Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway State of Play: Geopolitics, US Foreign Policy, and NATO Enlargement — with Jeffrey Sachs About this episode Jeffrey Sachs, a world-renowned economics professor at Columbia University, joins Scott to discuss the state of the nation’s debt ceiling – specifically as it relates to military spending. We also hear Professor Sachs’ take on the broader geopolitical landscape, as well as the war in Ukraine.
Scott opens by discussing Meta’s privacy violation fine from the GDPR as well as the firm’s potential to build a Twitter competitor.
Algebra of Happiness: switching mediums.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:18 Scott Galloway? Episode 251. 251 is the area code serving southwestern Alabama. 1951, the development of the birth control pill began. I have the ultimate birth control. It's my personality. True story, my girlfriend said she was on birth control, yet got pregnant. Ends up she's dyslexic and got a DUI. My partner and I use the pull-out method for birth control. We pull out our phones and ignore each other all night. I use a birth control that works despite having holes in it. It's called Crocs. Go, go, go!
2:01 Scott Galloway? Welcome to the 251st episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Jeffrey Sachs, a world-renowned economics professor at Columbia University, bestselling author, and global leader in sustainable development. We discuss with Professor Sachs the state of the nation's debt ceiling, specifically as it relates to military spending. We also hear Professor Sachs' take on the broader geopolitical landscape, as well as the war in Ukraine. I think a lot of Professor Sachs, and he's one of those scholars that has just a tremendous amount of influence, and the thing I admire most about him is that he's fearless, is that he's just not afraid to ignore the narrative around any issue and put forward a thoughtful viewpoint that's supportive of data and makes you think.
2:44 Scott Galloway? Okay, what's happening? Meta is in the news for nothing we haven't seen before, copying its competitors and receiving a record fine. So let's start with the fine. EU privacy regulators hit Meta with a $1.3 billion fine for transferring European user data to the US, which they said they wouldn't do, or are not supposed to do. Regulators from Ireland's Data Protection Commission demanded that Facebook stop transferring European users' data to the United States, or it can be subject to exploitation by US spy agencies, and delete data that's already been sent. Whoa. $1.3 billion may sound like a lot. It's the GDPR's largest fine since it went into effect in 2018, but it's smaller than the FTC fine of $5 billion against Meta for consumer privacy violations.
3:28 Scott Galloway? It's also less than some of the EU's largest antitrust fines. Not only that, okay, let's talk about this. $1.3 billion is approximately what the Zuck spends and loses every month, such that it can create a series of in-cell panic rooms called the Metaverse. And to think this is going to stop them from doing exactly what they want with data, such that they can make it more fluid... And figure out ways to monetize it to a greater extent. It's just ridiculous. The algebra of deterrence is not in effect here. As a matter of fact, what we are saying to these folks is what you would be saying to anyone if you put a parking meter in front of their house and the parking meter costs a hundred bucks an hour and the ticket for not feeding the meter was $20. You would decide to break the law. And that's what we're telling these folks is that it makes sense on a shareholder basis to break the
4:13 Scott Galloway? law. In response, our favorite Metta's comms guy, Nick Clegg, said in a statement, quote, "We are appealing these decisions and will immediately seek a stay with the courts who can pause the implementation deadlines, given the harm that these orders would cause, including to the millions of people who use Facebook every day." Well, Nick, Nick is the new Sheryl Sandberg, except he's not as well paid. He is basically prostituting himself and lying and being totally disingenuous and using weapons of mass distraction that our teens pay for every day and that increases or makes our discourse increasingly coarse. But I think he's only going to make 30 or 50 million bucks where I have more empathy for Sheryl Sandberg, who basically sold her soul for about $1.7 billion.
4:55 Scott Galloway? By the way, Sheryl, about 10 million parents of teenage girls in the US would like a word. Anyways, Nick Clegg will go down in history. This will be kind of, again, he's throwing his reputation on the funeral pyre by just consistently lying, but he's doing it or he's trading it for only, I think, about 30 or 50 million dollars. Anyways, maybe a little bit more. Don't know. Don't know. The US and EU are hoping to finalize a new agreement over how to handle data transmission by July. Reuters noted that even if an agreement is met, there's a good chance it'll be challenged by other agencies because previous data agreements were rejected over concerns that Europeans can't control how that information is used by the US government for surveillance. So, how would you fix this? My sense is, the way to fix this, and I don't know if
5:38 Scott Galloway? it's practical or even viable, is there are laws that say if you're caught selling drugs within 100 feet of a school, you're, they add 10 years to your sentence. I think of a, of a tech company that has, say, over $100 billion in value is caught... Or convicted or fined for misuse of data violating privacy. I think you should just add a zero to it because if you find Meta $13 billion for violating GDPR and transferring data cross-border, which you're not supposed to do, they would get really smart, really fast on how to stop that. And the moment a real fine or real regulation comes into place, guess what? It tends to work. And this delusion of complexity is their go-to,
6:19 Scott Galloway? that it would be impossible to figure this out, yet we kick one account off Twitter and 30 to 60% of election misinformation disappears overnight. The real Donald Trump, if you are at the real Donald Trump. We say, all right, we're removing sex trafficking from the protections of 230. And what do you know? Meta does not have a lot of content that would be classified as aiding and abetting sex trafficking. They managed to figure it out right away, once they were no longer, could no longer deploy a liability shield called 230. These companies have learned from the sins of the father, the father being Microsoft. Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, back in the 80s and 90s, said, we're not going to play the game. We're not going to spend money on DC. We're not going to lobby. And what do you know? They swooped in and broke them up. And that was overturned in the courts.
