Cold War II + An Update on Global Conflicts — with Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson, a historian, author, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and columnist at The Free Press, joins Scott to discuss why we’re currently in Cold War II, his thoughts on the US presidential candidates, and gives us an update on conflicts happening around the world. @nfergus. Scott opens with his thoughts on the DOJ’s antitrust hammer on Google. Algebra of Happiness™: where you live. Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Buy "The Algebra of Wealth," out now. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 0:56Scott Galloway?

  Episode 311, 311 is the number in NYC you call for non-emergency city services. Choose to it. I almost called 911 and said, I am masturbating too much. And the operator said, that's not really a problem. So I put him on speakerphone and said, see, Mom? Get off my case. Go, go, go!

• 1:25Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 311th episode of The Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Neil Ferguson, the Milbake Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He's also a columnist at the Free Press and the author of 16 books. We discuss with Neil why he believes we are currently in Cold War II, the state of play with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and who he thinks is likely to prevail in the upcoming presidential election. I'm a huge fan of Neil. I love, Neil's the real deal. Neil writes these incredibly intense, long, really well-researched books. He loves writing, and then he's used his platform as kind of a world-class historian

• 2:08Scott Galloway?

  to launch a consulting business called Green Mantle that is really... Powerful, very similar, kind of along the same veins as Eurasia Group with Ian Bremmer. But anyways, I'm a huge fan of Neil. He's a great thinker. We have almost nothing in common politically. His views are much different than mine, but his views inform mine because he's such a clear blue flame thinker. And I love how he couches everything in a historical reference. Okay. Before we get to that, what's happening? What's happening? Where's the dog barking?

• 2:38Scott Galloway?

  Where's he barking? I am still in Aspen, but I'm heading to Nantucket this weekend on the privileged white douchebag tour. That's right. Why am I headed to Nantucket? So let's talk a little bit about the two. I love Aspen. This is where I'm definitely going to hang out. I bought a home here. And then Tucket, I did not want to like. Why did I not want to like Nantucket? I think of myself as being sort of Euro fabulous. I have that impression of myself and I'm a little cool, a little edgy. None of those things. And then Tucket is very Americana, like the pink shorts, the kind of cobblestone streets. It's actually a really interesting town. It's sort of where venture capital originated. The captain would raise money, pull together a team and then go hunting for whales and then come

• 3:20Scott Galloway?

  back. And if they got a bunch of whales, then make a bunch of money. And it is spectacularly beautiful. And I like places where my boys can just go free and not get into too much trouble. My parents were worried about me getting in too much trouble. I'm worried my boys are going to get into too little. So I like pushing them out and shoving them out and hoping that they find some fun. But I absolutely love it there. And it gives me a chance to come back to New York and work. What did I vacation when I was younger? First vacation I ever took, my mom took me to Niagara Falls. No joke. We went to, we saw the Canadian side of the waterfall, which is much more impressive. And then we went to this, we went to the kind of this camp where we stayed in a cabin with her other

• 4:00Scott Galloway?

  single mother friend and their daughter, or her daughter, Annette. And we went to kind of this little camp where, you know, the big highlight was the tire swing. We did. So my vacationing is a much different complexion now. But it was a ton of fun when you're a kid being outdoors, having a lot of fun. I don't know how I got here. Should we get back to the podcast? Okay. So moving on, Google got hit with a massive antitrust hammer. Boom, said the FTC and the DOJ. Oh, my God. Couldn't happen to a nicer group of people. What do you know? A federal judge ruled on Monday that Google is an illegal monopoly when it comes to its search business. The ruling claims that Google has not achieved its stronghold on search just by happenstance.

• 4:45Scott Galloway?

  It's hired highly skilled engineers, innovated consistently, and made shrewd business decisions. Okay, I'm not sure that makes their case. But anyways, what they are, I believe, guilty of is something called monopoly maintenance. What do we mean by that? And that is, search is really unusual in the sense that it ages in reverse. What do I mean by that? The companies that have any shot at becoming a trillion dollar company, and I think this is something entrepreneurs should take note of, is they age in reverse. It's what I call the Benjamin Button effect. And I wrote about this in my New York Times Bestseller of the Four by Scott Galloway, which, by the way, has been optioned for an original scripted drama. We'll see how that goes. I'm going to LA this week to pitch a bunch of the platforms. Literally, the biggest story that's never been told, or not told yet, is about big tech. But anyways, we'll see.

• 5:27Scott Galloway?

  But effectively, the companies that, in fact, run to a trillion dollars defy biology. Benjamin Button, a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a father whose heart is broken because he loses his son in World War I and thinks that if he builds a clock that perfectly goes in reverse, then maybe he can reverse time and bring back his son. It's actually a really lovely story and was made into a wonderful movie starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, who are just really easy on the eyes. Oh, my God. Anyways, where was I? The Benjamin Button, aging in reverse. That is what trillion dollar companies do. They age in reverse. They defy biology. What happens when you drive a car off the lot? It loses about 30% of its value, literally, when you drive off the lot.

• 6:09Scott Galloway?

