The Top Geopolitical Risks of 2023 — with Ian Bremmer

Ian Bremmer, the founder and president of Eurasia Group, returns to the pod to discuss what we should be paying attention to regarding international affairs, world development, and geopolitical threats. Follow Ian on Twitter, @ianbremmer. Scott is happy to be back on the mic after a long holiday and discusses his travels, the latest tech layoffs, and the strong labor market. Algebra of Happiness: slow down 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.

• 0:01Scott Galloway?

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• 0:48Speaker 01

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• 1:18Scott Galloway?

  Episode 226. 226 is the area code of the southwestern region of Ontario. In 1926, Winnie the Pooh was published, and Ford Motor Company announced the creation of a 40-hour work week for factory workers. I've decided to become a sex worker. As you know what they say, prostitutes are like a box of chocolate. You just don't know which ones have nuts. Go, go, go!

• 1:52Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 226 episode of the Prop G Pod. Aren't you glad to have me back? Have a little dog back in your life, a little life? How about some life with your dog? That's right, you miss me. Get in touch with your feelings. You need me in your life. I get it. I understand. We are back after a long holiday. I was literally on the road for about five weeks. Let's talk about me. I went to, when I go, I went to New York. I don't even remember why. And then I went to Dubai to hang out with a bunch of buddies in Dubai. Dubai is like Vegas minus the charm. I still don't quite understand Dubai. Um, but it was a good time, good to hang out with, with friends. Then I went to Doha to see the two semifinal games, which was fantastic.

• 2:37Scott Galloway?

  Uh, Doha, I'd never been before, unusual place. I actually like or, um, and, and I'm very interested in the Gulf. I want to get to know more Gulfites. I don't know what you say, Qataris. Anyways, uh, enjoyed myself. And then my family came and I took my boys to see the semifinal and final. And the final was arguably the best match in the history of World Cup play, where Argentina was victorious over France. Uh, you don't need to be a sports fan, which I'm not, to appreciate that game. And the World Cup in Qatar was just a fantastic experience. Then I went to Thailand, I went to Bangkok. By the way, the Four Seasons Bangkok, I love hotels. I will travel to hotel. I don't travel to cities or places. I travel to hotels and I realize how strange that sounds, but I love hotels.

• 3:20Scott Galloway?

  The Four Seasons Bangkok, God, that sounded like a douchey statement. The Four Seasons Bangkok is the best deal in luxury travel. It's basically a six-star hotel, brand new, incredible services, incredible amenities. And it's reasonably priced because you're in Thailand and the dollar is so strong. Anyways, for those of you thinking about, thinking about a long weekend in Thailand. Anyways, that's what, that's what I did. What did you do? Uh, back in London, trying to get ramped up, trying to get excited and about to head to DLD, the Digital Life Design Conference hosted by Bourde Media in Munich. I love Germany. I've always felt an affinity for German people, kind of work hard, play hard, drink a lot. So I'm sorted down with all of that.

• 4:02Scott Galloway?

  And, uh, DLD actually played a key role in my professional life. I had done fairly well up until the last 10 years or, you know, ups and downs. I think like most people's careers. And then I did this talk at DLD on the four. And this was before my book, but I was fascinated by, uh, the impact that technology was having.

• 4:26Scott Galloway?

  On business, specifically the big four, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, and pulled together this presentation and did it at the DLD conference. I don't even know why they asked me to do it. But anyways, I did it and they were taping it and they put it on their website. And this guy named Bob Lefsetz, I think I'm pronouncing his name correctly, is this industry or this music industry analyst. And he writes one of the most thoughtful newsletters in business. And he writes about music, but even if you're not into the music industry, just the way he looks at the world is so interesting and he's so insightful and has, you know, when you read his music, it's like reading rock and roll. It's just so raw and has a rhythm to it. And he basically saw the video and said, you should watch this and said some nice words about the video.

• 5:08Scott Galloway?

  And my, my four video went quote unquote viral and it got a couple of million views. And then a publisher reached out to me and said, you should make this into a book, which turned into the four, which led to a series of kind of upward spiraling or an extensible upward spiral. And that's probably the reason I'm here now. So what's the lesson here? Accept invitations to conferences whenever you get the chance to engage in a platform that gets your content or your skill beyond kind of geographic boundaries, using other people's platforms or video or the written word. If you're in the business of thought leadership or you want to establish yourself as a domain expert, you want to be thinking about, one, what can I bring insight to?

• 5:50Scott Galloway?

  What is, what is my domain that I can be in the top 1% of? And then two, how do I communicate it in a thoughtful way? And these social media platforms especially give you the ability to extend beyond your geographic influence, if you will. In other words, you want to tear down proximity. And that was a big moment for me. So I feel a lot of, I feel a lot of goodwill and gratitude towards the DLD conference. And when they invite me, I go and I have a great time. Anyways, all right, enough bragging. Let's get on with the show. Today's episode, we speak with one of our favorite Blue Flame thinkers, Ian Bremmer. I absolutely love Ian. He is a more successful version of yours truly. Let's bring it back to me again.

• 6:32Scott Galloway?

  He's developed, we were colleagues at NYU and he's developed a fantastic company called the Eurasia Group that I just think he's just calls balls and strikes. And I find that I'm not even aware how my bias, my political bias sort of influences, or if you will biases, my geopolitical view of the world. And I find that Ian is especially adept at just taking domain expertise and data and his sort of unparalleled Rolodex to call shit as he sees it. So we're going to get an update on the ever evolving world with, with Professor Bremmer. Okay, what's happening? First podcast of the year. What's the 411 in 2023?

• 7:15Scott Galloway?

