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0:01:18 Episode 331
0:01:21 331 is the area for the West Suburbs of Chicago in 1931.
0:01:23 The Empire State Building opened in New York City.
0:01:27 It took a year to build the Empire State Building.
0:01:30 It took eight years to build an extension for the Seven-Line Subway.
0:01:37 And last night, it took one man about 17 minutes to pee.
0:01:47 Go, go, go!
0:01:50 Welcome to the 331st episode of the Prop G Pod.
0:01:56 The dog is back, it’s 2025.
0:02:02 Okay, onto today’s episode, we’re going to speak with Ian Bremmer, the president and
0:02:06 founder of Eurasia Group, the world’s leading political research and consulting firm.
0:02:10 Ian is to prop G what Alec Baldwin is to SNL.
0:02:17 Alec Baldwin has appeared on SNL 52 times and 17 times as a host.
0:02:20 By the way, I am the COVID Alec Baldwin of the Bill Maher Show.
0:02:26 During COVID, I was on Bill Maher four times, I’ve been on a total of five times.
0:02:28 I was on most recently, but technically, I guess it wasn’t COVID.
0:02:31 But I was sort of there, COVID ho.
0:02:32 That’s right.
0:02:37 Anyways, in today’s episode, we speak with Ian about the top risks for 2025.
0:02:41 These risks include a breakdown of the global order, Trump’s return to office along with
0:02:44 escalating tensions between major powers all over the world.
0:02:45 What’s happening?
0:02:46 What’s going on?
0:02:53 What’s the 411 in 2025, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory warning
0:02:58 that alcohol consumption is a leading cause of cancer.
0:03:02 The Surgeon General is calling for the U.S. to add cancer warning labels to alcoholic
0:03:04 drinks similar to the ones on cigarettes.
0:03:09 He said that alcohol is responsible for about 100,000 cases and 20,000 deaths annually in
0:03:14 the U.S. and ranks as the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the U.S. following tobacco
0:03:15 and obesity.
0:03:17 I bet obesity is number one now.
0:03:23 This is greater than the 13,000 alcohol-associated traffic crash fatalities that occur each year.
0:03:27 According to Surgeon General Murthy, even in small amounts, alcohol can increase the
0:03:30 risk of developing breast, colon, liver, and other cancers.
0:03:31 Oh my gosh.
0:03:38 So first off, Surgeon General Murthy is the most consequential Surgeon General in history.
0:03:42 And for all of the, I don’t know, consensual hallucination and narcissism that surrounded
0:03:47 the Biden campaign believing that he was the right guy to run again, you have to hand it,
0:03:52 I believe, to the Biden administration for appointing talented people, not people who
0:03:59 think that the polio vaccine is dangerous or that they write children’s books saying,
0:04:03 talking about retribution against political enemies and that they’re going to head the
0:04:04 FBI.
0:04:08 I mean, Jesus Christ, if Dancing with the Stars invited lower IQ, more dangerous people
0:04:09 on the show.
0:04:13 That could be the current Trump administration appointees.
0:04:14 What were we thinking?
0:04:15 Literally, no.
0:04:16 What are they thinking?
0:04:18 Anyway, no for that.
0:04:21 I always promised myself I’m going to be less political on the shows.
0:04:23 Broken promises to myself.
0:04:26 I also thought, I also said I’m going to be kinder to myself and I’m going to love myself
0:04:28 more and I’m going to allow myself to be happy.
0:04:34 Well, that shit hasn’t panned out either, although I’m doing the straw breathing method.
0:04:38 Yeah, that shit doesn’t work.
0:04:44 My method for anxiety is what I call pirony and Xanax or as I like to call it, panics.
0:04:47 By the way, I had a breathing coach last night and went to this place and this guy taught
0:04:48 me how to breathe.
0:04:52 I’m sitting there thinking, this is getting me fucking anxious and angry.
0:04:53 I used to know how to breathe on my own.
0:04:55 I used to not have to think about it.
0:04:57 Now it’s another thing I got to think about.
0:05:00 Seriously, breathing class made me angry, intense.
0:05:01 Enough of this shit.
0:05:04 I think there’s self-care and there’s self-love is more self-hate from rich people looking
0:05:09 for reasons, I don’t know, to punish themselves under the delusion or the illusion they’re
0:05:10 going to live to be 100.
0:05:12 No, you’re not Tom Cruise.
0:05:17 He is going to live to be 100 and he’s going to be sexy as hell, but not you.
0:05:20 You’re going to look like just an old person and then we’re going to die.
0:05:23 Anyways, back to dying early, alcohol.
0:05:28 This is fascinating and it’s causing huge ripples on a number of levels.
0:05:33 Some data, 70% of Americans consume alcohol, but a recent survey found that only 45% of
0:05:36 people believe alcohol can cause cancer.
0:05:40 The US has ranked 35th in the world in alcohol consumption per capita and fourth in the world
0:05:43 in age-standardized cancer rates.
0:05:49 According to Gallup, just 58% of Americans were drinkers in 2024, that’s a 28-year low.
0:05:53 Studies show Gen Z drinks approximately 20% less alcohol than millennials.
0:05:55 In other words, this is really fucking ugly.
0:05:57 This is like cable TV, right?
0:06:02 Look at the average age of an MSNBC viewer, they’re dead and as you go lower and lower
0:06:05 and lower, younger and younger and younger, people don’t even own TVs, much less watch
0:06:08 cable television, and it’s the same with alcohol.
0:06:12 The writing is on the wall here, folks, young people are not drinking alcohol.
0:06:17 You can see evidence of this shift on dating apps, I love this, 72% or almost three-quarters
0:06:21 of Tinder members said they don’t drink or only drink occasionally on their profiles
0:06:25 and 75% of global hinge singles say getting drinks is no longer their preferred first
0:06:26 date activity.
0:06:27 Wow, that’s wild.
0:06:32 One of my most popular TikToks is, “I think young people should drink more.”
0:06:35 I don’t see drunkenness, I see togetherness.
0:06:38 My advice to young people is to go out and drink more and make a series of bad decisions
0:06:40 in my payoff.
0:06:49 I think that we need more togetherness, more people, more sex, more random encounters,
0:06:53 and absolutely people need to be in the company of strangers more and more, and I think young
0:06:54 men are sequestering.
0:07:01 We’re turning into a different species of asexual, socially isolated, lonely people
0:07:06 who become shitty citizens, and when women don’t have a romantic relationship, they reinvest
0:07:10 in work and they’re friends, when men don’t have a relationship, they tend to just go
0:07:12 down a rabbit hole.
0:07:15 No, what do I mean by that?
0:07:19 If you have a problem in alcohol consumption and you need to be cognizant of any substance
0:07:25 intake, yeah, be thoughtful and ask your friends and you don’t use it as a crutch, but for
0:07:30 the most part, I think the majority of young people can process alcohol, can handle it,
0:07:35 and I believe, and I’ve said this, that my kind of tongue-in-cheek advice to young people
0:07:39 is that they should go out more, get out of the house more, drink more, and make a series
0:07:41 of bad decisions that might pay off.
0:07:46 Some of my, basically, the majority of my really strong relationships, my friendships
0:07:52 and my romantic relationships, have involved alcohol, and while doctors Atia and Huberman,
0:07:56 correctly you could argue, see drunkenness among young people, I see togetherness.
0:08:00 I think a bigger threat to younger people is not alcohol.
0:08:02 It’s sequestering from each other.
0:08:03 Look at what’s happening.
0:08:09 Molson Coors is down 10% their stock price, ABM Bev is down 25%, they’ve lost a quarter
0:08:10 of their value.
0:08:13 By the way, ABM Bev is one of the best-run companies in the drinks industry.
0:08:14 These people are smart.
0:08:17 Heineken is down 29%.
0:08:23 This is in the face of 23% up in the markets, right?
0:08:29 London’s spirits company Diageo is down 12%, US whiskey maker Brown Forman is down 34%.
0:08:30 They make Jack Daniels.
0:08:35 I used to drink Jack and Coke and then I figured out that all that sugar and all that alcohol
0:08:36 is probably not very good for me.
0:08:39 God, just saying that, I’m salivating.
0:08:40 I love Jack and Coke.
0:08:42 And then I got fancy and I started ordering makers and Coke.
0:08:44 Anyways, enough of my alcoholism.
0:08:45 What are they doing about this?
0:08:48 They’re leaning into the growing trend of non-alcoholic beverages.
0:08:49 These are smart people.
0:08:54 Global sales of non-alcoholic drinks hit nearly 20 billion in 2023, doubling in size over
0:08:55 the last five years.
0:09:00 The non-alcoholic market grew about 20% last year compared to just 8% for alcoholic drinks.
0:09:05 Big brands, including Diageo and LVMH are getting into the alcohol free market.
0:09:08 Diageo made a non-alcoholic Captain Morgan.
0:09:09 Jesus, that sounds awful.
0:09:15 And about Ritual, LVMH has taken a minority stake in French Bloom, a non-alcoholic sparkling
0:09:16 wine.
0:09:20 Actually, that’s probably a pretty decent idea for a startup, some sort of cool, well-branded
0:09:24 non-alcoholic drink that feels aspirational or has some sort of, whatever, NAD or something
0:09:27 that makes you younger, faster, smarter.
0:09:30 Non-alcoholic beer leads the market, though, with brands, including Heineken.
0:09:33 It’s paying off, according to the economists, non-alcoholic drinks are more profitable than
0:09:35 alcoholic drinks.
0:09:39 That’s because their price nearly the same as regular drinks, but taxed at a much lower
0:09:40 rate.
0:09:43 I love the thought that bars are really being sympathetic to people who are not drinking
0:09:45 by offering them $14 mocktails.
0:09:50 Anyways, let me just finish where I began here, and that is you need to constantly take an
0:09:56 audit of what substances or what behaviors you’re engaging in that are damaging the other
0:09:57 parts of your life.
0:09:58 That’s kind of the definition of addiction.
0:10:02 You continue to do something despite the fact that it’s bad for the other parts of your
0:10:03 life.
0:10:10 We do believe that young people need to get out and engage in some bad decisions.
0:10:16 We’ll be right back for our conversation with Ian Bremmer.
0:10:18 Support for the show comes from Nerd Wallet.
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0:12:50 Welcome back.
0:12:54 I’m Ian Bremmer, the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the world’s leading political
0:12:56 risk research and consulting firm.
0:12:59 Ian, where does this podcast find you?
0:13:01 I’m in New York in our new headquarters.
0:13:03 Okay, let’s bust right into it.
0:13:07 Eurasia Group’s top risk report for 2025 is out.
0:13:10 In the report, you say we are heading back to the law of the jungle.
0:13:11 That’s dramatic.
0:13:15 We’re the strongest do what they can, while the weakest are condemned to suffer what they
0:13:16 must.
0:13:18 What did you mean by that?
0:13:26 For the last 35 years, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the wall,
0:13:33 we talked at least nominally about the idea that we’re living in an increasingly globalized
0:13:40 world, that the United States is a democracy that supports rule of law around the world,
0:13:45 supports other democracies, collective security, all of those things.
0:13:48 And yet the reality is that order is breaking down.
0:13:51 It’s breaking down for a lot of reasons.
0:13:56 It’s breaking down because the Russians are not a part of the West.
0:13:58 They’re in decline structurally.
0:13:59 They’re really angry about it.
0:14:05 They blame the U.S. and they’ve now alliance up with North Korea and Iran, and they’re pretty
0:14:07 friendly with China too.
0:14:10 So that’s an incredibly dangerous place for the world to be.
0:14:12 It’s not something we had to deal with 10 or 20 years ago.
0:14:13 Now we do.
0:14:18 We’ve got China, second most powerful country in the world, but they’re not aligning with
0:14:20 the United States.
0:14:26 They’re actually becoming, in many ways, a more consolidated dictatorship under Xi Jinping.
0:14:28 And they’re putting more pressure on the private sector.
0:14:34 They’re supporting more privately owned national champions and state capitalist state-owned
0:14:35 enterprises.
0:14:40 And so that’s causing much more conflict in the most important geopolitical relationship
0:14:41 in the world.
0:14:49 Most importantly, the U.S. in particular has just fundamentally rejected the idea that
0:14:55 we’re going to be global leaders supporting rule of law and multilateral institutions.
0:14:56 It’s America first, baby.
0:14:59 It’s our way or the highway.
0:15:03 And we’re going to tell other countries that you’re going to work with us and do the things
0:15:07 we want our way, or there’s going to be hell to pay.
0:15:14 And so, yeah, that sounds a lot like a reversion to the law of the jungle, that the powerful
0:15:18 and strongest countries and people get to do what they want.
0:15:24 I think Trump is much more of a winner than he is a leader.
0:15:28 I think that Elon is much more of a winner than he is a leader.
0:15:29 What do you mean by that?
0:15:34 Well, leaders are people that in their organizations, they bring people together.
0:15:38 So if you’re the leader of the United States, all American citizens look and they say, this
0:15:42 is my leader, your leader corporation, all of the all the people in that corporation say,
0:15:43 this is my leader.
0:15:47 If you’re a winner, right, you divide your winner.
0:15:50 There are other winners and then there are losers, right?
0:15:57 And I really think that that is a fundamental challenge that American democracy has and
0:16:04 American capitalism has, that we’ve moved away from being a country of leaders that
0:16:10 are trying to make a difference for their fellow man and woman and fellow citizens in
0:16:11 the world.
0:16:16 And instead, we’re winning individually, but we’re very tribal.
0:16:22 We’re very divided, including inside our own country and with our allies.
0:16:25 And that makes the world a much more dangerous place.
0:16:28 And if you’re a loser, you got to suck it up.
0:16:32 You got to accept the rules that the winners are making, right?
0:16:33 Because they won.
0:16:37 So, I mean, you know, if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, you know, you better, you better change your
0:16:42 attitude, my friend, because it’s not about how successful you’ve been.
0:16:44 It’s about are you on board with the winners, right?
0:16:46 I mean, and that’s true for everybody.
0:16:50 If you’re, if you’re the French, the Germans, the Brits, you know, you better get on board.
0:16:53 If you’re the Canadians, right, I mean, Trudeau just resigned.
0:16:55 And he resigned a little faster because he screwed up with Trump.
0:16:56 Yeah, I think so.
0:16:57 I think Trump pushed him.
0:17:02 I mean, he was shot in the face by, by Christian Freeland, his deputy prime minister, but
0:17:08 he was still on life support until Trump shivved him, and, and now he’s out, you know.
0:17:12 So, I think there’s a lot of that happening in the world today, geopolitically as well
0:17:13 as in your world, Scott.
0:17:18 So, just a couple of theses I want you to respond to or get your reaction.
0:17:22 In terms of the law of the jungle, my sense is we’re the king of the jungle, we being
0:17:23 the U.S.
0:17:26 And that is, I look at our enemies slash adversaries.
0:17:32 So, let’s start with Iran, Russia and North Korea.
0:17:33 And so-
0:17:34 You can throw China in too if you want to.
0:17:37 Well, I think of China, I’ll come back to that, but I think China is what I call an
0:17:38 adversary or a competitor, but not our enemy.
0:17:39 I completely agree.
0:17:42 It’s a different category, but it’s interesting because they’re weaker now than they were
0:17:43 a couple of years ago.
0:17:44 A hundred percent.
0:17:47 So, this is your, this is the thesis and you respond to it.
0:17:50 In terms of our enemies, we’re kicking their ass.
0:17:54 And that is, Iran’s air defenses have been penetrated by Israel.