  When you twist the cap off of toothpaste, it loses 100% of its value. You just can't, it's not resalable. That is the pace of most companies. So that's the cadence in most products, is they age in reverse. I'm sitting here looking at all this equipment, a ring light that makes me look... Like Joe Biden in 10 years. Jesus Christ, look how fucking ugly I am. Anyway, all of this shit ages, like everything. Most, most business mimics biology, but the companies that bust a move towards a trillion defy biology and they age in reverse, mostly through network effects or agility. And search is one of those. And that is every time someone searches, the next search gets better because the links you pick inform which links are the best links to present higher in the query results than the search before it. So it ages

• 6:54Scott Galloway?

  in reverse. So size matters and creates a better and better search product such that it makes sense for Google or Alphabet to go and pay Apple $20 billion to become the default search engine. And what happens, that gets some additional traffic, gives them more pricing power, and slowly but surely they run away with it. And they have these deals with a variety of different companies. And essentially, they've become, their position has become unassailable. Now, was that the smart thing to do? Yeah. But is it create monopoly power and monopoly abuse where they charge greater rents on advertisers, basically every other company in the world? Yes. As a matter of fact, essentially Airbnb, which is my largest position, the reason why Airbnb is so powerful for shareholders is it's one

• 7:38Scott Galloway?

  of the few companies that's been able to exit the stranglehold that is Google or Meta. What do I mean by that? These are giant toll booths at an Amazon, that basically every e-commerce, every information age company, every, every institution or organization that wants to acquire customers online, see above everybody, has to go and pay a toll through one of these three organizations. And slowly but surely, they have increased the rents on the rest of the corporate world. So what would be the biggest tax cut in history? The biggest tax cut in history is if you made these markets more competitive and broke them up. And effectively, that's what they're saying here, is that the monopoly rents they are charging, because everybody has to use Google, has gotten to the point where it is stifling competition. And because they have access to cheaper and cheaper capital because of their monopoly position, they can become, go out and basically buy their

• 8:21Scott Galloway?

  position as the default search engine across the largest platforms. And effectively run away with it. And this is what you refer to as monopoly maintenance. One of the important points the ruling makes is that, in fact, that Google charges a supra competitive prices for general search ads, meaning that they're getting unfair rents. I think there's tremendous innovation to be unlocked in search. Once they, in fact, break these companies up. As a matter of fact, you kind of could argue that ChatGPT is a function of the innovator's dilemma, where this $170 billion business called search, right? It's actually 175 billion, had no vested interest in innovating. And as a result, ChatGPT or AI came in and said, we're not going to give you every answer in 0.0055 seconds. We're not going to give you 1100 results.

• 9:05Scott Galloway?

  We're going to give you one and we're going to try and do our best to give you the best answer. But still, this is a good decision. This is absolutely evidence of what I think is the smartest thing to oxygenate the economy and the complexion of the Biden-Harris administration around making markets more competitive and breaking up big tech. So I think this is good for the ecosystem, good for the planet, good for consumers. And also, I believe it's good for Alphabet. If you're an Alphabet shareholder, I think you want YouTube spun. I don't think you want them cooperating and coordinating with Google Search. I think YouTube on its own probably trades, would trade at a greater multiple because it is the premier. Everyone talks about Netflix, TikTok. I actually think arguably the most dominant video search and video platform amongst people

• 9:48Scott Galloway?

  under the age of 30 is probably YouTube. And I just think it's fantastic that Lena Kahn and Jonathan Cantor have taken a more aggressive approach to this. What will be the remedy? That'll be really interesting. Could they break them up? Could, I don't think they'll do it fine because that doesn't mean anything for these companies. Will they maybe ask Apple or demand that those players present multiple options? And then you get to pick which search engine you want? I don't know, we're going to see, it's going to be really, the remedy part of this case is going to be super interesting. We've already seen TikTok playing an interesting role in search, particularly for Gen Z. Axios reported that 21% of 18 to 24 year olds start their search journey with TikTok. Oh my God, 21% search share on TikTok.

• 10:33Scott Galloway?

  Who would have thought that? Lucky it's not controlled by an adversary that wants to deposition. America and train our youth to hate America. But anyways, Amazon, Instagram, Snap, and of course, ChatGPT have also played a big part in where and what people search for. Google shares closed down four and a half percent on Monday because of the ruling. Analysts speculate that Apple would face a blow if one of the court remedies prevents Google from paying to be the default search engine. You've got to imagine that $20 billion a year payment, about 19.9 of it hits the bottom line. And then their multiple on profits, I think it's about 30 or 33. So you're looking at about a $600 billion hit to their share price if all of a sudden it were to, if shareholders would decide, okay, they're going to have their EBITDA reduced by 20% here.

• 11:17Scott Galloway?

  I don't know if it's going to have a big impact on Apple because I think what Apple could probably do is get that same $20 billion. Can they get $20 billion? I don't know. They control custody to the billion wealthiest people in the world called iOS users. And if it's not Google, it's going to be someone else that they'll backfill and say, do you want to be the premier or the default search query AI here? I think they're still in a pretty good position. Alphabet also, I don't think, I don't think their shareholders are going to get hurt because I think a breakup would actually be good for the company. But this definitely sends, I think, a healthy flare across the bow of these companies which have become way too powerful. What's some evidence down that way? If you got your flight canceled a few Fridays ago, it's because of the concentration in

• 11:59Scott Galloway?

  the tech industry where basically entire airlines were shut down because one company, CrowdStrike, had to be integrated into the dominant operating system, which is Microsoft. And effectively, they found they were so reliant. What was really interesting is the COA Bastian came out and announced a half a billion dollar lawsuit against CrowdStrike and Microsoft. But he didn't say, we're switching vendors or switching technology. Why? Because he can't because see above monopoly power. The best thing we could do to oxygenate the economy would be, one, to restore senior US relations, the first and second largest economy, kissing and making up would bring down the price of everything globally. They got manufacturing and supply chain down. We got IP innovation and consumer demand. Come on, let's kiss and make up. Anyways, anyways, that would be the number one tax cut.