7:02 Scott Galloway? But big tech has learned, and they spend a ton of money on lobbying, and they realize, and it's one of their fastest-growing expense lines. There are more full-time lobbyists working for Amazon, living in DC, than there are sitting US senators. These companies will throw out this, I want to be regulated, and then immediately deploy an army of regulators and lobbyists to try and delay any type of regulation. And the comms department, the comms department manicuring their image is now enormous at these companies. And what we've seen over the last 30 years is the number of journalists has been cut in half. Whereas PR and comms executives, that job has gone up sixfold across the technology sector. So the ratio of bullshit and weapons of mass distraction to actual journalism
7:47 Scott Galloway? has gone the wrong way by 12x, and we're all buying into it. We all think these companies, or not all of us, most of us think these companies are good people. And simply put, when I interviewed Senator Amy Klobuchar for my CNN Plus show, No Mercy, No Malice, six episodes, six episode, I made it to number six, said, I'm just outgunned. She had proposed antitrust regulation and said, I'm fighting with a staff of 60 people, maybe I can take a half a dozen or a dozen and put them on this. And I'm literally fighting hundreds of lawyers. So why is Meta so negative? Why is Meta a net negative for society? And I say that with some I don't know, some discretion. If you had a button to push to get rid of all of big tech, I wouldn't push it. I think we're a net gainer from big tech. The problem is with the word net.
8:32 Scott Galloway? And that is we're a net gainer from fossil fuels. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be thinking about climate change. It doesn't mean we shouldn't have emission standards. We're a net gainer from pesticides. Doesn't mean we shouldn't have an FDA. And I also think we're a net gainer from big tech, but we should absolutely have regulation that you cannot find any industry that is a tenth of the market capitalization of the tech industry that doesn't have 10 times the regulation. Now, why is Meta such a negative for society? What is happening here? There's always a arbitrage, or there continues to be arbitrages of one substance to another. And whenever there is for economic gain, you have an externality. So we have plant-based to meat-based calories. We get methane. We get deforestation. We have a transfer of fossil
9:18 Scott Galloway? fuels to petroleum. We get an emission of carbon. But, but the worst puff into the atmosphere, the worst emission in my view, is the enragement that is the externality of transitioning or converting or arbitraging attention into Nissan ads into shareholder value. And the biggest coal-fired plants in the world aren't in Shenzhen, or they aren't in Kentucky. They're in fact in Silicon Valley, specifically Meta and Google and Twitter. The biggest threat to our society, and we'll speak to this a little bit with Professor Sachs, is that we don't like each other. We no longer see each other as Americans. We see each other as trans, or cisgender, or as Republican versus Democrat, not recognizing a fundamental
10:01 Scott Galloway? truth. And that is Americans will never have greater allies than other Americans. And what Meta has done is found out or deployed a series of algorithms that have figured out that it's no longer sex that sells, it's rage. And the most profitable thing to do is pit your neighbor against another neighbor, pit one person in one party against another person. Oh, that's not working, then find the conservative wing of your party and get you guys fighting. They have made our discourse more a course of America, we're a horror movie. The call is coming from inside of the house. Republicans get this, are now more worried about inter-party marriage than interracial marriage, which A is a signal of our success and our progress, but also a signal of just how fucked up we are. What do we need? We need national service. We need to bring the temperature down. We need to get out and
10:46 Scott Galloway? touch and smell and feel each other more and recognize. I'm, I was more social when I moved to Florida. I have really good friends down there that love to have fun, love to party. And I lived in an environment that was probably conservatively two thirds Republican. And it opened my eyes to the fact that you need to separate the person from the politics. Recognize we're all Americans, we all love our kids and just develop a greater sense of what it means to be a citizen. Oh my God, what a guy. Wrap myself in a flag. Where are my Wheaties? Where are my Wheaties? Anyways, back to Meta, back to Meta, back. Scott, we need you back. Come back to us, Scott. So supposedly the firm is quietly creating a Twitter competitor.
11:28 Scott Galloway? I think everyone's creating a Twitter competitor, including yours truly, who invested in post.news, a healthier place to have a discourse centered in the news. By the way, I love Post. People are just nicer to each other. We did, we've done some deals with media organizations. It's run by who I think is probably the best product person in the last 10 years, Noam Bardeen, who created Waze. Anyways, check it out, check it out. Anyways, according to reports, the app will be connected but separate from Instagram and be compatible with other accounts, including Mastodon. In some, everyone's coming for Twitter's launch because they look at this, what used to be a $5 billion company, it's now $2 billion and say, the self inflicted wounds here, the head up your assery of their former CEO is just too ripe an opportunity.