0:18:00 Their proxies, the Houthis, Hamas and Hezbollah have had their hands cut off.
0:18:01 Ben Assad’s gone.
0:18:02 Ben Assad’s gone.
0:18:09 Basically, kind of the ally of Russia has had to flee to Russia because of a collapse
0:18:10 there.
0:18:15 Russia is bogged down in a war, they were not expecting to go this long with these types
0:18:16 of results.
0:18:21 And let’s move to, as you said, our competitor/adversary, not our enemy.
0:18:27 Their economy has just been underwhelming the last 10 years whereas ours has accelerated.
0:18:29 I mean, it’s better to be lucky than good.
0:18:36 I see Trump as inheriting the strongest hand he could have in America on almost every dimension
0:18:39 other than the fact we hate each other.
0:18:43 And a lot of our prosperity is not being distributed equally.
0:18:48 On a balanced scorecard, on a relative scorecard, we are kicking everyone’s ass.
0:18:49 Your thoughts.
0:18:55 First, let me add to your list, because you mentioned enemies and adversary/competitor.
0:18:58 And I do think that’s the right way to put it.
0:19:05 I think China is not the axis of evil or a pariah state the way that the North Koreans,
0:19:07 Russians, and Iranians are.
0:19:11 Those are chaos actors that want to destroy the international system, they want to defeat
0:19:12 the Americans.
0:19:16 And the Chinese actually need a stable global economy to prosper themselves.
0:19:20 So even if they would like to defeat the Americans, they know that that doesn’t actually work
0:19:21 with their system.
0:19:28 But in addition to that, America’s allies are also weaker, technologically much weaker.
0:19:32 I mean, you think about where the Americans are in terms of entrepreneurship and semiconductors
0:19:36 and AI and all these new companies and the markets and the strength of the dollar.
0:19:37 Where are the Europeans?
0:19:38 Where are the Japanese?
0:19:39 Where are the South Koreans?
0:19:40 Where are the Canadians?
0:19:42 The answer is nowhere.
0:19:47 And the governments are so weak, the U.S. has just elected Trump.
0:19:55 And unlike last time around, with Biden winning on January 6, I mean, Trump has a mandate.
0:19:58 And unlike 2017, Trump has coattails.
0:20:02 I mean, the Republicans see that they need him, not the other way around.
0:20:04 So he’s appointed a whole bunch of loyalists.
0:20:10 You don’t have any Rex Tillerson’s in this group, no Jim Mattis in this group, no Nikki
0:20:12 Haley in this group.
0:20:14 So no Mike Pence in this group, right?
0:20:18 So he’s consolidated, he’s strong.
0:20:20 He’s willing to use American power.
0:20:24 And America’s allies are incredibly weak.
0:20:25 Their governments are falling apart.
0:20:30 South Korea, Germany, France, Canada, all of these countries.
0:20:35 So everywhere you look, the United States is stronger.
0:20:42 Now I also think at home, the U.S. is not in decline.
0:20:44 Not at all.
0:20:45 People still want to come to America.
0:20:47 The American economy is doing very well.
0:20:48 America military is doing well.
0:20:51 It’s technology is doing very well.
0:20:55 But of course you said, except the fact that we hate each other, not just that, not just
0:21:00 that Scott, except the fact that our political system is increasingly not representative.
0:21:04 It’s increasingly captured by money and special interests.
0:21:10 The U.S. system is increasingly a two-tier system, and it’s not Democrats versus Republicans.
0:21:14 It’s access to power versus no access to power, right?
0:21:22 And that is uniquely dysfunctional in the context of advanced industrial democracies.
0:21:28 So you’ve got a political system that is not working, that is arguably in crisis.
0:21:34 I mean, if Narendra Modi, who is the most popular democratically elected leader of
0:21:40 a large country in the world today, okay, Bukele and El Salvador, hasn’t beat.
0:21:47 But in a big country, if he were to have a phone call or meetings with heads of state
0:21:55 and CEOs and bring in Gautam Adani, you and I would rightly state this country is an oligarchy.
0:22:01 It’s a kleptocracy, and yet that’s precisely what’s happening with Trump and Elon right
0:22:03 now, and it’s completely normalized.
0:22:09 So I do think that we can’t just say, well, with the exception of the fact that we hate
0:22:14 each other and the political system doesn’t work, actually, that’s a pretty cool thing
0:22:18 about the United States is the fact that the U.S. has a political system that other countries
0:22:21 are supposed to admire, are supposed to be more aligned with.
0:22:25 They’ve got values that set the standards for the rest of the world.
0:22:29 Rule of law is something that the rest of the world wants to be a part of.
0:22:34 Our worldview is supposed to be the dominant collective worldview.
0:22:36 That’s not true anymore.
0:22:38 So we’re very powerful.
0:22:43 And in the law of the jungle, we’re the big ape, absolutely.
0:22:51 But the law of the jungle is a much more brutal, nasty and dangerous place than a world that
0:22:58 has laws and accountability and responsibility and institutions and architecture that the
0:23:03 United States is leading with its allies and trying to get other countries to increasingly
0:23:04 align with it.
0:23:05 It’s a radically different place.
0:23:10 You bring up an interesting thought, and that is, we’re now 50% of the world’s market
0:23:12 capitalization, our stocks.
0:23:15 There’s one company in the U.S. that is more valuable than every stock market, with the
0:23:18 exception of Japan.
0:23:23 But if there is a global crisis that emerges, as strong as we are, we just can’t go it
0:23:24 alone.
0:23:25 We need allies.
0:23:32 And I don’t care if it’s World War II or repelling a Saddam out of Kuwait, whatever it might
0:23:35 be, even addressing COVID.
0:23:37 There needs to be global cooperation.
0:23:39 There needs to be a certain level of goodwill.
0:23:41 There needs to be alliances.
0:23:46 And I think first and foremost, I think of how successful NATO has been keeping the peace
0:23:48 since World War II.
0:23:53 Is it fair to say that those alliances have been dramatically frayed thereby making it
0:23:57 a more dangerous world for America despite its strength?
0:24:00 That’s an interesting question, Scott.
0:24:07 On the one hand, the level of trust of American allies for the United States that the U.S.
0:24:13 would be there when push comes to shove has eroded dramatically.
0:24:24 So there, if a collective security is in somehow fundamentally based on the notion that you
0:24:31 believe in each other, you’re accountable for each other, I think it has weakened.
0:24:37 On the other hand, the Europeans are spending a lot more on defense now than they were.
0:24:41 And the Japanese are spending a lot more on defense now than they were.
0:24:47 And Mark Rutte, the new Secretary General of NATO, former Prime Minister of the Netherlands,
0:24:54 is now working with the Europeans to move to 3 percent GDP spend on defense, which they’re
0:25:00 doing outside of the EU mechanisms so that the Hungarians can’t veto it, which means
0:25:01 they are moving.
0:25:06 I think that’s going to happen, which means that they’re going to be in all likelihood
0:25:11 by the end of the Trump administration, the Europeans will be paying about as much percentage
0:25:14 of GDP on defense as the Americans do.
0:25:16 So that’s a stronger NATO.
0:25:22 And I mean, when Trump demands that NATO allies spend more on defense, that’s not a pro-Putin
0:25:23 message.
0:25:27 That’s the exact opposite of what Putin wants them to do.
0:25:29 So it’s kind of interesting, right?
0:25:34 I mean, in the same way that America is not in decline, but its political system is, the
0:25:42 alliances, like the soft power, the willingness to engage with each other on the basis of
0:25:47 we like you, we trust you, this matters to us, that has eroded a lot.
0:25:52 And yet with America as a much more powerful country that other countries have to align
0:25:57 with or else, you know, actually the Americans can drive a lot more.
0:26:03 And so, you know, you saw this in our risk report, we have red herrings at the end, things
0:26:07 that people think are going to happen that we think will not.
0:26:09 And one of our herrings was Trump fails.
0:26:15 And, you know, you see this a lot in the mainstream media, this guy’s a buffoon, he’s incompetent,
0:26:16 you know, he only cares about himself.
0:26:18 So of course, he’s going to fail all over the place.
0:26:19 We don’t think so.
0:26:23 We think that Trump is going to say a whole bunch of stuff and people are going to get
0:26:24 on board.
0:26:25 They’re going to align with him.
0:26:29 I mean, if you think that Facebook and Apple are kissing his ass in Mar-a-Lago, that’s
0:26:34 nothing compared to how foreign governments who are aligned with the United States and
0:26:38 know they can’t afford to do anything else, the Mexicans, you know, the Europeans, they’re
0:26:42 going to want to find a way to ensure they don’t have a crisis with this guy.
0:26:47 So he’s going to have a lot of wins in the early stages.
0:26:54 It’s interesting because to be fair, I think what you’re saying is Trump’s, I don’t know,
0:27:02 I wouldn’t call it a middle finger, but his rolling his eyes or his lack of fear of saying
0:27:08 aggressive things about allies has resulted in an increase in spending, which should,
0:27:14 if you will, we still might be the world’s policemen, but other people are now buying
0:27:20 their own squad cars, that this has been a direct positive result of Trump’s actions
0:27:25 or adversarial tone of complexion with our allies, do you agree?
0:27:30 I do, I do, but also I would say that the gap is big.
0:27:37 It’s going to take a long time for them to spend at that level to get close to capabilities
0:27:38 to really defend themselves.
0:27:44 This is not going to get resolved in four years, even if their level of spending at that point
0:27:46 percentage-wise is equivalent to the U.S.
0:27:50 And some countries are already there, the Baltics, Poland, you know, some of the Nordics,
0:27:51 that kind of thing.
0:27:57 But also there’s a question of the fact that the Americans have the capacity to be a global
0:28:01 policeman, even with support, Trump has no interest in doing that, right?
0:28:07 I mean, Trump was the one that cut the deal with the Taliban that Biden then executed on.
0:28:13 Syria, you know, you’ve got a government that’s now in place in Syria that’s very unlikely
0:28:21 going to be able to stabilize that incredibly complex and volatile territory.
0:28:24 You’ve got over 2,000 U.S. troops stationed in Syria right now.
0:28:26 Trump doesn’t want to keep those troops there.
0:28:30 If Trump pulls them out, it’s not like France is going to send those troops.
0:28:32 It’s not like the U.K. is.
0:28:36 It’s much more likely that the Turks are going to be on the ground.
0:28:40 They’re going to hit the Kurds hard.
0:28:47 No longer jailing ISIS on the ground, and the potential for that to become fertile for
0:28:49 a new caliphate is real.
0:28:58 So, I mean, the absence of the U.S. as a willing policeman will save American taxpayers.
0:29:05 It will put fewer lives at risk, but it will lead to more ungoverned spaces.
0:29:10 It will lead to more depredation, more forced migration, that will affect other countries
0:29:15 to a much greater degree to the U.S. because the U.S. is geographically very well located
0:29:21 and between Canada and Mexico and two big bodies of water, but the world will become
0:29:23 more dangerous and more unstable.
0:29:25 So, you know, there’s that.
0:29:30 So, and I don’t know if this is a function of living abroad now, but when I come back
0:29:36 or I don’t feel as I’m as in touch with America’s, which is a good and a bad thing, and I’d like
0:29:42 to think it’s offered some perspective, but I am mildly horrified minus the mildly.
0:29:51 What I see is this in full embrace by not only our leaders, but by acceptance by our
0:29:59 media and the general public of what is just an obvious naked, unafraid, unashamed kleptocracy
0:30:05 that if you look at the inaugural campaigns, I think of all the big 10 or the magazine
0:30:11 10, there was like a couple of $200,000 donations to the inaugural campaign or inaugural celebration
0:30:12 of Biden.
0:30:15 And now every one of them is lined up and put in a million bucks.
0:30:19 I mean, this feels like literally an episode of the Sopranos where they walk into the local
0:30:23 retailer and say, you know, it’d be a shame if your windows got broken and this place
0:30:24 got robbed.
0:30:26 We need protection money.
0:30:32 And this has now gone full kleptocracy where Musk increases his wealth by 150 or 200 billion
0:30:33 for no other reason.
0:30:37 As far as I can tell that they assumed that because he put in a quarter of a billion dollars,
0:30:41 that the largest, deepest pocketed customer in the world will throw money at him and anybody
0:30:44 else who decides pay for play.
0:30:45 Have we gone?
0:30:50 Is it unfair to say we have gone full kleptocratic?
0:30:58 This trajectory is very strongly in that direction and it was already bad before Trump.
0:31:04 I mean, you know, three billion plus spent on our presidential election over two years
0:31:07 doesn’t need to be that way.
0:31:13 You know, the incredible willingness of special interests in the U.S. to capture the regulatory
0:31:20 system to write their own policies, you know, that’s not a competitive free market.
0:31:28 A competitive free market is one where you’ve got regulators that represent the public interest
0:31:31 and companies have to compete against each other.
0:31:35 It’s not about who has more access to power and who has the ability to write regulations
0:31:37 that support them and get subsidies.
0:31:41 It’s about who has the best product, who’s the most competitive.
0:31:44 We’re very far from that in the United States right now.
0:31:50 We still have, you know, a great environment for small enterprises that start up with plucky
0:31:56 entrepreneurs like you and I have experienced and benefited from through our lives.
0:31:59 But in America is still great at that.
0:32:07 But in terms of big corporations and billionaires, now we’re talking about a country that is
0:32:13 open to the highest bidder and our allies see that and they’re worried about it.
0:32:15 They don’t like it.
0:32:19 And it’s not the way their systems run, not the advanced industrial economies anyway.
0:32:26 It’s closer to way a lot of emerging markets run and we should worry, I think, a lot about
0:32:27 that.
0:32:28 Absolutely.
0:32:33 And that’s where the Elon thing really bothers me.
0:32:38 Less about freedom of speech and more about, you know, what does it mean?
0:32:44 What does he get for his quarter of a billion dollars with Trump?
0:32:46 I mean, we see how much access he has.
0:32:51 We see that he, I mean, he has a position that’s a non-governmental advisory position
0:32:52 in Doge.
0:32:58 We see his ability to talk directly with competitor CEOs while he’s sitting with the
0:33:05 president or heads of state while he’s sitting with the president to functionally even veto
0:33:09 legislation when he speaks out against it, get people aligned.
0:33:11 I mean, that’s a pretty unique position.
0:33:14 We’ve not seen anyone like that before.
0:33:19 He’s certainly the most powerful individual in the private sector that the US has experienced
0:33:22 since the Gilded Age.
0:33:23 What does that mean?
0:33:26 What does that mean for the United States domestically, its political system?
0:33:30 What does that mean for the US with its allies in the global order?
0:33:32 I don’t think it’s a good development.
0:33:59 It’s January 6th and Congress met today at 1 p.m. to certify Donald Trump as the winner
0:34:02 of the 2024 election.
0:34:06 Four years ago, you may recall, Congress was meant to do the same, but the certification
0:34:10 was delayed when thousands of Trump supporters marched on the Capitol.
0:34:15 The president-elect has said repeatedly, and he told NBC again last month that he’s going
0:34:19 to pardon at least some of the insurrectionists.
0:34:25 Those people have suffered long and hard, and there may be some exceptions to it, I have
0:34:26 to look.
0:34:32 But if somebody was radical, crazy, there might be some people from Antifa there?
0:34:36 I don’t know, because those people seem to be in good shape.
0:34:37 Whatever happened to Scaffold Man?
0:34:38 You had to be there.
