The Week: Iran, IPO Mania, and the New American Dream

We're back with another episode of The Week, a new weekly show from Prof G Media, hosted by George Hahn. Every Friday, we'll break down the biggest stories shaping business, technology, politics, and culture — and connect the dots across the conversations happening throughout the Prof G universe. This week, George Hahn breaks down what the war in Iran reveals about American power, why Wall Street is bracing for a wave of AI IPOs, and how the housing crisis is reshaping the American Dream. Plus, Scott reflects on our obsession with optimization — and why the most important things in life can't be measured. We’d love your feedback as we build this show. Let us know what you think at [email protected]. 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.

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• 1:29George Hahn?

  Welcome to the Week from Prof G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Han, and it's Friday, June 12. Today, we get into what the Iran War is revealing about American power. Then, nearly a trillion dollars in new stock is about to hit the market. And finally, why optimizing your life might be the surest way to miss it. Let's get into it.

• 2:01George Hahn?

  This week, Scott sat down with two of the sharpest foreign policy minds alive. Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize winning historian and staff writer at The Atlantic, and Fiona Hill, former National Security Council official and one of the world's leading experts on Russia and geopolitics. And after more than 100 days of war with Iran, neither sounded particularly optimistic about where things are headed.

• 2:27Scott Galloway?

  The IRGC is a car dealership. Trump is a car purchaser browsing for cars. And Trump is trying to negotiate and has accidentally or has let the car dealership know that he needs a car to get home. Or that he's playing poker and his cards are turned upside down and he has a weak hand. Fiona, your thoughts?

• 2:47Speaker 06

  I think that's absolutely true. And I think, you know, the other part of your analogy here is that Trump also thinks that he's the seller, not just the buyer. And that is the problem, because he's always telling the Iranians what he would do. And in real time, he's laying out everything, everything that he's thinking. So of course, there is no incentive whatsoever for them to make a deal on any kind of basis right now, because they have no certainty, no assurances of what the outcome is going to be. So Trump, every single day, confounds his own ability to make any progress.

• 3:15George Hahn?

  On the war in Ukraine, the story that deserved far more attention than it got this week, Anne had just returned from Kyiv and told us her report. Something has fundamentally shifted.

• 3:28Speaker 07

  The real interesting part of this story is not so much that Ukraine has gone from defense to offense, is that Ukraine has changed completely the way this war is being fought. And so what you have to understand about the Ukrainian frontline is that it's a kind of 20-mile-wide zone. It's not like a line that people are fighting against. It's a 20-mile-wide zone, which is now completely transparent. And the Ukrainians can see everything in it because of their extraordinary, the literally millions of drones that they've built in the last couple of years. They have reconnaissance drones, they have short-range drones, long-range drones, they can see the whole frontline.

• 4:09Speaker 07

  And every time any Russian truck or car or person comes into the zone, they see that person and they can hit them. And these huge numbers of people dying, a thousand a day, thirty thousand a month, or dying or being wounded, are coming from the fact that despite the existence of the zone, the Russians have, until now, continued sending people in it. And, you know, even at the beginning of this year and late last year, by doing that, they were able to move it forward a little bit. They were, you know, so many resources were being thrown into it that they were still moving. That has now stopped completely. They cannot move forward.

• 4:50George Hahn?

  Ukraine has gone from aid recipient to security provider. Gulf states and European companies are now seeking partnerships with Ukrainian drone firms. Scott called it the third Silicon Valley, and they did it after the US cut off supplies, hoping it would force a surrender. On the Russian side, Fiona laid out how Putin may well be running out of road.

• 5:14Speaker 06

  And in Russia, Putin is now starting to get very nervous about Russian society and perhaps the elites. I mean, we hear stories about this. I wouldn't, you know, overplay it because Putin has all kinds of repressive capacities. But it's certainly the case that now his choices are shrinking. And, you know, as Anne has described, on the front line, he's not as close as he would like to be, to be able to be taking the whole of the Donbass, which is certainly one of the intermediate goals. And he's going to have to make some tough decisions as to whether he keeps on escalating these bombardments against Kiev. And it's just a question of whether the constraints around him, in terms of the number of people will continue to volunteer, as Anne's described about all of the casualties here.

