics and trading in human history, the lowest

• 15:00Fareed Zakaria?

  number of conflicts in human history. Is that all gonna go away because we're gonna allow a return to the jungle of realpolitik?

• 15:11Scott Galloway?

  It's interesting because you talk about pushing back, and it strikes me, I love what you're saying, we kind of have the muscle, it's a question of whether we have the mentality or the will, because I was reading that as a percentage of our GDP, our military spending is actually quite low relative to historically, but yet...

• 15:27Scott Galloway?

  Just whatever it is, 3% of our GDP is 800 billion, which is greater than the next 10 economies combined. I mean, we have the resources, right? It feels as if the great threat, and this is a thesis and you push back or tell me that, you know, if America was a horror movie, the call is coming from inside of the house. It's that we don't like each other. We can, we can battle any external threat. We just can't, we have the muscle. I'm just not sure we have the coordination or we, or we're starting to self harm. Does, does that make any sense?

• 15:57Fareed Zakaria?

  Hundred percent right. Think about it this way, Scott. You know, one of the points in the book is that the country that leads in technology always ends up being the dominant power. So it's Netherlands in the, in the 17th century. It's Britain by the end of the 18th century. It's the United States in the 20th century. In the 21st century, the United States leads in technology like it has never led before, like no country in the world has ever led before. If you look at the world of, of information revolution, biotech, nanotech, AI, whatever you want, the US is so far ahead in the lead. Those seven or eight companies that, that, you know, are top technology companies,

• 16:38Fareed Zakaria?

  the market cap of those companies is larger than the market cap of the entire countries of Britain, France, Germany, and Canada put together. Apple's market cap alone is larger than the stock market capitalization of the total country of Germany. We make more energy than anybody in the world. We make more oil than Saudi Arabia. We make more natural gas than Qatar. Our banks are the dominant banks in the world. The dollar is the dominant currency in the world. And unlike any other rich country in the world, we are demographically vibrant because of immigration. Every other rich country in the world is declining in population. They're basically turning into Florida's retirement communities. We are vibrant.

• 17:23Fareed Zakaria?

  You put all that together and you say, could we handle China? Of course we can handle China. Could we handle Russia? Of course we could. It's, the problem is our, our dysfunction within, you know, that's taking this amazing hand of cards and making us play it badly.

• 17:41Scott Galloway?

  You described the phenomenon you call the rise of the rest, which examines how nations outside of the US have gained strength and confidence. Which nations are you paying the most attention to? And how have they kind of shifted the world order?

• 17:54Fareed Zakaria?

  So when I wrote that book, obviously, the one I focused on most was China, which was rising fast, and you could see that even then. And I talked about it as the inevitable challenger. I think India is probably the next most important one. I know India is having a kind of moment in the sun, but it's basically justified. It's because there's no other country that has the scale that China has. And India has that scale, and it has an incredibly vibrant economy. It's growing from a very slow, a small base. People don't completely understand when they sort of talk about India as the next China. So Chinese economy is still four and a half times bigger than the Indian economy. And so India's going to have to take a while to catch up.

• 18:39Fareed Zakaria?

  But it is on that scale. But then there are, you know, under those two, there's Indonesia, there's Brazil, there's Nigeria, there's South Africa. And the most interesting feature of all of these, Scott, is that they're becoming politically stable and economically dynamic enough that they're getting culturally and politically independent and proud. So you can't boss them around anymore. That's the dilemma of the world we're in, in terms of kind of management, if you will. It's not that there is, you know, a superpower that can truly rival the United States. There isn't. And it's not that the US has declined. I mean, we are still 25% of global GDP.

• 19:22Fareed Zakaria?

  You know what we were in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected? 25% of global GDP. It's amazing. With all this change, our share of the world economy has stayed the same. It's the Europeans and the Japanese that have gone down.

• 19:34Scott Galloway?

  And the losers.

• 19:35Fareed Zakaria?

  But it's a world of upper middle powers, if you want to put it that way. You know, that aren't going to be taking directions from Washington. And how to navigate a world like that? How to corral these countries into some collective action? That's, you know, that's where the skill of diplomacy becomes really important. Because you don't have, you don't quite have the muscle you had in the past. You've got to use words as much as muscle.

• 20:01Scott Galloway?

  Coming up after the break.

• 20:03Fareed Zakaria?