• 12:42Scott Galloway?

  The number two tax cut would be the breakup of big tech who are every day increasing their rents on essentially every business in the world. We'll be right back for our conversation with Neil Ferguson.

• 12:57Scott Galloway?

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• 14:00Scott Galloway?

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• 14:45Scott Galloway?

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• 15:06Scott Galloway?

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• 15:51Scott Galloway?

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• 16:23Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Neil Ferguson, the Milbeig Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. Neil Ferguson, where does this podcast find you?

• 16:37Speaker 03

  I cannot disclose my location for reasons of national security, but I'll say New England.

• 16:45Scott Galloway?

  New England, wow, very mysterious. So first off, let's bust right into it, starting with something topical. The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovitz has been freed as part of what the White House National Security Advisor described as a historic exchange, something not seen since the Cold War. Neil, what do you make of this?

• 17:03Speaker 03

  Well, I've been saying for the last six years that we're in Cold War II, and there you go. It's a very Cold War thing to do prisoner exchanges with the other side. And so for me, it's fresh evidence, if fresh evidence were needed, that we're in a new Cold War. And Russia, as in the first Cold War, is on the other side. So of course, is China, so is Iran, so is North Korea. But this is a good day, because obviously, Evan's release was something that everybody who has any connection with journalism was praying for.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  And although, of course, we've had to let some Russian spies go to get him out, I'm inclined to think that that is a price worth paying.

• 18:00Scott Galloway?

  Let me ask you, though, when Brittany Griner was exchanged for, you know, this merchant of death, I think his name was Viktor Bout. I was worried we were setting up a series of incentives that encouraged Russia and other, kind of, for lack of a better term, axis of evil nations to take more and more people prisoner on unfounded charges. Do you have any, and we don't know what they're trading for here, but do you think this sets up poor incentives that will only result in more Americans being incarcerated?

• 18:32Speaker 03

  It's possible. On the other hand, they're not going to stop spying. And we're not going to stop trying to catch their spies. If the lesson of the Cold War is relevant here, that didn't produce an escalating cycle of prisoner-taking. And so I wouldn't expect that to happen in this case, mainly because there are bigger pieces on the chessboard than spies and journalists. And in the end, the Cold War is like a massive game of chess. And these are pawns.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  Or if there were pieces smaller than PONs, they would be, they would be those. And the Russians have much bigger pieces that they want to move and bigger pieces of ours that they want to take, like, say, Ukraine. And in that sense, there's no, there's no obvious rationale in their accumulating more ill will by arresting more journalists. And I'd be surprised if it happened on a larger scale in the coming years.

• 19:43Scott Galloway?

  So let's use that as a jumping out point, talking about the war in Ukraine. Give us what you think the state of play is there, what you think a likely outcome is, and how you would approach it, or what advice you would have for Western policymakers as it relates to Ukraine?

• 19:58Speaker 03

  Well, there are two, perhaps more than two, but two plausible futures, depending on who wins the election on November 5th. In the scenario in which Kamala Harris wins, there'll be a continuity of the policy that has got us to where we are. And that policy has been outwardly to support Ukraine and its maximum war aims by saying, Ukraine sets the war aims privately to continue the war at such a level of support that Ukraine

• 20:42Speaker 03

  doesn't lose, but not at such a level that it can win. That policy, I imagine, would continue into the next four years if Harris wins, because I wouldn't expect a big change to the national security strategy or team. There'd be some changes, but I don't think there would be a huge shift. And the danger with that policy became obvious last year and earlier this year. If the US stops its support for Ukraine, then Ukraine loses. For six months.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  The House of Representatives cut off financial military aid from the US to Ukraine. The Europeans couldn't compensate for the shortfall. And Ukraine started to lose the war because it simply cannot maintain its defenses along this now very long front without American support. And so the risk of a protracted war without a conclusion is that at some point we lose interest or politics leads us to lose interest. And then I think Ukraine loses the war. I was always against prolonging the war. I said in late 2022, when it was going well for Ukraine, that it would have been ideal

• 22:03Speaker 03

  to lock in some kind of peace negotiation then, when Ukraine's fortunes were at their height. Because if it dragged on, the sheer superiority of Russian resources would be bound to tell. So that's one future, and it's not one that I or indeed my Ukrainian friends find very appetizing, especially because in this future, you'd expect a President Harris to be as easily intimidated by threats of nuclear escalation as President Biden has been. From a very early stage in the war, the Russians realized that if they said nuclear weapons, the Biden administration would kind of pull back.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  And this has put a lid on the support that the Biden administration has given Ukraine. It's, I think, the best explanation for why support has been enough not to lose but not enough to win. So now let's imagine scenario two, in which Donald Trump is re-elected after a four-year intermission. What would that be like? Many people wrongly assume that Trump would just throw Zelensky, President Zelensky of Ukraine, under the nearest available bus and do a deal with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, that would be hugely favorable for Russia. That is not, I think, what would happen. And the reason I say that is that one national security spokesman after another

• 23:31Speaker 03

  on the Republican side has come out against that kind of isolationist, the hell with Ukraine stance in recent months. If you look closely at what Trump says, if you look closely at what J D Vance said to the New York Times last week, you will see that the Trump plan is radically different. The Trump plan is to put huge pressure on Russia, economic and military, make the sanctions bite more, make the weapons available to Ukraine more powerful in order to force Putin to the negotiating table. And then you're going to try and rerun the Korean peace of nineteen fifty-three, where you don't actually ever get to a peace agreement, but you have an armistice so the fighting

• 24:16Speaker 03

  stops. And then this nasty border just kind of stabilizes roughly where it is. I think that's, that's the very different future that, that we'll get if, if Trump wins.