0:34:43 Antifa was actually not there four years ago, but members of several extremist groups were
0:34:45 at the Capitol on Jan 6th.
0:34:49 And today on Explained, we’re going to ask, “Whither American extremism on the eve of
0:34:52 a second Trump administration?”
0:34:55 Today Explained, every weekday, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:35:03 So, you touched on Syria, and risk number nine, you called ungoverned spaces.
0:35:07 Do you think, and you did begin to outline this, do you think what’s happened in Syria
0:35:11 is a net positive or negative for the West?
0:35:19 I think the fact that Assad is gone is a net positive for the West, because Assad was an
0:35:29 utterly brutal dictator who allowed for more people around the world to believe that they
0:35:34 could act with impunity in their own backyards and get away with it.
0:35:38 He was an ally to not just Russia, but Iran.
0:35:46 He facilitated the illegal transfer of weapons from Iran into Lebanon, strengthening Hezbollah,
0:35:53 which is seen by the US as a terrorist organization, as a principal adversary of Israel.
0:36:02 He was the principal, oversaw the principal production of Captagon, an incredibly addictive,
0:36:08 enormously debilitating illegal drug that was being exported all over the region and
0:36:11 Europe, and some to the United States.
0:36:17 I am delighted that he’s gone, and I don’t shed any tears about him getting poisoned
0:36:22 in Moscow within a couple of weeks of the Russians accepting him in quotes.
0:36:29 What has replaced him is at best, at best uncertain.
0:36:39 I mean, this new government came out of ISIS-connected folks, and they are certainly showing that
0:36:45 they want to be more inclusive, that they’ve turned over a new leaf, but does that really
0:36:51 mean that they’re going to be either capable or willing to run a more stable, more inclusive
0:37:00 government that won’t either collapse or won’t launch a war against large numbers of its
0:37:01 own citizens?
0:37:03 We’ll have to wait and see.
0:37:09 But no, it’s clearly a positive, a net positive for the West and for everyone that Assad has
0:37:10 gone.
0:37:15 So, one of the few places I think we have a bit of a differing viewpoint is on Israel
0:37:17 and the conflict there.
0:37:22 And I’ll put forward another thesis that Israel’s bold and courageous actions taking out more
0:37:27 terrorists in six weeks than we took out in 25 years on our most wanted list, cutting
0:37:36 off the hands of the proxies of Iran, incredibly bold, the most precise anti-terrorist action
0:37:41 or operation in history with the Pagers and Hezbollah, that Israel has demonstrated not
0:37:48 only tremendous power expertise and strategy here, but they, in my view, their actions
0:37:54 are going to make the Middle East a safer, more stable, more pro-West place because of
0:37:56 their actions.
0:37:57 Your thoughts?
0:38:06 Well, first of all, the only risk that shows up in our report on the Middle East, one is
0:38:11 that oil prices are likely to be low, which means less money for the Gulf states, both
0:38:16 for themselves as well as to help countries in the region that need and have benefited
0:38:21 from their aid, like Jordan, for example, Egypt, for example, Tunisia, for example.
0:38:29 And secondly, Iran, which is a significant risk in part because they are, their regime
0:38:35 is on life support, they’ve lost their empire, and the Americans and the Israelis might well
0:38:38 decide this is the opportunity to really hit them hard.
0:38:39 Those are the risks.
0:38:46 So I mean, we didn’t have in the report Hezbollah or the West Bank or Gaza, because the Israelis
0:38:53 have shown that they are militarily dominant, they, they determine the nature of escalation,
0:38:59 and their enemies can’t do anything to them, and that includes, frankly, the Iranians.
0:39:07 So I certainly accept the fact that the Israelis have defeated their enemies to in a pretty
0:39:14 spectacular fashion over the last year and a bit, following October 7th.
0:39:16 I agree with that.
0:39:22 Where you and I probably disagree, and we’ve had discussions about this in the past, Scott,
0:39:29 is that I don’t believe that you can resolve the Palestinian problem by blowing them all
0:39:30 up.
0:39:31 I just don’t.
0:39:37 I mean, I think that, you know, if Hamas is an army, they’re defeated.
0:39:42 If Hamas is an ideology and an idea, you’ve probably made them stronger because you’ve
0:39:45 radicalized people for generations.
0:39:56 And what I see in Gaza, and the lack of humanitarian support, and the comparative breadth of bombing,
0:40:05 and lack of willingness to be accountable for the risks of the civilian population.
0:40:11 And I’m not in any way trying to say that Israel shouldn’t want to blow up Hamas.
0:40:14 I absolutely accept terrorist organization.
0:40:18 They’ve done horrible things to the Israelis and to their own population.
0:40:25 But ultimately, the fact that as a result of this war, the Palestinians are facing far
0:40:30 greater depredation than they were on October 6th.
0:40:34 And also the Palestinians in the West Bank have lost a lot more territory.
0:40:36 They’re living under more of a security state.
0:40:39 They are much farther from having a state.
0:40:43 I believe that will lead to more radicalism.
0:40:50 I believe that will lead to more violence against Israel, against the United States,
0:40:52 and more broadly in the region.
0:40:53 I believe that.
0:40:57 Now, I mean, how do you balance those things?
0:41:00 Because again, at the end of the day, Israel’s a tiny country.
0:41:01 They’re very wealthy.
0:41:03 They’re incredible in terms of surveillance.
0:41:08 If they keep their eyes on the ball, as Netanyahu did not before October 7th, they will have
0:41:11 great control over their borders.
0:41:18 So I think in the context of that, maybe they can effectively occupy Palestinian territories
0:41:22 and the Palestinians will just live as an imprisoned people.
0:41:25 It’s possible and that that won’t be a threat to Israel.
0:41:27 I don’t believe that that’s humane.
0:41:29 That’s not a world I want to live in.
0:41:32 But I also don’t think it’s true.
0:41:37 So I mean, even if you don’t care about the Palestinians as people, and there are a lot
0:41:43 of people that don’t, I believe and I do, but I understand that there are people that
0:41:47 just have decided that’s my enemy and I don’t care.
0:41:53 But I actually believe that these are people that are industrious.
0:42:00 They are capable and with advanced technologies, they will increasingly find ways to make their
0:42:02 voice heard.
0:42:04 And I worry about that.
0:42:09 I mean, I worry about that in the same way that I worry about when the CEO of United
0:42:15 Healthcare is assassinated by some pretty boy idiot, that a whole bunch of people on
0:42:20 the Internet, and by the way, some establishment Democrats, seem to lionize the guy.
0:42:22 Oh, I understand what he did.
0:42:23 That’s what happens.
0:42:25 You radicalize people.
0:42:27 They do crazy shit and they have supporters.
0:42:34 And I worry that the Palestinians are increasingly going to be prone, larger numbers of them.
0:42:37 To do crazy shit with supporters.
0:42:41 This idea and a lot of people hold it that you, even if you kill, you can kill people
0:42:42 but you can’t kill an idea.
0:42:46 I would push back and say, we for the most part killed communism.
0:42:49 We for the most part at least we saw killed fascism.
0:42:52 And at the end of World War II, we were bombing Hamburg.
0:42:57 We killed 40 service or military and killed 40,000 civilians.
0:42:59 And we had already won the war.
0:43:03 And when asked the generals and Eisenhower asked why they continued to devastate Hamburg,
0:43:05 they said they need to know they lost.
0:43:07 And I know that sounds brutal.
0:43:13 But I would argue that we would have done worse had we been as viciously attacked.
0:43:19 And two, when you actually look at the data, specifically the deaths of combatants relative
0:43:26 to civilians, that the Israelis are prosecuting this war more humanely than any Western nation
0:43:28 has prosecuted another war.
0:43:29 Your thoughts?
0:43:40 So, I accept the fact that the United States in the war in Iraq and in Afghanistan also
0:43:47 saw massive amounts of civilian damage and brutality, except it completely.
0:43:54 But let me, I was focused when I said I take exception to the way the Israelis have proselytized
0:44:00 this war, I’ve talked about the utter lack of humanitarian aid getting in to Gaza.
0:44:06 And I also talked about taking more land and the greatest security state in the West Bank.
0:44:08 And again, I think those things matter.
0:44:16 Now, I don’t think you need, you can blow up Hamas and still allow food in for the Palestinians.
0:44:22 I mean, my view is that if you’re a friend of Israel as I am, you want Israel to do well
0:44:24 in sustainably long-term.
0:44:28 And that means criticizing Israel when you think it’s fucking up.
0:44:33 The United States, which has been the strongest supporter of Israel, bar none.
0:44:41 No one else is close over the last year, has been incredibly critical, mostly privately,
0:44:44 of the fact that not enough aid has gotten in.
0:44:50 So, again, my point here is simply that I believe that there’s going to be greater radicalization.
0:44:57 And we need to move to thinking about how after they’ve lost.
0:44:58 And do they know they’ve lost?
0:45:00 It’s not like just the war since October 7th.
0:45:05 The Palestinians have known that they’ve lost for decades now, right?
0:45:10 I mean, like they have less and less territory, they’ve been moved farther and farther out.
0:45:15 There are opportunities, economic opportunities, educational opportunities are more and more
0:45:16 constrained.
0:45:20 A lot of that is on their own poor governance.
0:45:21 Don’t get me wrong.
0:45:23 It’s not just all about Israel.
0:45:25 A lot of that is because they were forgotten by the Gulf states.
0:45:27 A lot of that is because the Americans don’t care about them, the Europeans don’t care.
0:45:31 I mean, no one cares about the Palestinians, except the Palestinians.
0:45:32 They do.
0:45:34 The Palestinians care about the Palestinians.
0:45:38 And ultimately, I think that’s going to cause a problem.
0:45:42 Hasn’t Qatar sent over a billion dollars, which they decided to spend on tunnels and
0:45:43 rockets?
0:45:46 And the beneficiary of a tremendous amount of aid?
0:45:53 Qatar has been the single biggest supporter on the ground in Gaza over past years.
0:45:55 And of course, that’s now been cut off, absolutely.
0:46:02 But if you look at what kind of support the Palestinians have had on the ground to build
0:46:08 their economy compared to other countries, actual countries in the region, the answer
0:46:10 is very, very little.
0:46:13 And look, you know that my mother’s side of the family is Armenian.
0:46:20 I mean, 125,000 Armenians just ethnically cleansed from Nagorno-Karabakh.
0:46:21 And no one’s talking about it.
0:46:22 You’re not going to ask me about it.
0:46:23 It’s not in our top risk report.
0:46:24 We didn’t write about it all.
0:46:25 Even in ungoverned territories.
0:46:28 We didn’t bother to mention it because nobody cares.
0:46:31 And that’s what I’m saying, law of the jungle.
0:46:39 The fact is, we could have a very long conversation about why it got to this situation where 125,000
0:46:46 civilians got tossed out of their homes, left with nothing, places blown up, occupied
0:46:49 all their historic monuments, their churches blown up.
0:46:50 Nobody talks about it.
0:46:52 It bothers me as a person, you know.
0:46:55 But the fact is, I mean, look, we talk about the Palestinians because it gets a lot more
0:47:01 attention, but we could, there are so many places where these are the same conversations.
0:47:05 But again, I love this because I want to stop you because I feel like I’m sitting across
0:47:08 the table from someone I respect immensely and I can have a civil conversation around
0:47:13 things I recognize, I feel strongly about, but I don’t know what I don’t know.
0:47:19 And that is, you talk about, we’re not having these conversations around the 120,000 people
0:47:24 who have been disappeared in Syria under Assad or, you know, what’s happened in Yemen, isn’t
0:47:30 it mostly because when Jews kill people, it’s seen as a different crime against humanity
0:47:32 than when other people kill people.
0:47:34 Isn’t there just a tremendous double standard here, Ian?
0:47:39 Look, I think that there are all sorts of double standards, Scott, but they don’t just
0:47:40 go one way.
0:47:47 I mean, the Holocaust has been seared in the imaginary, the collective historical memory
0:47:54 and the imagination of everyone that lived at that time and since.
0:48:01 And you know, for a long time, the Jews were seen to be like the principal global victim
0:48:05 and we all had to ensure that never happened again.
0:48:08 Today, that is not true.
0:48:15 Today Israel is the dominant military actor in the entire Middle East, not just vis-à-vis
0:48:19 the Palestinians, and they are the ones that get to decide.
0:48:23 Now we in the United States love an underdog.
0:48:29 I think that there has been a shift for a lot of young people in the United States that
0:48:34 suddenly don’t see support for Israel as support of the underdog.
0:48:39 They think that we’re somehow the bad guys because we’re in favor of the powerful and
0:48:41 not in favor of the oppressed.
0:48:46 And the Ukrainians are in the position that the Israelis used to be in.
0:48:48 So I think there’s some of that.
0:48:57 I think there has been a massive surge in anti-Semitism around the world, very disturbing,
0:49:00 and that certainly has to do with the fact that there are a hell of a lot more Muslims
0:49:06 than there are Jews, and a lot of them are on TikTok, for example.
0:49:10 And so you see that performing algorithmically, not because TikTok is nefarious, but just
0:49:14 because it performs with those eyeballs, there’s some of that.
0:49:19 And also the fact that there’s just a lot of media occupying that space.
0:49:24 You know, I mean, this is an area that has a lot of journalists on the ground and covering
0:49:25 it.
0:49:29 There’s no journalist in Sudan or Yemen writing about it.
0:49:32 This part of the world matters economically, technologically.
0:49:33 It doesn’t.
0:49:34 Sudan, nobody cares.
0:49:35 Right?
0:49:36 It doesn’t have a market impact.
0:49:39 There’s no one that’s going to school there that’s going to come and talk about it.
0:49:41 There’s not as much of a diaspora in the West.
0:49:46 There is when you talk about the Israelis and the Palestinians.
0:49:52 So I think there are lots of reasons, and to simplify this to just one factor, you and
0:49:55 I would not do that about any other discussion we’d have.
0:49:59 We certainly wouldn’t want to simplify this in that way.
0:50:01 Let me first pros again.
0:50:02 First comment.
0:50:04 I absolutely love these conversations.
0:50:05 So thank you too.
0:50:10 You said that TikTok, not because TikTok is nefarious, another thesis.
0:50:16 TikTok is largely influenced, if not controlled by the CCP, who has a strategic reason to
0:50:19 deposition us or make us weaker.
0:50:23 If they can’t beat us economically or kinetically, why wouldn’t they put their thumb on the scale
0:50:28 of content that polarizes us, resulting in 52 pro-Hamas videos for everyone pro-Israel
0:50:33 video, which according to the research I’ve seen is taking place on TikTok.
0:50:40 In some, I would argue TikTok is nefarious and purposely trying to delegitimize or create
0:50:43 polarization amongst our public.
0:50:45 So I think social media is nefarious.
0:50:56 And I agree that TikTok is certainly influenced by the CCP, the Communist Party of China.
0:50:58 And we should not trust that.
0:51:02 They have said that they are not giving any information to the Chinese Communist Party.
0:51:03 That has been proved in many investigations.
0:51:06 Wall Street Journal, other reports to be not true.
0:51:13 So I’m not comfortable with the idea that TikTok is just a free market corporation that’s
0:51:19 only seeking profits and nothing matters, but to the extent that the Chinese have been
0:51:26 involved in cyber operations to influence U.S. elections and the Russians have been
0:51:32 involved in the Iranians and the North Koreans, the Russians are actively promoting information
0:51:40 that is trying to increase a sense of racism, rage, violence, hostility, maltreatment.
