Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway State of Play: The Geopolitical Landscape — with Ian Bremmer About this episode Ian Bremmer, the president and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, joins Scott for a conversation about the United States' global position, how to think about the nation’s relationship with China and Russia, and why he believes no country is the number one leader. Ian also discusses the power dynamics within the digital ecosystem. Follow Ian on Twitter, @ianbremmer.
Scott opens with his thoughts on why Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse won't work.
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Transcript 13,297 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:18 Scott Galloway? Episode 113, the atomic number for neonium. 113 is a symbol of positivity and optimism. I'm a pessimist, a pessimist on the train tracks sees a dark tunnel. An optimist, a light at the end of the tunnel. A realist sees the train coming towards them. And all the train conductor sees is three fucking idiots sitting on the tracks. Go, go, go!
1:46 Scott Galloway? Welcome to the 113th episode of the Prof G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Ian Bremmer, a total gangster political scientist. He's one of, probably arguably, one of the most blue flame thinkers in the world of political science. And the thing I love about... Professor Bremmer, he was a colleague at NYU and now he's at Columbia, he calls balls and strikes. He doesn't, as far as I can tell, see the world through a political or a partisan lens. He just looks at the data and is totally unafraid, doesn't care about alienating any constituency, just kind of calls it as he sees it and has built an amazing company called G Zero Media and is considered, was considered one of the brightest young minds in the world
2:29 Scott Galloway? of political science and continues to be sort of the advisor to CEOs and leaders all over the world. Anyways, we discussed with Ian the state at play regarding the geopolitical landscape, including the United States' global position, how to think about the nation's relationship with China and Russia, and why Ian believes no country is the number one leader, as evidenced by his book, he called it G Zero. He just doesn't think there's any superpower anymore. We also learn about Ian's thinking that the biggest technology companies are acting similar to states and exercising a form of sovereignty beyond regulators' control. Huh, that's a novel thought. We've been overrun. That's, who's been saying that for the last, I don't know, fucking 110 million years? Okay, okay, what's going on? All sorts of
3:14 Scott Galloway? stuff. There were two major climate summits in Glasgow and Rome this week. Elections took place across the country. Tesla kicked Facebook out of the top five companies in the S and P 500 by market cap. Think about that. Tesla's now got a greater market cap than Facebook. And Robinhood posted a terrible quarter where their earnings and their revenues were down, but their monthly active users were also down. However, however, today we're talking about Facebook's rebrand as Meta, or more specifically, what people are getting wrong about the Metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg envisions a series of virtual worlds where people can socialize, work, and live. And as with many things, Facebook, this is total
3:55 Scott Galloway? bullshit. As a matter of fact, it's an attempt to distract, more weapons of mass distraction, from the insurrection, teen depression, and general coarseness of our discourse, courtesy of Facebook, brought to us by Mark Zuckerberg. And he's decided that, oh, wait, call me Altria. Maybe you'll forget where a tobacco And Aswath Damodaran, who was our guest on Pivot yesterday, kind of summarized it best that he's actually sold his stock when he heard they were changing their name. Because when you change your name, you're basically acknowledging that your name and reputation has become so odious that you no longer want it associated with your company. The problem is the people that built this reputation in this foul stench, and let's be honest, it is a really foul stench, are still there. So you can change your name, you can be the artist formerly known as Mark Zuckerberg,
4:40 Scott Galloway? but you're still a fucking sociopath. So for starters, Facebook or Meta, whatever you want to call it, can't build anything. They did build, or the Zuck did build Facebook. Some people would argue that it was actually the Winkleville and other people that built Facebook, and he just stole it. But they haven't had a lot of success building their own things. As a matter of fact, they've had almost no success. They've primarily used Snap as their R and D department. They've been fantastic acquirers, accomplishing what is probably the best acquisition in the history of tech, maybe with the exception of Google acquiring YouTube. But Facebook's acquisition of Instagram, as a matter of fact, they acquired Instagram for, I think, one or 1.1 billion. And several weeks later, Marissa Mayer, arguably one of the worst CEOs in technology of the
5:23 Scott Galloway? last decade, acquired Tumblr for the same amount, I think it was about one or 1.1 billion, and then seven years later, sold it for, get this, $3 million. That's not easy. As a matter of fact, reminiscing a little bit, I'm writing an op-ed with Jeff Bukas, the former chairman and CEO of Time Warner, about Section 230, which is nothing but downside as a bunch of First Amendment lawyers. And when someone's a First Amendment lawyer, it means they're a First Amendment maximist, meaning they just don't believe we should ever do anything to inhibit free speech. And they're kind of like, I don't know, they kind of bring this certain sort of nuance and reasonable argument similar or reminiscent of the Taliban. Anyways, whenever you wade into 230 waters, you just get attacked. So, but like, that's going to stop me.
6:07 Scott Galloway? Anyways, bit of a digression, bit of a left turn. Let's turn here, just see what's down this alley. Anyways, let's not forget to mention that Facebook is run by a mendacious fuck who has no regard for a healthy democracy, distinct of how he changes his name badge. Secondly, there are other companies that are better positioned to make the metaverse a reality that does not involve wearing ridiculous-looking headsets. This notion, he said, "Imagine your friend is at an amazing concert somewhere else in the world, and you could join him or her." What, because you're just gonna pull out your ridiculous Oculus and throw it on your head? This is where... Who the fuck is advising these people? It's just so ridiculous that they think this thing is actually gonna work. It's the right strategy. Facebook needs to go vertical.
6:52 Scott Galloway? What do we mean by that? You are in a position of vulnerability when you don't control the end distribution. And, case in point, iOS and Apple can all of a sudden ask people to start, or offer people the opportunity to opt out of tracking because they control the end device. There is still a tremendous power to controlling being totally vertical. That's what I believe Netflix and Disney's Achilles' heel is, is that they don't control the end distribution. Now, they might... Roku's making moves, they control distribution, they're making moves with smart TVs, but everyone's going full stack. And when you are just an app, you are vulnerable. And I think Facebook realizes this, they wanna be control of their own universe, so
7:32 Scott Galloway? they're like, "I know, let's create the closest thing to a universe that will stop people from being distracted by their leaf blowing, their herb gardens, and things like dating. And they can live in our universe and dictate their own religions and not have to make eye contact." But who is the god of this universe? Whoever controls the voting share, specifically Mark Zuckerberg? If you could have a scientific god, if you could put someone in charge of a metaverse that involves relationships, the economy, how we interact with each other, would you choose Mark Zuckerberg? I mean, it's just... That's the bad news. The notion that this individual is gonna spend $10 billion to try and elevate himself
8:14 Scott Galloway? just from the most dangerous man in the world to our god is frightening. But, but, the saving grace here is there's no way this thing will work. There are already companies that have a metaverse. Twitter is a metaverse. Roblox is a metaverse. Fortnite is a metaverse. Grand Theft Auto is a metaverse. And the idea that you would need something that would be interoperable, have economics or opportunities to build an economy, some sort of offline, online...