• 24:29Scott Galloway?

  That sounds like in some sort of endorsement of the Trump plan as it relates to Ukraine. And what I would say is, and I don't know this as well as we, I'm trying this closely, but, you know, I remember Trump saying I'd have this done in a day. And my sense is that Putin and his supporters are bigger fans or are hoping for a Trump administration. But you think that actually a Trump administration would in fact go harder at Russia in the short term, trying to force a deal?

• 24:58Speaker 03

  Well, that's, I think, exactly what Mike Pompeo said in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. He said, the sanctions have not been enforced nearly hard enough. We need to go after the Russian banks. We need to really make the Russian economy hurt. We need to confiscate the reserves and make them available to Ukraine as reparations. And we need to step up the firepower that we give Ukraine in order to force our negotiation upon the Russians. And I'm not endorsing Donald Trump when I say that that makes more sense to me as a plan than carrying on with what we're currently doing, which I think will lead to Ukraine's

• 25:42Speaker 03

  defeat. The longer this lasts, and the more we drip feed weapons to Ukraine, the more likely it is that ultimately Russia's superior manpower, superior raw materials, superior resources, together lead to victory. And we really have to avoid Russian victory. So I think it makes sense to try and get to an armistice. And what's interesting is that if you talk to people close to Zelensky, they will privately say, we kind of prefer this to what we're getting from Biden, which is this drip feeding of support and this constant language of de-escalation. The problem about the word de-escalation, which the Biden

• 26:27Speaker 03

  administration loves as a word, is that in practice, it means the opposite of deterrence. And you need to have some deterrence. You have to make it clear to Russia that it will cost them to carry on this war if you're going to have any kind of peace negotiation. Of course, it doesn't get done in a day. These things never get done in a day. It'll take six months, 12 months. And I don't think even at the end of 12 months, there'll be agreement on everything. But if you can get an armistice, a ceasefire even, that hugely helps Ukraine, even at the cost of accepting for who knows how long that the Russians control a part of their territory and that the frontier between them and the bad guys would be a very dangerous place for quite a long time to come.

• 27:12Scott Galloway?

  So just for the purposes of discussion, some pushback. I see that Biden and Harris have distinctive some dysfunction in Congress that, as you said, delayed funding for the war for six months, which was, I think, I would describe more of a lack of leadership on the part of Congress, not necessarily Biden and Harris, in that this has been, in my view, I think of the president as the CEO responsible for allocating resources to their greatest return. I would argue this return has been one of the greatest investments the West has ever made. We've taken out what a third of Russia's kinetic power, defanged the reputation of the supposedly ferocious army, given she pause before he tries to invade.

• 27:53Scott Galloway?

  Taiwan, without ever even putting a boot on the ground, an American boot on the ground, NATO is out of its brain coma, Europe is finally unified, and I don't want to in any way diminish the incredible loss of human life on both sides. And then on the other side, this notion that the Trump administration would put forward more pressure, when I hear JD Vance consistently saying he's indifferent and doesn't care about Ukraine, you don't worry that it emboldens Putin to be less apt or inclined to accept some sort of deal or armistice here? I see the opposite. I see this emboldening Russia, not getting them to the negotiation table.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  The problem with your first point is that this business strategy, as you describe it, doesn't look good if after three years, your enterprise goes bust. If after three years...

• 28:43Scott Galloway?

  You mean Ukraine loses?

• 28:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:45Scott Galloway?

  You mean if Ukraine were just to lose?

• 28:47Speaker 03

  Yes. And that's a highly likely scenario. It's not a surprise that the United States embarks on a war and then after two years, finds that domestic support for it ebbs away. That's not new. Domestic support for aid to multiple countries in Cold War I faded. And so to say that it's all the fault of the House of Representatives, this is slightly missed the point. It was obvious from the outset that there would be a finite amount of domestic patience in channeling resources to a war in Eastern Europe that really ought to be much more a concern of Europeans than Americans.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  I think the risk that they ran, when they said to themselves, which they did, let's keep this going because we're really destroying Russia's military capability, the risk that they ran was that in the end, if Russia won, albeit at a high cost, then Putin would be the winner. So I think this was a very poor business strategy, and I said so at the time. It would have been much smarter to try and push for a peace or at least an armistice. When the war was going really badly for the Russians, which it was in late 2022, when they were driven back from Kharkiv, they nearly lost a large amount of their military outside Kherson. That was a moment when I think he could have attempted a negotiation. And we didn't do that because we thought, we're so clever.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  We're going to fight to the last Ukrainian and exhaust Russia's military. Point one. Point two, Vance has changed his tone. Because it's been explained to him and to Speaker Mike Johnson and to all the people in the House. This is what happens if Ukraine loses. And what's been fascinating to me, Scott, over the last six months or so, has been to see that the isolationist faction within the Republican Party, which is quite well represented in the House of Representatives, has been routed. And the reason that it's been routed is that they had it explained to them in, I presume, intelligence briefings, what would happen if Ukraine lost?