  This is largely a second order issue. It's a it's a sideshow compared to the big forces that are shaping the world. Israel is the dominant power in the Middle East and will remain the dominant power in the Middle East.

• 20:19Scott Galloway?

  Stay with us.

• 20:24Scott Galloway?

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• 21:27Scott Galloway?

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• 22:33Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch-up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. The Regent Trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year-round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools including Claude or

• 23:16Scott Galloway?

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• 23:41Scott Galloway?

  The last time we spoke, we spoke the week after October 7th. So it's been five months. And by the way, I was saying off-mic, the video, or the video of the podcast we did with you got, I think, 1.2 or 1.4 million views. And I was, I was ribbing you that more people watched you on this podcast than watch any CNN show, which is a different talk show about how the world of media is changing. But what, in the last five months, in terms of the war in Gaza, what, give us a sense for the state of play, how it's unfolded, and what has surprised you, and where do you think it's headed?

• 24:20Fareed Zakaria?

  Sure. So, I mean, in terms of these broad systemic things that we're talking about, it's worth putting this in perspective. This is largely a second-order issue. It's a sideshow compared to the big forces that are shaping the world. Israel is the dominant power in the Middle East and will remain the dominant power in the Middle East because it is the technologically most advanced country, it is politically the most potent, it has the military that none of these other countries can match. So you put all that together, and Israel is not just there to stay, but it's there to be the dominant player. Now, is it handling this challenge appropriately?

• 25:04Fareed Zakaria?

  My view, they went from an appropriate response to an overreaction. And I think I, in this regard, basically share the Biden administration's view, that they've just gone too far. Donald Rumsfeld used to have a rule, which he said, which I wish he had followed himself after the Iraq War, but when he was Secretary of Defense in the War on Terror, he would say, "Are we creating more terrorists than we are killing by our actions?" And I think about that when I think about Israel now. You know, it's killed about 15,000 Hamas militants by their own, by the Israeli government's own count. They've killed about 30-odd thousand Palestinian civilians. They've destroyed about 60% of the buildings in Gaza.

• 25:48Fareed Zakaria?

  And if they do rougher, it'll probably be worse because these people have now, these one and a half million people have now been displaced three times. And my question is, are you, you know, are you, is it worth the next, you know, this last 5,000 Hamas militants, given the costs you are generating in terms of the radicalization of Palestinians, the radicalization of the Arab street? I don't think they've got the balance right right now. Frankly, we got the balance wrong after nine eleven. So I understand it. There's a lot of rage, there's a lot of outrage in this, particularly for Israel, a feeling of existential vulnerability that I don't think we appreciate enough.

• 26:30Fareed Zakaria?

  I mean, this is a country that from the day it was founded, its neighbors tried to eliminate it. And then twenty years later, in sixty seven, tried to eliminate it again. And then in nineteen seventy three, tried to eliminate it, you know. So it is not a case of being paranoid. This is a case of there are real, there were real enemies. But a lot has changed and Israel has become very strong. And the question it should be asking itself is, in a world in which these moderate Arabs want to make peace with us, in this world in which, you know, we have so much more strength than the Palestinians, if you think about it before this and from the West Bank, there have been no terror attacks on Israel. Because that wall that Ariel Sharon built, which I supported at the time, it worked,

• 27:11Fareed Zakaria?

  you know, it it had just, the the incidence of West Bank terrorism went down to basically zero. And so that piece of it is, I think, without any question, working. The the challenge is, what's the long term sustainable strategy? What, you know, where does this go in terms of a post-war settlement? Can you get the Arabs on board to create some kind of governing structure in Gaza? And I think all that becomes harder if you're just pummeling and pummeling and pummeling. And so that's my view. I I I get Israel's desire to completely eliminate the Hamas as a fighting force.

• 27:53Fareed Zakaria?

  I just think that the price you pay for those last five thousand militants might be quite high, and I'm not sure you get anything out of it. Because what is Hamas? It's the idea of armed resistance. You know, if you kill them, you're saying there aren't going to be any Palestinians who believe in armed resistance, particularly after the last six months? I'm not sure.

• 28:14Scott Galloway?

  So just for the purposes of discussion, some pushback. But what this comes down to is what is the proportionate response to this type of attack or terrorism, right? And this is almost an impossible thing to calibrate. I look historically at the Japanese killed 2,200 servicemen at Pearl Harbor. We go on to kill 3 million Japanese, including 100,000 in one night, and the terms are unconditional surrender.