  We are about two weeks, dos semanas into 2023 and the tech sector layoffs have yet to slow down. Amazon is laying off more than 17,000 employees, which equates to cutting 70% more jobs than had previously planned. By the way, another lesson here, a quick timeout. When you do fire people, if you're a leader and you need to fire people, I always say the same thing to CEOs that I'm on the boards of, go deeper than you plan. Cause, cause firing people is like surgery. It may be required, you may, you may need, the, the patient may be better after the surgery. The company may be better off after you take out, I don't want to call laid off people a tumor, but after you operate on the company. But you want to go in and you want to do it once and you want to sew up the corpus, you want to do the layoffs and you don't want to go back in.

• 7:58Scott Galloway?

  Every time you perform surgery on somebody or on an organization, you have layoffs, it takes a real toll on the company. It totally diverts the company. The company doesn't get anything done usually for a couple of weeks before or several weeks after. There's a lot of mourning, there's a lot of anxiety, people aren't focused on their jobs. So you want to go in and make sure you get all of the cancer out. I gotta come up with a better metaphor than people being laid off as, as cancer, but you get my meaning. Go deeper than you want to, because what you don't want is two layoffs. Then people start to think, well, that probably means there's going to be a third and a fourth and I should start looking for another job. Anyways, despite this being just 1% of its workforce, it is indeed the company's largest layoff ever. So think about that, think about that.

• 8:42Scott Galloway?

  It's just 1% of the company's workforce. I think Amazon was the first company. To hire half a million people just in one year. So what is this? Does this say anything about Amazon? All it says is that Amazon got over its skis. And a lot of us, including yours truly, thought that a lot of the trends from COVID were going to be secular or structural, not cyclical. And some were structural. I think the most enduring change is remote work. We're just not going back to the before times of nine to five, five days a week. We're just not doing that. But some of the other stuff has returned to sort of where it was pre-pandemic. For example, e-commerce, which I wrote, has been dramatically accelerated. It did, but it's actually come down.

• 9:24Scott Galloway?

  And in-store traffic has increased dramatically as people leave their homes. And e-commerce is where it would have been had we not had the pandemic, which isn't to say it isn't greater than it was, but it's where it would have been if it had just followed existing growth patterns. According to Deloitte, in 2020, the tech workforce represented just 4% of total employment, and it's only been growing at an average annual rate of 2.2% since 2001. Actually, I had heard there was only 2% to 3% of total jobs. There's about 150 million jobs in the US. Think about that. There are 350 million people and only 150 million jobs. Why? Because between stay-at-home mom and dads, people in prison, kids, people who are discouraged and no longer working, seniors,

• 10:08Scott Galloway?

  there actually aren't that many people working. If you meet somebody, if you meet the average American, it's more likely they don't work or don't have a full-time job or a traditional corporate job, if you will, than they do. Think about how unusual that is. As a matter of fact, I just read a scary stat that somewhere between four and five million able-bodied, you know, 18 to 45-year-old, fully employable men have decided to stop looking for work. They've just said, that's it, I don't want to work. I think that is really strange and really disturbing. Now, unfortunately, this is, or fortunately, the media loves these layoffs because we're obsessed with these companies and we think it's really interesting and it says something. We extrapolate everything that a CEO of a tech company does or anything that happens to a tech company to the broader universe.

• 10:53Scott Galloway?

  And this is more spectacle than it is significant. Why? Why? The services sector, or the hospitality sector, I should say, you know, restaurants, hotels, is 10% of the total labor force, and it is going gangbusters. They can't find people. Unemployment is back to its pre-pandemic low of 3.5%. There are 1.7 open jobs for every person that's unemployed. There's more jobs than there are unemployed people right now. So at the end of the day, you're either not skilled or have an issue that employers don't like, or you have constraints around where you can live, or your expectations are too high. Another lesson here. I have a lot of friends, or a decent number of friends,

• 11:36Scott Galloway?

  who killed it in their 30s, 20s, 30s, and 40s, left their job, whatever, got laid off, you know, decided to retire from investment banking, whatever. And they have spent the last 3, 5, 10 years essentially doing nothing. And they didn't plan to do nothing, but here's the problem. A lot of people end up with just the wrong amount of money. What do I mean by that? They have enough money so they can be choosy regarding their next job, but not enough money to go start a business or go full-time into philanthropy. And they end up kind of in this stasis, or they end up in this limbo. Because if you had a great job, unfortunately, you create a series of filters or metrics or bars that no job can clear. So what I tell people who are out of work is that, all right, have your dream list, go after it, wait,

• 12:21Scott Galloway?

  you know, do whatever you need to do to feel good about your next thing, but put a statute of limitations on it. Because if you're waiting for the perfect boss, it's not going to happen. And the key to finding a great career or doing the next thing is doing the next thing and getting on with it. So be thoughtful and assemble a kitchen cabinet and be aggressive. I find jobs don't come to you generally. I thought after I left or sold my first company profit in 2002 that I would be the CMO of some big company. And I found that my phone wasn't ringing. And jobs are always, even a strong economy, jobs are about you going out and do something. It's like publishing a book. These book publishers have a PR department. I always say, assume they do nothing for you and you won't be disappointed. And generally speaking, they do do nothing.

• 13:04Scott Galloway?

  Assume you will never get a job unless you find that job, unless you go out and get meetings and show interest because it's unusual, unless you're already at a tech company, that you're going to get just tons of people calling you, hoping that you'll get a job. But anyways, anyways, do something. If you, if you are in fact out of work, the key to making money and finding the right job is just getting a job and getting on with it and finding opportunities. The economy added four and a half million jobs last year. Think about that. Think about that. And the most recent jobs report revealed that non-farm payrolls increased by 223,000 jobs in December, so almost a quarter of a million jobs in December. I think there's been about 150,000 layoffs in tech and it gets a ton of news. Think about that. That is, that is, what is that?

• 13:49Scott Galloway?

  Three and a third percent of the four and a half million jobs added. So we added 30 times the number of layoffs in the tech industry. And think about how the media, think about how much attention the media has provided to tech layoffs and think about how much attention they provided to the 30X number of increased job or non-farm payroll jobs that are out there. In sum, in sum, this is a historically strong labor environment. Oh my God. Let's get to work, bitches. We'll be right back for our conversation with Ian Bremmer.