• 30:58Speaker 03

  And then they realized that not only would Putin be laughing, but so would Xi Jinping. And what's interesting in this past six months is that the argument that I made last year is now almost conventional wisdom amongst Republicans, namely that there is an axis of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, that it is engaged in a Cold War against the United States and its allies. And a victory for Russia in Ukraine is a victory for Xi Jinping, as surely as it's a victory for Vladimir Putin. Republicans have had that explained to them. They've had it drummed into their heads that if you let Russia win, it's a very bad outcome for the US and its allies, and a very good outcome for China and its allies.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  So I think there's been a big shift. Not everybody's noticed this, but I think it's very important because it means that Putin, who is certainly paying attention, is realizing that a Trump administration won't simply hand in Ukraine in a phone call. I think that that scenario was never very likely, and it's certainly not going to happen now.

• 32:04Scott Galloway?

  Thoughts on the war in the Middle East?

• 32:06Speaker 03

  Well, we're speaking of what could be the eve of a new war, the one that is brewing between Israel and Hezbollah. The probability that that war happens this August is, I think, high now after the events of recent days. It's pretty clear that Benjamin Netanyahu came back from Washington and made like Al Pacino in The Godfather and settled family business with the succession of remarkable hits against Israel's enemies. It's difficult for me to see that there isn't retaliation for that.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  I think the Israelis expect it. It's possible that the Iranians and Hezbollah duck because they don't want to be drawn into that conflict. On the other hand, they may realize that there's some non-trivial probability that Donald Trump gets re-elected, in which case their situation is going to be much worse next year because Trump will ramp up the pressure on Iran in a way that Biden has not. So I'm afraid we're probably on the eve of a war that will make the war against Hamas look quite small because Hezbollah has much, much better armed than Hamas. It has a formidable arsenal of weapons and missiles. And if this war does break out, as I think is increasingly likely,

• 33:34Speaker 03

  it's going to be a bloody war for both sides and Israel will certainly suffer more casualties than it has in the war in Gaza.

• 33:42Scott Galloway?

  It appears that the calculation is that Israel's decided they're ready, that they're up for that fight. Your thoughts?

• 33:48Speaker 03

  It's been a debate within the government since October the 7th. I was in Israel in the spring and met with members of the government as well as with their opponents and the critics of Mr. Netanyahu. And what struck me was that although the political divisions remain very deep in Israel and hostility to Bibi is something that is very widespread.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  Nevertheless, October the seventh changed something in Israel and created a new unity, not a political unity, but a unity of purpose. The sense that a second Holocaust was premeditated, was being planned by the likes of Hamas, has greatly changed the atmosphere in the country. And it has made even my liberal friends in Tel Aviv more or less write off the idea of a Palestinian state and more or less acquiesce in a very aggressive policy directed against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and now Hezbollah.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  So if you go back to the days after October the seventh, when we were all reeling from the sheer horror of what was done by Hamas and its confederates, the debate that was going on within the Israeli government was, do we hit Hamas or do we actually go after Hezbollah? And Defence Minister Gallant and other military advisers said we should go after Hezbollah because it's the stronger of our enemies. And the planes were on their way, they had taken off to hit Hezbollah when Netanyahu overruled that that decision and said, no, we we go after Hamas first. So the, as always, the Middle East needs to be understood partly through the lens of

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Israeli domestic politics. Many people forget just how important that is, given it's the only democracy in the region, you have to follow its democracy closely. And that battle about when do we hit Hezbollah has been going on ever since October. And I think ultimately, the realisation is you can't postpone indefinitely a showdown. A, because they keep acquiring more weaponry. B, because your people near the Lebanese border were evacuated many months ago now, and they want to go back to their homes. You've got a very large displaced population that was moved away from the Lebanese border. If you want to get them back in time for the school year, you have to do this now in August. So I think, although one can never

• 36:29Speaker 03

  be certain, I think we're quite close to the brink of a new phase of the Middle Eastern conflict, which in any cases is a multi-front war already. It's not just about Gaza, though that's what has dominated media coverage. It's also about Iran's direct attacks on Israel. It's about the Houthis. This is a very complex picture. But Hezbollah is the organization that poses the most clear and present threat to Israel. And sooner or later, there's going to be a showdown. And I think the argument that has been made by the Israeli security services and armed services is why wait for them to hit us first? Why give them the initiative? If we take the initiative, then we're likely to suffer

• 37:14Speaker 03

  fewer casualties than if they do.

• 37:17Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I felt as if, I don't know if assassinations are the right word, or strikes, were pretty bold. And that Israel, the way I read it was Israel believes that they are coming to an end of the war in Gaza, that the tunnels are nearly taken out. They've kind of cut the region in half and controlling the flow of Hamas. I was actually struck by how bold this was, that they're effectively willing to open up a two-front war. Is that your sense of it?

• 37:42Speaker 03

  Yes, I don't think it's born of overconfidence, though. Rather, the opposite. I think there's considerable disquiet about the extent to which Hamas has really been destroyed. There's a sense that Israel has to act now, because the longer it waits, the worse the situation becomes. So I think this decision to force the issue with Iran and with Hezbollah has been taken because they realize that they're getting nowhere.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  With ceasefire negotiations, with the hostage negotiations, because there's no good faith on the side of Hamas, their situation internationally is one of relative isolation. That's not new in the history of Israel. And the support that they've received from Biden administration has been tepid, ambivalent, and there are elements of the administration that clearly still somehow to believe that you can reach a modus vivendi with Iran or resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal. So the Israelis have decided, it might as well be now. It's not ideal, but if not now, when? Is our situation really going to be better next year? I think that's what's going on.

• 39:05Scott Galloway?