• 28:39Scott Galloway?

  Al Qaeda kills 2,800 Americans. We go on to kill 300 to 400,000 people in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the terms are unconditional surrender. We killed 5 million Germans. The terms are unconditional surrender. When Israel is attacked, at least as severely as we were in any of those instances, why do they not have the same rights to demand unconditional surrender?

• 29:02Fareed Zakaria?

  It's a great question, and the fundamental reason is the Palestinians live within land that Israel controls and are going to be there for the next 100 years. In other words, Israel has to live with these people and has to figure out a way to live with them in a way that we didn't have to figure that out with the Germans. We didn't have to figure that out with the Japanese. We didn't have to figure that out with the Taliban in Afghanistan. These are all 8,000 miles away, different countries, different... This is the problem for the Israelis, is that at the end of the day, unless you believe there is going to be a wholesale mass expulsion of 5 and 1/2 million Palestinians into Egypt and Jordan, you've got to live with these people.

• 29:46Fareed Zakaria?

  And does it make sense to do that in the context of people who technically Israel isn't in charge of, right? When you take land, the people who are on that land become part of your legal responsibility. So that's, to me, the fundamental difference.

• 30:03Scott Galloway?

  Do you worry that if Hamas is left in power, there's any sort of ceasefire, that we're just going to wash, rinse, and repeat, that we're going to have the same... I mean, the people in power, who we're calling for a ceasefire, we're calling for some sort of a truce, which we had October the 6th, you leave Hamas in power. Haven't they just explicitly said that they're committed to rebuilding, taking whatever aid they have? It might take a year, it might take 10 years, but doesn't this just happen again unless we... Figure out a way to, quite frankly, eliminate Hamas the way we eliminated the Third Reich, or we demanded that the emperor in Japan acknowledge that he wasn't a god. I mean, aren't we just kicking the can down the road? And as painful as it might be, as much of a humanitarian crisis as it might be,

• 30:48Scott Galloway?

  isn't the only solution to take out Hamas fully?

• 30:53Fareed Zakaria?

  So I am very much of the view that Hamas should not govern Gaza after this. And I think that I've talked to people in Qatar and Egypt who have been working on talking, frankly, to Hamas. They believe that that is attainable, that is already attainable, that Hamas does not have the capacity to regain control in Gaza, particularly if you can work out some security system post-war, because that becomes the key. Unless you believe you're going to literally, you know, kill every last Hamas militant, and there will never be another one. There are going to be some scattered remnants and scattered violent resistance, right? So the question is, who governs Gaza?

• 31:37Fareed Zakaria?

  And your ability to set up some kind of governance of Gaza depends on, you know, being able to bring in the Arabs, bring in the Palestinian Authority. But they're not going to be willing to come in as Israeli stooges. You know, they're not going to be willing to ride on the back of Israeli tanks and govern a restive Palestinian population. So that's why I think the dynamic at work that's most important to ask about is, are you going to be able to get some kind of stable governance in Gaza? And again, that's why I think it's different. Japan has been governed by itself for 5,000 years. You knew that, you know, when you left Japan, the Japanese would be governing themselves.

• 32:19Fareed Zakaria?

  Whereas what we are trying to do, as you say, is prevent the return of Hamas. And I really do believe that Hamas, in that sense, is an idea. They can call it something else. They'll call it Islamic Jihad. They'll call it some new term.

• 32:34Fareed Zakaria?

  What we're trying to do is to make sure that there isn't so much radicalization in the population and in the broader neighborhood that you can get moderate Arabs to come in, you can get the Palestinian Authority to come in, create some structure of authority, you can then pass it off to that. Otherwise, Israel is going to be back in Gaza. And we know how that movie ended. It's what it takes from Israel in terms of material, in terms of men, you know, to to run these places. And what it takes in terms of the fabric of a liberal democracy to to run it, you know, on a kind of colonial occupation is very, very tough for Israel to to manage.

• 33:15Scott Galloway?

  What do you think a solution might look like? I mean, they call you, and I'm sure you get these calls, and they say, Fareed, what is what is what is a post-truce world or a post-war Gaza look like? Who are they? My sense of Hamas is still actually quite popular among the populace. My understanding is 70%.