• 14:28Scott Galloway?

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• 16:51Scott Galloway?

  We're back. Here's our conversation with Ian Bremmer, the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the world's leading political risk research and consulting firm. Ian, where does this podcast find you?

• 17:01Ian Bremmer?

  I'm in New York City, though I'm on my way to Europe in a few hours.

• 17:05Scott Galloway?

  Oh, where are you going to be in Europe?

• 17:06Ian Bremmer?

  Amsterdam, London, and then the Davos thing.

• 17:11Scott Galloway?

  I was hoping you'd be a DLD, kind of the low-rent Davos. Anyways, let's bust right into it. You wrote, or you recently released what you believe are the top political risks of 2023. Let's start there. What are the, what are the biggest political risks coming into the new year?

• 17:28Ian Bremmer?

  Well, maybe as opposed to going through the list, I'll say there are like two really big buckets of things that describe the risks this year. First are a handful of individual human beings who have way too much ability to make decisions with yes-men surrounded around them, no checks and balances inside their institutions, and therefore can make big mistakes. In no particular order, that's Chinese Xi Jinping, that's Russia's Vladimir Putin, that's Supreme Leader Khomeini in Iran, and it's also a number of CEO founders of technology companies.

• 18:06Scott Galloway?

  I was gonna say, enough about Elon Musk, what about world leaders?

• 18:08Ian Bremmer?

  Exactly. But no, but it's not just Elon, right? It's Mark, it's a whole bunch. And, and then the second big thing, big group of things, is the fact that the winners of globalization on a global stage, the emerging global middle class, are really losing now. And you see that through inflation, you see it through energy shocks, and, and you see it more broadly in just a rapid growth of, of extreme poverty, of, of kids leaving schools, of women being forced into the informal economy. And so what had been 50 years of humanity progressing on an overall basis,

• 18:52Ian Bremmer?

  not just a few rich people, is now actually turning in the other direction. So those are the two groups of risks that are most important in this report.

• 19:01Scott Galloway?

  So, let's unpack this. So my sense is there's always been autocrats and dictators who are good at surrounding themselves with yes-men and women. Why is this any different or more of a danger?

• 19:14Ian Bremmer?

  Well, for one, in China, that increasingly wasn't true. The fact is that China was an authoritarian state, just as it is today. But there were a lot of different actors inside the senior leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. It was very meritocratic in terms of how one advances into leadership. And they valued internal debate on matters of expertise, whether you're talking about technology, or security, or the economy, what have you. You'd always talk about, you know, the Shanghai clique and, you know, Beijing princelings. You'd talk about technocrats and hardliners. That's no longer true.

• 19:57Ian Bremmer?

  The second largest economy in the world, the second most powerful country in the world, is now run by a leader who governs a lot like Putin, who has become, you know, the be all and all for all decision making, surrounded himself by people that only are accountable to him. And he's not getting good information. He's making mistakes as a consequence. That's a, that's a pretty new development on the global stage. For Russia, Putin has been in this position, but he finally got to the point that he made a massive mistake. He pushed all in on a relatively weak hand, and he got called. He thought he wasn't going to get called. I mean, he's not a chess player, he's a poker player, he's an all-in Texas Holden player. And he got called with a bad hand.

• 20:42Ian Bremmer?

  And now he is in deep, deep trouble. And, and in the case of the technology firms, it's more about the fact that these, the, the impact, the power that these companies have in the digital space, the power that the algorithms have, that AI has, to disrupt democracies, civil society, is exponentially greater than it used to be. So I think your question is exactly the right one methodologically. And we get to this unhappy constellation in sort of, in a, in a number of different ways.

• 21:14Scott Galloway?

  So on the second point around poverty increasing, I've, I've always kind of turned to, or took cold comfort, what it sounds like in this notion. The World Health Organization, I think in 1980, set a goal of cutting abject poverty in half in 40 years, and they did it in 10, and then they did it again. It seems like we were absolutely headed in the right direction. What's, what's gone wrong?

• 21:35Ian Bremmer?

  A few things have gone wrong at the same time. One is a really big thing, which is climate change. It's, of course, costing trillions of dollars, but it's overwhelmingly hitting hardest countries that can't afford to respond. So you saw in Pakistan, you know, a third of the population was underwater with floods. In India, a billion people couldn't work outside after 10 a.m. for months because it was, the conditions were too extreme. There just isn't money to pay for those people, to pay for those countries to get their feet under them. So that, that is a growing structural condition that is increasing every year.

• 22:16Ian Bremmer?

  But on top of that, you have a pandemic that led to massive fiscal outlays, and as a consequence, massive inflation, that the West can handle and can pay for the people that are suffering, even if the Brits are in worse condition than the rest of us, but the developing countries can't. And then you have the Russian invasion of Ukraine, creating all of these supply chain challenges around energy, around food and fertilizer, again, more expensive for our Christmas dinner, but in developing world, a lot of them just don't have food. And so you put those three things together on top of themselves and, and you actually get a unique turning point away from human development that we had been measuring in

• 23:01Ian Bremmer?

  a positive way, as you suggested, Scott, for 50 years straight. And suddenly, a majority of people on the planet, looking at their next five years, aren't going to see progress.

• 23:11Scott Galloway?

  And economic strain or stress in a nation can often lead to nationalism and much worse places and is often sort of the basis or the foundation for, for military intervention. Do you see any of that poverty or economic strain resulting in additional regional flare-ups?

• 23:32Ian Bremmer?