8:44 Scott Galloway? Transition or transitory properties. So if you bought a pair of Supreme shoes, it would show up. You, your character, your avatar would have Supreme online. You create the equivalent of beachfront real estate online. It could be some sort of currency or some sort of store value. And if that sounds ridiculous, just see above crypto. So there is real potential here. I don't think that there's any one company in a position to control all of it. And I think that's probably a good thing. But the last one, the one that is probably least likely, based on their track record, the lack of creativity and the fact that the searches for metaverse spiked when Mark Zuckerberg announced it. Why did they spike? Because the Zucker verse scares the shit out of everybody. And again, the only saving grace here is that there's no, just no way it'll happen. This is not an innovative company.
9:29 Scott Galloway? The VR headset sales have been anemic and wildly overhyped. In 2020, Facebook's Oculus sold just three and a half million units. So just as a reference, Crocs sold nearly 70 million pairs of shoes that year. I think Crocs are a crime against humanity, but nonetheless, they sold 70 million pairs last year. Meanwhile, if Apple AirPods were to be its own business, it would be a Fortune 50 company. Think about that. Apple spins AirPods and it's one of the 50 biggest companies in the world. In 2020, Apple sold 110 million pairs of AirPods and Beats. Now, think about this. Think about this, and it's important. This is the fundamental flaw that the Zuck is making beyond damaging the world and depressing
10:14 Scott Galloway? teens. I guess that's kind of a, that could, that's not even a flaw. It's a crime against humanity. But the flaw in this strategy here, and the reason why it won't work is I believe the metaverse, or what will be a bunch of mini-verses, if you will, is going to be more a function of the following. And that is that when people go deaf, supposedly is more difficult for them and they withdraw from society at a greater clip than people who lose their vision. That audio is more important than visual. And I believe that's the key takeaway here. And that is the metaverse or these mini-verses will be, we are overstating, we are overstating the visual and underhyping the audio. So who's in the best position to create anything resembling the metaverse? Apple, specifically AirPods.
10:59 Scott Galloway? Why? Why? Because in order for this to work, you've got to be wearing this thing pretty much all the time, such that you have some serendipity and some randomness to this whole thing, such that if you do, in fact, come across a building and think, I want to see what apartments are available, or I want to, I need a meditation app to begin immediately playing, or I want to know who's around me of a certain cohort, whatever it might be, where you go into a certain, an augmented universe or your own miniverse, you're going to have to have a device that is intelligent, on you, knows your history, and picks up, has signal liquidity. And what better? What device has more signal liquidity and has more ubiquity right now? AirPods. I wear my AirPods around the house even when I'm not listening to music
11:44 Scott Galloway? or on a phone call. So what's going to happen? Apple's going to introduce some sort of incredible technology or some sort of nanocamera that they put in your AirPods. They'll be able to register your mood, your temperature. You'll be able to control it with voice. To a certain extent, Amazon, I thought the most transformative technology of the last 10 years was voice. And if you look on LinkedIn, there are more open job positions in Amazon's voice group than in all of Google. So Amazon is making an enormous investment in voice. And I think they're on to something. I think audio is underhyped, visual overhyped. I think the miniverse, the next metaverse, or the company best positioned to take advantage of it is Apple because of the ubiquity of AirPods, because of the signal liquidity. And, and, if you're going to have a god, if you're going to have a god,
12:29 Scott Galloway? you've got to trust that the god is benign. Who is a more trusting benign god? Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Cook? See above, the Facebook metaverse is, let me use an academic term here, fucked.
12:45 Scott Galloway? Stay with us. We'll be right back for our conversation with Ian Bremmer, where we discuss the state of play regarding the geopolitical landscape.
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15:12 Scott Galloway? Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Ian Brimmer.
15:19 Scott Galloway? Ian, where does this podcast find you?
15:21 Ian Bremmer? I am in my office in New York. We're just off Madison Square Park.
15:27 Scott Galloway? Nice. So let's bust right into it. We're big fans of your work and most recently, you had an article in Foreign Affairs, or your recent Foreign Affairs article, "The Technopolar Moment: How Digital Powers Will Reshape the Global Order." And in it, you write, open quote, "It's time to start thinking of the biggest technology companies as similar to states. These companies exercise a form of sovereignty over a rapidly expanding realm that extends beyond the reach of regulators in digital space." Can you walk us through kind of the power structures and dynamics you see playing out between private corporations and the geopolitical landscape?
16:04 Ian Bremmer? Well, I guess I specifically see it with tech companies and not necessarily with private companies writ large, right? Because, I mean, private companies sometimes do exert extraordinary amounts of influence, but frequently they do it because they've managed to, through lobbying or through informal means, to capture the regulatory environment. Where, in the case of the tech companies, I think it goes much deeper and much broader than that. I think the tech companies actually are exerting sovereignty over digital worlds that they are creating from scratch. They're creating the rule set,
16:49 Ian Bremmer? they're creating the algorithms, they're creating the values, the currency, if you will, both, you know, sort of real and imputed. I mean, kind of everything about what happens inside these walled gardens is determined by these companies. And it's creating kind of a parallel sovereignty that didn't necessarily matter so much when the digital world wasn't where you were spending so much. Of your time or wasn't where so much of the economy was occurring or wasn't where national security was relevant. But as those things all start to change, suddenly that sovereignty becomes, it matters immensely and it becomes kind of a parallel track of
17:31 Ian Bremmer? how power is exerted on the geopolitical stage. And by the way, the Chinese government clearly is deeply concerned about this.
17:39 Scott Galloway? So where do you see the biggest threats to national security? What role do you think big tech companies have in this space? And what's, do you think there needs to be more regulation? And how did, how did the different players match up? There's Chinese tech companies, there's US tech companies. Where, who are the winners and losers here?
17:56 Ian Bremmer? Well, I mean, first, I, I kind of think that this is over determined. And let me give you an example. I mean, when I first came up with this idea that we were heading into a G zero world, so not a world where the Americans were providing global leadership, but no one else was going to be in it. And that was about 10 years ago. And a lot of the questions I got was, okay, so what do you think we need to do to avoid the G zero world? Like, I mean, you know, what, what did the Americans need to do? Or the Europeans? Like, no, it's like, no, that, that wasn't the point. I'm not happy about it. I'm not embracing a G zero world. But I think the combination of the internal divisions in the US, the fragmentation inside Europe, this was pre Brexit, the Russians doing their
18:39 Ian Bremmer? damnedest to undermine us both internally and the transatlantic relationship, and the Chinese growing in power and building a competitive alternative model. All of those things kind of ensured a G zero world was coming. So this was an analytic point as opposed to a policy point. And
18:58 Scott Galloway? So a G zero world, the power abhors a vacuum. Have tech companies filled that vacuum?
19:02 Ian Bremmer? That's an interesting question, right? So I, I think that to a degree, technology companies are starting to fill some of that vacuum. I think that a lot of what we think of as the social contract that is breaking in much of the developed world, the tech companies have operated in some of that space, certainly in the post-January 6th environment. Right? I mean, I don't, I don't know if you feel this way, but I feel like that was the single biggest domestic attack on the legitimacy of our political institutions of my lifetime.
19:43 Ian Bremmer? And the response to that was not taken by Congress or by the judiciary, and obviously not by the executive. It was taken by tech companies.