  You think it's fair to call the Biden support of Israel or involvement of Israel tepid? My understanding is it'd be difficult to point to any country in the world, in my view, that has provided more steadfast support than the US, immediately deploying carrier strike forces, coordinating around intelligence, coordinating around defense systems for the missile attack from Iran. You really think it's fair to call the support from the US tepid?

• 39:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do. I mean, because apart from the initial fine words that Joe Biden uttered, the support has been publicly, internationally tepid. Of course, these things are all relative. The US is more supportive of Israel than any European country. Yeah, I mean, there are European countries that are recognizing a Palestinian state this year, even though it doesn't exist, doesn't seem likely to exist. But if you compare Biden's administration with, say, Richard Nixon's in 1973, which was the last time Israel suffered the surprise attack. The scale of the support was far greater then.

• 40:16Speaker 03

  US support for Israel is much less important economically than it was 50 years ago. Much, much smaller share of Israeli GDP because the Israeli economy is actually a much bigger and more innovative economy. So one mustn't make the mistake of thinking that the US is absolutely crucial to Israel. It's much less crucial than it was from a military as well as an economic standpoint. But it's not indispensable. And so, for example, the big problem that doesn't get talked about nearly enough is that Iran is now very close to having a nuclear capability. I asked a Biden official not so long ago, are you in fact acting like they do have nuclear capability? Are you treating them as if they already are a nuclear arm power?

• 41:01Speaker 03

  Because although you sent two aircraft carrier groups, they didn't actually do anything to punish Iran for its obvious complicity in October the 7th. And on the whole, the administration tried after October the 7th to pretend like Iran wasn't involved, which got hard to do when the Iranians unleashed a direct drone missile attack on Israel for the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic. So I think this kind of ambivalence, which characterizes the administration as a whole, is in marked contrast to the support that Israel could count on in the 70s when that support was absolutely indispensable. I'll add one other point.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Back in the 70s, you did not have a wing of the Democratic Party, the progressive wing, taking the side of the Palestinians. And so the politics is very different in 2024 as compared with 1974. In 1974, the Democratic Party was pretty strongly supportive of Israel and had a significant Jewish element, which Nixon used to complain about because he would always bitch that he was doing so much for Israel and where was the gratitude, typical Nixon? But we're in a very different world today where, you know, although Joe Biden's still kind of rooted in that era, and I think he means it when he talks about the US commitment to Israel.

• 42:25Speaker 03

  There are plenty of people to the left of Joe Biden who certainly don't feel that way. We'll be right back.

• 42:35Speaker 04

  Here's your report.

• 42:36Speaker 05

  Oh, thanks, Jane. I wish I could hire someone just like you.

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• 42:55Speaker 05

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• 44:40Scott Galloway?

  So let's move to the US. You said that Vice President Harris is a California Democrat through and through, therefore will be hard to draw in moderate voters. And also, you've described the Republicans remain the captives of the personality called the MAGA movement, and the Democrats remain the captives of the donor crats, the wealthy friends of the Clintons and the Obamas. Give us what you think the state of play is in the election, and who do you think is likely to prevail in November?

• 45:07Speaker 03

  Well, anybody who tells you they know the answer to that question in August of an election year, I think, is having you on. It's, once again, close to a coin toss. We've gone back to where we were on the eve of the debate that blew Joe Biden's hopes of reelection up. And the polls are going to be noisy, probably for the next few weeks, because not only do you have the bounce that comes with the novel nominee, but you have the problem bounce that comes with the convention. So my sense is that when all of this bouncing

• 45:49Speaker 03

  is over and we get to Labor Day, there will be some return to where we were in June, with Trump slightly ahead, but with some polls putting Harris ahead and within the margin of error. And then you'll look at the states that are in play, and you'll say, well, it's still pretty close in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan, and maybe there are some other states that have changed a bit since Harris became the nominee. But it's close. And that's not surprising, because if you set aside the personalities of the candidates, which media, they pay more attention to than is warranted, American politics is

• 46:32Speaker 03

  really run by two machines, Republican and Democratic Party machines. And these machines are very good at delivering most states and most counties within most states to one or other party, leaving very little contested ground. And the contested ground is contested partly because it just has demographic peculiarities, and partly because there are independent voters who are up for grabs, who vote one way in one election and another way in another. So When you kind of take a step back and look at American politics, two things are really striking. One, it's a two-party system still, and there aren't any others like that everywhere else, including in the English-speaking world, where they used to have two-party

• 47:17Speaker 03

  systems like the UK. It doesn't have a two-party system anymore. But the US has institutionalized a duopoly, and it's extraordinarily difficult to get into that, to break that duopoly, even although about a third of the electorate say they're independents and would rather that they had another option. Second really striking thing is that one party has retained elite control, Democrats. That's why I use the term donorcrats, because the wealthy elites currently in the Hamptons or in Aspen, that elite still controls the party. They determined that Biden was no longer viable, and they agreed that it would be Harris and that they

• 47:57Speaker 03

  wouldn't have a contested or open convention. All of this was done with phone calls and texts between, oh, perhaps a dozen people who made the decision. The difference with the Republican Party is that their equivalents, the wealthy Republican donors, no longer control the party. Those people would have far rather, Ron DeSantis was the nominee, and when that didn't work out, they would far rather have had Nikki Haley. But they failed because a MAGA movement that is part of personality cult around Donald Trump now controls the Republican Party. And that's what makes this election close, because if

• 48:37Speaker 03

  you had a better organized, better disciplined Republican machine and a more conventional candidate, you would absolutely clean up in this election. The Democrats are very vulnerable on key issues. They had an inflation mistake that was predictable, and people haven't forgiven them. They have an immigration problem on their hands because of the southern border. Those two issues alone should ensure that the next president's a Republican. But because the Republican Party is no longer under the control of its elites, it's capable of making tremendous self-harming mistakes. And that may give Kamala Harris a chance to be President of the United States.