  I do, but let's let's start with at least one risk that might be a positive one. I think as a consequence of how bad this is getting, there's a greater likelihood that in Turkey, President Erdogan loses in the coming months. And if the opposition comes together behind one candidate, given how bad things are and how he's just gone after and they've given a two-year sentence to a major opposition figure, the mayor of Istanbul, there's a better chance they'll do that. I think he may well lose. Now, if he loses, they're going to have an economic crisis, but the new government will turn to the IMF, to the Europeans' bilateral support for an economic bailout, and that

• 24:11Ian Bremmer?

  will be a huge political win for democracies around the world, for the EU, for NATO, for the United States. So you're right, this leads to a lot of instability, but leads to instability for people that are entrenched in power in place in these countries. And in some cases, we'd like to see the back of them. But on balance, Scott, of course, yeah, it also leads to greater instability in countries that we'd like to stay stable. And that's certainly potentially true in Brazil over the coming years. Peru, Colombia could see big problems like this. Peru, Chile have already been experiencing it. It's probably going to get worse. Sri Lanka's basically fallen apart on the back of this, and no one's really coming in to provide the money they need.

• 24:54Ian Bremmer?

  Southeast Asia looks a little better than most, in part because of more favorable commodity production as well as demographic trends. But generally speaking, you look at developing countries around the world, and they are going to get hit hard with greater social and political instability.

• 25:11Scott Galloway?

  Brazil, question mark. Your thoughts on what's happened there?

• 25:15Ian Bremmer?

  In so many ways, so analogous to what's happened in the United States. So maybe we should talk about what's different. Um, one thing that's different is that the president, the former president in Brazil, and remember, the inauguration already happened in Brazil, in the US it hadn't happened yet, they were trying to stop it from happening. He wasn't even there. Uh, he's in Florida. And he, uh, he basically said, I've got no part of this. He's been not talking it up. And then he condemned them a few hours after they cleared him out. So, I mean, we'll find out with investigations whether he or his advisors were involved in financing, in organizing the demonstrations.

• 25:55Ian Bremmer?

  He certainly wasn't telling them, go away while there were thousands calling for a coup. He wasn't saying, I've got a problem with them doing that, which has happened for the last weeks, outside of, uh, military barracks in Brazil. But it's not what Trump was doing for January 6th, that's one thing. Second thing, there were nobody in these buildings when they took them over. Remember, January 6th, hang Mike Pence, you know, Nancy Pelosi, all these people in their offices, people could have been killed. They occupied these buildings, it was Sunday, the buildings were empty. So it was very performative, from that perspective, right? Um, and, uh, and thirdly, unlike Trump, I actually think Bolsonaro is in stronger position

• 26:37Ian Bremmer?

  to continue to be the nominee, the force, uh, for Brazil's opposition, uh, over the next couple of years, where Trump has actually, uh, a much greater, uh, challenges in his own party to, uh, to compete with him as we think about 2024.

• 26:54Scott Galloway?

  And these government overruns with these insurrections, is this the beginning of the end, or are we just getting started, where everyone's going to model the US, and when they lose an election, try and organize or not get in the way of some sort of, you know, low-rent insurrection?

• 27:08Ian Bremmer?

  So, I mean, one of the sentences I wrote in the update, and I'm, I'm not going to quote it, because I don't have it in front of me, but it was really painful to write, uh, was that in, when the wall came down in 1989, the United States was the principal exporter of democracy. And and today, we're the principal exporter of tools that destroy democracy. And that's not our intention as a government, as a nation, or even in terms of the tech companies themselves. But it is a a direct second order implication of the business models and the technological tools. And, you know, it's just way too easy for bad actors in politics to grab a hold of

• 27:46Ian Bremmer?

  these tools and use it to destroy the establishment, to build massive support base with conspiracy theories, absent any degree of fact, all disinformation, and get people whipped up and violent. And that's happened in the United States, even though our population politically actually falls on a bell curve, but you'd never know that from the politicians deploying these algorithms. And the same thing is true in Brazil. And so in that regard, this is structural, and it's not going to go away. In fact, what I expect will happen in Brazil is they will engage in the investigation. They will find that a number of senior Bolsonaro advisers were involved. They will arrest them.

• 28:30Ian Bremmer?

  There will be cases against them. And of course, what are they going to say? Witch hunt. This is going to be a feature. It's going to be, you know, the media are enemies of the people. And the judiciary is engaged in an effort to smear and bring us down. And all of this only makes your base stronger, only makes them more committed to your craziness because you're the only one that is willing to stand up against them. That's that's the problem.

• 28:59Scott Galloway?

  But what is your, as it relates to Brazil, do you think this strengthens, does Bolsonaro and Lula, who comes out of this stronger and weaker?

• 29:09Ian Bremmer?

  In the near term, Lula comes out stronger. And the reason for that, Lula's approval ratings before the insurrection was about fifty seven, fifty eight percent, which sounds good, but he just got inaugurated. That's very weak for a honeymoon president. He was up towards ninety when he was leaving office the first time around. Um, in part, it's a very divided country. So just like the United States, nobody does that well. It's it's kind of impossible to get over sixty in Brazil right now, no matter who you are. Lula's popular in Brazil, but nobody's popular because everyone hates the other, right? Um, so I it wouldn't surprise me if he gets a five-point boost because all of the major political parties have condemned these attacks, all of them, and

• 29:54Ian Bremmer?

  the judiciary and the military leaders. Um, though, uh, there will be questions around why Lula allowed these demonstrations to persist and call for a coup without more adequately defending, um, the seats of power for the judiciary, legislature, and the executive branches in Brazil. He's going to have to deal with that at some point. But over the next year, two years, what you're going to see are investigations that are deeply politicized, supported by a judiciary in Brazil, which is not independent, which is actually pretty biased against Bolsonaro. That's the difference between the US, um, and and Brazil. And, um, where the economy is going to turn south. And and Lula, knowing that, is going to try

• 30:39Ian Bremmer?

  to do popular things in Brazil's economy. He's going to try to make bigger fiscal outlays without increasing major taxation, which is very hard for him to do, will lead to a market reaction against Brazil that will squeeze the more dollar-denominated debt in a high-interest-rate environment that they're not going to be paid for. In other words, as we get closer to the end of Lula's term, he's going to have huge economic headwinds. His popularity is going to go down, and Bolsonaro and Bolsonarism is going to be much stronger, more agitated, more willing to turn to violence. So I think in the near term, Lula's fine, but this portends problems, big problems for South America's biggest democracy. You haven't fixed or addressed any of the underlying issues.