19:52 Scott Galloway? And you've written that US and Chinese technology giants will operate in one of three geopolitical environments: nationalists, globalists, and techno-utopians. What did you mean by that?
20:03 Ian Bremmer? Yeah, I mean, I think that if you're in a world where these companies are geopolitical actors, well, two things. First, saying that a company is a geopolitical actor is a pretty audacious thing. It might be the most audacious thing I've written as a political scientist. And my view is if that's really true, I mean, we know how to categorize countries. We say that they're either democracies, or they're authoritarian, or they're somewhere in between. They're along the spectrum of openness to the transit of ideas and capital and people and all of the rest. So if that's the case, how do we think about tech companies? I mean, they aren't all the same. I mean, they all want to make money.
20:47 Ian Bremmer? But what's a way to categorize them? And for me, I thought the most interesting way of categorizing them is how do they relate to this other thing? The geopolitical actors that we've all been living with, the state, the government? And I think that there are three such categories. And they're incomplete categories, and they're ideal types. No companies really fall completely in any one. One being national champions, and national champions where ideally, they would want complete alignment with the government. Globalists, where they want alignment only where necessary to maximize the profitability of their model.
21:29 Ian Bremmer? And techno-utopian, where their ideal engagement with the state is literally none.
21:35 Ian Bremmer? They think they're creating a completely separate space. And, and so you can see how, I mean, in, in an environment where there's a technology Cold War between the United States and China. And so in certain areas, I'm saying if that were to occur, we, we aren't in one now, but we might end up being in one. Then you can see companies saying, I don't want to have a model that looks for global access because I'm not going to get global access. I want to be seen as a champion of my, of my country or my model, which is, you know, so you see why Huawei wants to be a national champion for China because they know they're not going to effectively be in the American market. So they align more with Beijing.
22:16 Ian Bremmer? You could argue Microsoft is doing more of that in the United States these days. Then you have a more globalist model that says, no, actually, uh, we, we want access to global markets. We think that's where the world is going to continue to be. And so we want to capture the regulatory process in the areas specifically where we operate, but otherwise we don't want to be seen as aligned with any government. We want to be, have access to all of those consumers everywhere. And then you have the techno utopians who are saying, no, we just, we think the government is going to fail in these areas. We're creating a new governance model that is meant to actually subvert slash replace
22:56 Ian Bremmer? the old outmoded government and as a model. And, and indeed there are a lot of people out there that increasingly believe that's where we should go. I, I, I am deeply skeptical, um, but that I'm not the person that's driving those business models.
23:15 Scott Galloway? Because there is a, a weird gestalt, if you will, in the tech community that especially amongst some of the wealthier or more influential tech innovators, if you will, that I'm a better capital allocator. You should take my taxes to zero because I've made more progress against climate change in putting someone on Mars than the government has. There's this weird kind of, maybe it's visionary libertarian feel that I'm beyond the government. And to me, that strikes me as not only discouraging, but dangerous. Do you have any thoughts about these individuals who've decided that they're sort of a, you know, A, do you buy that premise? And B, is it, have we been just overrun? It seems like people are much more fond of Elon Musk than they are of the government.
24:00 Ian Bremmer? Yeah, I really personally mistrust this idea that individuals should be responsible for allocation of capital, because that requires an awful lot of trust on the individual values of people that have incredible wealth and power and not a lot of knowledge about how the world works outside their narrow base. And values that frequently aren't really aligned, even with their fellow citizens, never mind that of the citizens of the rest of the world. And I'm not trying to suggest that the US government gets it all the time right, or even half the time right.
24:44 Ian Bremmer? But I mean, I see the growing level of inequality in the United States. And the fact is that the US has much more inequality economically than the rest of the G7, the advanced industrial democracies. We have much more political dysfunction than the rest of the G7. We even have a lower vaccination rate in terms of first jabs than the rest of the G7, which is ridiculous, given the access to vaccines in the US. Why is that? And I think that one of the core reasons is that we happen to have the country that is most aligned with unfettered animal spirits and libertarianism, with a country that is
25:24 Ian Bremmer? most bought by big money to ensure that individuals and companies can do precisely that. And that has profoundly undermined the social contract and has led far more Americans to get disenfranchised than in Canada, than in Germany, than in Japan. I think our country has gone too far in the Elon Musk direction. And I am someone who, I mean, God bless what Elon Musk has been able to build. I think that the world is better off for having people that are entrepreneurs that do that kind of stuff. I'd like to think that I've done a tiny version of that myself. But I also am very proud to pay serious taxes. And I personally think my taxes are too low, given what's happened in this country over
26:09 Ian Bremmer? the last 40 years.
26:12 Scott Galloway? Yeah, I forget who is the conservative commentator who said there's nothing more oppressive than a weak and feeble government, and it feels as if we, relative to our individuals, have a weak and feeble government. And then you look at China, and they've taken a much, kind of, you know, steel hand in a velvet glove, minus the velvet glove, it looks as if they have learned from us and said, "We're not going to subvert national interest to economic interest." Is your sense they kind of have looked at us and said, "No, that shit's not going to work here?"
26:40 Ian Bremmer? I think that they've looked, they looked at the Soviet Union when it fell apart, and they said, "We can't do political reform along with economic reform." That was a lesson they took, and they decided that's just not going to work, and they cut off all of those experiments. And I think they're now looking at the United States, and they're saying, "We don't want this kind of, you know, really powerful individual CEOs that are allowing wealthy people to get even wealthier at the expense of equality of opportunity of really smart, middle-class or working-class people." And I think that's part of why Jack Ma was defenestrated. I think that's part of why they decided to make illegal all of these high-priced educational training companies, because they saw varsity blues in the United
27:25 Ian Bremmer? States. Absolutely. So I do think they've taken those lessons, but I also think that there are some very serious structural problems inside of China right now that are forcing them to focus much more domestically than they would like to. I mean, Belt and Road, they're investing like one-tenth in Belt and Road right now than they were eight years ago. And that's because they realize that they've got some serious domestic priorities that they have overlooked for a while.
27:49 Scott Galloway? So just speaking specifically to China, and I was thinking about the supply chain issues the whole world is grappling with, do you think that there's a possibility that we, that China will cede backs and power and leverage to the US? Because our fulfillment is of zeros and ones, and their fulfillment is of stuff. Like Netflix, it doesn't have a supply chain problem. Consulting and fintech doesn't have a supply chain problem, whereas moving, you know, a container of tops has a supply chain problem. Is the supply chain... Issues in some of the reshoring that's taken place, does it represent a reversal of the rivers in terms of flow or of economic power back from China to the US?