• 49:21Scott Galloway?

  So just on the inflation issue, I would argue it's unfair to lay it at the feet of Biden. My sense of inflation is too many dollars facing too few products. And with the amount of stimulus... Presented with in both the Trump and Biden administration where eighty five percent of it was saved and it just went into the market, which sent prices skyrocketing and had more money chasing Tufu products. And ultimately, I would argue the culprit of inflation is Putin, who interrupted the supply chain. Don't you think both Trump and Biden share equal blame along with Putin for inflation? I just think it's unfair to say that Biden had a misstep around inflation that's any greater than the misstep around Trump. Your thoughts?

• 49:59Speaker 03

  Scott, I seem to remember that your family hails, as mine does from the East and I don't remember anybody in Sheffield.

• 50:09Scott Galloway?

  Sandy Hills.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  Nobody in Sandy Hills ever said life was fair. In fact, it was a recurrent refrain of my childhood. Life isn't fair. Get used to it. No, of course, politics is not fair, and the voters are deeply unfair to Joe Biden when it comes to the performance of the economy, which practically any president of the last hundred years would have seized with both hands if it had been offered. Here's the deal. You get full employment, you get surging growth, you get investment in manufacturing structures. I mean.

• 50:47Scott Galloway?

  Markets touching all time highs.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  And the stock market's roaring and inflation has a nine percent high in the midterm year and then it then it falls back towards two percent. I mean, the presidents going all the way back a hundred years would have taken the data that this president has presided over with relish. And yet, the voters bitch about the economy to every pollster who calls them up. And why is that? So there are two theories, as you know, Scott. Theory one is they just don't forgive nine percent because they got real, really used to low single digit inflation and high single digit inflation has made them mad. And they like

• 51:30Speaker 03

  the price level. They don't care about core CPI or core PCE. They're just like, hey, it's still expensive compared with what it was. That that's explanation number one. I have a lot of sympathy with that explanation because it tracks with my observation of how ordinary people think about the economy. But then there's the Larry Summers point, which you probably know, which is, well, actually, higher rates might not hurt you through your mortgage if you have a thirty year mortgage, but it hurts you through a whole bunch of other things, a whole bunch of other debts you have. So. You take your pick. My my basic view of this is that the Democrats were dreaming last year when they said they were going to run on Bidenomics because the voters hate Bidenomics

• 52:08Speaker 03

  and it's unfair. I will I will add the fair part is that the inflation overshoot in the US was a direct consequence of fiscal overkill in 2021 that was the result of hubris in the Biden administration. They did not need to throw so much money at the economy when the vaccines had 90% plus efficacy. And I said that at the time, Summers also said it, that this was an avoidable policy error. They did not need to juice the economy as aggressively as they did. Most of the inflation in Europe was Putin's fault. It was basically a supply shock. About half or more the inflation in the US was a demand effect, which I think came from keeping the stimulus

• 52:53Speaker 03

  going too long after the pandemic was was beginning to dissipate.

• 52:58Scott Galloway?

  And then finally, as we wrap up here, both of us have spent time in different directions and different tenures in different parts of our life, but in the UK and the US, I would argue those are the two nations you know the best, they're the two nations I know the best. And my understanding is you're now spending more time in the UK after spending a lot of time in the US. Can you compare and contrast what the difference between business and politics and general lifestyle between your observations, having spent time in both countries and what it says about us?

• 53:27Speaker 03

  Yes, well, Britain, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to be precise, is despite a brief foray with a republican government in the mid 17th century, a monarchy that retains a hereditary aristocracy, even though they've just lost their seats in the House of Lords. It is a society still bound to a striking extent by tradition.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  And I noticed this, having returned to spend more time in the UK for family reasons, because I've spent most of the last twenty years in this revolutionary republic, the United States of America, which still has the character of a revolutionary republic. When you view it through British eyes, the way in which this election is being conducted, the vituperation, the threat of violence, the sheer nastiness, is very reminiscent of the American politics Charles Dickens encountered when he visited early in the nineteenth century and was appalled. British politics is still a game of cricket between people who went to Oxford.

• 54:37Speaker 03

  And you saw that very clearly when Rishi Sunak was roundly defeated by Salkia Starmer on July fourth. The the handshakes, the jokes, the I say old chap, Johnny good show, bad luck old boy, I mean, all of that is exactly the way in which British politicians have conducted themselves over two hundred years. And so there's a sense in which that continuity limits the range of outcomes in British politics. Even after a period of turmoil that Brexit created, that period of turmoil was like periods of turmoil in the nineteenth century over the corn laws,

• 55:19Speaker 03

  over protectionism, turmoil over the Irish question. Although we have periods of turmoil and we've had years of multiple prime ministers before, the system remains stable around, particularly around Oxford University, because there seems to be one rule of British politics, and that is that the prime minister has to have been to Oxford. There are very, very few exceptions to that rule. Having said all that. We would be deluding ourselves if we didn't recognize some similarities and points of convergence. I don't think Taylor Swift is a smaller deal in the UK than in the US. I don't think AI is a smaller deal.

• 56:00Scott Galloway?