• 31:26Ian Bremmer?

  Coming up after the break. In the next year, you're going to have millions of people that cannot tell whether they're interacting with human beings or bots. And there are so many ways that can go so badly. I mean, think about what GameStop would be like if instead of being driven by a bunch of reditors, it's actually driven by millions and millions of bots and bots that are impersonating people that are real actors inside these companies or analysts or the rest.

• 31:56Scott Galloway?

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• 32:39Scott Galloway?

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• 33:05Speaker 03

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• 33:50Scott Galloway?

  You said in your comments that you thought that AI posed a risk to democracies. What did you mean by that?

• 33:56Ian Bremmer?

  Well, I mean, we saw, first of all, the name of that risk, which is Weapons of Mass Disruption, was actually written by ChatGPT. You know, I, I, I put the, uh, the outline of the risk to the ChatGPT bot. And I said, can you give us some titles that would work? And that's what they came up with, which was pretty good. So I used it. You know, I, I see now that there, people are using ChatGPT to write malware. Uh, let's, that's, it's fairly obvious that, um, if, you know, relatively low lift, uh, you don't have to pay people, but can instead use bots, um, to, uh, to improve your ability to, to destroy stuff, to spearfish, uh, to promote disinformation. That's going to be a challenge.

• 34:39Ian Bremmer?

  But then more broadly than that, if this is the year of that the Turing test is functionally broken, and I know that that doesn't have much meaning for the AI coders themselves. They say, well, it's kind of an artifice. It's not that important, doesn't really show deep AI. Yeah, but for human beings interacting with AI, it actually does. I mean, you remember that guy from Google, the engineer that lost his mind saying Google had developed sentience? Yeah, I think he was fired and that's fine. So he was early stage and kind of weird. Um, but, uh, you know, in the next year, you're going to have millions of people that cannot tell whether they're interacting with human beings or bots. And there are so many ways that can go so badly.

• 35:20Ian Bremmer?

  I mean, think about what GameStop would be like if instead of being driven by a bunch of reditors, it's actually driven by millions and millions of bots and bots that are impersonating people that are real actors inside these companies or analysts or the rest. I, I mean, I, I don't know how the market will function well in that environment. I don't know how elections will function well in that environment. I, I just don't think we're ready to respond to these challenges.

• 35:50Scott Galloway?

  Doesn't that, you just inspired a thought, doesn't that make the case or the need for identity, whether it's this is a real person and this is original thought and writing even more important?

• 36:00Ian Bremmer?

  Yes, yes, yes, you and I have talked about this, we're so desperate that we need verification on these platforms, but until a massive crisis happens, verification is antithetical to the business models that drive them. And so if the incentives are all in the other direction, they're just not going to do it.

• 36:17Scott Galloway?

  So you see, you see AI as being more, I mean, because when you say AI could be used to write malware, I see as well, AI could also be used to fight malware, that it becomes an arms race, but the good guys have the same technology and usually the good guys don't have the same constraints, but they are usually better resourced. I guess that I, I think, I wonder if some of the alarm around AI is a little overblown, that it is going to be what robotics was to manufacturing, it's going to be the same to the information economy, like a lot of editors, low level editors, the kind of second term media firms are going to have their jobs go away. But I'm not sure I see the existential risk that people see. What is the scenario?

• 37:02Ian Bremmer?

  Well, I mean, first of all, you just got at it with your previous point, which is that right now, the business models are not aligned to actually fight this because the business models make money off of this. The second issue is that I think this is much greater risk in weaker economies, in brittle developing countries. So, you know, the fact is Twitter and Facebook took Trump off. They didn't take people that were doing much worse than Trump off, leading other countries in the world, because they don't have as many resources devoted to that, and they don't care as much. It's not as big of a deal. To the United States, there'll be much more scrutiny. And I'm not suggesting that taking Trump off was the right or the wrong decision, frankly. I'm simply saying

• 37:43Ian Bremmer?

  that it's clearly not applied equally to other countries around the world. So I'm much more worried about the impact of this on more brittle democracies.

• 37:52Scott Galloway?

  Let's talk about, since the last time we talked, what's happened in Russia that surprised you or confirmed your initial, your initial views on it? And what's the state of play in Ukraine right now?

• 38:02Ian Bremmer?

  So the Ukrainians have been able to secure even greater levels of offensive and defensive equipment. I'm a little surprised that they're getting Patriot systems from the United States and Germany, which means that not only can they prevent the Russians from taking more land on the ground, they've got them to basically a standstill, and we're probably going to see some Ukrainian counter-offensives in the coming weeks, but also, over time, they'll be able to prevent the Russians from doing the same level of damage in the air to Ukrainian critical civilian infrastructure. And that's great for Ukraine, and the question is how Russia's going to respond to it, because this is a war, right?

• 38:47Ian Bremmer?

  And I don't mean it's just a war between Ukraine and Russia. This is a proxy war being fought between NATO and Russia, right? And so is Russia going to simply be constrained with its actions on the ground in Ukraine when the reason they're losing is because they're fighting all of NATO? I suspect they won't. There's one other thing that's surprised me a little, and that is that four months after the investigations have started, we have not a shred of evidence pointing to the Russians attacking Nord Stream 1 and 2.

• 39:19Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, I saw that, too.

• 39:20Ian Bremmer?

  I think that's really interesting, because these are multi-billion dollar pipelines.

• 39:26Scott Galloway?

  So what's the thesis? What do you think happened?

• 39:28Ian Bremmer?

