Conversations in Review: AI, Geopolitics, and Lifestyle Revelations

We’ve made it to our final episode of 2023! Please enjoy as we highlight a few of the blue flame thinkers who joined us on the pod this year. Episodes in order of guest appearances: Conversation with Mustafa Suleyman — The Proliferation of AI & the Next Wave of Technology The Promises and Perils of Neurotechnology – with Nita Farahany Behind the Scenes of SVB’s Collapse + A Vision for America — with Ro Khanna The State of Play: Markets, Economy, and Ukraine & China’s Growing Power, US Diplomacy, and Ukraine’s Counteroffensive — with Ian Bremmer Conversation with Fareed Zakaria — The Conflict in Israel and the State of Foreign Affairs Capitalism, Private Equity, and the Seven Deadly Sins — with Stephen Dubner The Psychology of Money — with Morgan Housel Conversation with Jennifer B. Wallace — What to Do About Toxic Achievement Culture How to Get Unstuck — with Adam Alter Conversation with Jennifer Cohen — Building Healthy Habits and Staying Confident Understanding AI’s Threats and Opportunities — with Mo Gawdat Masculinity, Media, and How to Citizen – with Baratunde Thurston Conversation with Simon Sinek — Finding Your Why, Feeling Stuck, and Building Strong Leaders Scott closes by thanking YOU for supporting the Prof G Pod in 2023. 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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• 1:16Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the final Prof G episode of 2023. What a thrill! For our final episode, we'll be sharing the highlights from the Blue Flame thinkers who provided us with rich insight on topics including: Big tech, oh, that's a shocker. AI, oh, heard of it? Heard of it? It's the new thing. Social media, it's the old thing. Still depressing your kids, though. Still depressing your kids and spreading misinformation. Geopolitics, nothing going on in the world of geopolitics. Finance, work ethic, and modern masculinity. Anyways, here we go. I love our guests. I learn a lot. I used to interview guests just to hear myself speak and try and sound smart. And now I'm actually trying to be a better interviewer and actually listen and ask questions. So again, back to me.

• 1:59Scott Galloway?

  So with that, let's bust right into our favorite moments of 2023.

• 2:05Scott Galloway?

  AI was a big, if not the biggest, topic of the year. The first clip comes from our conversation with Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO and co-founder of Inflection AI. Mustafa has a more positive outlook on AI than some of his peers.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Today, AI, for example, I think is going to be, you could argue, like a bulldozer for the mind. I mean, it is going to reduce the cost of decision making and reduce the cost of synthesizing, interpreting, and predicting, which is basically the essence of intelligence. What makes us capable, what makes you so capable as an individual, your expertise is consuming vast amounts of data and making speculations or predictions about the past and reflecting on those, whether they turn out to be true or not, and then updating and iterating on what you say next. We do that in pretty much every role that we do in professional life.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  And that is exactly what these AIs now do. In many respects, it will make us more productive and make us more efficient. So on the face of it, I think that is an incredibly positive story about what's going to happen over the next few decades.

• 3:20Scott Galloway?

  Again, that was Mustafa Suleyman, a key player in the realm of AI and tech. Next up, we have a clip from our discussion with Nita Farahani, a professor of law at Duke University and the author of "The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology." Nita discussed the threats to privacy and freedom of thought. But among the various topics she covered, one that is near and dear to us is the influence of social media on the well-being of children and adolescents.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  The effects on children and adolescents seems to be profound with both brain development, but in particular, self-image and self-reflection and self-confidence. It seems to be incredibly problematic for self-image and self-development. I don't think we have the longitudinal data yet to know what that means. And we don't have a comparison set well to be able to look at, like, here's a child who grew up without social media. Here's one who had an hour a day. And here's one who had none. And be able to look at their brain development over time to really understand, what does that mean long term? There are people who are studying this to see what the detrimental effects are.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  You know, I worry about children's ability to pay attention, to be able to enjoy the outdoors, to be able to get enough physical exercise, to be able to interact socially with other people.

• 4:46Scott Galloway?

  Again, that was Nita Farahani. And speaking of social media, we also spoke with Representative Ro Khanna, huge fan of Representative Khanna's, in March to hear his thoughts regarding TikTok and ByteDance.

• 4:57Speaker 04

  Well, I think it's a mistake to have TikTok owned by ByteDance and that we should force the sale of TikTok. And I'll tell you a couple of reasons why. One, you could have the Chinese CCP at any point use the platform for subtle propaganda. So imagine there's an American candidate who has a more pro-China policy. Could they manipulate videos to have that come up first for the millions of users? Two, even though right now I don't believe that any of the data is compromised, at a future point, you could have Gigi Ping or someone compromise it. And three, I don't think we owe the Chinese much reciprocity. It's not like they allow Google or Facebook or Amazon to pop right there.