28:26 Ian Bremmer? I think there are maybe a few different pieces of it. You just identified an important one. There's also the fact that so much of China's growth in the last 50 years was on the basis of being the greatest repository of relatively low-income, hard-working labor. And that labor has gotten considerably more expensive over the past decades. Chinese local competitors are much stronger than they used to be. There is no rule of law. So if you get into a fight with a Chinese competitor, you have a problem because you don't go to an independent judiciary. And also, Xi Jinping has not traveled since January 2020. I mean, I think the absence, the fact that he's not there in the hallways of the
29:08 Ian Bremmer? G20 in Rome, or the COP26 in Glasgow, in part because they have a zero-tolerance COVID policy, and they have vaccines that do not work well at all against Delta variant. I think all of those things, in addition to the very significant one that you just brought up, Scott, I think are making China considerably less attractive as a global model. Now, cut against that is the fact that they have massive scale, they're the biggest data market in the world, and their tech companies are increasingly very impressive themselves. So it's not like the Chinese don't have things that are going in their direction, but it's cutting against some very significant negatives. And when I look at American allies, I see
29:52 Ian Bremmer? them as pushing for more alignment with the Americans these days, in spite of the mistakes, the own goals of the Biden administration on Afghanistan, or AUKUS, or closing down our borders to the Europeans and Canadians, in spite of four years of Trump, and maybe Trump coming back in 2025, because they've been antagonized much more by what they see coming out of Asia.
30:17 Scott Galloway? And when you look at the creation of these economic titans, mostly through tech, if you look at the percentage of unicorns, so China has, is disproportionately are growing the number of their unicorns relative to the total number of unicorns being birthed. The US is actually held strong. I think there's this mistake that we have, China's ascent has come at our cost. But if you look at, it's actually Europe that now has fewer unicorns. They've just sort of, it's almost as if they've fallen off the map of innovation. A, do you agree with that? And B, what is the dynamic culturally and geopolitically that makes Europe what feels like to be sort of a loser in this, if you call it a triumvirate
31:02 Scott Galloway? of competition between the US, Europe, and China?
31:06 Ian Bremmer? It's not only the unicorn number, it's also percentage of global GDP. The United States has held strong through that period and Europe has lost very significantly. But of course, this is the converse of the political issue that you and I were just talking about. We had an election in 2020. It was deeply broken. And 2024, in my view, is probably going to be as bad or worse. Germany just had an election. It was fine. It went very smoothly. It's a new coalition that's coming in place, but Olaf Scholz is probably the closest to a true successor that was available to Angela Merkel. And the policies are going to be aligned with a strong EU and a good relationship with the US. And the people
31:51 Ian Bremmer? are pretty happy with their government. You know, Canada just had an election and it returned exactly the same government they had before. It was very smooth. Japan just had an election. It returned a pretty damn similar government to what it had before. It was very smooth. The US, we're the ones that screw up our elections. So yeah, on the one hand, our economic power is holding strong. Our technological power, macro, top down, is holding strong. But increasingly, large numbers of people inside the United States are just not a part of it and are getting angrier as a consequence and more anti-establishment, where Europe doesn't have that problem. So the question is, how do you create a balance between those two models? Because we're clearly moving in kind of opposite directions here.
32:37 Scott Galloway? So let me put forward a theory and you tell me where I'm correctly paranoid if I'm wearing a tinfoil hat. If I were the Russians and the Chinese, I would see election or a constitutional crisis as the best means to undermine our power. And I think you've correctly identified that while our economy is pretty strong, it feels like we're barreling towards a constitutional crisis and we might have two presidents that show up on inauguration day in January of 2025. And then what, right? So if I were the Chinese or the Russians, instead of spending a billion dollars on a new aircraft carrier squadron, I would hire thousands of people in Albania.
33:18 Scott Galloway? And I would say, okay, there's Ian Bremmer, who's like number, the 34th most influential person and who has this, kind of this, has been infected by the truth. And then there's number 9,000, and that's Scott Galloway, who consistently rails against Putin. We're going to take the top 20,000 people and we're going to sow disinformation and crowd their Facebook and Twitter feeds with, with little messages that undermine their credibility every day. And we're going to also increase the credibility of anti-vaxxers and we're going to increase the credibility of people who think the election is being stolen. Isn't this the ultimate Trojan horse? Are we, I mean, just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean I'm wrong.
34:00 Scott Galloway? But I look, I look at my Twitter feed and sometimes when I talk about these issues, I think a third to half of them are likely sponsored by a bad actor. How paranoid am I? Am I, is what I'm saying wrong or is, are we, are we not scared enough? Are we, where are we on this?
34:17 Ian Bremmer? I preferred your previous theory.
34:19 Scott Galloway? Yep.
34:19 Ian Bremmer? Which was that we are our principal enemies. We are our principal adversaries, that we are doing far more damage to ourselves internally than the Chinese or Russians either could do or have the appetite for. Especially because to the extent that it gets found out, the potential for backlash is significant. I mean, what the Russians actually did in 2016 at the end of the day was fairly limited, low cost, you know, sort of disinformation crap, which they've also Done with the French and the Germans and the UK and the rest. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but the bigger damage came from us. So it and furthermore, I think there's a big difference between China and Russia, which is important to recognize.
35:01 Ian Bremmer? The Chinese, as much as they are competitors of ours, are also incredibly economically interdependent with us. And and so politically, they have wolf warriors that are coming after us. And politically, we've got people on the left and the right that are saying the Chinese are big adversaries. But the worst thing for the United States would be as if China suddenly failed, because it would it would be devastating for our own economy. The Chinese feel the same way about the United States. They do not want implosion in America. They are way too dependent on us. The Russians, very different story. They actively, I mean, they have very little, they depend much more on Europe.
35:42 Ian Bremmer? There's a lot of, you know, energy export, a lot of banking that goes on, a lot of oligarchs have a lot of money there, a lot of property, some tourism, some agriculture. With the United States, there's virtually nothing. And the willingness, I think, if if Putin thought he had a relatively low cost option, which is why there's so much more cyber, you know, activity hitting our economy in ways that are dangerous, coming from Russia as opposed to from China. I think that reflects the differentiation in how those two countries think about the rest of the world.
36:18 Scott Galloway? So the enemy is us. If you think about two or three solutions, if you're advising the Biden administration, and you may be, if the enemy is within, what are the two or three steps that we need to restore such that there is, we start looking at each other as Americans, not as red and as blue? And we try to, what's the chemotherapy for this cancer that's metastasized internally?
36:39 Ian Bremmer? Well, first, we have to ask ourselves, what's the reason for the cancer? What are the underlying structural conditions that make the United States worse than Germany, Japan, and Canada? And I think that there are three areas that are really problematic. One, we've already talked about, which is this extraordinary economic inequality that comes from so much of the government process being captured by moneyed special interests. So how do we take money out of the system? Or at least, how do we redistribute more effectively? And in that regard, three trillion plus being spent over 10 years specifically oriented towards the middle and working class in the United States. So a New Deal of some form, or certainly the biggest internal spend we've had since
37:22 Ian Bremmer? Great Society under Truman, I do think that that will move the needle somewhat. I support it. I think it will make a difference. There are things that aren't in the new package that I would have liked to have seen, like, you know, the community college being free, for example. I'd love to have seen that. Eternity leave. Yeah, yeah. I mean, but there are a lot of things that are in there that I do want to see. I think it makes a difference if you do affect a broadband in rural areas of the country and get those people more involved in the economy. There's a lot of good stuff in those three trillion dollars that I think is going to happen. Then you have issues of race and demographics. The fact in the United States that the last time we gave out a shit ton of money in the New Deal, blacks were not a part of it. They were just fundamentally disenfranchised.