• 33:35Fareed Zakaria?

  If anything, it's gotten more popular because of this, you know, five months of pummeling. So you got to find some way to bring, I think, to bring some, in some way, the Palestinian Authority from the West Bank has to be a partner here. You got to get the moderate Arabs involved because those are the people who are going to have credibility on the ground. You've got to create some kind of structure that gives people hope that there's rapid reconstruction of their of their houses, you know, of return of normalcy to their lives. And then I do think one thing has come out of this whole episode, which is the Israelis have always argued for a demilitarized Palestinian state, you know,

• 34:15Fareed Zakaria?

  if those Israelis who have been willing to to talk about a two-state solution. I believe that that argument becomes pretty powerful now. In other words, you can see why a non- demilitarized Palestinian state would be an existential threat to Israel. And so if you think about, you know, if you say to yourself, look, you got to have a 20-year horizon here, you're not going to solve this. In a twenty year horizon, the fact that maybe, you know, I would argue in some ways, this whole business has made us all realize, not Israel right now, but you've got to find some two-state solution, otherwise you're going to go on with this in-occupation forever, and you can't as a democracy, as a Jewish liberal democracy.

• 35:00Fareed Zakaria?

  But you can also understand that, look, you can't have a normal Palestinian state. Because for whatever reason, it is infected with enough radicalism and enough violence right now, that the Israeli concerns about security have to be addressed. And if you can, you know, if you can imagine those twin forces moving forward, that you've got to have a political solution, but there is not going to be a normal state with a normal military. That, I think, provides outlines for a possible solution, because frankly, if you had a Palestinian state, and they have a flag and a national anthem and a parliament, or whatever, you know, however they choose to govern themselves, if they don't have an army, the worst thing they can do is, you know, some kind of a terror attack, and that'll become, by the

• 35:44Fareed Zakaria?

  way, from, as I said, the West Bank, the wall has essentially eradicated that threat. You can do the same thing in Gaza, you can build effectively a version of what Sharon built, and Israel will be largely impregnable. And in that circumstance, disentangling these two peoples from their, you know, from this kind of joint existence is probably, in the short term, the only solution.

• 36:12Scott Galloway?

  I love what Robert McNamara said in The Fog of War, that to defeat an enemy, you just, you really have to empathize with them, walk in their shoes, and really try and understand things from their frame. And I look at the objectives of Hamas, or I try to understand the objectives of Hamas on October the sixth, and it was, and I'll outline three, you tell me if you agree, and where this leaves us, but one is, kill Jews. They accomplished that. The second worst day in history for Jews. Two, they, I think, were hoping to bring attention to their plight. And I think they've accomplished that. I think there's a lot of people in America who, when they look closely at Israel's leadership,

• 36:57Scott Galloway?

  do, you know, think Israel has not draped itself in glory. There are huge bigots and racists on the Knesset, over settlements. I think there is a greater understanding of an appreciation for some of the suffering of the residents of Gaza. I think they've achieved that. And the third thing is, I think they were hoping to inspire a multi-front war to see above, number one, kill more Jews. And that has not happened. I'm curious if, if, if, I'm surprised, or I'm, I'm hopeful, happy that, and I think it's the function of two-carrier strike forces sitting offshore. But I'm curious if, if you agree with those three and, and how they have played out.

• 37:36Fareed Zakaria?

  Yeah, I agree entirely with, with those three. I think you put it exactly right. And I think that's why, in some ways, I think that there's a possible path to a solution, because it has made people realize that the current situation is unsustainable, both for Palestinians and Israelis. The reason the third hasn't happened is, is a really interesting one. Because what you're really referring to is the fact that, at one level, Hamas is part of a larger strategy of what, what the Iranians call an axis of resistance. Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Iraq, the Iraqi Shia militias in Iraq, the Assad government in, in Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen.

• 38:20Fareed Zakaria?