  That's what unites us, Taylor.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  I was the first. The second was, of course, AI, and the third is this potential for conflict over immigration. It's tragic that three little girls were murdered by, it appears, the teenage son of immigrants from Rwanda when the girls were attending a Taylor Swift dance class. And this has unleashed a kind of classic summertime period of violence in the UK that reminds us that it's not all cricket and well done, old chap. That some of the trends that have produced populism and political violence in the US are, in fact, still to be found in the United Kingdom, too.

• 56:46Scott Galloway?

  It's interesting, if I understand you correctly, you're saying the coarseness of our discourse in the US might be a feature, not a bug.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  Oh, it's absolutely a feature. And visitors commented on it from very early on in the republic, the sense that politics in America is a contact sport, perhaps even a blood sport, whereas in Britain it's cricket. That goes back a very, very long way indeed. But, you know, we're divided by a common language, united by a great deal of increasingly global popular culture, and both the United States and United Kingdom face the same sociological dilemma. We are aging societies. Half of the electorate in the United States is over 50, somewhat similar, perhaps even older in the UK.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  Older voters are not only more numerous relative than they used to be, but they also turn out at higher rates than younger voters. And older voters want two contradictory things. They don't really like inflation. That's nothing new, but they also don't like immigration. The problem is that if you don't have large scale immigration, the inflation would have been higher. Think about the counterfactual of closed borders in the period of the last four years. The inflation would certainly have been higher because the tight labour markets would have driven wages up. And so it's very hard to satisfy what old American and old British voters want. They also want healthcare. In the US, this manifests itself as a sort of health insurance inflation problem.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  In the UK, the National Health Service rations healthcare, and so everybody's always grumbling that they take weeks, take weeks to get a doctor's appointment and months, if not years, to get a surgical procedure. But it's the same basic problem, it's just that the systems are radically different in the way that they work. So as I go back and forth across the Atlantic, which I have to do far too often, I'm struck by the fact that although we think of ourselves as being very different, and in some institutional respects we are, there is real convergence in the experience of being British and the experience of being American, whether you were an oldie or a Taylor Swift fan.

• 58:58Scott Galloway?

  Sir Neil Ferguson is a Millbank family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow at the Bell First Centre for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He's also a columnist at the Free Press and the author of 16 books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, and Kissinger, 1923 to 1968, The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Prize. In 2024, he was knighted by King Charles III for services to literature. What a nice moment for you, Neil. Congratulations on that. That's a nice, just a really nice thing for you and your family. And he joins us from somewhere in New England. Neil, I always love hearing from you, as do our listeners.

• 59:40Scott Galloway?

  It's just, you just kind of have, your comments are totally puncturing and open me up to a viewpoint, quite frankly, that I don't share most of the time. I really appreciate all your good work and welcome back to the UK. Anyways, it's great to catch up with you.

• 1:00:06Scott Galloway?

  Author of Happiness, Where to Live. So I had two close friends, Eddie Blau and David Frey, who were my roommates my sophomore year, come hang out with me in Aspen, and they brought another close friend from the fraternity, Michael Baruch. It was just so wonderful to see all three of them. But one thing I think they've missed out on, and that I've gotten right, and that is I have lived in five different cities, and they chose not to leave their city. And I understand they have nice lives. But my advice to any young person would be to take a risk and live in another city. And I think it informs you. I think it's an incredible experience. And I think the analysis that young people do is that they say, well,

• 1:00:48Scott Galloway?

  I could never do better than to live in this city. I have family here. I have friends here. I'm doing well here. I totally get that. And I'm living in London right now. To be honest, I don't like it as much as New York. I don't like Europe as much as the US. But the key is not necessarily to do better, it's to do different. And it informs you. It creates a different appreciation to look at the world through a different lens. I think it's really interesting to look at America through a different lens. What is looking at America through a European lens done for me? Makes me appreciate America more. And despite all of our faults, all of our weirdness, I mean, some of the things I love about the UK, there's not a discussion around assault rifles, or transgender rights, or bodily autonomy

• 1:01:30Scott Galloway?

  for women. These are givens there. It's like, well, of course, we don't allow assault weapons in the general public. Well, of course, a woman should be able to decide if she wants to terminate a pregnancy. And I really enjoy that, or appreciate it, I should say. But I also recognize that there's something about the US, we're willing to take risks. We embrace risk. It's, you meet with people around business. It's like, okay, we're not interested, or we are interested, let's go. People are much more willing to take risks. The kind of distinction, or the thing that summarizes the distinction between Europe and the US for me is simple. Millions of people looked around and said, you know what? I'm going to get on a steamship and go to this place, an unknown, and I'm going to try and forge a new life and stake my claim, if you will.

• 1:02:14Scott Galloway?

  And tens of millions of people decided, no, I'm just going to hang here. That is the distinction. The DNA, the type of people that came to America, immigrants from all over the world, decided to take a risk. And it's made me appreciate the risk aggressiveness, the diversity of the US, the action orientation, sort of the ready, fire, aim. But I wouldn't have that perspective unless I'd lived in Europe. And what I would suggest to any young person is that if you have the ability, especially with remote work, if before you have aging parents or you have kids of your own, by all means, brother, get on a boat, a plane, a bus, and live in a different city. You don't need to do better. You need to do different.

• 1:02:56Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Caroline Shager. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer. Andrew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our Prop G Markets pod wherever you get your pods. Your new episodes every Monday and Thursday.

• 1:03:25Scott Galloway?

  Little muffin.

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