38:05 Ian Bremmer? That won't happen this time around, so that will help. But we have the culture wars on the other side, too, where we know that by 2045, whites are going to be a minority. And there's a lot of work that needs to be done to try to reduce that level of identity warfare that comes from that kind of a fundamental shift in power, right? And the Republicans are. I mean, they're fighting a rear-guard action where they're losing in demographics, but they're winning in a minoritarian system, and they're trying to continually disenfranchise, which they probably can't pull off for 20 years, but maybe they can pull off for 10. So, and that's a question of how quickly can you do election, like voter rights? Can you suspend the filibuster for voting rights legislation that will help to ensure
38:50 Ian Bremmer? that fewer people are disenfranchised? And if you do that, does it make the Senate into the House? And, you know, what's the next thing that happens? How broken? So that's a second point. And then the third point is this social media piece. And I can give you some, I'm sure you've come up with lots of things that would help fix it. I've, I've got a few. I mean, one would be no more anonymous accounts on Facebook and Twitter. Everyone has to be verified, like on LinkedIn. A second would be Facebook, stop taking political ads. A third would be reduce the power of algorithms that are driving political information as opposed to things like food and culture and dog photos. I'd like to see more dog photos personally.
39:31 Ian Bremmer? But we all know that none of those things are going to happen. I mean, the first two have things that are probably going to happen that are important, but gradual and incremental and this, we got ourselves into this trouble over 40 years, two generations. It will take us a long time to get us out of it, but we can start to steer the ship. On the tech piece, I actually think we're heading in the wrong direction. We're still heading in the wrong direction. And I don't think we're close to even considering the fixes at this point. I don't think we're close.
40:00 Scott Galloway? And you're heading in the wrong direction, meaning these companies are accreting more power?
40:05 Ian Bremmer? And, and that the, to the extent that they are accreting more power and are not aligned with a strong functioning representative democracy and a vibrant civil society, to the extent that their business models just don't line up with that, not because they don't want those things, but because they're just misaligned as business models, I think that gets worse.
40:30 Scott Galloway? Coming up after the break.
40:32 Ian Bremmer? If Bitcoin and/or Ethereum, other cryptocurrencies become really seriously of scale and start threatening fiat currency and therefore the sovereign ability of the US government to leverage its power, weaponize, finance, all the rest, not to mention finance things more cheaply, I think that we do our damnedest to either seriously constrain it or shut it down.
40:58 Scott Galloway? Stay with us.
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42:38 Scott Galloway? So going back to the way you outlined the dynamic between Russia, China, and the US, it feels as if you invest in your opportunities, not your problems. Wouldn't it make sense for the US to kind of join hands with the Chinese and say, look, we may not like each other, but we're sort of married here? And... Quite frankly, just a somewhat of a China-US 80% alliance. They kind of says, all right, we're going to work together against any threats against us. And I don't know the relationship between the Chinese and the Russians. That was actually a question I should put forward. But isn't the opportunity to get closer to China?
43:12 Ian Bremmer? So it's funny that you use the marriage analogy, because I've used it as well. I've used it a little differently. I've said that I think that we are a married couple that just can't stand each other. There's no trust left in the relationship, but we have kids and they're in the house. And we love the kids. We both love the kids. And so in that situation, it is clearly psychologically deeply painful to both be in that environment. But we also have to put on the big boy pants and we have to deal with this. And right now, the funny thing is, we are dealing with it, but we're not admitting we're dealing with it. Because there's just too much political opportunity to take a whack. I mean, when
43:55 Ian Bremmer? you sit down and you talk to senior Biden-level officials, they understand what you just said, Scott. They know that we can't suddenly, like, just pull the plug on Chinese tourists coming to the US after we get through this pandemic and Chinese students paying full freight at American universities. And the NBA seeing China as their most important business model, and the most important new movie that's opened in the pandemic, did bigger box office in China than anyone else. No one's trying to kill that. No one's trying to kill it.
44:32 Scott Galloway? That's Apple, right?
44:33 Ian Bremmer? Yeah, Apple with, I mean, you know, the production model there is enormous. I'm looking, even artificial intelligence. The fact is that a lot of this stuff may be construed as dual use with national security, but every new AI development is published by those scientists open source. And they're working, the Americans and the Chinese, together.
44:54 Ian Bremmer? So I mean, I do think that an honest recognition that irrespective of how little trust we have, we are absolutely married to these people and we have to live together. That's even before we talk about things like climate, where, you know, we're just all living on the same planet. We have, the Americans, have emitted more carbon than anyone else historically, and the Chinese are emitting more than twice as much as we are right now. And if the two of us don't come together with a fix, it's going to be worse for everybody, but principally, ultimately, the two of us that have benefited the most, right? So that is a problem.
45:29 Scott Galloway? So for a married couple, and we recognize we have a shared interest in raising our kids and trying to keep the peace, it feels like the exogenous effect that could just blow the house apart, and tell me if this is correct or incorrect, is just as we fought wars over oil, it feels like we could begin to fight wars over microchips. And it feels like Taiwan is that exogenous threat. What are your thoughts?
45:51 Ian Bremmer? So I was on a, I've done a lot of media around Taiwan, and I've had a lot of people in the media pushing me really hard to say why we were going to war. It's sexy, it's exciting, it's an external enemy, we can be scared about it.
46:07 Scott Galloway? Situation room.
46:08 Ian Bremmer? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's better than a, it's better than a category five, you know, hurricane, right? I really don't buy it.
46:15 Scott Galloway? You don't see it?
46:16 Ian Bremmer? At all, at all. It's the one area where even though we're not talking to each other much, I mean, it's been everyone in, that works on these policy issues, understands the policy of strategic ambiguity between the US and China on Taiwan. They understand that the status quo ante is critical to maintain, that they know the dangers and the red lines of both sides. And we're very careful not, I mean, we move up to those red lines, we test them frequently. And part of the reason we test them frequently is because we want to see where the other side is. And the other side continues to say, no, no, no, this isn't Afghanistan, it's not Ukraine, we really care about this stuff. We've showed that to
46:58 Ian Bremmer? mainland China, mainland China has showed that to us. So first of all, the communication lines on this compared to other stuff are actually very open and functional. And the risks are very severe. On semiconductors, it is true that the Chinese are investing a lot in semiconductors. It's true, the Americans are investing a lot in semiconductors. But Taiwan, as you mentioned, is critical, particularly this company TSMC, which is responsible for 80% of the global export of semiconductors. Now, we, the United States, have said that we would like TSMC to become a trusted partner of the defense industry in the United States and build a fab in Arizona, which we will
47:38 Ian Bremmer? provide some tax subsidy for, start building advanced semiconductors in the US. Now, if they were to do that and we were to put export controls on TSMC as an integral part of the US military industrial complex, that would subvert the status quo, that would be unacceptable for China, and it would be critically dangerous for Taiwan because China would have interest in shutting it down and also pressuring Taiwanese companies massively to change that decision point, to change the behavior, because the Chinese really need access to those semiconductors. They can't build up their semiconductor industry fast enough. As a consequence, that's not what's going to happen.