  Well, I mean, either we can't, either the Russians are much better at it than we think, and so they could do it without fingerprints, which means they can probably engage in other attacks against pipelines and fiber and international waters, causing massive damage to Europe. Or it meant that Ukrainians and/or with Western help, say Poland, engaged in the strikes, which means that it's fair and open season to engage in strikes against critical infrastructure, which the Russians also take note of. Either of those things are bad for escalation.

• 39:58Scott Galloway?

  It strikes me that, in my predictions, I know you do predictions, that the best trade of 2023 was we're taking 6% of our military budget and giving it to Ukraine.

• 40:11Ian Bremmer?

  To blow up like half of Russia's.

• 40:13Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, and basically we've taken fifty percent of their kinetic power away.

• 40:17Ian Bremmer?

  Yep.

• 40:18Scott Galloway?

  It just strikes me that this is the best investment we've ever made and.

• 40:22Ian Bremmer?

  Yeah, it's not intentional, but yes. The reason, I'm not pushing back a little bit because there are a lot of people out there that believe that this war is in America's interests. The belief that America is fighting this war and getting the Ukraine and they want the war to continue and that is absolutely wrong.

• 40:38Scott Galloway?

  And you're, we've talked about this before, you believe because as long as we have a superpower with eleven thousand nuclear weapons or whatever they have engaged in a war. That it just creates an existential risk that every, that you always have incentive to end the war. Is that, and am I putting words in your mouth or?

• 40:55Ian Bremmer?

  There are so, well, first of all, I'm saying it because as someone who talks to all of the principals in the United States and NATO, I know how much they are trying to end this war. I know how much they wanted this war to not happen.

• 41:07Scott Galloway?

  The US wants the war to end.

• 41:08Ian Bremmer?

  Absolutely, absolutely. Now, they want the Russians to withdraw, but they want the war to end. Because a, a long-term environment where the, where the Russians are destroyed and defeated and really angry with six thousand nuclear weapons and they're a rogue state is a really dangerous environment, right? It's a bad place to live. We're gonna, it means that, you know, the Europeans are gonna have to keep spending very heavily on defense forever. It means that, you know, energy is always gonna be disrupted. It means the Russians are engaged in all sorts of attacks, the way the Iranians are across the Middle East. Like, we don't want that. You'd much rather have a normal relationship with a normal Russia. We just can't get from here to there. Right now,

• 41:52Ian Bremmer?

  there's no way to do with Putin in power, but we don't want this war to continue. Beyond that, you know, forty-four million Ukrainians, a hundred thousand casualties on the Ukrainian side, a hundred thousand casualties on the Russian side. Now, the human damage here is massive. Eight million refugees streaming into Europe. It's a huge, huge problem. And the knock-on impact of the global economy from the energy disruption, the food disruption, the fertilizer disruption all over the world, this is, none of this is good. I mean, the Americans are in a much better position than the Europeans, of course, because our energy costs are so much lower. But this is a massive pain in the ass. And one final thing to mention, Scott, we've done a really good job in keeping the alliance together.

• 42:34Ian Bremmer?

  But that doesn't mean that we'll be able to do that in five years. And so, like, at some point, you really want to say, okay, we've succeeded. Like, you know, the war is over, the Russians are out of the territory they took since February 24th. And now, let's, like, we don't want the Europeans to get wobbly. We don't want, you know, a future American president to say, why the hell are we doing this? Well, this, this could still end in disarray. There's so many reasons we don't want this war to happen.

• 43:02Scott Galloway?

  Let me, let me just take the other side of it and have you respond. Natural gas prices, despite all the fear, are at pre-pandemic lows.

• 43:10Ian Bremmer?

  Yep.

• 43:10Scott Galloway?

  The European Union is actually a union again. NATO is out of a brain coma.

• 43:15Ian Bremmer?

  Yep.

• 43:16Scott Galloway?

  We have just commercially sent a massive advertisement to the rest of the world that you should buy our weapons, not Russian weapons. They will never have a stable Europe as long as Putin is in power. So the longer he continues to shoot himself in the foot, the more likely it is we have some reasonable stability in Europe with someone other than Putin. And we're accomplishing all of this without a single boot on the ground. We're also, aren't we also potentially sending a message to China? That a small nation with the support of the West in terms of technology can put up a hell of a fight? Isn't this kind of win-win-win all the way around?

• 43:51Ian Bremmer?

  Well, first, I agree with every single point you just made, Scott. And what that tells me is that we have managed to respond to crisis very effectively. We have taken advantage of that crisis to do things that we should have been doing for decades. And we haven't. And now we are. And that's great. But that doesn't mean that you wanted that crisis. That's the point. That's my last book, right? I mean, the same thing is true of climate change, but we'd be much better off if there wasn't climate change. I mean, we have to recognize, Scott, there is a, there is a non-negligible chance that a nuclear warhead is deployed in this war. And then we're fighting directly with Russia.

• 44:34Ian Bremmer?

  Then we are blowing shit up on the ground that belongs to Russia. And that is, that is a, nobody's going to say, oh, I'm so glad that we have that going on. And I don't, I don't think, I mean, I've had friends that are in NATO and in the White House that were thinking that was a 20% likelihood at one point. I never did. I thought it was more like five, but five is too high. Um, and, and again, the idea that this war is not over.

• 44:58Ian Bremmer?

  This war right now is affecting economically a lot of people, but it's only directly affecting the human beings on the ground in Ukraine and Russia. But if the Russians start engaging in direct cyber and fiber and pipeline attacks across Europe, this war is going to feel very differently for the world's largest common market. And again, when people say, well, isn't the war going to be over in the coming months? No, the war's been going on since 2014. We just didn't, we didn't pay any attention to it. Ukrainians did, they were fighting, right? The Russians were fighting. So, I mean, a war that's been going on for 10 years, do we think that that war is going to keep going for more than another few months? I would be willing to bet on that. I think that we haven't begun to experience the human damage and fallout

• 45:41Ian Bremmer?

  as a consequence of all of this fighting, and there are real risks around it. But again, all of your, in the first 11 months, the US and the Western response has been exemplary. I give Biden at least an A minus. And the NATO leaders, and the Germans, and the French, and the Brits, they've done, we've done a really good job in an environment where a lot of times we don't do a very good job. So, no question there.