12:12 Scott Galloway? The app is expected to be available as soon as June. Twitter's new CEO, Linda Yakarino, I love that name, Yakarino, quote tweeted in an article about this and wrote, game on. Well, good for you, Linda, game on. So does it make sense to build an app from Instagram to take on Twitter? Absolutely. From a corporate strategy standpoint, I hate to admit it, I'm watching reels more. You know, TikTok has been slowed down by what I think is a justifiable and warranted conversation around them being a national defense threat. But I find myself on reels a lot. It's not nearly as good as TikTok, but why am I on it? Because they captured me because I'm on Instagram, like. Another 2 billion people. So they have such incredible interface. They're also very
12:55 Scott Galloway? good, very good with products, very good with small innovation, not good with new products. Their best product, Instagram, probably I would argue Meta is the best acquirer, arguably the best acquirer. Would it be Google? Anyways, they're a great acquirer. But it makes absolute a ton of sense for them to start a microblogging platform and take advantage of the weakness of the self-inflicted wound that is Twitter and Musk right now. It'll be interesting to see what happens. But Meta, 100%, the best thing that could happen for all of us is that Mark Zuckerberg continues to make these ridiculous consensual hallucination, big gold biowask investments in the metaverse. And he needs some signs of success. Well, everybody log on to the metaverse just for a little while. Let's give the good people
13:39 Scott Galloway? in Reality Lab some encouragement. I absolutely think the metaverse is the future. I want to go to Greece without actually going to Greece. I want to have friends where there really isn't any friendship. Way to go, folks at Reality Lab. When you head down the 280 into work, you aren't wasting your life. You aren't wasting your life to build these incel panic rooms that about seven people every three months go to. Keep it up. Go bigger. Spend more.
14:08 Speaker 02 Imagine you put on your glasses or headset and you're instantly in your home space. It has parts of your physical home recreated virtually. It has things that are only possible virtually, and it has an incredibly inspiring...
14:25 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back for our conversation with Professor Jeffrey Sachs.
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16:52 Scott Galloway? Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.
17:00 Scott Galloway? Professor, where does this podcast find you?
17:03 Speaker 03 I'm in New York for a change, so back home.
17:06 Scott Galloway? In New York, nice. So let's bust right into it. You recently wrote regarding the debt crisis, "Facing down the military-industrial lobby is the vital first step in putting America's fiscal house in order." Let's start there. Why do you think that's the first thing or spending you would attack to restore fiscal sanity?
17:24 Speaker 03 Well, we've just been in one war after another. The military budget is out of sight, and it's got a lot of bipartisan support for even more spending. So I regard this as something we actually should think about after wasting so much money in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and now Ukraine. Maybe, maybe there could be some sensible discussion. But the way our government works is that each, each part of public policy, so-called, is parceled out to special lobbies. This one goes to the military-industrial complex.
18:05 Speaker 03 It's got a strong constituency in Congress, and there's really no debate about any of this stuff. So that was really the purpose of the article, to say, "Look, we've spent maybe six to eight trillion by now on these wasted wars." We never look backwards in this country. You know, that's, that's part of our national trait. Never think about what just happened, just plow ahead. And six to eight trillion, by, I think, a reasonable calculation, is perhaps half of the total increase of the publicly held debt from 2000
18:45 Speaker 03 till now. I show a little arithmetic on that point. And so we ought to contemplate, we're in it, deep in another... Wasteful and destructive effort and we should sort this out.
19:01 Scott Galloway? So just for the purposes of discussion and some pushback, we have an ascendant China spending more and more money on its military. Even places like Saudi Arabia are, they're increasing their military budget 16% a year. We have obviously a very aggressive Russia, a land war in Europe. Is this a time to be cutting military spending? Or, I mean, is it, there's deficiency, are there better ways to spend the money? And then there's the overall budget. But at, what is it, 12 or 13% of our budget? Is military spending really the place to start in terms of fiscal responsibility?
19:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, it is. You know, we all know the prisoner's dilemma situation where it's individually rational, say, for the US to engage in an arms race and maybe individually rational for China to engage in an arms race. And yet, the outcome is absurd for both countries and very dangerous, actually. The way you get out of a prisoner's dilemma is you actually talk with each other. And that's, that's the one thing we're not allowed to do right now. So the whole setup of how we think about these things is phony to my mind, first of all, and extremely destructive.
20:15 Speaker 03 The idea of the prisoner's dilemma, which we teach in school to our students year after year for the last 70 years, is that if you don't talk to the other side and realize that you're stuck, it's called a dilemma because you're stuck with a terrible outcome, you'll end up with that outcome. But we could actually talk to the other side and say, you know, this mutual arms race is, is really absurd. Of course, China thinks they're just being defensive because they say, look, we're spending one-third of what the United States spends. You go to Washington, which unfortunately I have to do once in a while and listen to
20:57 Speaker 03 these politicians, and it's drumbeats of war everywhere. And so the Chinese say, well, we gotta do this, this is our defense. And then the United States says, oh, China's increasing its spending, we need to do the same thing. That's a prisoner's dilemma. But I would say for Americans, it's good to know. We're spending three times more than the Chinese right now. The US military spending is more than the next 10 countries combined. If you want to get a good recent accounting of this, there's an organization in Stockholm, Stockholm Institute of Peace Research. I have it wrong, somehow I've dropped an I in that, it's CIPRI.