• 5:57Speaker 06

  In the last months, we've seen the numbers of dead, not just injured, increasing. And in fact, it's kind of flipping now the ratio of dead to injured in a way that is very detrimental to Putin. The other thing is that oil. Everyone's expecting that Russia will have benefited enormously from the increase in oil prices. But in fact, the sanctions that were imposed by the Europeans and others on Russian oil have actually constrained some of those revenues. So it's not a tipping point at this particular point, but we can see that the picture has become darker from Putin's perspective.

• 6:30George Hahn?

  And the conversation ended on a reflection on what these autocracies, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, really have in common. Hint? It's not ideology.

• 6:44Speaker 07

  You know, what binds this group of autocracies to work together, and right now, the most important ones are Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, you know, plus a handful of others, is really not religion, and obviously, it's not any ideology. So, you know, ideology doesn't matter. I mean, the Chinese are communists, and the Russians are nationalists, and the Iranians have a theocracy. You know, what binds all of them is rather their dislike of and fear of the language of the liberal world. In other words, the language of rights, the language of rule of law, the language of separation of powers. You know, all of these are states that are seeking to create a kind of total environment where the regime, or the leader,

• 7:28Speaker 07

  or the ruling party controls all media, all conversation.

• 7:32George Hahn?

  Autocracies aren't winning because they're stronger. They're winning because democracies are increasingly divided, distracted, and uncertain about what they're willing to defend. And it wasn't just academics making that argument. Last week, at the final stop of the Prof G Markets Tour in New York, Scott posed many of the same questions to someone who spent years making these decisions from inside the Situation Room: Hillary Clinton.

• 8:02Speaker 08

  I think we are in a weakened position. I think Iran is in a stronger position than it was before we did this. I actually approved of the strikes on the nuclear facilities back in June a year ago. They had a clear objective. They were carried out effectively. They didn't accomplish all that they claimed, but they did accomplish enough to argue that the nuclear weapons program was setback. But now, I think the Iranians are really playing a stronger hand vis-à-vis Trump. And he's kind of flummoxed. He doesn't know what to do. I mean, on his

• 8:44Speaker 08

  truth socially, talks about how he doesn't find it interesting pursuing these peace negotiations. He's bored by it. And, you know, when you think about the hard work of both waging war and everything that it entails, and then trying to...

• 9:04Speaker 08

  Extricate yourself from a conflict with some sort of advantage. That's really hard work and that's not being done.

• 9:17George Hahn?

  We'll be right back after the break.

• 9:28Scott Galloway?

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• 10:13Scott Galloway?

  You can download the Built app and join the membership for where you live at joinbuilt.com/propg. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com/propg. Use our link so they know we sent you.

• 10:28Scott Galloway?

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• 11:13Scott Galloway?

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• 11:34Scott 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. Their regentic 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?

• 12:19Scott Galloway?

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• 12:45George Hahn?

  Welcome back. Meanwhile, on Wall Street, a different kind of arms race is heating up. SpaceX goes public today, raising $75 billion in what is now officially the largest IPO in history, more than double Saudi Aramco's 2019 record. Anthropic has filed confidentially for its own offering. OpenAI is targeting September. Google announced an $85 billion equity offering, the largest public stock sale ever recorded. And Meta is reportedly planning its own raise on top of that.

• 13:24George Hahn?

  And if all of that weren't enough, Goldman Sachs estimates another $500 billion in shares are about to be unlocked as lockup periods expire across the industry this year.

• 13:40George Hahn?

  Added up, nearly a trillion dollars in new equity supply is about to hit the market all at once. The question is whether there's enough money to buy all of them.