  These are all pro-Iranian forces that Iran has variously encouraged and funded. And in some ways, this is part of that larger struggle that, that we were talking about. The Iranian mullahs regard America and its liberal democratic ideology as, you know, the, the kind of great cancer. And they regard Israel as a outpost of Western liberal democracy in the Middle East. That's why they call the, America the Great Satan, and they call Israel the Little Satan. But they are, the Iranians have combined with this kind of religious ideology, the old Persian tradition of pragmatism and real politics. So they're aware that

• 39:01Fareed Zakaria?

  they are facing a formidable foe in the United States. And you talk to administration officials over the years, by the way, and they'll say, there's one thing very interesting about Iran. When you push, they are very cautious. They don't needlessly provoke. They don't needlessly get into, you know, into conflicts. So if you remember that moment when the Houthis fire a drone at Americans in Jordan and they killed three American servicemen, that could easily have blown up. And the Iranians did everything they could to signal, A, they had not authorized this, B, they did not intend to, you know, this was not a step into, in an escalatory cycle if they had anything to do with it. Hezbollah, Nasrallah, the

• 39:44Fareed Zakaria?

  head of Hezbollah, after the October 6th attack, made a very interesting speech where he said, you have our warm wishes, you have our, you know, we have, you have ideological support, but basically you're on your own militarily. We're not going to get into this militarily. So again, you see this very interesting pragmatism that they have. And I think your point, Scott, is exactly right, that Biden did exactly the right thing in sending those two carrier task forces. It just reminds them, you know, if you want to escalate, this can get very messy and the US has incredible firepower.

• 40:17Scott Galloway?

  It's just incredible. It's sort of what's old is new again. If you look at the battle lines in Ukraine, it looks very similar to 1917. And if you look at, your analogy is a really interesting one, agrarian versus naval power. I've heard in almost all the biographies I've written on US presidents, whenever kind of quote, quote, shit gets real, the first question they ask is where are our carriers? It's still really a battle of the seas and delivering violence and firepower via, you know, blue ocean waters. I want to put forward a thesis and I apologize, I'm digressing a bit here, but I'm curious to get your thoughts. I went to UCLA and I had a lot of close friends who were Iranian. There was a big influx into UCLA of Iranians after the revolution. And I always thought

• 41:02Scott Galloway?

  the most American kids in my fraternity were Iranians. They were hardworking, really into commerce, which is a polite way of saying they're capitalist and into money, generous, really into education. Just the most American kids that I thought at UCLA that I met were Iranians. And I'm one of my mentors, Amit Mogadom. I've always thought, I've always held out this hope that it feels to me like Iran and the US, culturally, we would be great allies. That when I go to Israel, I see a version of America. And I always thought if I went into Iran, if Iranians were like the Iranians I know here, and maybe that's self-selection bias. Do you think there's ever a chance that Iran and the US could become allies?

• 41:45Fareed Zakaria?

  Well, I think you're absolutely right about the culture. Iran is a very worldly, it's a trading culture. It's been a trading culture for 5,000 years.

• 41:54Scott Galloway?

  More modern than many Arab nations, right? With the fact of how it treats women.

• 41:58Fareed Zakaria?

  There's a bazaar culture. You know, when I talk to people who negotiate with the Iranians, they say, you know, you always feel like you're in the bazaar. They're always scanning, they're always clever about it.

• 42:09Scott Galloway?

  Love to trade, yeah.

• 42:10Fareed Zakaria?

  The experience you're describing, I have an even more vivid version of that, which is, you know, when I used to go to Egypt and Iran, what I was always struck by was here you'd go to Egypt, where the government was resolutely pro-American and the people hated America. And then you'd go to Iran, where the government hated America and the people loved America. When I went to Iran and you're on the streets of Tehran, they are incredibly pro-American. Now, this has been changed a little bit by the last 10 years of really ruinous sanctions and particularly Trump's withdrawal from the Iran deal, which really meant that Iranians, you know, the brunt of the effect has been felt by ordinary Iranians and they blame America for it.

• 42:53Fareed Zakaria?

  But if you go back 10 years, it was amazing how pro-American the people on the street were. So I think, you know, what we have in Iran is a counter-revolution. If you put it in the terms of my book, a cultural reaction, you know, reactionary forces that have hijacked the country for 35 years now. And it's a reminder that history doesn't always move in a positive direction. For the Iranians, it's been going backwards for a long time. Can that regime break? The problem is, somebody once said about Leninism, when these groups come to power by revolution, they know one thing, how to prevent another revolution. Because they, you know, they're experts at revolution. And this regime is very good at that, I think.

• 43:36Fareed Zakaria?