• 46:08Scott Galloway?

  What do you think? So, let's assume the war continues to go for at least another three or six months, and the balance of victories is massively skewed towards Ukrainian victories. When do we see the beginning of the end of Putin? Are we still a long way from that?

• 46:24Ian Bremmer?

  We're a long way from that. Ukraine's economy has contracted by 40% in the last year. Russia's by 4%. Energy prices are relatively high, and everyone still wants to buy Russian commodities. They can't get gas because they don't have pipeline for that, but for everything else, they can buy it at a discount in many cases. So, and Russia's central bank governor, Naibulina, is very effective as well. She's done, everybody recognizes she's done a fantastic job for the Russians. And Putin hasn't bothered her. He's let her do what she does, not like Turkey, you know, intervening because he doesn't like the economic policies, the economy gets worse. Putin's not so stupid about his own economy.

• 46:57Scott Galloway?

  The ruble's done really well, hasn't it?

• 46:59Ian Bremmer?

  Well, that's a bad indicator because the ruble can you can maintain a high level of your ruble if you can't buy anything on international markets. I mean, the ruble never broke the buck when it was the Soviet Union, but you try to go in the stores and buy stuff that wasn't shit to buy. So I mean, there is there's a constraint there and Russian high end consumers are a little pissed off about it. Russia's, you know, automobile manufacturers about three percent of what it was at the beginning of the war. So they're definitely and there's been a lot of brain drain. So five years out, 10 years out, Russia economy is going to do very, very badly. And as you mentioned, they won't be able to export the weaponry. And that was their second largest hard dollar maker, right? And in terms of exports after energy, the US is going to pick that up. The Europeans will pick that up.

• 47:44Ian Bremmer?

  So this is horrible for the Russians long term. But you asked me about six months. Six months. I don't think there's a meaningful internal threat to Putin. I I don't see significant internal demonstrations. I think that the Security Council around him is deeply aligned with him. You've you probably noticed that about 20 mid level oligarchs have jumped out of windows over the past 10 months. All of them probably dead before they jumped. You know, it is it's a they don't just clip your nails. They take your fingers off in Russia. And I think they're worried about that.

• 48:18Scott Galloway?

  And in Iran, what's your view of Khomeini's longevity there?

• 48:23Ian Bremmer?

  Well, first, it's so connected. You know, the fact is the Chinese are not providing military support to the Russians. The Iranians are. The Iranians have become the most important ally to Russia on the global stage. They're giving them drones. They're

• 48:39Scott Galloway?

  And why is that, Ian? What's their rationale for for cozying up to Russia?

• 48:42Ian Bremmer?

  Well, number one, there had been a lot of coordination, for example, around Syria on the ground and supporting Assad. Number two, these are countries that are both incented to have high levels of commodity prices, energy prices. But they're also countries that are facing complete decoupling from the West. They're sanctioned. They're being made into rogues. And so Iran and Russia are increasingly painted with the same brush in a way that China's not. Like China wants to keep doing business with the rest of the world. They want to be in the G20, right? They they want to show up. They want to be in all these meetings. They're debt holders. They're creditors, just like the Americans, the Europeans are. The Russians aren't. The Russians increasingly smell like Iran on the global stage. Um, we're

• 49:23Ian Bremmer?

  fully sanctioning them, and we kind of want the end of the regime. We talk about them in the same way. Well, is Putin gonna be out? Is the supreme leader gonna be out? And the response, you know, is not like Xi Jinping with zero COVID, suddenly let it rip because he wants to listen to the people. No, it's screw you. I'm gonna tighten it hard. I'm gonna I'm gonna call up 300,000 reservists and send you to the front. Uh, or in the case of Iran, I'm gonna I'm gonna, you know, redouble my efforts to repress. I'm gonna execute a few more people, um, that don't deserve to be executed. That's what they're doing. So I mean, there's no, there's only repression. Uh, uh, look, the theocracy could well go. The supreme leader is, I think he's 83. He's not in great health. Um, if he dies, um,

• 50:04Ian Bremmer?

  I could imagine that the military takes over. So the IGR, the, uh, the Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran might well take over and Iran could become a military dictatorship, but they they would still become, you know, a very dangerous rogue in the region. And and also, in addition to the domestic instability and all the support for Russia, they're also much closer to nuclear weapons, and they've kicked out the international inspectors. Um, and that's a serious problem, right? Because we've got the Israelis that won't tolerate that, the Americans that won't tolerate that. I mean, this, it's clearly more likely that you would see a direct military series of strikes against Iran as

• 50:47Ian Bremmer?

  a consequence of all of this, um, than at any other point since we signed the JCPOA, the Iranian nuclear deal, which now no longer functions.

• 50:55Scott Galloway?

  So just as we wrap up here, Ian, I'm curious, just on a personal level, have you taken any time over? Over the New Years or the Holidays to reflect on what you're looking for in 2023 in terms of professional or personal growth? Like, what do you, when you look into this, you look down the barrel of 2023, what are you hoping to achieve professionally and personally?

• 51:14Ian Bremmer?

  Well, you know, first of all, to put it in the context of the conversation we've just had, you know, which I really enjoy doing, I mean, I'd look at the schedule and go, oh, I'm talking to Scott. Like, I just know it's gonna be fun and engaging, which is nice. One of the things about 2022 that's really been a plus as I look back. You know, when I write this report, at the end of the year, I go back and I spend a couple of days looking at it and seeing how I did, how we did, what we got right, what we got wrong, and why. And I always find that a wonderful way to close the year because analytically, it is, you know, it's kind of like, it's kind of like a big shower. And you come out and you're refreshed and you're thinking about things a little bit differently.