• 5:41Scott Galloway?

  Again, that was Representative Ro Khanna, an American politician and lawyer who has been representing California's 17th congressional district since 2017. And now, this wouldn't be an end of the year review if we didn't mention Ian Bremmer. He's clocked in on the pod a record eight times, the latest being back in September, from the Russian-Ukrainian war to US-China relations. We've covered a lot with Ian this year.

• 6:04Speaker 05

  There's a wide variety of scenarios that you can imagine with the most positive for Ukraine is they're able to get all the ammunition they need. They're fighting like hell, really well-trained. The Russians have internal fights between the Wagner Group, paramilitary, and the defense guys. They start falling apart. The Ukrainians break the land bridge between Russia and Crimea. The Ukrainians are plausibly threatening supply chain to Crimea, and Putin faces a very significant situation at home. And he's got to think about whether he Wants to escalate in terms of use of weapons of mass destruction just to try to keep Crimea from falling down the road.

• 6:49Speaker 05

  That's the best possible scenario for Ukraine, also could lead to the Russians being willing to more strongly accept peace talks led by China.

• 6:59Speaker 06

  Global stage, the economy is no longer driven by the US. The economy is not driven by anyone. It is multipolar. And some of that is because China is bigger than it used to be. Some of it is because they're consolidated state capitalist under one leader. Some of it's because the Americans are so divided and no longer have a trade policy and can't provide market access. There are lots of reasons for it, but it's a frustration. It's a frustration for Americans in part because the reason why China was brought into and welcomed into American institutions for the last 40 years, part of it was because

• 7:40Speaker 06

  the US knew it would make Americans wealthier, American corporations wealthier. But part of it was a mistaken assumption that as the Chinese became wealthier and more powerful, that they'd become Americans. And they're not. They're still authoritarian, they're still state capitalists, they're just wealthier and more powerful. And, and, you know, Americans are not prepared to accept that.

• 8:02Scott Galloway?

  Keeping on the trend of geopolitics, our most downloaded episode of the year, CNN's Fareed Zakaria. We had Fareed on to discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict shortly after the October 7 Hamas attacks.

• 8:15Fareed Zakaria?

  Really, the most important thing that has happened over the last two decades in the Middle East is the withdrawal of American power, you know, in a fairly dramatic sense. The United States had been the kind of dominating outside force in the Middle East for decades. It used to be the Soviet Union and the United States, both had their client states. Then in a kind of amazing move of diplomatic jujitsu after the 1973 war, Kissinger gets Egypt to flip. It goes from being pro-Soviet to pro-American. And that begins the end of the Soviet era and/or the bipolar era, and it becomes a period of American domination.

• 8:57Fareed Zakaria?

  So the United States had better relations, if you think about it, in 1975 with every country in the Middle East than they had with each other.

• 9:07Scott Galloway?

  Coming up after the break, you'll hear from some of our most sentimental guests and lifestyle Yodas.

• 9:17Scott Galloway?

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• 10:02Scott Galloway?

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• 10:19Scott Galloway?

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• 11:26Scott Galloway?

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

• 12:11Scott Galloway?

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• 12:44Scott Galloway?

  Welcome back to the Prof G Pod's 2023 Year in Review. Next up, we have a clip from the conversation we had with Morgan Housel back in February. He told us about the behaviors to consider when it comes to building wealth and the importance of earning, saving, and investing. Most notably for our listeners, he said,

• 13:01Morgan Housel?

  You think that everyone's looking at you, but even when people are noticing you, they're imagining themselves being noticed by other people. And it's true for cars, it's true for houses, that nobody is thinking about you as much as you are, nobody cares about your stuff as much as you do. Once I realized like that game, it was like, okay, now I see what the game is. And therefore, my aspirations for nice stuff went way down.

• 13:26Scott Galloway?

  Again, that was Morgan Housel, a partner at the Collaborative Fund and the author of The Psychology of Money. Moving on, let's hear from Jennifer B. Wallace, an award-winning journalist and author of Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It.

• 13:42Speaker 09

  I came across this psychological construct called mattering. Mattering is basically what you're now focused on at home. Mattering is making children feel valued for who they are at their core, by their family, by their friends, by their communities, and depending on them to add meaningful value back to their families, to their friends, to their communities. The kids who were doing the worst are kids who felt like their mattering, their worth, was contingent on their performance. The other kids I found who were not doing

• 14:22Speaker 09

  as well were kids who got those messages that they mattered a lot, but no one ever depended on them to add value to anyone other than themselves and their own resume. And so what these kids lacked was social proof that they mattered.