48:18 Ian Bremmer? Our talk to TSMC is probably going to get them to eventually build a fab in the US that will be not their most advanced, but it'll be one generation behind the best they can do. And they will simultaneously build a fab of the same technology in mainland China. In other words, we will move strategic ambiguity beyond just conventional weapons into the technologically sophisticated semiconductor space. It's not going to be fun or comfortable to get from here to there, but it is honest to God, the only pathway where all sides avoid massive downside risk to themselves. And the Americans know this.
49:03 Ian Bremmer? We can't say this publicly, but I have had this exact conversation with principals involved in the drafting of the AI NSC paper, which actually put all of this forward. This is where we expect to go.
49:18 Scott Galloway? I love that the headline risk around Taiwan is, in fact, headline risk. And typically, it's whether it's an economic catastrophe or a war. It's the stuff you're not worried about that gets you. What are we not worried about that we should be?
49:32 Ian Bremmer? I'm more worried about cyber because I think that the act... One of the reasons why the US and China scares me less is because we are very interdependent and also relatively risk averse as actors. In the case of cyber, increasingly, you're seeing a proliferation of cyber capabilities to both government and non-government actors that are much less risk averse and that will have the capacity to do very dangerous things. And also, the potential for accidents is also a lot higher. So you probably remember the Nafta attacks taken by the Russians against Ukraine that, you know, hit a couple of companies that were in Ukraine, and it got out, and suddenly
50:17 Ian Bremmer? Maersk was down globally. And that wasn't Russia's intention. It just happened to be like the impact of releasing this malware into the Ukrainian environment. You add that to criminal actors or smaller governments that are potentially facing revolution. You know, what happens if the Iranians have that kind of cyber capability and it looks like they're going to be forced out of power? Or even terrorist organizations? And suddenly, your critical infrastructure is a threat, is a risk. And I don't, I don't think we have yet deterrent capabilities, either existing or in train, that would prevent that. All we have is a hell of a lot of intelligence that's trying to identify those individual
51:01 Ian Bremmer? threats as they pop up, which means if one of them comes through, we've got a cyber 9/11. I do worry about that.
51:09 Scott Galloway? So let's talk a little bit, let's use cyber as a as a bridge to cryptocurrencies. Do you, how do you think, or if and how does cryptocurrency reset the chessboard? Is there a real threat to the dollar no longer being the reserve currency? Does it have geopolitical ramifications?
51:30 Ian Bremmer? I mean, to the extent that there is a medium term threat to the US dollar, it probably comes from crypto as opposed to anything else. I mean, it's not going to come from an RMB in a closed system. It's not going to come from a euro that doesn't have any tech companies behind it and is losing its its share of muscle in the global economy pretty dramatically, as you suggested. What is it? Is it Japan with their, you know, radically shrinking population? I mean, where else would it come from? And I think the very fact that the Chinese are saying, we don't want Bitcoin. We want stablecoin that we control, that we surveil, that is in, you know, fundamentally a part of the Chinese government, they see that problem.
52:15 Ian Bremmer? My presumption, Scott, is if if Bitcoin and/or Ethereum, other cryptocurrencies, become really seriously of scale and start threatening fiat currency, and therefore, the sovereign ability of the US government to leverage its power, weaponize, finance, all the rest, not to mention finance things more cheaply, I think that we do our damnedest to either seriously constrain it or shut it down. I have a hard time imagining that the US government would simply allow that, allow itself to be subverted by that.
52:50 Scott Galloway? And do you think, so when you think about our position in the world, and you think, okay, crypto could be an existential threat, but we would probably intervene or or shut it down, and that elections are potentially kind of our, I don't know, our soft tissue, or the enemy is within, can you talk about?
53:14 Scott Galloway? If we were going to invest, so end of World War II, we make this historic investment in enemies, turn them into allies, and NATO argues, kept the peace for 75 years. What is the next, could we make a visionary investment around distributing vaccines that we're letting spoil to India and Brazil? Like, what in your mind are the, some of the visionary, bold leadership actions that the US could take right now to try and restore us as sort of G1, if you will? Let's go from G, how does Ian Bremmer take us from G0 to G1?
53:45 Ian Bremmer? I don't think we can get to G1. I think China's too big, and I think the world is, has become too fragmented. Tech companies are too powerful. I think we're past the G1 moment, but I think there are things we could do to really, really improve our position. And we're still by far the most powerful country in the world. The vaccine thing, oh my God, Scott, I mean, we had such a generational opportunity.
54:11 Scott Galloway? Moment, I agree.
54:12 Ian Bremmer? We, my God, and I mean, we had so many vaccines and, and we did not, out of an overabundance of caution and selfishness and short-termism and no one wanting to take the lead themselves, we just booted it. Now, by the way, we're still doing more and better than anybody else out there. I mean, through, through the Quad, the agreement that was during the last Quad summit announced, where we would provide J and J vaccines, the Japanese are doing financing, the Australians are doing logistics, and the Indians, God bless them, after what they've been through, are actually doing the production and the export.
54:55 Ian Bremmer? We're going to be doing hundreds of millions of vaccines by January, donating. And that's more than anybody else, a month, a month. And that's a big deal. But, I mean, for tens of billions of dollars, we could have resolved this globally at trillions of dollars of global return. I mean, there has never been that kind of clear, definitive return on leadership and capital in my life, nothing even close, and we just didn't get it done. And if you talk to the people that were trying to make this argument inside the administration, they are so goddamn frustrated, it's incredible.
55:32 Scott Galloway? So that was a missed opportunity. More generally, who do you see as the biggest winners and losers coming out of COVID-19?
55:38 Ian Bremmer? Oh, I mean, the US is an enormous winner, an enormous winner. And the wealthy countries are enormous winners because we have the vaccines, we got them first, we deployed them first, and we also had the money to rebound. I mean, the difference between the developed and the developing world coming out of COVID, let's leave China aside for a second, China's very specific, but when we talk about the wealthy countries are today right back on track with where we were in terms of consumption and GDP before COVID had hit. We had a really bad recession. It was very sharp. It was extremely short, and we rebounded incredibly
56:20 Ian Bremmer? fast. Why? Because we spent trillions and trillions of dollars on our businesses and on our poor. The Japanese did it, the Canadians, the Europeans, the Americans, we all did it. The Europeans even redistributed from the wealthy countries to the poor countries. You go now and look at the developing world that is still dealing with COVID in front of it, most of them, because they haven't had the same vaccine rollout. And furthermore, they're not having a deep recession that they've bounced back from. No, they're experiencing a depression, and that is a permanent loss of income with economic scarring that will last for decades. And that is Africa, that's a lot of Latin America. And in the case of
57:02 Ian Bremmer? Russia and Eastern Europe, it may never become endemic because the anti-vax sentiment is just too damn high. China should have been a winner from the pandemic because they were able to do this incredible lockdown and surveillance immediately. They got their supply chain back up and running 100% by last May, and they were the only major economy in the world that actually grew in 2020. The second largest economy to grow last year was Vietnam. Right? And yet today, China is facing very significant knock on challenges because they're still they're still locked down. And they're seeing more cases and they want they want zero. And and they also don't really want to let in foreign vaccines.