21:42 Speaker 03 But you can find it online, their recent report showing $2.2 trillion of military spending. The United States is 40% of the world total, though we are 4% of the world population. I think we've got some scope to do this in a more rational way.
22:01 Scott Galloway? So I think that's a really important point. And it's funny you're saying that because I have in front of me the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. And just to look at some of the numbers, United States spends 877 billion. China, number two, spends 292. And if you look at the top 10 spenders, I think you'd argue six or seven of the 10 that were allies. That even the 877 number is a bit misleading because if you think about Western or OECD countries that are largely coordinating with each other, we dwarf the rest. And your belief is that if we sat down and said, okay, China and Russia, and I don't know if you consider India and Saudi Arabia as sort of swing votes, this is out of control. We all have better ways to spend our money.
22:44 Scott Galloway? Similar to what we did with nuclear arms or nuclear missiles, where we took them from 50,000 to 10,000, we're all going to start reducing our military budget. Is that, would that be a good starting place?
22:54 Speaker 03 I think a really good starting place would be the idea that first, we shouldn't be aiming to blow each other up because behind all of this is even a more destructive point than the budget, which is the mindset. The mindset right now in the US is China's an enemy. War is very likely, which is, I can't even believe that. But that's actually what is thought in Washington, that war is likely. And this mindset that we're aiming or we're heading for conflict is relatively new, extraordinarily wrong-headed.
23:38 Speaker 03 Easily avoidable. You know, a good way to avoid it is for Nancy Pelosi not to fly to Taiwan, for example. I mean, you don't just stick the thumb in the eye of your counterpart and expect everything's going to work out fine. You actually, you don't freeze dialogue like the Biden administration did when it came into office. You know, there was an order in the government, don't talk to your Chinese counterparts. That was for most of the first year of the administration. You don't say, we're cutting you off from all advanced technology in every way we can
24:19 Speaker 03 and roll out the old containment playbook and expect that you're going to have any kind of peaceful relations. So I think even deeper than the budget issue, though the way you put it is exactly right, is a mindset issue. We're in the prisoner's dilemma in a most naive way, which is we think, we know that they are going to be aggressive, so we're going to be aggressive back. And that's the mindset right now. And it's completely wrong-headed.
24:51 Scott Galloway? Do you think some of this chill, though, in US-China relations is? I think China, I used to go to China a lot. And I think Xi as, or China is a different place than it was 10 years ago. And that Xi's rise to power, that it's an autocracy, that they've actually been quite aggressive. And that us going to Taiwan, who has been an ally, a strategic ally, we do great trade with them. And that no one should intimidate us into having our representatives visit Taiwan. It just strikes me that you're not holding both parties accountable for the chill here in relations.
25:29 Speaker 03 I think it's actually something different, which is a more kind of international realist approach, which is that, starting around 2012, you could really date it to around 2014, China reached a new level of its economic development. You know, during the period from 1980 to 2010, arguably, China became the world's manufacturing workshop. But the idea was, okay, we have the technologies, they have the low-cost labor, and this is a great relationship, we're going to get a lot of low-cost iPhones out of this, and this is, this is good.
26:13 Speaker 03 But Chinese, extremely clever and extremely capable, they started minting hundreds of thousands of PhDs per year. And what really freaked out the American policymakers was two things that came around 2014. I'd say number one was a program in China called Made in China 2025, where China used terms that I would not have advised them to use, but they said, we're gonna, we're gonna, I don't know if it's dominate, but you know, we're gonna be the major players in a lot of key technologies by 2025. So that was one thing, and it really freaked out Washington.
26:55 Speaker 03 And the second was the Belt and Road Initiative. And the Belt and Road Initiative was China saying, we're the phenomenal world savers, while the United States barely saves, we save 40% of our gross domestic product or more, and we're going to use those savings to build highways, fast rail, 5G, all over Eurasia, and by the way, even in East Africa, Latin America, and that's the Belt and Road Initiative. We don't have any initiatives like that, 50 years ago we would have, but now the United States doesn't. So, these two things were kind of an announcement, China's reaching a level of superpower status
27:40 Speaker 03 in the world, and a superpower of 1.4 billion people and a highly successful society.
27:47 Speaker 03 At that point, you start finding remarkable statements. It didn't have to do with Xi. And it didn't have to do with anything specific about putting up some military facilities on a tiny island in the South China Sea, nothing like that. It had to do with the recognition that China was now a threat to US dominance. And there's a remarkable paper by a former colleague of mine, Ambassador Robert Blackwell, who wrote, I think it's 2015, Council on Foreign Relations, people can download it,
28:27 Speaker 03 that the United States needs to rethink its relations with China because China is now a threat to US predominance or US dominance. And he lays out a number of steps in that paper very clearly. We need to restrict technology flows. We need to organize countries in Asia to engage in trade with us in ways that deliberately exclude the Chinese from any role in policymaking. And he lays out quite explicitly a kind of neo-containment strategy, if I could call it that.