0:51:43 I mean, they’re flooding the zone with shit.
0:51:50 In ways that really is trying to disrupt and undermine U.S. democracy and stability.
0:51:58 China’s cyber influence on the U.S. elections was overwhelmingly intelligence seeking.
0:52:03 It was get inside the systems to figure out what they’re really doing so that we can take
0:52:05 advantage from it.
0:52:11 It was also get inside critical infrastructure so that just in case things go badly, we might
0:52:13 be able to blow these guys up.
0:52:18 So I’m someone that believes that I don’t know what I don’t know, I know what I know.
0:52:23 I am not inside, I know the CEO of TikTok, I’ve met him many times.
0:52:25 I’m not inside their decision-making process.
0:52:28 I don’t know what they’re saying to the Communist Party.
0:52:33 But I know what I see, the evidence from what the Chinese have done in other areas.
0:52:37 There’s no reason for me to believe that that would uniquely and somehow be different with
0:52:44 TikTok than it is with their entire national strategy, which has been risk averse and influence
0:52:47 and information maximizing for them directly.
0:52:52 It has not been breaking and blowing up the United States.
0:52:59 And I also think that there’s a much simpler Occam’s razor explanation for why young people
0:53:07 would get a lot more pro-Islam and pro-Palestinian content than they would get pro-Israel and
0:53:08 pro-Jewish.
0:53:14 And it’s because TikTok is a global platform with enormous numbers of people from Pakistan
0:53:17 and Indonesia on it.
0:53:23 And also oriented towards younger people that are already, even in the West, much more pro-Palestinian
0:53:26 than they are pro-Israel all over the world.
0:53:28 And that’s just being driven algorithmically.
0:53:30 I think that’s the simplest argument.
0:53:33 So that’s how I feel about that.
0:53:36 Let’s talk about Ukraine.
0:53:38 Give us your state of play in Ukraine.
0:53:43 So you’ll remember back at the beginning of 2024, you and I talked about this.
0:53:44 And I said, and I wasn’t happy about it at all.
0:53:47 I said, I think Ukraine is going to get partitioned.
0:53:49 You were one of the first people that ever said that out loud.
0:53:52 I want to point that out.
0:53:56 You said, look, this land, they’re never getting it back is essentially what you said.
0:53:57 Yeah.
0:53:59 And I mean, I want to be very clear.
0:54:02 I really don’t want that outcome.
0:54:06 But it’s not for me to be telling everybody what I want.
0:54:10 It’s much more about where you think things are going.
0:54:18 And the Ukrainians, I think, increasingly understand that they’re now trying to position
0:54:24 themselves for the best possible negotiation where they are going to have to lose most,
0:54:28 if not all of the territory that the Russians presently occupy.
0:54:32 They’d like a little leverage, which is why they’re continuing the offensive in Kursk,
0:54:35 which is inside Russia, so that they have something to trade that’s going to make the
0:54:41 negotiations more fraught, but does give them leverage.
0:54:46 The Russians also are, they’d benefit from a breather.
0:54:53 I mean, yeah, they’ve got 15,000 North Korean troops that are not fighting well and are
0:54:58 dying in large numbers, but they’re having a harder time raising significant numbers
0:55:00 of troops for the war effort.
0:55:06 And their economy is increasingly performing badly under strain of sanction and lack of
0:55:08 human capital.
0:55:13 So I think that Trump is going to succeed in getting a ceasefire.
0:55:18 I don’t think it’s going to take a day, and it’s going to be hard of any thought.
0:55:22 But when he tells the Ukrainians, you need to accept what I’m telling you or else.
0:55:26 First of all, he’s creating some cover for Zelensky to say, look, I’ve got no choice
0:55:30 now because of the Americans, which is helpful to Zelensky, frankly.
0:55:34 But also he does know that the Americans will cut off aid if he doesn’t.
0:55:35 So that will move.
0:55:40 And the French McCronev has also delivered that message just yesterday to Zelensky.
0:55:41 He’s heard it from the Germans and others.
0:55:44 So he’s getting that pressure.
0:55:48 And the Russians also know, though it’s harder to pressure them in this environment, the
0:55:49 US has less leverage.
0:55:54 They know that if they don’t accept negotiations in a ceasefire, that they’re going to get
0:55:57 tougher sanctions from Trump.
0:55:58 I do believe that.
0:56:00 And Trump has delivered that message.
0:56:02 I also thought it was very interesting.
0:56:05 I mean, Trump’s tweets aren’t always interesting, but sometimes they are.
0:56:11 And there was one he put out a couple of weeks ago that said about Russia, Ukraine, that
0:56:14 also China can help.
0:56:17 And it was very interesting that Trump would say that.
0:56:19 I fully agree with it.
0:56:23 China does not benefit from this war continuing.
0:56:28 They would like the Russians to have a ceasefire.
0:56:33 It is undermining China’s relationship with Europe, which especially the front line states,
0:56:35 which they would like to be more stable.
0:56:38 It is making it harder for the Chinese to have flexibility globally.
0:56:41 They really don’t like the Russian North Korea relationship.
0:56:43 They want this war over.
0:56:47 As you said before, the Chinese need stability, the Russians are chaos actors, so they’re
0:56:48 not fully aligned in this.
0:56:55 If I were Trump, I would absolutely reach out to the Chinese to be a part of this solution.
0:57:00 And the first Trump-Sijian pin call is going to be utterly fascinating for so many reasons,
0:57:02 but this is one of them.
0:57:07 So just as we wrap up here in, we have a lot of young people who listen to this podcast
0:57:11 and are very focused on trying to develop their own careers.
0:57:15 And I think a lot of people listen to this and hear about your background in GZERO Media
0:57:19 and think, “God, that is just such a cool job in business.”
0:57:25 What it just gives us, just the cliff notes, I would imagine your business is booming.
0:57:27 And what is the friction right now in your business?
0:57:34 When you look at 2025 as the founder of this consulting firm or media company, what are
0:57:39 you most excited about and most worried about as it relates to being an entrepreneur and
0:57:41 building your business?
0:57:47 Well, I mean, it’s kind of funny because, of course, given that we try to help people
0:57:51 understand the world when there’s more uncertainty, more people need us, and that’s true both
0:57:55 in terms of the companies that pay us to do consulting and advisory work and also in terms
0:58:02 of just the members of the public that engage with our media channels and the rest, I mean,
0:58:07 we did a lot better growth-wise in the Trump administration than we did in Biden.
0:58:12 I mean, leaving aside the fact that tax rates went down, so all the corporates did well
0:58:18 under that, but just generally speaking, much more uncertainty driven by the Trump administration.
0:58:25 We already see that starting now, he’s certainly acting as president with Biden doing much
0:58:26 less.
0:58:30 I expect that’ll be true again, so that’s not a point of friction.
0:58:33 The point of friction, and I think you’ll appreciate this.
0:58:37 So we’ve got almost 250 employees, right?
0:58:41 For me, that sounds amazing because I started as a kid from the projects and it was just
0:58:42 me.
0:58:43 Sounds like a headache.
0:58:44 Well, I’ve got a CEO.
0:58:48 It’s not like I’m running it, but I mean, 250 people is a small company.
0:58:55 In the grand scheme of things, it’s a small company, and the biggest point of friction
0:59:02 is that we need to ensure that the bets that we make in a given year, there are so many
0:59:07 places that we could go and engage and build the firm.
0:59:11 Different types of businesses, different geographies, different sectors we can invest
0:59:15 in, different kinds of staff, all sorts of things we can do.
0:59:21 And yet as a firm with 250 people, you can only make four or five of those bets in a
0:59:24 serious way in any given year.
0:59:28 So it’s not about who your competitors are globally.
0:59:35 It’s much more about marshalling your resources intelligently yourself and making those bets
0:59:41 so they’re not singles, but a couple of them are actually home runs, that they really do
0:59:43 your constraint.
0:59:48 I mean, it’s kind of like you and I have so many hours in the day, you’ve got so many
0:59:52 hours with the kids before they don’t want to talk to you anymore.
0:59:55 How are you going to spend that time with them that maximizes it?
0:59:59 We’ve got only so many people and so much money we can deploy.
1:00:03 How do we do that in a big world that’s rife with opportunity?
1:00:05 There’s too much opportunity in the world.
1:00:12 And there’s only one of me, and there’s only one Eurasia group, only one GZero media.
1:00:13 How do you do that?
1:00:18 And I’m an optimist, my eyes are always bigger than my stomach, everything can work out.
1:00:26 The people around me are meant to ensure that there is structure and reality around all
1:00:27 of that.
1:00:29 And I think they do a real good job.
1:00:35 Yeah, the charge of any leader is not what to do, but what not to do, how you allocate
1:00:38 capital to its greatest return.
1:00:41 Ian Bremmer is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the world’s leading political
1:00:46 risk research and consulting firm, and GZero media, a company dedicated to providing intelligent
1:00:49 and engaging coverage of international affairs.
1:00:54 He’s also the author of 11 books, including The New York Times bestsellers, Us vs Them,
1:00:59 The Failure of Globalism, and his latest book, The Power of Crisis, How Three Threats and
1:01:02 Our Response Will Change the World.
1:01:07 Ian, Alec Baldwin has hosted SNL 17 times, you have now been on Prop G seven times, we
1:01:08 are catching up fast.
1:01:13 You are hands down our favorite guests, you’re thoughtful, you’re civil, you’re creative.
1:01:17 I just love these conversations, really appreciate your partnership and friendship.
1:01:31 All right, brother, take care, happy New Year.
1:01:32 Algebra of happiness.
1:01:37 This guy, I think his name is Tyler, I found him on TikTok or Instagram, kind of obsessed
1:01:38 with him.
1:01:41 He’s this former financial advisor that takes these long walks in the woods, it looks like
1:01:45 he’s in a work camp in Vladivostok and gives financial advice, and I just think he’s fantastic
1:01:46 what he does.
1:01:51 And he said something that impacted me, he said that here is the definition of success,
1:01:55 a series of small actions every day.
1:01:59 And it just, it struck me as so simple, but this is what I hope we’re all going to do,
1:02:03 or I’m going to suggest you do, and I’m going to try and do the same thing.
1:02:08 And that is every day this year, do one small thing, one small thing that’s going to add
1:02:12 up to something great at the end of the year, 15, 20, 30 minutes of exercise, it might be
1:02:17 a long walk, a text message every day to someone you care about, telling them that you care
1:02:22 about them, and it might not be, I care about you, but just checking in, hi, how are you?
1:02:26 You’re going to aggregate those, those text messages are going to compound something for
1:02:30 yourself, create one or two minutes of content every day.
1:02:35 I’m going to write a blog post or 100 words of a blog post every day, I’m going to put
1:02:39 out a minute or every three days, I’m going to put out a video, I’m going to put out interesting
1:02:42 content on a social media platform to try and garner my following.
1:02:46 I’m going to save 10 bucks a day, I’m going to not, I’m going to not take an Uber, I’m
1:02:51 going to take the subway, and I am not going to buy that latte from Starbucks, and I’m
1:02:58 going to invest 10 bucks every day in Vanguard and ETF or on the Acorns app, whatever it
1:02:59 might be, right?
1:03:06 A series of small actions every day that add up to something great, especially around relationships.
1:03:09 This is our year, it’s 2025.
1:03:14 Everything behind you is gone, it’s done, it’s immutable, but 2025 is immutable.
1:03:17 Let’s start now.
1:03:21 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez, our intern is Dan Shalong, Drew Burroughs is
1:03:25 our technical director, it’s so nice to see Drew again, so nice to see Drew, he comes
1:03:29 over to my house, he sets everything up, he’s this nice presence.
1:03:32 Thank you for listening to The Prof. G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
1:03:37 We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercino Malice, as read by George Hahn, and please
1:03:41 follow our Prof. G. Markets Pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday
1:03:42 and Thursday.
1:03:49 Woohoo!
1:03:51 (gentle music)

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0:01:08 – Welcome to the Prophg Pod’s Office Hours.
0:01:09 This is the part of the show where we answer questions
0:01:11 about business, big tech, entrepreneurship,
0:01:12 and whatever else is on your mind.
0:01:14 If you’d like to submit a question,
0:01:15 please email a voice recording
0:01:17 to officehours@prophgmedia.com.
0:01:20 Again, that’s officehours@prophgmedia.com.
0:01:22 So with that, first question,
0:01:23 I have not seen these questions.
0:01:26 – Hello, Scott, my name is James.
0:01:28 Thank you for what you do every day.
0:01:30 My question is simple, but requires some background.
0:01:33 How do I scale myself?
0:01:36 What do you do when the product you’re selling is you?
0:01:38 As a physician with more than 20 years experience
0:01:40 in practice, I have some professional assets.
0:01:42 The first is my work ethic.
0:01:45 The second is my experience and expertise.
0:01:47 The third is that I care.
0:01:50 And the fourth is the integrity of my personal brand
0:01:52 that’s been built upon all of the previous.
0:01:55 I’m blessed to have a successful practice
0:01:57 that draws patients from a surprising distance
0:01:59 and for which I am very grateful.
0:02:01 And over the years, people have asked me
0:02:03 to expand my presence locally and beyond,
0:02:05 but I’ve been unable to figure out a way
0:02:08 to duplicate myself to make that happen.
0:02:10 I have very many employees for decades
0:02:14 and they depend upon me and they have made me who I am.
0:02:15 So I don’t want to do anything
0:02:18 to risk my family’s wellbeing or theirs.
0:02:20 I’ve been reluctant to expand my influence
0:02:22 or espouse my opinions through social media
0:02:25 because I don’t want to come off as an opportunist or a quack.
0:02:27 But more and more, I feel like I have something
0:02:28 to offer to a wider audience
0:02:29 and I would like to get it out there.
0:02:31 At least I feel I should try.
0:02:34 If I can’t clone myself to help people face to face,
0:02:37 how do you think I could do it indirectly?
0:02:40 – The first thing is to step back and just acknowledge
0:02:42 you’re building economic security for other people.
0:02:43 It sounds like your employees sounds like,
0:02:45 I don’t know this, but I’m going to assume you’re a good boss.
0:02:48 So you’re kind of riding like, you know,
0:02:50 you’re already on the metal podium.
0:02:51 It’s just a question of whether, you know,
0:02:53 how many golds you collect, if you will.
0:02:56 Look, I’m honestly, this is something I’m good at.
0:02:59 I’m a good professor, I understand marketing,
0:03:01 but the way I’ve been able to build this life
0:03:03 is by quote-unquote scaling myself.
0:03:05 And it all comes down to one statement.
0:03:07 Greatness isn’t the agency of others.
0:03:08 It’s finding good people.
0:03:09 If you have a practice,
0:03:10 that means you can bring in other young,
0:03:11 I don’t know what you want,
0:03:13 orthopedic surgeon or dermatologist,
0:03:14 you can bring in other doctors
0:03:17 and try and create a culture of excellence
0:03:18 such that you can scale yourself.
0:03:20 And when I go, you know,
0:03:22 my friend is the top orthopedic surgeon.
0:03:24 When I hurt my knee, you know,
0:03:25 I saw him for the first consultation,
0:03:28 but then he passed me off to another very talented
0:03:30 orthopedic surgeon to look at my knee.
0:03:31 I ended up not getting surgery,
0:03:33 but you’ve already kind of figured out
0:03:36 that you scale with other good quality people
0:03:38 and you can run a business and run a practice
0:03:40 and try and create a good culture,
0:03:41 try and, you know, try and instill loyalty
0:03:43 by being good to people.