• 14:41Scott Galloway?

  Again, that was Jennifer B. Wallace, an award-winning journalist and social commentator. Back in April, we spoke with Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the bestselling book Freakonomics, to talk about the role of private equity in our society and his thoughts on the seven deadly sins. In this clip, Stephen comments on the aspects of sloth.

• 15:00Speaker 10

  Sloth? Really? A sin? I mean, some of the smartest people I know are some of the laziest, self-professed laziest people I know, because they're smart enough to know that unless something gets inside your cranium and really, really agitates it in a good way or bad way, you should not pursue it. You're just gonna waste your, you're gonna waste your brain cells. Wait until you have the thing that makes you go. And so that can look like laziness.

• 15:29Scott Galloway?

  Next up, we have Mo Gaddat, who joined us on the pod back in July. Mo is the former chief business officer of Google X and an expert on happiness. While much of this conversation focused on the need to control our response to AI and the impact this technology is having on society, it was Mo's vulnerability around coming to terms with his son's death that still resonates with our team today.

• 15:51Speaker 11

  Can accept the fact that there is a non-physical element to us. Okay, that non-physical element by definition exists outside spacetime, because otherwise it wouldn't be able to perceive time and the passage of time. It's a simple object-subject relationship. Then that non-physical element is not affected by the events of the physical. So my son really never died. Okay, so my son's physical form was born and my son physical's form decayed. But the essence of my son, his consciousness, has never gone anywhere. And when you really understand this, you understand that death is not the opposite of life. Death is the opposite of birth. And life exists before, during, and after.

• 16:34Speaker 11

  That I don't expect everyone to agree with. Okay, but to me, because I see it from a physics point of view more than a religious point of view, I tend to believe that my son is okay.

• 16:49Scott Galloway?

  Again, that was Mo Gaddat, the former chief business officer at Google X and an expert on happiness. Back in February, we had a conversation with Baratunde Thurston, a founding partner of the media startup Puck and an Emmy-nominated multi-platform storyteller. If you've been following along with our Algebra Masculinity series, you'll enjoy his thoughts here on modern masculinity.

• 17:09Speaker 12

  We built a structure and inherited for most of us. Some of us more actively maintained than others, but we all kind of were born into the system that gave us a lot of access and seeming power, but also stole from us an internal access and a different sort of power. Knowledge, the power of being aware of weaknesses, the power of softness, the power of our own feminine. And told to suck it up and never express pain and be aggressive instead of vulnerable. You know, use aggression to shield vulnerability.

• 17:50Speaker 12

  Which doesn't serve us. We bottle that stuff up and it comes out sideways. And there's a movement of more awakened manhood that's emerging. And it doesn't mean you can't be strong.

• 18:08Scott Galloway?

  Our final, but certainly not the least clip, comes from an August episode featuring Simon Sinek. Simon is a renowned leadership expert, author, and motivational speaker. He joined the pod to discuss his concept of Start With Why, along with insights on building strong teams, leadership, feeling stuck, and finding your purpose. This was an emotional episode, to say the least.

• 18:29Speaker 13

  I mean, your purpose, Scott, I mean, is clear. You are become your mother, which is for all of your very open struggles. And in your mother's case, it was extreme. It was cancer. In your case, it's being a curmudgeon or being maybe an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. You talk about these things very openly. And well, let's just chalk it all up to struggle. That in those moments, the times that you find great joy is to put your struggle aside and be in the audience and cheer others on and tell them, be there to support them. And like when you write the posts about moving in with your dying mother, or you write the posts about how to deal with your dog that's dying,

• 19:12Speaker 13

  what you're doing, you're celebrating other people. What you're doing is taking everything that you have and using it for others.

• 19:26Scott Galloway?

  And that's a wrap. Thank you to you, our listeners, for tuning in each week. We really do appreciate your support, your feedback, and your engagement. We try to deliver compelling content. We take this very seriously. We'll be back in your feeds with Office Hours on Wednesday, January 3rd. We will see you then. And on a personal note, thank you so much to the people who come up and say hi. One of the things I find is so, such a contrast in our world is things can be so ugly online, but in person, people are just wonderful. So if I do see you out in the wild, please come up and say hi. It is literally one of the highlights of my day, my week, my month. And for those of you who I've had a chance to say hi to,

• 20:07Scott Galloway?

  thanks so much for coming up and saying hi and being, just generally speaking, so lovely.

• 20:14Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Gaddy McNamee and edited by Caroline Chagrin. Our technical director is Drew Burrows. Thank you for listening to the Prof G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network all year long. We will catch you in 2024. Here comes the ass cancer. Too much?

• 20:32Speaker 14

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• 21:02Speaker 15

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