29:10 Speaker 03 So that's when the US started to move. It started under Trump, but Biden has accelerated it. And I think it's just wrong to think that somehow this was provoked by Xi, was provoked by China's continued rise in excellence, in innovation, in science and technology. And it was provoked by the good old US idea that, hey, this is our century, nobody else's century, and we're not going to let it happen. Now, I happen to think that's a ridiculous approach to life because as an economist, I guess, maybe as a human being, I believe in win-win ideas.
29:52 Speaker 03 I don't believe that this is really a game of who's on top, but actually, are we? prospering, which is not a zero sum idea, but more of a shared idea. Um, and I regard that whole shift in US politics as being dangerous and wrong headed, sure to create an enemy of the other side. And just if I could, you know, finish on this thought, one of my favorite political scientists is John Mearsheimer, who is our kind of go to super realist at the University of Chicago, and he, he wrote a
30:33 Speaker 03 very powerful, very influential book in the early 2000s called The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. And in the early 2000s, when he wrote, he said, you know, it looks calm right now. Uh, it looks like, uh, you know, we're past great power crisis, but he writes very presciently. When China grows in power, we're going to be right back to great power conflict. And I give him a lot of credit for it. But I, I said to him, uh, John, this is gonna lead to self fulfilling crisis. He said, yes. Yes, John, that's a tragedy. Yes. He says, that's how it is.
31:17 Speaker 03 And I, I don't accept that part, that we have to have a tragic outcome to all of this.
31:23 Scott Galloway? Yeah, it's, so I just want to acknowledge, I mean, it doesn't. I work a lot with Chinese companies or company, I shouldn't say, I work a lot with companies whose entire or the majority of their supply chain is in China. And I find that the rhetoric coming out of DC and among the media is different than the rhetoric from companies who still have very productive relationships with people on the ground in China, including Chinese entrepreneurs. We have a great relationship. I mean, I mean, 92% of toys under American Christmas trees are manufactured in China. They buy our debt, we buy their stuff and it's been a fantastic relationship.
31:57 Speaker 03 That's my feeling too.
31:59 Scott Galloway? Yeah. So it also the other, just to, I mean, a couple of stats that have absolutely blown me away. The year I was born, the life expectancy in China was 47, now it's 77. They've brought 500 million people out of poverty into the middle class. That's arguably one of the greatest feats in the history of humanity. And it does feel like we have mutually assured or mutual prosperity. Uh, there that I'd like to pivot to the, to another region. I've recently spent some time in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And it strikes me that the adult reality, I love that term you use, or the adult reality is that we are going that they're, they have just a massive amount of capital and power. The money translates to power and influence.
32:40 Scott Galloway? And, um, and I'll go out on a limb here and I want, I want to get your thoughts. I think they're a swing vote. Most elections are decided by moderates and I think there's a small number of nations that'll be the swing vote if you think of us becoming adversarial and between like, you think of China and Russia on one side, America and Europe on the other. And hopefully we can figure out ways to dialogue and come up with mutually prosperous solutions. But at a minimum, it strikes me that we want to make really massive investments economically and, and in terms of diplomacy in India and Saudi Arabia, that these nations are becoming increasingly important. Economic power translates to political power.
33:21 Scott Galloway? And I'm just curious what you think our relationship with the kingdom should be?
33:27 Speaker 03 Well, I think it should be, first of all, friendly. Second, the, the big thing about the U S that is really important to understand, we've been the Imperium. In fact, we viewed ourselves as the empire. Empires tend to rule by dividet et impera, meaning divide and conquer, divide and rule. And so the United States in region after region of the world has actually pressed division.
34:05 Speaker 03 This may be counterintuitive, but we like to stir up trouble in regions and pit countries against each other so that some come running under our wing. And so the reason that I say this is that what has the U S done in the Middle East since 1978? You know, in 1978, 79, this big Brzezinski had the, uh, the idea, he was a clever person, but this was a pretty world-changing.
34:44 Speaker 03 Stepp, he said, "We're going to provoke the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan. We're going to do it by funding jihadists, the Mujahideen, and that's going to cause the Soviets to come in and we're going to trap them in a war by funding jihadists fighting the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan." So we did that typical CIA operation. I'd say 44 years later, one of the great disasters of all time, and boomeranged on us incredibly. Okay, that was one thing in 1979, triggering what turned out to be more than four decades of war in Afghanistan,
35:28 Speaker 03 leaving that country in complete ruins. Same time, that was the Iranian crisis. We decided we'd kill the new Islamic regime of Iran. So from 1980 onward, we funded Iraq, Saddam, to fight an absolutely bloody war throughout the 1980s with Iran. And then we took every step to do everything we could to kill the Iranian regime from then until now with just a few tiny iterations. Then in 2009, 2011, excuse me,
36:12 Speaker 03 Hillary Clinton and Obama got the not-so-bright idea in their head, "Why don't we overthrow Bashar al-Assad?" And we unleashed the Syrian, so-called Syrian civil war. It was really a CIA-backed operation to overthrow the Syrian government. I mention all of this in the context of your... Your question because Saudi Arabia knows we've been everywhere meddling and stirring up trouble all over this region from the Middle East, the Gulf, and Western Asia.