  They do a mixture of repression, patronage, and escape valves. The repression, we all know. The patronage is they spend a lot of money, particularly in the rural areas, among conservative people, among older people. So they do have a kind of constituency. And the escape valves is they have an election here or there. You know, they do things that in some way let off steam. And by doing all three, they have managed to stay in power despite, you know, frankly, so many predictions that they would leave. So I wish it were not true, but I think it's going to be very hard to dislodge this regime.

• 44:15Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back.

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• 46:25Scott Galloway?

  In our remaining time, I want to talk about domestic affairs. And I'm terrible at sports analogies, but this, I won't stop. I was with my father a couple of weekends ago, and we used to go to Rams games, which were the football team in Los Angeles. And we'd always lose to the Dallas Cowboys and the Minnesota Vikings every year in the playoffs. And my dad would constantly say, there's nothing like the Rams to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And I kept thinking that when I saw him. I was thinking of how he used to say that to me all the time. And I thought, that kind of sums up perfectly how I feel about America right now. We have no reason to lose. We're just so incredibly strong and prosperous right now. And yet it feels like that's not going to stop us, quite frankly, from fucking it all up.

• 47:09Scott Galloway?

  So if someone from the White House called you and said, I'm worried we're about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And distinct, if you want to talk about the election, but I'm not, I think it's bigger than Trump. What do you think are the social policies, or the economic policies, or just the way we approach being American that can save us from ourselves, save us from snatching defeat from the jaws of victory?

• 47:34Fareed Zakaria?

  So, look, I think Biden has been a good president. He has done one thing that has been really important in America. We have, for the last thirty or forty years in America, not had enough public investment. America has been, the story of America has been one of private affluence and public squalor. And Biden with the Infrastructure Act, with the IRA, with the CHIPS Act, all of that is an investment in America, a long-term investment in America. And I think that that was much needed, and a lot of it is going to areas which have been left behind. You know, I think one calculation was two-thirds of the money is going to rural areas, and two-thirds of the jobs being created don't require a college degree.

• 48:18Fareed Zakaria?

  And that's, that's really good, and that's the right direction to go. The thing that Biden is not, I think, understanding enough is, it's not just about money. It's about the sense that these people have that their world has gone away, that their communities have disappeared, their faith has crumbled. You have to play in the cultural arena, and you have to play offense in the cultural arena. You can't be playing defense. And I think on things like immigration, on this whole woke stuff, Biden has to get out there, and he has to make clear that he is not with, you know, all this stuff. The two most successful left-of-center politicians in the last thirty years in the West were

• 49:02Fareed Zakaria?

  Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. And they both understood that if you want to help people, and you want to get your agenda through, and you want to get your ideas implemented, you've got to reassure people that you're not some crazy radical. And it's all culture, it's not economics. So, my favorite example of this is Bill Clinton comes out very powerfully in favor of school uniforms. Now, the President of the United States has almost nothing to do with state education anyway, it's a state government issue, and he has really nothing to do with what clothes people wear at public schools. What he was doing was engaging in symbolic politics to tell all those people out there...

• 49:43Fareed Zakaria?

  I'm not some crazy hippie radical, you know, I believe in what can be more bourgeois, what can be more mainstream than school uniforms. Blair would do similar kinds of things, you know. You've got to realize that people do get unsettled by all this change and they get culturally unsettled. And you can't just, you know, you're not going to be able to bribe them. You've got to engage at that cultural level. Biden should make a speech against the woke agenda. He should go out there and basically declare a national emergency on the border and say, you know, we're not going to, and let the courts challenge it. That's not the point. Clinton had another great line. He'd say, "The American people don't always expect you to succeed, but they want to catch you trying."

• 50:26Fareed Zakaria?

  And Biden needs to be caught trying on some of these issues to show Americans where he is. I think if he did that, it's a powerful combination. You're never going to be wildly popular, but if you look at some of the guys who've managed to survive, Justin Trudeau and Macron, they all do this. They combine being kind of, if you will, tough on some of these cultural issues with economic opportunities for the poor.

• 50:52Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I'm reminded of, inspired a memory of when Clinton, I think he was somewhere in Michigan or a Rust Belt state, and he said, "Your jobs aren't coming back. I'm not going to lie to you." And I think he immediately got so much credibility among moderates, like, "Well, finally, someone's going to be honest with us." I think even the, I think even the union bosses appreciated that. Talk a little bit about what's happening on campuses or any thoughts you have about reform, if any, in higher education.