57:44 Ian Bremmer? So but their own vaccines don't work very well and they're not sharing data and they're being blamed for a bunch of stuff. So the Chinese should be in pole position coming out of this or not. So if you want me to really say, who are the winners and losers coming out of COVID? It's the Americans and the Americans more than others, because in addition to everything I just said, we have the tech companies. And of course, the tech companies are doing so much better, so much more investment through all of these lockdowns and the move towards more digital economy faster with with COVID. Then you've got the Japanese, the Canadians, the Europeans. Underneath that, you have the Chinese in a category themselves. And below that, you have these middle and lower income economies that just are are getting the shit beat out of them.
58:28 Ian Bremmer? And it's yet another reason why COP26 is going badly, because those economies are looking at the wealthy countries and saying, you want us to take climate on the chin and reduce our emissions for you after all of this? And and we don't we aren't yet middle economy countries yet. And it's why the Mexicans didn't show up. And they say, we're not doing that. That's why the Brazilians say, we're not doing that. The Russians say, we're not doing that. The Turks, I mean, Indians, it goes on and on and on. I mean, the Indians, they were part of the quad. We said, we're working with you. We know you have a lot of, you know, ability to produce vaccines. We're going to rely on you. And then they underestimate. Modi says, we've got this under control.
59:13 Ian Bremmer? This was back in January. They underestimate their own problems. Suddenly, they have a massive outbreak in India. They're the world's epicenter for COVID for a couple of months. They're running out of everything and they're begging us. Their leaders are calling the Biden administration, begging us for one plane, one plane of vaccines, just to show that the Americans are supporting them. They don't get it.
59:35 Scott Galloway? That's so disappointing.
59:36 Ian Bremmer? It's really disappointing.
59:37 Scott Galloway? But you don't, you don't think that, this is great perspective because America comes out of this a big winner. It's a glass half empty kind of guy.
59:45 Ian Bremmer? Yeah.
59:45 Scott Galloway? I saw America coming out of this with our reputation deeply stained. Despite having, spending more money on healthcare, despite having the supply chain, the blessing of the greatest product, the greatest product of the last century is not the iPhone or the, you know, the assembly line. I think the greatest product has been the vaccine. And yet despite all of this, we have shown remarkable selfishness, remarkable arrogance, tremendous death, disease and disability amongst our own citizens. I kind of thought, okay, we come out of this with less moral authority and with our brand deeply, deeply damaged. You see it as we come out as, look, the strong gets stronger. The bottom line, as you're saying, is the wealthy nations are pulling out and the, like everything
1:00:27 Scott Galloway? that's happening in our economy, you know, there's a bifurcation.
1:00:32 Ian Bremmer? We're deeply dysfunctional politically through all of this. And the fact that we have politicized vaccines and mask wearing to a much greater degree than any other advanced industrial economy is to our discredit. Having said that, there's a lot of this that's being driven by the media. I mean, if you look at actual per capita deaths per million in Europe and the United States over the last year and a half, they're roughly equivalent. So, I mean, does that tell you that we did a worse job or the Europeans did a worse job? I mean, there are, there's lots of different ways that we did slightly better than the Europeans, that the Europeans did slightly better than us. Clearly in terms
1:01:14 Ian Bremmer? of, did we lead with science? No. I mean, our leadership politicized the science. And I mean, Trump was absolutely god awful around that. But the Democrats weren't great at it. I mean, you, you'll remember, it was, it was one of the MSNBC hosts, one of the biggest hosts, and she came out and said that she wouldn't take a Trump vaccine. In the early days, and there were a lot of, lot of big Dems that were saying that.
1:01:45 Scott Galloway? Wouldn't trust it.
1:01:46 Ian Bremmer? Wouldn't trust it. And I was thinking, what, you're insane, you people. But this is what happens with the filter bubble. It's like, God forbid, when I said that, oh, the Abraham Accords were like incredible. And John Kerry said that could never be done when he was the negotiator between Israel and Palestine. Said, you couldn't possibly get peace with the Gulf States until you got to break through the Palestinians. Trump proved him wrong on something that was not only a big positive deal, but Biden just celebrated the first year anniversary of it. I came out at the time and said, that was a great thing. And I'm getting pilloried by people that can't stand Trump saying, how dare you say this. Look, I'm not, I'm not your monkey, as you know, Jon Stewart used to say, right? I mean, I'm here because I'm a political scientist, but the country can't handle that right now.
1:02:29 Ian Bremmer? And that's, that's a problem for us. It's a real problem for us.
1:02:32 Scott Galloway? So before our last questions, two more questions. So you're also an academic. We've spent a lot of time thinking and talking and writing about higher education. Any thoughts on where higher education is and the role it plays in American society?
1:02:44 Ian Bremmer? Well, one thing that I've always liked about a liberal arts education in the US is that it tries to teach you how to be a better human being, a more curious human being that functions better in society. I like that. When I did my PhD at Stanford, I was stunned that they really wanted me to take all of my courses in political science. All of them. And I think that's a mistake. I think that they should, we should be trying to get students to learn more about different fields that explain how the world works. It's not dilettantism, but I mean, it would have helped me to have had a basic business course. It would have helped me to have had a basic course, like an advanced course,
1:03:28 Ian Bremmer? but a proper course in like sociology, psychology. Like if you really want to be in the liberal arts, you need to be able to be, to know that interconnective tissue. And I think that I'd like to see the graduate schools work more like the undergraduate schools in that regard, at least in terms of social sciences.
1:03:46 Scott Galloway? Yeah, I like what people have said that Mark Zuckerberg is what you get when you replace civics and history with computer science.
1:03:52 Ian Bremmer? That's exactly right.
1:03:54 Scott Galloway? And you mentioned Germany. I loved Angela Merkel's last tweet as chancellor. She said, "I promise my departure will be remarkably boring." I thought that was the best tweet of a leader. So, we have a very young and quite male listenership. I think our average, the average age of our listeners is 28. Advice to your younger self, or a couple pieces of advice you'd feel comfortable doling out to young people?
1:04:21 Ian Bremmer? Yeah, I didn't appreciate how you need, how content by itself was inadequate. Like, it's table stakes to be really good at something, to really be able to have, like, bring, bring value to a conversation on whatever your topic happens to be, whatever your skill happens to be. But I hadn't appreciated how much you both need to be able to communicate that effectively to different audiences, and also how critical it is to understand who the stakeholders are, who the gatekeepers are, and how you can develop both access to those people and some level of respect from those people. That I think young people understand the former and don't necessarily respect or put enough time into the latter.
1:05:06 Ian Bremmer? And I think I would have wanted my younger self to know those things, but I also think my younger self needed to get his ass kicked a little bit to learn those things for myself. I think it's useful to be thrown into the deep end a few times and not always immediately swim.
1:05:21 Scott Galloway? So, say more, when you say "gatekeepers," what do you, what do you mean? Establishing relationships with media outlets, understanding new mediums? What do you mean?
1:05:29 Ian Bremmer? Everything. I mean, whether it's that, or it's who's in charge of jobs, or who allocates power in your field, or, you know, who are the most influential voices, the people that really matter? How are you going to have access to those people? And, and I think as a young person, I really didn't appreciate, I kind of, I didn't, it's not that I expected things to come to me, but I kind of expected more, well, if I just do the hard work, and if I get a really, really good piece out, or I really understand this, it's going to be recognized. And that just clearly ain't true.