36:52 Speaker 03 In fact, all of the major players know it, Iran, Turkey, the Saudis, and so forth, the Egyptians, and so on. So what's happened recently is that China stepped in to do something absolutely dazzling and completely beyond the imagination of an American strategist. And that is the Chinese brought the Iranians and the Saudis together to make peace. Unbelievable, by the way. You wouldn't have found one in a thousand in Washington that would have said, "It's not even possible. What do the Chinese know about this and the Saudis and Iranians?"
37:34 Speaker 03 Our whole game plan was based on that supposed Sunni Shia conflict being unresolvable, and the Chinese resolved it. The Chinese brought Bashar al-Assad back into the Arab League, and he was at the meeting just a couple of days ago, re-accepted. So if you ask how the Saudis view the United States right now, they view the United States as saying, "God, this is a country that is just enmeshed in conflict, and actually, we need to get moving to something bigger at this point."
38:13 Speaker 03 So unless the United States changes its approach, I don't think it's going to play in the Middle East. I think the countries in the Middle East are frankly a little bit tired of all of the wars that the US has stirred up.
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40:44 Scott Galloway? So Jeff, let's discuss the war in Ukraine. You believe the US government is falsely claiming that this war started with an "unprovoked attack by Russia." And then in reality, we should be recognizing the role that NATO enlargement has played. Say more.
40:58 Speaker 03 Well, back in 1990, Gorbachev, who was a kind of dream for the world to end the Cold War peacefully, said, "I'm going to disband the Warsaw Pact military alliance." And James Baker III and Hans Dietrich Genscher jumped in and said, "If you do that, we promise NATO won't move one inch eastward." And there's a great archival summary of all of that collected by George Washington University National Archives project that shows how many times NATO leaders, US leaders, German
41:42 Speaker 03 leaders told Gorbachev and then told Yeltsin, "Okay, no NATO enlargement." Of course, by 1992, when the Soviet Union was no more, our neocons, and at that point it was Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld, started planning NATO enlargement. Our promises lasted a nanosecond in historical time. And I spoke with a historian, leading historian, recently. I won't say his name because he hasn't published this work yet, but he was telling me that in the archives, he finds records already in 1992 that the intention is that NATO will expand to Ukraine.
42:26 Speaker 03 It's incredible to my mind. So in 1997, Szbírjinsky spells out in Foreign Affairs the timeline for NATO enlargement, and he gets it almost exactly because he wasn't surmising what it should be. He was reporting, of course, what the inside plan was in Washington and letting the Foreign Affairs community around the Council on Foreign Relations understand what all this was about. And from the mid 1990s, this became a public debate because a lot of people told Clinton, including America's leading diplomats, "Don't do that. This will provoke a new Cold War."
43:07 Speaker 03 And even Bill Perry, Clinton's Secretary of Defense, thought about resigning in protest over Clintons, and it was Madeleine Albright and the Democratic Party neocons. "Don't do this. This is absolutely reckless." Well, what happened, as we now know, and it was just like Zbigniew said and wrote in 1997, the NATO enlargement went in three stages. First stage was Poland, Hungary, and Czech Republic. Second stage, under George W. Bush Jr., was in 2004, seven more countries,
43:51 Speaker 03 right up to Russia's border, but in this case with the Baltic States. So it was Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and then on the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria, and then Slovenia and Slovakia. Putin gives a famous speech in the Munich Security Conference in 2007, where he says, "Would you stop it? This is a threat to our core national security. Do not move any closer." Well, 2008, the neocon agenda continued just on track. Victoria Nuland, by the way, who's now our Undersecretary of State and is probably the single continuity of the
44:34 Speaker 03 American deep state in both political parties, because she was Cheney's adviser, then she was ambassador to NATO in 2008, and now she's Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. In 2008, George W.
44:50 Speaker 03 Pushed that at the Bucharest NATO summit, we would commit to NATO enlarging to Ukraine and to Georgia. And this really freaked out the Russians because if you look at the map, what we were literally doing was surrounding Russia in the Black Sea. The idea was Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, exactly the countries that surround the naval base in Svojstopol would all be NATO members. And Putin told Bush then in Bucharest, because the day after the NATO conference, there was a US or there was a NATO-Russia meeting.
45:32 Speaker 03 He said, "If you do this, this is likely to go terribly wrong." Well, what I saw was what happened next, which is that a pro-Russian president of Ukraine was elected, Viktor Yanukovych. He said, "We need neutrality between the two sides." And neutrality was against the neocon purpose. And when protests erupted against Yanukovych in late 2013, there was Victoria Nuland flying back and forth, nonstop, to Kiev to help orchestrate what turned out to be a violent overthrow of Yanukovych in February 2014. That's when the war began.
46:15 Speaker 03 And I know we were very deeply involved in what was essentially a coup. And Yanukovych left. A Russophobic series of governments came in, all wanting NATO membership. And at the end of 2021, just to bring us up to the current moment, Putin put a diplomatic initiative on the table on December 17, 2021. Actually, a draft agreement between Russia and the United States on security matters. And I read it, I thought, "Yeah, this is absolutely the right basis for a diplomatic outcome."