0:03:46 The second thing is you kind of answer your own question
0:03:47 when you’re talking about social media.
0:03:50 If you want to expand your sphere of influence,
0:03:52 whether you like it or not, it’s social media.
0:03:55 I had lunch today with the woman who started,
0:03:56 I think it’s called the Eight Greens,
0:03:58 which is this really cool supplements company,
0:04:00 you know, all that green shit you take in the morning,
0:04:01 I take it every morning now.
0:04:04 And she runs a great business,
0:04:05 but the reason, or one of the reasons
0:04:07 her business is so successful
0:04:09 is not only because she’s got a good product,
0:04:12 but she’s on, she’s very attractive, very articulate.
0:04:16 So the view and, you know, Oprah loved to have her on.
0:04:19 And social media, if you really have desire
0:04:21 to kind of scale yourself,
0:04:23 unfortunately, it involves YouTube, TikTok,
0:04:25 Instagram, all that shit.
0:04:26 And you can be more measured.
0:04:27 You can be one of those doctors
0:04:30 that is a little bit more, you know, measured.
0:04:33 You don’t have to say blueberries will cure your cancer.
0:04:36 But I think doing stuff in an interesting,
0:04:38 visual arresting way that’s compelling,
0:04:41 talking about whatever your domain expertise is,
0:04:44 you know, it’s hard, it’s a slow build and it’s huge.
0:04:47 About 15, maybe even 20 years ago,
0:04:50 I thought, okay, I need to be a, you know,
0:04:53 professor of strategy or brand strategy at Stern.
0:04:55 I thought I want, I have a bigger ambition than this.
0:04:57 Social media, I thought this is gonna be big.
0:04:59 So I did a follower strategy.
0:05:02 Every day I followed 200 people on Twitter,
0:05:03 which is the max you could follow without getting,
0:05:05 and I’m locked out for whatever reason,
0:05:08 and about 60 or 80 would follow me back.
0:05:11 So over the summer, I got 1,000 users,
0:05:13 and over the year I got 10, or 1,000 followers,
0:05:13 and by the end of the year,
0:05:16 10,000 followers now, I’d given up Twitter,
0:05:18 but I had over a half a million when I stopped showing up,
0:05:20 pulling up a seat to the Nazi porn bar.
0:05:22 But I have not huge followings,
0:05:24 but decent followings for a professor
0:05:26 on all of these different platforms.
0:05:28 I have somebody very talented,
0:05:31 George Hahn, who helps me with my social.
0:05:34 I do about half the postings, he does about half.
0:05:36 We take it very seriously, we film video,
0:05:38 we have a firm, we pay $10,000 a month through
0:05:41 that does these mashups of my content or speeches
0:05:44 and turns them into cool little 60 second videos
0:05:48 that we then snake through LinkedIn, YouTube,
0:05:51 TikTok, Instagram, Reels.
0:05:53 We hit all of these things.
0:05:56 So I would say the thing that’s missing here
0:05:57 is thought leadership and social media.
0:05:58 If you want to write a book,
0:06:00 if you want to be known as the doctor
0:06:01 that kind of gets this domain,
0:06:04 but it probably starts with social
0:06:05 and it requires some production values.
0:06:07 You have to hire some people.
0:06:09 The first video, the first thing you do will suck.
0:06:10 You can release it or not.
0:06:11 Just commit to Mr. Beasing it.
0:06:12 What do I mean by that?
0:06:15 The second one, better lighting, better video,
0:06:18 some visuals, topics, read the comments.
0:06:19 Don’t take them to heart
0:06:21 ’cause there’s gonna be bots and weirdos out there
0:06:23 that are just angry.
0:06:26 Also, I’m not sure I would go all in
0:06:29 on any kind of big idea because I don’t know how old you are.
0:06:32 You sounded like you’re in your 40s or 50s,
0:06:34 but if you’re making good money with a practice,
0:06:39 my suggestion would be to double down on that,
0:06:42 make more money, invest in low-cost index funds,
0:06:44 and just build a great life for yourself.
0:06:46 And also start to experiment with thought leadership
0:06:49 and hire someone to manage your social media
0:06:53 and start allocating four to four, eight hours a week
0:06:56 for content that goes beyond yourself.
0:06:57 Appreciate the question.
0:06:58 Best of luck to you.
0:07:01 And again, congratulations on all your success.
0:07:02 Question number two.
0:07:03 (electronic beeping)
0:07:06 – Hey, Scott, this is Barbra from Istanbul.
0:07:07 Long time, this is the writer.
0:07:12 I have a question for you that you might not like answering,
0:07:14 but I think you will appreciate it.
0:07:17 So the other day, I was reading the corporate life cycle
0:07:18 from Espar the Modern,
0:07:20 which I got to know for your podcast.
0:07:21 Thank you for that.
0:07:24 And he was talking about how long-lasting businesses
0:07:27 usually have a sexation plan in place.
0:07:30 They usually think about sexation just in case
0:07:32 and they end up, you know, lasting longer.
0:07:38 But then I can’t help but notice that the podcasts
0:07:42 that you release, like Proficy Markets, Proficy Podcasts,
0:07:44 yes, they’re basically unapproachable branding,
0:07:49 but what happens if you decide to start one day
0:07:53 or if you decide to pass it over, you know, to Ed and a team?
0:07:55 Does that mean you will have to rebrand
0:08:00 or do you have a succession plan that you wish to share?
0:08:04 – Barbra from Istanbul, that’s a good question.
0:08:07 It would be relevant, but I’m going to live forever.
0:08:08 Yes, that’s right.
0:08:11 The midlife crisis, the rest of the adolescence tour
0:08:13 continues, new dates announced.
0:08:15 Okay, enough of that.
0:08:18 Yeah, this business is getting to the point
0:08:19 where I need to be thoughtful
0:08:21 about creating enterprise value.
0:08:23 When it’s just a group of a small number of individuals,
0:08:25 you don’t have a business or an enterprise,
0:08:25 you have a practice
0:08:27 and people are too dependent upon one individual.
0:08:29 I think about this a lot.
0:08:32 Realistically, I’d like to think I have 20 good years in me.
0:08:34 I know I have 10 good years left in me,
0:08:38 but okay, still a lot of people are making good money here.
0:08:40 You want them to continue to make good money
0:08:44 and any business that’s just dependent upon one business,
0:08:45 you know, that’s, you need to be thinking
0:08:47 the way you’re thinking about succession strategies.
0:08:49 So what have I done?
0:08:52 One, you noticed I’ve brought in Ed Elson
0:08:54 and Ed is the co-host of markets.
0:08:58 At some point soon, sooner, actually, I’d like to be sooner.
0:09:01 I want Ed to start co-hosting with guest hosts
0:09:03 that aren’t me such that over time,
0:09:06 ProfG Markets is the brand, not Sky Callaway.
0:09:10 I’m focused on getting us to 20 or 30 million revenue
0:09:12 with 15 million in EBITDA.
0:09:14 I think I can do that in the next three to four years
0:09:16 and then build a series of voices
0:09:19 that I help foster, create good businesses
0:09:22 and slowly but surely reduce the dependence on my voice.
0:09:24 I always start a job thinking, all right,
0:09:26 I either need to have an exit for people
0:09:29 or build something where they could have 10, 20, 30 years
0:09:32 of real solid earnings and help build economic security.
0:09:36 And this isn’t an obvious company that you sell,
0:09:37 although to a certain extent every four years
0:09:39 you sell the cash flows and you can actually make
0:09:42 tens of millions of dollars now if you’re in a,
0:09:44 we have three top 100 podcasts right now,
0:09:45 which is exceptional.
0:09:46 We’re very good at what we do
0:09:48 and we’ve also been very fortunate.
0:09:49 So you can kind of every four years
0:09:52 when the midst of this now renegotiate a deal.
0:09:55 And the way I try and build economic security is I give
0:09:58 and also just selfishly to keep everyone engaged
0:10:01 and acting like an owner is I give everyone,
0:10:03 or not everyone, but the majority of the full-time employees
0:10:06 a percentage of our revenues.
0:10:08 And so the question is how do you maintain
0:10:11 those revenue flows after, you know,
0:10:14 I start going Biden, if you will.
0:10:16 And by the way, I do not run the business.
0:10:18 My partner Catherine Dillon has been running the business
0:10:19 for the last few years.
0:10:21 I have talented producers.
0:10:24 So the risk is that I’m kind of the front end of the talent
0:10:27 and we’re going to need to dilute and diversify
0:10:30 away from that over the next three, five, 10 years.
0:10:33 And we have a plan for that, but it’s a correct question.
0:10:34 Thank you for asking.
0:10:37 A board strategy, a good fiduciary,
0:10:39 focuses on succession strategy.
0:10:42 And that is German companies demand that the CEO
0:10:43 take at least four weeks off every year.
0:10:45 And if the company goes to shit when they’re gone,
0:10:47 they fire the CEO ’cause they need an enterprise.
0:10:49 They don’t need to practice.
0:10:50 Thanks for the question.
0:10:52 We have one quick break before our final question.
0:10:53 Stay with us.
0:11:00 Fox Creative.
0:11:03 This is advertiser content from Miro,
0:11:05 the innovation workspace.
0:11:09 Last year, our team launched a star mapping app
0:11:11 that got good reviews,
0:11:14 but we wanted to take it to the next level.
0:11:16 So I got us working on Miro,
0:11:19 where we could go from idea to outcome in one place,
0:11:21 starting with a brainstorm.
0:11:23 What if we added a feature
0:11:26 that lets users name their own constellations?
0:11:28 Yes, great idea.
0:11:30 I’ll make a brainstorm board.
0:11:32 We can add stickies with user feedback.
0:11:35 Miro’s canvas is infinite and intelligent.
0:11:38 So my team could brainstorm as expansively as we wanted
0:11:40 while keeping everything in one place.
0:11:42 What about an astrology feature?
0:11:43 Oh, I love it.
0:11:45 Add it to the board.
0:11:47 Miro AI took all our unstructured ideas
0:11:50 and user feedback and synthesized them
0:11:52 into a product brief in seconds.
0:11:55 With the brief solidified, the team took the next step.
0:11:58 Okay, so I created a new board for the Dataflow diagram.
0:12:00 Can we update the query to pull in data
0:12:01 from the Southern Hemisphere?
0:12:04 Yes, I’ll get a developer on it.
0:12:06 And with Miro’s seamless third-party integrations,
0:12:08 like our two-way sync with Jira,
0:12:11 we added a con button board directly to the workspace,
0:12:14 keeping all of our work in a single organized space.
0:12:17 Wow, that was fast.
0:12:20 The stars have a line, let’s ship it.
0:12:22 From idea to outcome,
0:12:23 Miro’s innovation workspace
0:12:25 is your team’s one collaborative space
0:12:27 for seamless, productive work.
0:12:30 Innovation belongs on the canvas.
0:12:32 Innovation belongs on Miro.
0:12:34 Go to Miro.com to find out how.
0:12:37 That’s M-I-R-O.com.
0:12:43 Support for ProfG comes from LinkedIn.
0:12:46 It’s 2025, and if your B2B marketing strategy
0:12:49 for the new year doesn’t include improve your ad targeting,
0:12:51 then your ads can just get lost in the noise.
0:12:53 LinkedIn ads can help by ensuring your message
0:12:54 makes it to the right audience.
0:12:55 With LinkedIn ads,
0:12:57 you can precisely reach the professionals
0:12:59 who are more likely to find your ads relevant.
0:13:00 With LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities,
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0:13:36 Go to linkedin.com/scott to claim your credit.
0:13:40 That’s linkedin.com/scott, terms and conditions apply.
0:13:42 LinkedIn, the place to be to be.
0:13:47 – It’s a new year.
0:13:49 Maybe you’re taking a month off from drinking,
0:13:50 you know, dry January,
0:13:53 and maybe you’re placing it with something else.
0:13:55 – Puff puff pass.
0:13:58 – Some like one in five people who do dry January
0:14:01 say they’re smoking weed instead,
0:14:03 and more Americans are now smoking weed daily
0:14:05 than drinking daily.
0:14:07 Current president is into it.
0:14:09 – No one should be in jail merely for using
0:14:11 or possessing marijuana, period.
0:14:13 – Future president is into it.
0:14:16 – I’ve had friends and I’ve had others and doctors
0:14:19 telling me that it’s been absolutely amazing,
0:14:21 the medical marijuana.
0:14:24 – Failed president and former prosecutor was down to clown?
0:14:27 – People shouldn’t have to go to jail for smoking weed.
0:14:29 – Even health conscious brain worm guy likes it.
0:14:32 – My position on marijuana is that
0:14:35 it should be federally legalized.
0:14:36 – Everyone’s getting down with pot,
0:14:39 but legislatively we’re still stuck with a hot mess
0:14:41 in the United States.
0:14:43 Today explained.
0:14:45 Wherever you listen, come find us.
0:14:50 – Welcome back, question number three.
0:14:52 – Hey, Prof. G, my name’s Jack.
0:14:53 I’m attending Georgia Tech right now
0:14:56 pursuing my undergraduate in industrial engineering,
0:14:57 and I’m 19 years old,
0:15:00 which makes me an infant in your eyes, I know.
0:15:02 I recently landed a big wig consulting internship
0:15:05 at a tier two firm, which I’m pretty stoked about.
0:15:08 But as someone who has no experience at a corporate job,
0:15:09 I wanna make the most of my time there.
0:15:11 What can a lowly intern like me do
0:15:13 to increase my chances at a return offer?
0:15:16 Thank you, Prof, for your insights and dick jokes
0:15:18 and for making the professional world more navigable
0:15:19 for a young man like me.
0:15:22 And a big thank you to my dad, who put me onto your pod
0:15:23 and who makes me a smarter, stronger,
0:15:25 and funnier young adult every day.
0:15:27 Love you, dad.
0:15:29 – Jesus, I’m like still there.
0:15:34 If my son at 19 was a Georgia Tech in this thoughtful
0:15:37 and then took the time to like say something nice
0:15:41 about me on a podcast, you’re a wonderful young man.
0:15:43 So well done to your dad and your mom.
0:15:47 As it relates to your actual question,
0:15:49 okay, the easy stuff, listen more than you speak.
0:15:52 You know, offer ideas when people ask you,
0:15:53 but when you’re in meetings,
0:15:55 just try and do a really good job of listening,
0:15:58 taking notes, show up 10 minutes before everyone else,
0:16:00 stay at least 10 minutes after everyone.
0:16:02 Face time, it sounds stupid,
0:16:03 but you wanna show that you’re there to play,
0:16:05 that you came to play.
0:16:07 Come up with ideas every week,
0:16:09 trying to at least have one or two ideas
0:16:11 and say to someone, can I help you do this?
0:16:13 Or I was thinking of putting together
0:16:15 a list of potential clients or outreach,
0:16:18 or I was thinking about putting together show initiative.
0:16:20 And they might say, no, that’s a bad idea, don’t do that.
0:16:22 But see if you can’t come up with some ideas
0:16:24 that aren’t a part of your job description
0:16:27 and then ask people, would it help if you did something?
0:16:30 If you can save, if you can spend four, six, eight hours
0:16:31 making someone senior to you,
0:16:33 save them at 30 or 60 minutes,
0:16:34 they’re gonna want you back.
0:16:35 People are selfish.
0:16:38 This kid gave me an extra hour every week, right?
0:16:40 Hire him.
0:16:42 So you’re gonna get the easy stuff right.