• 13:53Ed Elson?

  My view, supply is about to flood this market. It is going to outstrip demand. The only answer after that is that prices go down. I do think that the, once these companies go public, that's going to signal the top and we're going to see a very significant pullback, specifically in the AI trade because there simply isn't enough capital to go around to keep prices propped up.

• 14:17George Hahn?

  Scott's take? If there's a first day pop, he knows exactly where he'd put his money.

• 14:22Scott Galloway?

  I'll be interested to see if they're, I don't, this isn't prediction. I wouldn't be surprised if their pricing has to come down a bit, but I think the biggest first day pop or the biggest initial pop on the first trade is going to be Anthropic. I think the momentum, the riz, so much about an IPO is the narrative versus the numbers. And the narrative is just strongest around Anthropic and weakest among OpenAI and somewhere in the middle of SpaceX because you have Elon, he's a meme, he's great at, he's great. You know, it is an exciting company. It's got kind of just, it's every eight-year-old's dream, you know, space and rockets and technology. And I think some of those animal spirits will come in around SpaceX.

• 15:04Scott Galloway?

  But if I were to rank them, I think that Anthropic has the biggest first day pop.

• 15:09George Hahn?

  While investors debate where to put the next trillion dollars, many Americans are wondering if they'll ever be able to buy a house. The median first time home buyer is now over 40 years old. Historically, it was closer to 30. That's not just a housing story, it's becoming a family formation story.

• 15:30Scott Galloway?

  Expensive housing is essentially birth control. For every 10% increase in housing prices, birth rates go down a percent because getting a house is sort of a bridge to, all right, we're going to, we're going to practice family and we have a spare bedroom. Okay, it's time to fill the spare bedroom. And medium home price is now roughly six to seven times median median income nationally. Historically, it's been between three and four X. First time home buyers are now over forty. Sixty percent of them are all cash buyers. And I think part of the reason you see people spending five and 10 grand to go to Coachella or to Ibiza and see Black Coffee is I think young people have just given up on saving for a house. They've just given up.

• 16:12Scott Galloway?

  They started looking and like, okay, this shitty home is 1.4 million dollars. I've saved 22,000. I'm going to need 400,000 for fuck it, I'm going to Thailand or I'm going to, you know, I'm going to Mykonos. And that doesn't, that's not great for the economy, nor is it great for birth rates in just taking it forward. If we don't have enough young people supporting an increasingly unproductive, unproductive and expensive senior population, the economy literally collapses on itself.

• 16:41George Hahn?

  How do you build a good life when so many of the traditional milestones feel out of reach? In last week's No Mercy, No Malice, narrated by yours truly, Scott explored a related idea: our growing obsession with optimization. What gets measured gets managed, even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so. In other words, our mania for measurement can obscure what matters most. Consider the popularity of health and fitness apps and the personal optimization trend those technologies enable.

• 17:26George Hahn?

  To a point, the more data we collect on ourselves, the better able we may be to improve our lives. But metrics aren't the arbiters of living well, nor is optimization life's end goal. My work and life are narrowing, distilling to a few goals. One of them is to prepare my son for others. Many things I do don't advance that goal and some things undermine it. I'm a work in progress, i.e. suboptimal. When I'm gone, if I've accomplished this goal, my sons will have, among other things, receipts in the form of grief,

• 18:11George Hahn?

  proof that they loved deeply, as Nicole Avant, former U.S. ambassador and film producer, wrote in her memoir, "Think You'll Be Happy." The boys won't remember my VO2 max. They won't know my sleep score or my macro splits. What they'll carry with them is me, the man who showed up imperfectly at the dinner table, at their games, and in countless fleeting moments that didn't register on any dashboard. The metrics were never the point. The sandwiches we shared were. We'll be back next Friday with a fresh edition of "The Week"

• 18:56George Hahn?

  from Prof G Media, breaking down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn. Have a banging weekend.

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