47:00 Speaker 03 I actually called the White House and had a long talk with one of the top people and said... Negotiate, for heaven's sake. You know what Putin's put on the table is absolutely reasonable because NATO enlargement to Ukraine could get us all blown up. Nah, no, Jeff, it's got nothing to do with this in any way. NATO is an open door and if Ukraine wants it, we're not going to stop it. Just baloney, by the way, complete baloney, as if the United States would say to Mexico, yeah, if you want to have a military alliance with Russia or China, that's just fine with us, or say that to Canada, you know, you can imagine what would happen here if anybody
47:45 Speaker 03 tried that unwise step. Well, we told Putin point blank in January 22, we will not discuss with you the issue of NATO enlargement because it has nothing to do with you. We will not allow any third country, meaning you, to have any say over where NATO goes. And if you read the minutes of the Russian National Security Council meeting of February 21st or Putin's speech to the nation that night, they said, look, we tried diplomacy,
48:26 Speaker 03 we tried to discuss this, we got the door slammed in our face and we're not going to tolerate NATO on our 1,900 kilometer border with Ukraine. So to my mind, Biden blew it badly and we're at war now and they still won't admit the truth. And one of the things I wrote in that article, Scott, is we can't barely get a discussion in this country going. I tried actually to publish something in the New York Times, they wouldn't take it in the end after they accepted it. They accepted it, then they said, nah, we're not going to really run it.
49:06 Speaker 03 I said, come on, you guys are writing all the time that this is an unprovoked war. This was provoked, you need to run something. Ah, yeah, maybe, I don't know. So this is why it's so hard to have an actual debate in this country. It's an inside job and it's dangerous. So that's really the point of my article.
49:26 Scott Galloway? Saw a lot there, and I want to acknowledge that if a military alliance that was pro-Russia showed up in Canada or Mexico, we would have a much different response. And that, and that I think it all comes down to the core issue that we're just, America is struggling with wrapping its head around the notion that we're no longer the only game in town.
49:47 Speaker 03 You got it.
49:48 Scott Galloway? That's what it all comes down to. Now, I wanna, I do want to push back a little bit on, I do believe that NATO, I don't think that NATO nor the West has any designs on invading Russia. I can understand why they're threatened, but I do believe that, let's talk about, here we are. Here we are in a land war, and let's be honest with NATO, in Ukraine. And my sense is the best way to end this war, quite frankly, is to win it. And that if Russia wants to leave, it's over. And that if they don't leave, or that we come to some sort of accommodation where they get land for invading and killing as many people, you know, obviously, a lot of the Rome people have perished, does that send a green light to autocrats all over the world
50:32 Scott Galloway? that they have a strategic advantage, or that it's in their best interest to invade their neighbors? I mean, distinct of how we got here, isn't really the only viable way out, or the best way out for Western interests and democracies all over the world, is to convince the Russians to leave?
50:47 Speaker 03 Well, they're not gonna leave because they, or let me put it this way, the answer is yes to your question. If we said, "If you leave, we don't come in." That's, that's the magic word. If we said, "You leave, and NATO doesn't enlarge," we have a real chance. That was what was on offer in December 2021. But we said, "You leave, and we'll do what we want." And that's just not gonna happen. That's the problem. So if we said, "You leave, and we won't enter the gap," I think that is absolutely a viable basis for negotiations.
51:31 Speaker 03 So in my point is, in December 2021, Putin was not looking to annex these four regions that are now annexed, which made everything much more complicated. Now, mind you, there's also a real complication, and maybe if we have another few hours, we can talk about Crimea, because that's a, that actually is a quite complicated subject. But just to say, your basic approach is, is the one I, I take, but I add an important footnote, which is, yeah, Russia should go home, but we agree that NATO won't go in.
52:13 Speaker 03 That line I've been urging for years. The White House explicitly won't say it for a real reason, which is that Victoria Nuland has been on this jag for almost 30 years, probably, and certainly, we know from the late 1990s, they want NATO to expand. And here's the point. Obama knew in 2014, he actually gave an interview, for which he was heavily criticized. He gave an interview that said, "I don't want to get into this more, because Russia has escalatory dominance."
52:55 Speaker 03 And what he meant by that is, whatever we do, they can take it up a notch, up to nuclear war, and they care about this a hell of a lot more than we do. So I don't want to take the first step and then have my pot, have the pot raised by the Russians, and then we match or raise and go on, because they can keep doing this. They will not allow NATO to expand to Ukraine. To my mind, that's been the story all along.
53:26 Scott Galloway? So Jeff, even generous with your time, I just have one last question. We've we've kind of done a whirlwind tour geopolitically. I know you speak to a lot of people at the highest levels. So let's do the magic wand question. The president or the White House or Congress only has the bandwidth or the ability to get two or three things done. What would you, what do you think are the most important initiatives that we can take here in the US to ensure not only continued prosperity but progress?
53:52 Speaker 03 You know, the key to prosperity is investment. We don't invest enough in this country. Our domestic investment rate, it's not properly measured, but even if you add in the R and D, you add in the fixed investment and you add in the education spending, it's a shadow of what it should be because we've got between a third and a half of this country basically outside of the education and even the physical infrastructure increasingly for prosperous life. And that's where our real issues are. It's a great country. We should invest in it.