0:16:43 You’re gonna listen a lot.
0:16:45 You’re gonna be very personal, very nice,
0:16:46 very supportive of other people.
0:16:48 Whenever you work on anything,
0:16:50 immediately thank other people for their help.
0:16:52 You’re going to show up early.
0:16:53 You’re gonna stay late.
0:16:55 And you’re gonna try and find little projects
0:16:56 that might help other people.
0:16:57 And it’s gonna be your idea
0:16:58 and you’re gonna pitch them to people.
0:17:01 What if I put together a data.
0:17:04 Now I’m in technology, I understand sites.
0:17:06 It would make sense for me to look at the technology
0:17:07 that our site is built on.
0:17:12 Can I do a project on how AI is impacting our business
0:17:13 and come back to you in a couple of weeks
0:17:14 or the presentation?
0:17:18 You wanna be the guy that was to get off your heels
0:17:19 and onto your toes, right?
0:17:22 You wanna walk into offices or send people an email saying,
0:17:23 would you be willing to have coffee with me?
0:17:25 Would you be willing to have lunch with me, right?
0:17:26 So you’re gonna network.
0:17:27 You’re gonna show up early.
0:17:28 You’re gonna stay late.
0:17:28 You’re gonna come up with new ideas.
0:17:31 You’re gonna focus on attention and detail around your work.
0:17:34 The work doesn’t have to be breakthrough or even right,
0:17:35 but it has to be professional.
0:17:37 No typos, right?
0:17:38 Attention to detail.
0:17:40 And just keep doing what you’re doing.
0:17:42 You’re obviously a very successful young man
0:17:44 and the fact that you understand the importance
0:17:47 of relationships is like you’re just so far ahead of the game.
0:17:50 So I’m like, Jesus Christ.
0:17:52 It’s like, will you coach me?
0:17:56 You have your shit sewed together at 19
0:17:58 that it’s encouraging and inspiring.
0:18:02 But again, congratulations on your success today.
0:18:03 That’s all for this episode.
0:18:04 If you’d like to submit a question,
0:18:05 please email a voice recording
0:18:07 to officehours@propertymedia.com.
0:18:10 Again, that’s officehours@propertymedia.com.
0:18:13 (upbeat music)
0:18:22 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez
0:18:24 and Caroline Shagarin.
0:18:25 Drew Burroughs is our technical director.
0:18:27 Thank you for listening to the PropG Pod
0:18:28 from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:18:29 We will catch you on Saturday
0:18:32 for No Mercy, No Malice as read by George Hahn.
0:18:35 And please follow our PropG Markets Pod
0:18:37 wherever you get your pods for new episodes
0:18:39 every Monday and Thursday.

0:00:01 – Nice.
0:00:03 – Support for the show comes from Nerd Wallet.
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0:00:35 – It’s winter and you can get anything you need
0:00:36 delivered with Uber Eats.
0:00:38 Well, almost, almost anything.
0:00:41 So no, you can’t get snowballs on Uber Eats,
0:00:44 but meatballs, mozzarella balls, and air and Chini balls?
0:00:46 Yes, we deliver those.
0:00:49 Moose? No, but Moose Head? Yes.
0:00:51 Because that’s alcohol and we deliver that too.
0:00:53 Along with your favorite restaurant food, groceries,
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0:00:59 For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age.
0:01:00 Please enjoy responsibly.
0:01:01 Product availability varies by region.
0:01:03 See app for details.
0:01:08 – Welcome to Raging Moderates, I’m Scott Galloway.
0:01:09 – And I’m Jessica Tarliff.
0:01:10 – Jess, we are together.
0:01:11 – We are together.
0:01:12 – We are in the same office.
0:01:13 – You came home to America.
0:01:15 – Yeah, I came back and you dragged my ass
0:01:17 downtown to Broad Street.
0:01:19 – And you’re being so pleasant about it.
0:01:20 – I’m so angry that first off,
0:01:23 they didn’t know who we were downstairs.
0:01:26 And this is a ghost town.
0:01:28 I don’t, it makes me want to try and figure out a way
0:01:30 to short commercial real estate.
0:01:31 I can’t believe you do this.
0:01:32 You like coming in, right?
0:01:34 – Went on that, yeah.
0:01:36 I was just like, oh, young people should want to be
0:01:37 in an office ’cause it’s nice to meet people.
0:01:40 – You’re just looking to escape your kids.
0:01:43 – Oh, I ran, yeah, yeah.
0:01:44 No, I ran right out of there.
0:01:45 – So the holidays, catch us up.
0:01:47 What’d you do over the holidays?
0:01:48 – I was around for most of it.
0:01:52 I worked on a ghost town week, which I always like
0:01:54 ’cause everyone who’s there is like in a good mood.
0:01:57 They’re getting overtime, which everyone likes.
0:01:59 Not on air talent, but the amazing hair and makeup people
0:02:01 and the tech people.
0:02:02 So I did that.
0:02:05 We were in New Jersey for Christmas Eve and Christmas.
0:02:07 Apparently, it was two separate holidays.
0:02:10 And we went to Long Island for a few days
0:02:12 and then we had a staycation.
0:02:13 – Oh yeah, that’s what you said.
0:02:14 – Which was the best.
0:02:17 I still like my husband, who knew.
0:02:19 I like my apartment, it’ll go.
0:02:20 – He’s a dude, we’ll fix that.
0:02:21 – Okay.
0:02:23 And tell us about Safari.
0:02:25 – I was fine.
0:02:26 I was in South Africa.
0:02:30 My sister is at a, our kids are at a wonderful age.
0:02:33 They’re both 14 and 17 and so are her kids.
0:02:35 And so it’s fun to get them to hang out.
0:02:36 South Africa is amazing.
0:02:38 Safari is really wonderful.
0:02:42 Yeah, I mean, super nice.
0:02:43 I think I’m really into this idea
0:02:44 of lifestyle arbitrages.
0:02:46 If I was 20 years younger,
0:02:48 there’s a lot I would do if I were 20 years younger,
0:02:52 but I think if you could make like a U.S. salary
0:02:53 and did remote work,
0:02:54 I think Cape Town would be a pretty interesting place
0:02:55 to hang out.
0:02:57 It’s so inexpensive.
0:02:58 I’m obsessed with prices and money
0:03:00 and that came out wrong,
0:03:01 but I find-
0:03:02 – That actually came out right.
0:03:03 – Came out right?
0:03:04 – Came out accurate.
0:03:05 – I’m gonna get out accurate.
0:03:06 I don’t know if you like that about yourself.
0:03:09 – But I’m fascinated with the cost of things.
0:03:11 And South Africa right now is like,
0:03:14 it’s sort of the old Navy of global cities
0:03:17 in the sense that it’s 80% of a world-class city
0:03:18 for 40% of the price.
0:03:21 Anyways, that was my big observation
0:03:23 around my great holiday with my family.
0:03:24 And what is in store?
0:03:26 Like if for just Harlow,
0:03:28 do you do New Year’s resolutions?
0:03:30 Do you have goals for 2025?
0:03:32 – Not set out like that actually.
0:03:33 Probably should have.
0:03:35 I just, I want to, you know,
0:03:37 I’m like so in it with young kids,
0:03:39 like three and nine months.
0:03:41 So I want them to have great years.
0:03:42 Yeah, in the soup.
0:03:46 I want to do, make sure that I do a couple big trips,
0:03:49 do good professionally, survive inauguration,
0:03:50 like all the things.
0:03:51 All the stuff.
0:03:52 – Yeah, what about you?
0:03:53 – I see all that happening.
0:03:56 I just want more of the same.
0:03:57 I’m really, I’m rounding third right now.
0:04:02 I’m enjoying my kids professionally, having a ton of fun.
0:04:04 Yeah, I’m just, if we’re up to me,
0:04:06 I want everything to stay the same.
0:04:09 I really don’t have any resolutions.
0:04:11 I want to be less angry, less depressed,
0:04:13 less unappreciative, less hard on myself,
0:04:15 less hard on others.
0:04:17 Other than that, everything’s good.
0:04:18 Everything’s good.
0:04:19 All right, let’s get, let’s get into it today.
0:04:21 Speaking of being angry at others,
0:04:24 today is the fourth anniversary of January 6th.
0:04:27 We’re recording this on, you guys said the six.
0:04:28 Mike Johnson’s encore speaker,
0:04:31 Jimmy Carter’s enduring legacy
0:04:33 and the Democrat strategy moving forward.
0:04:34 Let’s bust right into it.
0:04:37 It’s been four years since the January 6th Capitol attack
0:04:40 in the shadow it cast on American democracy
0:04:42 still looms pretty large.
0:04:44 Over 1500 people have been charged with sentences
0:04:47 ranging from a few days to 22 years.
0:04:51 Now on this anniversary, Vice President Kamala Harris
0:04:53 has certified President-elect Donald Trump’s win,
0:04:57 a bitterly ironic twist on a day already steeped in history.
0:04:59 Harris is called January 6th, 2021,
0:05:02 a moment of lawlessness, violence and chaos.
0:05:06 The test of the nation’s democratic foundations.
0:05:07 You know, one side of the nation
0:05:09 or 47% of the electorate or whatever it is
0:05:12 is going to try and just not talk about it.
0:05:14 I can’t imagine it’s going to come up a lot
0:05:16 on conservative radio today.
0:05:18 And Democrats are going to try and pound the shit out of it
0:05:21 and remind everybody what happened four years ago.
0:05:22 Do you have any sort of,
0:05:25 what are your observations kind of four years in?
0:05:26 – How little it matters.
0:05:30 Not even just amongst conservatives who,
0:05:33 and I would say as an addendum to your point
0:05:35 about conservative media and what they’ll do,
0:05:36 they will talk about it,
0:05:38 but they will talk about this transformed narrative
0:05:40 that it was a day of love.
0:05:42 And who, where will the partons be coming?
0:05:44 And you know, because Trump has said
0:05:47 that that’s going to be a day one activity for him
0:05:49 and really, you know, rewriting the script
0:05:52 of what January 6th looked like.
0:05:55 President Biden had an op-ed out about January 6th today
0:05:56 in the Washington Post.
0:05:59 You know, one of those, let’s never forget, right?
0:06:01 What actually happened on that day.
0:06:03 And for the people who still remember,
0:06:06 and a majority of Americans do think
0:06:07 that it was an attack on our democracy.
0:06:09 A majority of Americans think that Donald Trump
0:06:12 is personally culpable for what happened.
0:06:14 But the real take home message is,
0:06:16 no one gives a fuck, right?
0:06:18 Not enough, not enough people.
0:06:20 Not enough people for sure.
0:06:23 The Liz Cheney’s of the world and the bulwark guys
0:06:25 and those people, they’re out there.
0:06:29 But when you look at the hierarchy of issues concerning,
0:06:31 you know, a person in their day to day life,
0:06:33 it ranks pretty low on it.
0:06:36 And I think part of that might be that
0:06:39 we live in this rarefied world where we can afford
0:06:42 to sit there and pontificate about sort of threats
0:06:44 to democracy when the real threat to democracy is
0:06:46 that your grocery bill is too high, right?
0:06:50 Like that matters a hell of a lot more to you.
0:06:52 But then I think there’s also just been this
0:06:54 dearth of good messaging almost,
0:06:56 or keeping it in the national consciousness
0:06:58 in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re bludgeoning people
0:07:00 over the head with it all the time.
0:07:02 But that it’s always in the rear view mirror
0:07:04 that there’s one party that respects democracy
0:07:07 and there’s one party that doesn’t.
0:07:09 And your grocery bill, your gas prices,
0:07:12 whether you can afford to have a new home,
0:07:13 all of that actually doesn’t matter
0:07:15 if you have people in power
0:07:16 who think your vote doesn’t count.
0:07:19 And to me, that’s what January 6th was.
0:07:22 It was an attack on law enforcement, of course.
0:07:23 We’re gonna talk about that,
0:07:26 but it was a bunch of people saying,
0:07:29 it’s not one person, one vote here.
0:07:31 You know, it’s my way or the highway.
0:07:33 And I’m gonna invalidate, you know,
0:07:35 the will of millions of you.
0:07:38 – Yeah, I think we lost a lot of moral standing
0:07:41 or currency around the world with our,
0:07:43 what I thought was sort of an errand
0:07:44 or a mistaken invasion of Iraq.
0:07:47 I think that was probably the geopolitically,
0:07:51 maybe the worst if not the second worst decision
0:07:54 by US government that costs us currency around the world
0:07:56 and also turned Iran into a superpower.
0:07:58 I mean, it just couldn’t have been more stupid.
0:08:02 But I wonder in terms of our currency around the world
0:08:05 and our moral authority, seeing the capital attacked
0:08:07 and then having the guy who put up a golf tent
0:08:11 to watch the attack be reelected.
0:08:12 I just feel like we’ve lost all right
0:08:15 to kind of preach to anybody about democracy.
0:08:15 I remember thinking,
0:08:19 I loved it when Prugosian turned his army eastward
0:08:21 and started marching towards Moscow.
0:08:23 And I thought, oh my God, so embarrassing for Russia.
0:08:25 And I had to remind myself actually,
0:08:28 this Duck Dynasty mob getting out of their RAV4s
0:08:30 and their Oakley glasses and their,
0:08:32 you know, I’m being very disparaging
0:08:34 in identity politics here.
0:08:36 They actually raided the capital.
0:08:37 – Yeah, so.
0:08:40 – And the guy who kind of was aiding them on
0:08:44 and it was sort of their spiritual leader around this
0:08:45 was reelected president.
0:08:50 It just, of all the things you could add up,
0:08:52 you know, and there’s a lot here,
0:08:57 the kleptocracy, the conviction around,
0:09:02 you know, sexual abuse, the nuclear secrets
0:09:06 or the secrets being hidden in a golf cart storage facility.
0:09:08 I think this kind of bests them all.
0:09:10 And this is not an easy contest.
0:09:12 And that is, if you don’t believe
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0:09:23 This can, Brazil has a much stronger democracy than us.
0:09:26 Their guy tried it and immediately got kind of flung out
0:09:30 and they restored their democracy pretty quickly.
0:09:32 And we didn’t do that.
0:09:35 We reelected the guy who sponsored it.
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0:12:58 (upbeat music)
0:13:01 – All right, moving on.
0:13:03 Last week with two votes separating Mike Johnson
0:13:06 from the Speaker’s gavel, President-elect Trump stepped in
0:13:08 calling GOP holdouts Ralph Norman
0:13:10 and Keith Self to rally support.
0:13:12 Their shift secured Johnson’s narrow victory
0:13:14 highlighting Trump’s grip on the party
0:13:15 and the challenge of uniting Republicans
0:13:17 in a divided Congress.
0:13:18 Trump’s endorsement was pivotal,
0:13:20 with Johnson calling it a big factor
0:13:22 and Rep. Andy Biggs admitting the outcome
0:13:24 would have been different without it.
0:13:26 Trump’s hands-on approach to contrast
0:13:29 to past leadership battles showcases influence
0:13:31 and the stakes of keeping the GOP aligned
0:13:32 to deliver his agenda.
0:13:34 Jess, how does this mark a shift
0:13:38 in Trump’s approach to party leadership or does it?
0:13:39 – I’m not sure it’s a difference
0:13:41 in his approach to party leadership.
0:13:43 It might be a difference in how his approach
0:13:46 to party leadership is going to be received
0:13:47 for the next few years.
0:13:50 And I think that there are two factors
0:13:51 in this that really mattered.