1:05:59 Scott Galloway? Ian Bremmer is a political scientist who has focused on the business of geopolitics. He is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the world's leading political risk research and consulting firm, and G Zero Media, a company dedicated to providing intelligent and engaging coverage of international affairs. He's also the author of 10 books, including the New York Times bestseller, Us Versus Them: The Failure of Globalism, which examines the rise of populism across the world. He joins us from his office in New York. Ian, we appreciate your time and stay safe. Scott, great to finally meet you, man. Really enjoyed it.
1:06:39 Scott Galloway? So, Algebra of Happiness. I've been thinking a lot about America and love, and I'll try and backward integrate into what exactly I mean by that. So, I have been watching this wonderful, original scripted drama on Hulu, Hulu, called Dope Sick, starring Michael Keaton, who I believe is going to go down as one of the great actors. He's sort of the John Travolta of our generation in the sense that people keep talking about his comeback, but he never went anywhere. He was in Night Shift, Mr. Mom, he was in a wonderful Tim Burton film called Beetlejuice, tremendous comedic range, then went on to be, on my view, the best Batman, has been in some fantastic dramatic
1:07:22 Scott Galloway? roles, has been in Spotlight, won Best Actor in, I think it was called Birdman, yeah, it was called Birdman, and now he's just fantastic in this role as a small-town doctor dealing with the opioid crisis. And that is the subject of this series, about the scourge that is the opioid crisis in America that has claimed more lives every year than the entire Vietnam conflict. So, let me repeat that. More people have died, I think, in the majority of the individual years over the last decade than died in the entire Vietnam conflict. And again, that's combat deaths, and people always start throwing in my face on Twitter how I'm misrepresenting the tragedy because it was young people who died. But anyways, the bottom line is you get it. This thing has devastated middle America.
1:08:06 Scott Galloway? As a matter of fact, for the first time in the nation's history, I believe our life expectancy declined two or three years in a row, mostly because of how many young people were overdosing due to opioids. But that's not what this show is about, in my view. That's the subject matter. What this show is about, it's really, it's about love. There's a lesbian couple. In the show that have trouble expressing their love and just being who they want to be because they live in a small town in, I believe it's West Virginia, or maybe it's Pennsylvania. Anyways, all of the flyover states begin to mix, if that sounds elitist and a coastal elitist thing to say, trust your instincts. But also, it's about a man who is widowed and is trying
1:08:48 Scott Galloway? to get back into the game, if you will. And it got me thinking about love. And instinct is a powerful thing. And our instincts are there to ensure that the species prospers and propagates and continues. So it rewards us for things that are good for the species. Survival is very important, so it feels very good to survive. Specifically, it feels very good to eat. It feels very good to exercise. And more than anything, there's huge rewards in what is the most important thing for our species, and that is cooperation and love and propagation. We get huge emotional reward out of relationships. We get huge
1:09:29 Scott Galloway? reward out of cooperation such that we can build economies and prosperity. And more than anything, anyone who's been in love or had their heart broken knows that there is no joy, really, or there is no pain like that. And it got me thinking that you need to be courageous around love. And that is, if you're blessed with the opportunity to love someone, you should be aggressive. You should express those emotions. You should be courageous with your love in your heart and also be open to receiving it and reciprocating it as a young person. One of the biggest mistakes I think young people make is they decide that they don't want to love anyone that loves them because they immediately assume that that person is not in their weight class because we're insecure creatures and we only want to love people who don't love us. So I think learning how to love someone
1:10:12 Scott Galloway? who loves you is key to happiness. But anyways, a bit of a digression there. Being open and courageous with your heart, I think, is incredibly important. And then I started thinking about, well, it's kind of easy for you to say boss. And when I say boss, I mean Scott. And that is, I'm a heterosexual male. No one's going to second guess who I want to love. And one of the things that did impact me as I was thinking about it, though, is I always go to the study on death, or specifically the study about palliative care and people's regrets. And kind of the top regret, or a top regret, is not living the life that they wanted to lead, but the life that others wanted them to lead. And I think a lot of that comes down to deciding to love who you want to love.
1:10:57 Scott Galloway? I've dated a lot of women and had relationships with women for too long because I thought they fit a profile of who I should be in love with, based on, you know, the fashion industrials complexes view of what a woman should look like, or who I should be attracted to, or who had a certain type of background that somehow society constructed a list of who that's, that's who I should mate with. And I'd like to think that I've got more in touch with, well, who do I actually want to love? And I think a lot of us end up with partners that our parents, society, or the media tells us is who we should love, instead of who our heart says to love. So I do think there is an obligation to be courageous with love.
1:11:39 Scott Galloway? But then I started thinking, well, okay, what about America and love? And that is, we have unfettered rights around, or near unfettered rights around free speech. We have near unfettered rights around gun rights. We have near unfettered rights around capitalism, and that is, we get the hell out of the way of entrepreneurs and people who want to make money. We think that's wonderful. But for some reason, we've decided to put obligations and walls and restrictions around who you love and when you love them. And to me, that is such an enormous mistake and incredibly un-American. And there's some very dangerous things out there. Even in this package, the stimulus package, or I guess it's the spending package, where we've decided to be one of the seven nations that doesn't have maternity leave.
1:12:24 Scott Galloway? To get in the way of establishing connections and bonds and relationships and love between a mother and her child because she can't afford to make those bonds early in life... Is just an enormous mistake on several dimensions to tell people who should and should not be their beneficiaries in their life insurance, or who's allowed into the ICU when someone is sick, that is getting in the way of love. To have a tax policy that benefits certain types of couples and not others, to have state legislatures in states basically stick up the middle finger to people who want to love certain people or their same sex, or want to live their own lives and be who they believe they are, and say to them, "Well, we're going to pass
1:13:06 Scott Galloway? laws." I'm specifically speaking to some of these transgender high school sports laws that are nothing but a giant fuck you to the transgender community. They can't find, they can't cite a single instance where it's been an issue. They're getting in the way of love. Anything that gets in the way of our ability to cement and strengthen relationships with whoever it is we decide to love, whether it's mothers having more economic opportunity, whether it's providing a safety net for people in lower income groups who experienced not only tremendous stress around money in a nation where the lower income workers and the middle class haven't had a raise in 30 years, but are constantly thrust in their face how well everyone else is doing. That is the number one source of divorce. That
1:13:49 Scott Galloway? is the number one source of breakage in unions, and that is financial stress. Economic policies that make it more difficult to maintain relationships is getting in the way of love. Any of this bullshit around who you should love and who you shouldn't is getting in the way of what is the most powerful thing in our lives, and that is who we decide to partner with, who we decide to develop in a rational concern and care for. So be courageous with your heart. But also, as Americans, anything we do, anything we do from a policy perspective that gets in the way of who we love is not only immoral, it's un-American.
1:14:26 Scott Galloway? Our producers are Caroline Chagrin and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our assistant producer. As a reminder, we answer your questions on the pod every Monday. If you'd like to submit a question, please visit officehours.proptimedia.com. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week on Monday and Thursday.
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