54:37 Speaker 03 And that's where we should be putting our public finances. That's where we should be putting our efforts. That's where companies should be devoting their time, not fighting over Ukraine, not having a world war threat over Taiwan, not having 800 military bases around the world, all huge anachronisms. The impressive thing about the United States in the last 30 years, the most positive economic point, and it's a surprise for me if I think back 30 years, we really sustained the technology investments. In fact, not just sustain them, we increased them. And the payoffs have been huge.
55:20 Speaker 03 Our R and D spending is big and wonderful, and it's actually generating huge amounts of new technology. But then we don't invest in the people. We don't invest in basic healthcare. We don't invest in poor people and poor communities. We don't even have a concept of social housing. I've been spending a lot of time in Vienna this year, which is magnificent and has, you know, 100 years of tradition of social housing. We don't even have the concept right now in this country. And this war stuff is a complete drain. So what I said to the administration at the beginning, though, they could care less what I said. But I said, don't do foreign theatrics.
56:04 Speaker 03 Don't get entangled even more. Build this country peacefully. And there's enough for the whole world to have a mutual benefit. Don't break trade. Don't break agreements. Don't intense, don't contain China. What a waste of time for us. Let's invest in the United States. So that's, that would be my answer.
56:25 Scott Galloway? Let's invest in the United States. Jeffrey Sachs serves as the director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he holds the rank of university professor, the university's highest academic rank. He also has written several books, including three New York Times bestsellers, The End of Poverty, Commonwealth, Economics for a Crowded Planet, and The Price of Civilization. He joins us from his home in New York. Professor Sachs, I love how fearless you are in your willingness to go against the narrative, if you will. I think you do. I don't, I disagree with you on a ton, but I always find that-
56:59 Speaker 03 Good. Well, it's a great thing to have a great discussion. That's even better.
57:03 Scott Galloway? That's right. Evidence and argument, craft better solutions. But I just love how fearless you are. And you back it up with data. And it just strikes me that your heart is in the right place. And I always come away with a different or a twist on what I thought were my, my knowledge base, which I think is the key to learning. You're in the right place as a professor, Jeffrey. Anyway, thank you for your time.
57:22 Speaker 03 Hey, great to be with you. Really terrific.
57:34 Scott Galloway? Algebra of happiness, switching mediums. I'm having, I'm really struggling with my relationship with my father. My father is 92 and declining fast. He's suffering, I think, from dementia. At his age, they don't even make the diagnosis because kind of what's the point? But he and I used to have really good conversations every Sunday. And now the conversations are just increasingly difficult. It's essentially me yelling into a phone, the same question over and over, him feeling stressed out because he knows he can't hear. He knows I'm yelling and it's upsetting for him. And then he tries to answer and then he asks me the same question over and over. How are the boys? I think it's rough for him and it's frustrating for me. And so what I've started doing is recording voice memos and videos. And it sounds basic, you know, pretty basic, but I record a video.
58:18 Scott Galloway? I say, this is what's going on with me. Me and the boys watched, you know, the Inter Milan game. I'm excited about this. How are your Leafs doing? My dad's a huge Maple Leafs fan. And then him and his home health aide, she will go over with him. And if he needs to watch it seven or eight times and ask her to explain it to him. And then he writes back the text message where the video is. And I think it's more rewarding for him. And it gives him a snapshot and I can walk around the house and show him videos of the kids and the dogs. And it just struck me, why did this take me so long? I've had these really uncomfortable conversations with him for a couple of years over the phone. And it's just, it's, anyone who has parents who are struggling is going to relate to this.
59:03 Scott Galloway? It just gets very upsetting and very hard, very fast. So the bottom line is, and I wish I'd figured this out sooner. And that is if you're struggling with an aging parent and you're not communicating as well as you used to for a variety of reasons, write down all the different mediums and the different ways you could communicate with them and try those. Try those. Because intimacy is a function of proximity. You want to stay close to your parents. They want to stay close to you, but some of their faculties and their ability to communicate through certain mediums is going to decline with their cognitive ability. And one of the ways you continue to love them and you continue to invest in them is you come up with new mediums. You switch mediums with your kids.
59:48 Scott Galloway? When they're tiny, it's all about affection, right? It's all about getting close to them and let them smell you and lie on you. And then as a kid, it's constant verbal communication, mostly reprimanding them. Then as they get older, you start to communicate with them on the phone and via email and text or whatever it is, or actions, trying to be a role model for them, trying to have good manners. That's what I'm trying to do in front of my 12 and 15 year old. I'm trying to especially show really good manners such that they begin to model that. We switch mediums. We're smart when, when our kids are young. Let's think about switching mediums as our parents and an older generation get older.
1:00:28 Scott Galloway? This episode was produced by Caroline Shageran. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show.
1:00:52 Scott Galloway? All right. All right. How was the show? It felt a little flatter. Am I just jet lagged? Am I jet lagged? Am I jet lagged? I'm jet lagged?
Previous Office Hours: What’s Going On in the Retail Sector, The Future of AI-driven Mental Health Care, and How Can I Help My Child to Become a Great Storyteller? Next No Mercy / No Malice: Goals Page updated September 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