0:13:54 One, the impact of having the President of the United States
0:13:57 or President-elect get on the phone and tell you,
0:13:58 like, this is what’s best for us.
0:14:02 You’ve got to do this if you want to have any progress.
0:14:05 And then the second piece is that this speaker battle,
0:14:07 you know, was happening a few days
0:14:10 before the election needs to be certified.
0:14:11 And there’s no reason to think,
0:14:13 I mean, House Speaker Mike Johnson didn’t play a role
0:14:17 in the certification, but having the House in chaos
0:14:20 going into January 6th, 2025,
0:14:23 I think was something that was present in people’s minds
0:14:26 where they thought we need to get through Monday.
0:14:29 And it was only a couple of people
0:14:31 and there were, you know, from the Freedom Caucus people,
0:14:34 like Chip Roy, et cetera, they have a whole list of demands
0:14:36 that they were able to put out there.
0:14:39 But I think that the Republicans have resigned themselves to
0:14:41 for the ones who are not huge Trump fans.
0:14:43 Like this is Trump’s party at this moment.
0:14:48 And that we’re going to be able to be more effective
0:14:51 with the slimmest majority since 1917,
0:14:55 once these vacancies take place, if we just get on board.
0:14:59 And that’s what I think happened on Friday.
0:15:03 – It strikes me that if you a position yourself,
0:15:06 when I think of Senator Sinema and Manchin,
0:15:08 they like to position themselves as moderates,
0:15:10 but I just think that we’re raging narcissists
0:15:11 and love the position of being swing votes
0:15:14 and having the cameras and the president
0:15:16 or whoever calling them and begging for them
0:15:18 to see their way clear and then they could fall back
0:15:20 and say, oh no, we’re just moderates
0:15:22 and we have real concerns around these issues.
0:15:23 It strikes me, you’re going to see,
0:15:25 given the way elections work right now
0:15:27 and how important it is just to get attention,
0:15:30 regardless of if it’s good or bad attention.
0:15:32 I’m just be shocked if you’re not going to see
0:15:35 some of that Manchin Sinema hold out
0:15:38 from a lot of Republican Congress people
0:15:40 who are going to be like, look,
0:15:42 I’m really popular in my district.
0:15:43 And I like the attention.
0:15:44 I like the idea of having all this power
0:15:47 by basically wringing my hands and saying, well, I’m not sure.
0:15:50 I have some concerns, that’s their favorite word.
0:15:53 I wonder if they’re going to feel some of that frustration
0:15:55 we used to feel where we couldn’t.
0:15:58 And, you know, though with your heart and consciousness,
0:16:00 it’s important that people, you know,
0:16:03 occasionally I like it when people break from a party line,
0:16:05 but my sense is Manchin and Sinema got addicted
0:16:07 to the attention of it.
0:16:09 It’s almost, it really is kind of a split Congress
0:16:10 at this point.
0:16:13 It’s hard to even say it’s a Republican Congress, right?
0:16:16 – Thank you for coming around to my thinking about this.
0:16:18 It was not a landslide.
0:16:20 No, no, it’s not my idea that.
0:16:22 – I said the presidency was a landslide, not Congress.
0:16:25 – The narrative on their side is we have this massive mandate.
0:16:26 If you had a massive mandate,
0:16:29 you’d have a lot of people to be able to vote for your side.
0:16:31 And right now you don’t have that.
0:16:32 Now we lost.
0:16:35 They have a trifecta that is a better position
0:16:36 to be in and all of this.
0:16:38 But when you look at the margins
0:16:40 and you think about someone like a Thomas Massey
0:16:43 who didn’t vote for Speaker Johnson,
0:16:46 he said that they could pull his fingernails out
0:16:49 and he still wouldn’t vote for Speaker Johnson.
0:16:52 Look at like at a Chip Roy, for instance.
0:16:55 I mean, these people are going to be serious
0:16:56 about the things that matter to them.
0:16:59 And a lot of that is the deficit.
0:17:02 And they’re like, we’re not here to rubber stamp spending
0:17:04 the same way as if President Biden was in office
0:17:07 and Chuck Schumer was the majority leader.
0:17:10 And that is going to be a big problem, I think,
0:17:12 especially as we go through reconciliation.
0:17:14 Now, Mike Johnson wants one bill.
0:17:17 Trump said this morning, if it’s one or two bills,
0:17:19 I don’t really care ’cause Senator Thune told him
0:17:22 getting it to run one bill is probably not going to happen.
0:17:26 But I mean, they’re trying to do everything at once
0:17:28 in four months.
0:17:29 – My understanding is that’s near impossible,
0:17:30 logistically, so right?
0:17:32 – Well, especially if you look at these margins
0:17:34 and then it’ll be up to Hakeem Jeffries
0:17:35 to decide what he wants to do.
0:17:38 ‘Cause he’s in complete control of the Democratic caucus.
0:17:41 No one goes out on their own, basically.
0:17:43 Rebel forces are more likely inclined
0:17:45 to follow their leader, right?
0:17:48 When they’re kind of on their heels, if you will.
0:17:50 I think the deficit is a super interesting one
0:17:53 because deficits seem to be always at really high up
0:17:57 in terms of concerns of the party not in control, right?
0:17:59 And it is a huge issue.
0:18:01 I’ve both said that, or not always, but I do believe
0:18:03 that the largest tax increase in history
0:18:05 is that from George Washington to George Bush,
0:18:09 7 trillion in deficits, the Trump administration
0:18:12 was the first one, 8 trillion, and Biden wasn’t much better.
0:18:14 And all that is is pulling prosperity forward
0:18:16 from younger people, such that my generation
0:18:17 can stay wealthy, right?
0:18:19 At some point, someone’s gonna have to pay this thing.
0:18:21 And now the debt, or the interest on the debt
0:18:23 is now greater than our military expenditures.
0:18:25 What’s interesting is in the administration,
0:18:28 the unelected leader here, who I would argue
0:18:31 is the secretary of adult behavior
0:18:33 in the cabinet is the bond market.
0:18:35 And that is, if they come out with something
0:18:38 that’s gonna really continue to increase the deficit,
0:18:41 I think you’re gonna see the 10-year spike.
0:18:43 And I think for the first time, there’s gonna be rumors
0:18:45 that the Chinese or other investors might not show up
0:18:47 for the next Treasury auction,
0:18:49 which would take interest rates way up.
0:18:52 You see that happen, or you see inflation spike again.
0:18:55 You don’t need Congress, or you don’t need deficit hawks.
0:18:57 They’re gonna go, okay, if all of a sudden,
0:19:00 inflation’s back, we’re all getting swept out of office.
0:19:01 And people are gonna find a backbone again.
0:19:04 And I love the idea of the most powerful
0:19:07 unelected person right now is the bond market.
0:19:09 I like it too, we should put him in a costume.
0:19:11 I made it a hit, I gendered him.
0:19:13 And maybe it’s a woman, the bond market.
0:19:15 But I think that that’s a great way to look at it.
0:19:17 And I actually wanted to ask you about this
0:19:20 because it loops into the conversation
0:19:22 we were just having about messaging,
0:19:24 about threats to democracy, et cetera.
0:19:27 How can we effectively message the deficit?
0:19:30 Because when I talk to my friends about it,
0:19:34 or my mom, my mom’s gentleman suitor,
0:19:37 he says, well, okay, let’s talk about the deficit.
0:19:38 You know what the deficit is?
0:19:40 It’s the mortgage rate
0:19:42 that you can’t afford to pay right now, right?
0:19:44 That’s how it’s manifesting in your life
0:19:45 that it’s keeping young people
0:19:48 off the property ladder, for instance.
0:19:51 And I feel like we have done none of that,
0:19:54 talking about the links between those two things.
0:19:56 It feels like this amorphous thing that you just can,
0:19:59 that you are constantly kicking down the proverbial road.
0:20:02 And I wanna hear it in terms of interest rates,
0:20:06 mortgage rates, you know, cost of living expenses.
0:20:07 I mean, we have this number
0:20:11 that Trump’s plan will cost us $4.6 trillion, right?
0:20:12 That’s what I’ll add to the deficit.
0:20:15 Put that in real terms for somebody
0:20:18 who took a flyer on this chaos agent
0:20:19 heading into the selection, right?
0:20:24 Like the 32 year old that has a $150,000 job
0:20:26 doesn’t feel to ever be able to buy a house
0:20:28 is struggling to find a mate.
0:20:30 Like make the deficit real for that person.
0:20:33 – I think it’s a great messaging standpoint.
0:20:36 So last time we had a surplus, you know,
0:20:38 Democratic administration,
0:20:41 record low interest rates during the Biden administration.
0:20:44 And I mean, if you think about the power of the bond market,
0:20:47 essentially the shortest tenure of any elected leader,
0:20:50 I think in history of a G7 nation was trust
0:20:52 in the prime minister and basically the bond market.
0:20:53 – Was it 10 days as a lattice or something?
0:20:54 – Well, there was a lattice test,
0:20:57 which will last longer her prime ministership
0:21:00 or this head of lattice and the head of lattice,
0:21:02 I think one or she won by three days.
0:21:04 But basically the bond market showed up,
0:21:05 she put out a budget and said,
0:21:06 we’re gonna lower taxes,
0:21:08 we’re gonna go Reagan Thatcher here,
0:21:11 more Reagan and no plan to increase revenues
0:21:13 and it’s gonna take our deficit up.
0:21:14 And the world market said,
0:21:16 you don’t have the default currency
0:21:18 to keep printing money of people
0:21:20 if you can’t afford the interest rates here
0:21:23 and the market, the pound crashed, the interest rate.
0:21:25 I mean, the bond market showed up and said,
0:21:28 sorry girlfriend and she was out.
0:21:30 And I wonder if there’s gonna be a moment here
0:21:35 where if inflation, I think the seminal moment in 2025
0:21:37 for the Trump administration is gonna be
0:21:40 when inflation spikes.
0:21:42 And all of a sudden it says, oh no, I’m still here.
0:21:44 You thought you killed me?
0:21:46 I’m Jason, I’m in a hockey mask.
0:21:48 And just when you thought it was over, I’m back.
0:21:49 Just to scare the shit out of Jamie Lee Curtis’s
0:21:51 great, great, great granddaughter.
0:21:53 That was probably agist.
0:21:55 By the way, I went to the hottest woman,
0:21:57 I’d take some back to the 80s, wow.
0:21:59 I mean, what was that show, was it perfect?
0:22:01 What was the one with John Travolta
0:22:03 where she was the aerobics instructor?
0:22:04 And it was fantastic filmmaking.
0:22:09 – I think about, is it the sexy pole dance in True Lies?
0:22:12 – Yeah, that was a great film.
0:22:14 That was probably her cinematic peak.
0:22:16 Actually trading places was pretty good.
0:22:21 Anyways, back to actual policy here, substance.
0:22:25 But strikes me that again, the Democrats
0:22:28 aren’t doing a good job of saying, oh, FYI,
0:22:29 this guy is already threatening
0:22:31 an irresponsible fiscal plan.
0:22:33 And the bond market is already responding.
0:22:34 And guess what, your credit card bills,
0:22:37 your mortgage payments, and your student loan payments
0:22:40 are about to be higher because the adults
0:22:42 have left that are about to leave the building
0:22:46 and the bond market is already really scared.
0:22:48 And to put it in, like you said,
0:22:49 to put it in layman’s term saying,
0:22:51 folks, your price is about to go up.
0:22:53 You may think you’re not paying more,
0:22:55 but you are because interest rates go up,
0:22:57 which is a tax on everyone because people see
0:22:59 that this guy’s irresponsible.
0:23:04 And this new analogy I love is that at negative 40,
0:23:07 Celsius and Fahrenheit converge.
0:23:09 You know, usually if you’re in Canada and you’re in Europe,
0:23:11 I’m constantly converting, all right?
0:23:13 It’s 28 Celsius, double it at 30.
0:23:16 At negative 40, they’re the same.
0:23:18 That is not a hospitable or good environment to be in.
0:23:19 That means something’s fucked up.
0:23:21 You don’t wanna be somewhere where Fahrenheit
0:23:22 and Celsius converge, right?
0:23:24 It’s not as national– – Or just negative 40.
0:23:25 – Negative 40 is bad.
0:23:28 Just general, you just wanna stay away from negative 40.
0:23:31 And I find that there’s an analogy or an apt analogy
0:23:34 around whenever the far right and the far left come together,
0:23:35 you’re in negative 40.
0:23:36 It’s a really bad idea.
0:23:41 Whether I think the far left or the far right, anti-vaxxers.
0:23:43 The far left and the far right, total anti-Semites.
0:23:46 The far left and the far right seem to come together
0:23:50 to agree on, all right, we want more social policies
0:23:53 and more spending, all right, we want on the far right,
0:23:54 lower taxes and more military spending.
0:23:56 I know, let’s get together and do both
0:23:58 and explode the deficit.
0:23:59 – Well, that’s a pretty big deal
0:24:01 that we could already potentially predict that
0:24:04 two weeks out from inauguration, right?
0:24:06 Usually someone has to get in
0:24:08 and for us to see the lay of the land.
0:24:10 But because A, we have this strange situation
0:24:12 that we’ve already seen him as president before.
0:24:15 So we understand some of his proclivities
0:24:18 and that he has essentially become de facto president
0:24:20 since he got elected. – 100%.
0:24:24 I mean, Maloney is down there, Mar-a-Lago Trudeau’s been,
0:24:27 though, resigning from the leadership of the party,
0:24:30 which I think is a fascinating turn for Canada.
0:24:33 But Trump has essentially gotten an extra couple of months
0:24:37 of being president and the market, no likey, right?
0:24:39 I mean, Jerome Powell who came out and said,
0:24:42 A, he can’t fire me, which I kind of loved,
0:24:45 but then said, prices are not going to get better, right?
0:24:49 Your rates, we’re not bringing the rates down.
0:24:50 And then you have the mortgage rates,
0:24:52 which is certainly, it’s a hot topic of conversation
0:24:54 amongst my cohort, right?
0:24:56 Like elder millennials that are thinking,
0:24:58 okay, this is our time to get on the property ladder.
0:25:01 We’ve been paying these nuts rents.
0:25:03 And so the mortgage rates don’t come down.
0:25:04 And then on top of it,
0:25:06 are we going to have a little trade war with Canada?
0:25:08 We’re not going to be able to get any lumber
0:25:10 to build houses, right?
0:25:11 We’re going to have a deportation force
0:25:14 that’s going to kick everyone out of the hospitality industry.
0:25:16 There’s going to be no one to build our homes,
0:25:18 serve our tables, take care of our dying parents.
0:25:23 And you’re thinking like, what was I voting for here?
0:25:25 And there’s, I’m skipping ahead to,
0:25:26 something we’re supposed to talk about later,
0:25:28 but there was this big piece in the Wall Street Journal
0:25:31 about the millennials living in arrested development
0:25:34 in their 30s and 40s with their parents.
0:25:38 And it feels like this confluence of every big problem
0:25:38 that we’ve been talking about
0:25:40 for the last kind of four to eight years
0:25:44 from student debt to sex and dating and relationships
0:25:47 to social media and loneliness to high prices
0:25:50 to unrealistic expectations to helicopter parenting,
0:25:52 which I feel has been completely missed over
0:25:55 as a key factor in why all of these people
0:25:58 in my generation are fucked up
0:26:00 and still living with their parents.