• 51:56Ian Bremmer?

  Because it's not like I have any, I'm not personally invested in these outcomes. I'm invested in wanting to live in a better world. So in many ways, I really don't want a lot of these things to happen. But if they don't happen, you know, it's not on, it's not on me. So I think having a little bit of distance and allowing yourself to take your work seriously, but not take yourself so seriously, seems really important. And I don't, I actually don't take myself seriously at all. I take my work really, really seriously. I'm so grateful that I'm able to do what I do and have a platform and people bother to listen to me and engage, and I love it. I love people, I like being in the mix and all of that. But, but I don't take myself seriously. I mean, you can't, right? It's no fun to live that way.

• 52:38Ian Bremmer?

  And, and I think that, that essential whiteness of being is, is something that we should, that I've certainly aspired to have more of in 2023. I want 2023 to be a little more zippless. We're all traveling a lot more. We're not wearing masks anywhere, thank God. Let's make it a zippless year.

• 52:55Scott Galloway?

  Any parting thoughts, any advice? I always ask all of our guests, any thoughts or advice for young people as we contemplate a world with AI and tech is appearing to go not be the growth sector anymore? Someone coming right out of school, either a master's in political science or an MBA? Any thoughts on the world they face?

• 53:12Ian Bremmer?

  Yeah, second order thinking, thinking about thinking, understanding how to engage with people in real life. I mean, AI is going to subvert all sorts of things that are intermediated, but not things that involve interpersonal communication that's right in front of you. That's really important. Those management skills, those organizational skills. Who are the people that understand how to actually build groups of people, make them function well? A lot of young people hate that stuff. They need to learn that stuff.

• 53:37Scott Galloway?

  Ian Bremmer 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 11 books, including his latest, The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats and Our Response Will Change the World. He joins us from his office in New York. Ian, I always love speaking to you, and let's absolutely commit to spending more time in person and enjoying the 30 or 40 years we have left here.

• 54:09Ian Bremmer?

  Yeah, I'm looking forward to that.

• 54:19Scott Galloway?

  Algebra of happiness, the finite nature of life. There's nothing like a year clicking by. Do you remember, are you old enough to remember where you would calculate how old you'll be at the turn of the millennium? I remember, and I think I'm older than the majority of the people who listen to this podcast, we have an especially young and especially male listenership, but I remember thinking, oh, my gosh, I'm going to be 26 at the turn of the millennium, actually 36, but anyways. And I would freak out. I couldn't even imagine the world. I couldn't even imagine being that old. And here we are in 2023. What the actual fuck? Here's the thing. Here's the thing. Time goes exponential because our species.

• 55:00Scott Galloway?

  Through 99.9% of our time on this planet as our current rendition of this species, or Homo sapiens, or whatever you want to call modern man, for 99.9% of that tenure, we didn't live past 35 or 45. So our brains have trouble calculating, how the hell am I still around? In time, you lose perspective of time. It just begins to fall off a cliff. Why? Why? The more differentiation in your life, the slower time goes. And that is when you're a kid, every day kind of brings different things, discovery, you have incredible neuroplasticity, you're absorbing a lot. So life seems different every day. So when your mom says, no, we're not going to Star Wars tonight, we're going tomorrow night. It's like, oh my God, this

• 55:43Scott Galloway?

  is a tragedy. I can't even imagine the future 24 hours. Now what happens, and you experience this, or if you're over the age of 40, you can relate to this, years become seasons, seasons become weeks. So the question is, what can I learn from this? How do I take advantage of this? It's comforting to know you'll be dead soon, and so will everyone else. Or it's liberating. It's liberating. When's the last time you beat yourself up? You got upset, or you thought, I'm not doing as well at my job as I thought, or I got fired, or I had a relationship not work out, or I said something stupid, or I didn't handle this situation well, or I really fucked up here, and you start beating yourself up?

• 56:23Scott Galloway?

  Guess what? Guess what? It really doesn't matter, and you should forgive yourself. You will meet other people. You will have other opportunities. And the thing you will regret, when you get towards the end, which will happen much faster than you think, the thing you'll regret, isn't that you got fired, isn't that you screwed up, isn't that you, someone broke your heart. That's not what you'll regret. You'll regret how upset you were. Because here's the thing, it goes really fast, and you want to enjoy the ride. You want to be as good to yourself as you can be. You want to forgive yourself. That's not to say don't hold yourself accountable. That's not to say don't become increasingly

• 57:05Scott Galloway?

  kind and increasingly generous as you get older, and you start to think about Bigger picture things like what is my role in the world? How can I do what I'm supposed to do and add value to other people's lives? How can I nod to the universe if you're blessed with certain things and start creating more opportunities? Such that other people can recognize some of the same blessings that you've registered? All of those things matter. Hold yourself accountable. But for God's sakes, don't beat yourself up. Be kind to yourself. Why? It's all gonna be over very soon. And it's liberating. It's liberating. Enjoy every goddamn day. When you're somewhere beautiful, stop and force yourself to look around and go,

• 57:46Scott Galloway?

  "Jesus Christ, this is beautiful. How fortunate am I to be here and register the incredible senses I have?" Are you strong? Are you running? Are you in the gym? Take a moment to go, "I'm a fucking beast. Isn't this wonderful how strong I am?" Do you get to be affectionate with people? Enjoy it. Drink it up. Drink it up. It's all gonna be over. That's the bad news. The good news is, if you realize that, you're gonna enjoy this so much more. Slow down. Register your blessings. Register how incredible it is to live in a democracy. Register how incredible it is, if you're fortunate enough, to make good money.

• 58:30Scott Galloway?

  Register how fun it is to spend money. Register how incredible it is to have friends. Register how incredible it is to share experiences with people in different places. Register how incredible it is to be in love or to have someone love you. Register how incredible it is that you have people in your life that love you unconditionally. Stop the fuck down and enjoy it. Enjoy it. It's gonna be over soon.

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