• 51:24Fareed Zakaria?

  Look, I think American universities are amazing places. Let's not, again, forget the big story. We have the best universities in the world. They do amazing stuff, particularly in the sciences, but even other places. We, you know, the fundamental advantage we have over the rest of the world is other countries, Singapore, South Korea, they teach people how to do well at tests. We teach people how to think and problem solve. That is a fundamentally different way of approaching education. It's a deeply American way and we do it very well now. I think two things have happened over the last twenty or thirty years. One of them is that you have had a certain degree of the, you know, the young population

• 52:07Fareed Zakaria?

  has been getting more left wing for, you know, particularly on cultural issues and things like that, and that's a real trend. That, I don't pay too much attention to that in the sense that people forget, in the early nineteen seventies, the Harvard Crimson was writing editorials in favor of Paul Pau. It was writing editorials arguing that the North Vietnamese should win the Vietnam War because they were the forces of, of progress and liberation. You know, these are nineteen, twenty euros, that, you know, they've often been radical, they've often, there were a lot of Maoists at Yale when I was there.

• 52:40Scott Galloway?

  They're supposed to be pushing the limits, right? That's the idea.

• 52:43Fareed Zakaria?

  Right, exactly. What has changed, and I think what makes it much more cancerous, is this, this building up of this, um, this diversity, equity and inclusion apparatus and bureaucracy. And I want to be clear about one thing, it's not that all these people are bad. Many of them are very good people, they're, they're, they're right minded, they're trying to do the right thing. It's a good example of incentives and institutions. When you create these large bureaucracies, they have a kind of self-perpetuating reason to exist and to, and to grow. And what that rests on is there are being problems, those problems being highlighted, those problems being exacerbated.

• 53:25Fareed Zakaria?

  And one of the things I noticed on, on college campuses, so I was at, went to Yale and then I served on the board, you know, decades later. Between those two periods, mid nineteen eighties when I was at Yale and around, you know, two thousand eight, nine, ten, when I was, when I was on the board, um, what had happened is you had this whole apparatus of segregation.

• 53:49Fareed Zakaria?

  That had built up because you created, you know, African American House, Latin American House, Hillel, South Asian students, African American students, just you created this huge apparatus of these organizations and these administrative officers whose almost job it was to separate people, reinforce that separation, emphasize all the, you know, the problems, the, you know, the lack of, you know, the kind of ways in which people felt discriminated. And what that ended up being was it in some total, what you ended up doing was creating a more segregated, more resentful, more hostile campus than was

• 54:34Fareed Zakaria?

  necessary because you're feeding these fires instead of saying, we're a campus about integration. You know, what we really want to find is to see the commonality in all of you. And I understand where, you know, as I say, it might have been well motivated, but what you've now created is a completely balkanized campus where you have these, you know, these groups that think of themselves as victims, this bureaucracy that feeds that. And every time they, there's a problem, they, the demand is give us more money, give us more funding, you know, so it reinforces the segregated identities. And I think this is a huge problem and it's fundamentally illiberal because we are not looking at human beings as human

• 55:14Fareed Zakaria?

  beings anymore. We're looking at them based on a script of identities of race, ethnicity, national origin, which is fundamentally opposed to the liberal project, which sees, as Martin Luther King so beautifully put it, judges people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

• 55:32Scott Galloway?

  Fareed Zakaria is the host of CNN's flagship international affairs show Fareed Zakaria GPS, as well as a weekly columnist for the Washington Post. He is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, including Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World and his latest, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. He joins us from his home in New York. Fareed, I always, you're, you're one of the few reasons I turn on the television, Premier League games, and I like to watch you for whatever reason on the big screen in our home. I think you're doing fantastic work and having a huge impact. Appreciate your time.

• 56:09Fareed Zakaria?

  As they say in the Talmud, from your lips to God's ears.

• 56:13Scott Galloway?

  There you go, Fareed. Thanks, man.

• 56:21Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Caroline Shageran. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod on the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show.

• 56:38Speaker 04

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• 57:08Speaker 05

  I'm Glenn Washington. This is Snap Judgment from KQED. When everything is falling apart, what do you do? Hurricane Helane shut everything down. No roads, no cars, no way through, but his daughter was getting married. And somehow, some way, he was going to walk her down that aisle.

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