0:26:02 And it’s all coming together
0:26:06 at the beginning of the second Trump term
0:26:09 in a way that is not only concerning,
0:26:12 but offers, I guess, a window
0:26:15 into a very scary next 10 to 20 years
0:26:18 where people might not be pushing culture
0:26:22 or civilization forward in the way that we always have.
0:26:26 – Yeah, that’s dystopic, you know, that would be dystopic.
0:26:28 You’re learning to, I think I’m infecting you
0:26:30 with half glass, half empty items.
0:26:32 You said something, you said something
0:26:33 that really struck me. – I want out.
0:26:35 – There you go.
0:26:36 And I’ve been thinking about this a lot
0:26:37 and that is I’m pissed off.
0:26:39 And it falls back, I think, again,
0:26:42 at the feet of democratic or poor democratic leadership.
0:26:44 We’ve decided that Trump’s presidency
0:26:47 is gonna be not four years, but four years and three months.
0:26:51 He and First Lady Alania are controlling the news cycle.
0:26:54 Musk is having more influence over foreign policy right now
0:26:56 than Biden, it feels.
0:26:59 And I just, just a call out to all of my colleagues
0:27:03 and friends who were constantly sending me emails saying,
0:27:04 he, Biden is gonna be our nominee
0:27:07 and you need to understand the assignment and get on board.
0:27:10 The reason why an unelected man
0:27:12 and the world’s wealthiest man
0:27:14 are now controlling the narrative
0:27:16 is because we have a guy who should not be president
0:27:17 because of his age.
0:27:20 And they are afraid to put him in front of a camera
0:27:22 for the first time he’s doing his,
0:27:23 I forget what was sign off speech.
0:27:25 – Yeah, for the whole address.
0:27:26 – Without taking any questions from reporters.
0:27:30 They are clearly so scared of this guy
0:27:31 getting in front of people
0:27:33 to actually have to answer questions
0:27:36 and express that cognitive ability
0:27:38 that they’ve said, even with this little to lose,
0:27:41 even with, you gotta think even the folks from Fox
0:27:42 are gonna be pretty nice to them
0:27:44 if they ask questions during this thing.
0:27:46 They said, no, we can’t take that risk
0:27:49 ’cause this guy isn’t such serious decline.
0:27:51 We should move on ’cause we’ve gotten literally through
0:27:54 about 10% of our topics here.
0:27:57 So curious what you think about, we were talking,
0:27:58 we started this conversation with talking about
0:28:02 Speaker Johnson being, getting the gavel again.
0:28:04 I initially, when I had a litmus tester
0:28:06 saw some of Speaker Johnson’s background,
0:28:08 I thought, oh, this is David Duke-Light.
0:28:09 I use that term all the time.
0:28:11 – Oh yeah, you said that when we were on Bill Murray together.
0:28:12 – Yeah, and that was the wrong thing to say.
0:28:15 And I don’t know the man, he doesn’t care what I think,
0:28:16 but I think I got that wrong.
0:28:18 I actually think Speaker Johnson
0:28:20 has done a really good job.
0:28:22 And that is the speakership is supposed to be
0:28:24 an administrative position, not a political one.
0:28:27 I don’t agree with his politics, I’m never going to.
0:28:29 But I think he’s been a good administrator.
0:28:31 I think he has done his job.
0:28:34 He has tried, he has corralled people,
0:28:37 he’s gotten debt ceiling elevated.
0:28:40 I think he is doing what that role commands of him.
0:28:42 And I find him to be an adult
0:28:45 and taking his actual position really seriously.
0:28:50 I think he’s done as good a job as we could have expected
0:28:52 from what is arguably one of the worst,
0:28:55 is gotta be just almost an impossible position right now.
0:28:58 What are your thoughts on Speaker Johnson?
0:29:01 – I largely agree, not with the David Duke-Light part.
0:29:04 I think there are concerning things about him.
0:29:06 And when we had that conversation a bit over a year ago,
0:29:10 we didn’t know much about soon-to-be Speaker Johnson,
0:29:11 except that he was part of an architect
0:29:13 to overturn the election results.
0:29:14 And there was good reason to think that
0:29:18 he was more of a firebrand than an administrator.
0:29:20 And it turns out that he’s happy to kind of be
0:29:23 like a little elf right in the workshop.
0:29:25 And he’s just running around from office to office
0:29:27 saying, what do you need?
0:29:29 What do I need to do to get your vote?
0:29:32 And he doesn’t have rhetorical flourishes.
0:29:35 He, I mean, he’s fine on TV.
0:29:37 He’s on all the time, which I appreciate.
0:29:40 I think it’s good to hear from these people.
0:29:42 He doesn’t seem that afraid to talk to people
0:29:45 he disagrees with, which I think is a massive plus point,
0:29:46 but he doesn’t, you know,
0:29:48 he’s not going to bring down the house
0:29:51 like a Nancy Pelosi speech or Kim Jeffries
0:29:52 or even Kevin McCarthy.
0:29:57 I think had, you know, bigger moments of gravitas.
0:29:59 But he’s getting the job done and he is working,
0:30:01 like I said, it’s going to be the slimmest majority
0:30:03 since 1917.
0:30:04 What do you want from the man?
0:30:07 He shows up every day, he looks perfect.
0:30:08 He knows who he has to talk to.
0:30:12 He has created a good, seemingly working relationship
0:30:15 with President-elect Trump and Alania.
0:30:18 And he knows how to kind of take what he gets from them
0:30:22 and bring that back to an unruly caucus.
0:30:23 He’s also going to benefit from the fact
0:30:26 that Matt Gaetz is not around from all this.
0:30:28 He I think has a pretty decent relationship
0:30:31 with Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is now, you know,
0:30:35 nutcase number one, I feel like in the house
0:30:39 and Lauren Boebert, I guess, 1A for her.
0:30:41 But generally speaking, yeah, I think he’s probably
0:30:43 the right man for this moment.
0:30:47 But I don’t know how this bill comes into existence.
0:30:49 And I thought that we were trending
0:30:52 the first speaker fight from a couple of weeks ago.
0:30:54 I thought we were moving towards a world
0:30:57 where maybe we weren’t going to have single issue bills,
0:30:59 but we were going to have smaller bills, right?
0:31:01 Like at least by policy area.
0:31:03 So you say, here’s the immigration bill, right?
0:31:04 Here’s the energy bill.
0:31:09 Here’s what we’re going to do on climate taxation, et cetera.
0:31:10 – Or not.
0:31:11 – Right.
0:31:14 And this just feels like it’s going to be more of the same.
0:31:18 And it’s going to obviously affect those less well off
0:31:20 the most, which is what happens, right?
0:31:22 The cuts are going to come from people
0:31:24 who rely on entitlement programs,
0:31:26 the people who, you know,
0:31:29 operate at the lowest economic levels of our society.
0:31:31 And the people who frankly needed
0:31:34 whatever Trump was selling the most in all of this, right?
0:31:37 The people who the great Biden economy
0:31:38 was not working so well for the people
0:31:42 whose credit card debt is soaring through the roof.
0:31:44 I mean, the numbers on that are staggering
0:31:46 from a historical perspective.
0:31:48 And they’re going to get totally shafted,
0:31:51 which this crazy reconciliation bill,
0:31:53 it’s going to cost us trillions
0:31:56 and change nothing about the way Washington does business.
0:31:59 – Okay, let’s take a quick break.
0:32:00 Stay with us.
0:32:03 (upbeat music)
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0:34:12 – It’s a new year.
0:34:14 Maybe you’re taking a month off from drinking,
0:34:16 you know, dry January,
0:34:18 and maybe you’re placing it with something else.
0:34:20 – Puff puff pass.
0:34:23 – Some like one in five people who do dry January
0:34:26 say they’re smoking weed instead.
0:34:28 And more Americans are now smoking weed daily
0:34:30 than drinking daily.
0:34:32 Current president is into it.
0:34:33 – No one should be in jail merely
0:34:35 for using or possessing marijuana.
0:34:36 Period.
0:34:38 – Future president is into it.
0:34:41 – I’ve had friends and I’ve had others and doctors
0:34:44 telling me that it’s been absolutely amazing,
0:34:46 the medical marijuana.
0:34:49 – Failed president and former prosecutor was down to clown.
0:34:52 – People shouldn’t have to go to jail for smoking weed.
0:34:55 – Even health conscious brain worm guy likes it.
0:34:57 – My position on marijuana is that
0:35:00 it should be federally legalized.
0:35:01 – Everyone’s getting down with pot,
0:35:05 but legislatively we’re still stuck with a hot mess
0:35:06 in the United States.
0:35:08 Today explained.
0:35:10 Wherever you listen, come find us.
0:35:15 – Welcome back.
0:35:17 Former president Jimmy Carter, the 39th president
0:35:19 and a trailblazer in humanitarian efforts
0:35:23 passed away at the age of 100 in his hometown
0:35:25 of Plains, Georgia surrounded by family,
0:35:28 a peanut farmer turned president.
0:35:30 Carter single term from 1977 to 81,
0:35:32 faced economic and foreign policy challenges,
0:35:35 but his post presidency legacy as a Nobel prize winning
0:35:38 advocate for human rights and global peace reshaped
0:35:40 how we view former presidents.
0:35:43 President Biden called Carter a model of what it means
0:35:45 to live a life of meaning and purpose.
0:35:46 It’s nice.
0:35:49 Let’s read that again, a model of what it means
0:35:51 to live a life of meaning and purpose
0:35:54 and declare January 9 a national holiday of mourning.
0:35:56 President-elect Donald Trump was often been critical
0:35:58 of Carter acknowledged the former president’s
0:36:01 contribution saying we all owe him a debt of gratitude.
0:36:04 Carter State funeral will be held on January 9
0:36:06 in Washington DC, followed by a private internment
0:36:07 in Plains.
0:36:10 Jess, what are any thoughts on Carter’s legacy
0:36:13 and how he’ll be remembered in light of the contrast
0:36:17 between his presidency and his post presidential work?
0:36:19 – I’m concerned that it’s just always gonna
0:36:21 kind of be shitty for Carter,
0:36:26 because his presidency is so present in people’s minds,
0:36:30 especially having gone through this high inflationary period
0:36:32 that people just think of the Iranian hostage crisis
0:36:34 and they think of the prices.
0:36:36 And they just say Jimmy Carter was all bad.
0:36:40 And something that I’ve been reading up more on
0:36:42 since he passed away or towards the end of his life
0:36:44 since these obits have been hanging in the air.
0:36:46 And there was this great, well, not great
0:36:48 because the obituary writer ended up passing away,
0:36:51 but Jimmy Carter outlived one of his obit writers
0:36:52 by like over a decade.
0:36:57 But looking at his foreign policy record hostage crisis
0:37:02 aside, it’s incredible to look at all the groundwork
0:37:06 that was laid during those years when it comes to China,
0:37:09 when it comes to our anti-Soviet positions.
0:37:13 You know, Reagan obviously getting credit for ending Cold War,
0:37:17 but like, you know, Carter being the first one
0:37:19 to actually be speaking out about the Soviets
0:37:21 and to talk about democracy and human rights
0:37:24 in those contexts, the Camp David Accords,
0:37:28 you know, peace treaties with Israel and Egypt.
0:37:31 You know, he has a reputation or had a reputation
0:37:34 for being for strong Israel supporters
0:37:38 as perhaps two pro-Palestinian, but looking back at
0:37:42 pushing through and went through unanimously
0:37:44 the vote to establish the Holocaust Memorial Council
0:37:46 and built the Holocaust Museum.
0:37:48 That is part of Jimmy Carter’s legacy
0:37:52 that he was then hired as part of the Carter Center
0:37:56 by multiple presidents to go be election monitors
0:37:57 all over the world to make sure
0:37:59 that we were spreading democracy and human rights.
0:38:02 There’s a lot of very cool stuff to Jimmy Carter.
0:38:05 And I wanna say first and foremost with that,
0:38:08 the 77 year love story with his wife,
0:38:11 I went to see Jimmy and Rosalind Carter speak
0:38:13 when I lived in London and they were talking
0:38:15 about the work of the Carter Center
0:38:19 and about eradicating disease and spreading democracy.
0:38:23 And I was so overwhelmed by the palpable affection
0:38:28 that those two had for each other and that it just radiated
0:38:33 from them a marriage of equals that I had not seen before.
0:38:36 And I thought it was so special
0:38:39 and I was so lucky to have been able to see it in person
0:38:42 with another 5,000 people that were in the room watching them.
0:38:44 But those are my quick thoughts.
0:38:47 – Well, I think he’s getting a lot of well-deserved
0:38:50 recognition, A, because of the extraordinary life you live,
0:38:53 but also because of the contrast.
0:38:57 And that is to think about one president exiting the stage
0:38:59 and his character and the way he acquitted himself
0:39:01 and the one entering the stage.
0:39:05 The contrast is just so palpable.
0:39:10 And I’m on a board of a startup
0:39:12 and the chair of the board is this former,
0:39:13 I don’t know what it’s called,
0:39:17 there’s this like there’s so many amazing units
0:39:19 of our armed services where they find these incredibly
0:39:22 superhuman like fit and also very smart people
0:39:24 who decide to serve their country.
0:39:26 And he was on one of these mini submarines
0:39:28 off the Iranian coast where they weren’t allowed
0:39:31 to ever surface for fear they’d be detected.
0:39:36 And their job was to perhaps evacuate of operatives
0:39:40 from the shores of Iran, they had some strange,
0:39:43 I forget what the group’s called, forward something group.
0:39:45 And they would kind of go in first for recon
0:39:48 in very sensitive places where it’s like don’t get caught.
0:39:51 And his job was to be in this tiny submarine
0:39:56 off the coast of Iran, never emerging, if you will,
0:40:00 and go out into freezing water and grab these people
0:40:02 and put them back in a submarine that was floating
0:40:04 at three miles an hour, four feet under the water.
0:40:05 And if you miss the submarine,
0:40:08 you were gonna drown in freezing water.
0:40:10 And he was talking about the rescue,
0:40:13 the failed rescue attempt and that the one thing they knew
0:40:15 when they’d heard that one of the helicopters
0:40:19 had been downed and that they’d called off the mission
0:40:22 was that his presidency was done.
0:40:24 That was gonna be, you know, the October surprise
0:40:27 really kind of inflation, oil spiking,
0:40:29 Reagan was an outstanding candidate.
0:40:34 The other place I go is I think about trying to evolve
0:40:39 or shape a more aspirational vision of masculinity
0:40:41 as I think masculinity has been perverted and conflated
0:40:44 with coarseness and toxicity and correctly.
0:40:47 And as people try to develop a more aspirational form
0:40:49 of masculinity, I’m constantly asked,
0:40:51 well, who are some great role models?
0:40:54 And I think about Jimmy Carter, you know,
0:40:59 who grew up in Georgia, married for 77 years,
0:41:02 went to college, then did graduate studies
0:41:04 in nuclear physics, decided to serve as country,
0:41:08 joined the Navy, was actually in an incident involving
0:41:11 an accident and went into the room to fix
0:41:12 some sort of nuclear reactor or something,
0:41:16 was seen as a, by his colleagues as a brave person,
0:41:19 became an entrepreneur, took over this peanut business,
0:41:23 ran for governor, you know, just a really
0:41:27 intelligent discipline, serve your country,
0:41:32 generous, loving man, like a nice vision for like,
0:41:34 I think a nice role model for young men.
0:41:37 And he said something that really struck me.
0:41:39 And I thought, oh, this guy’s so appreciant.
0:41:42 He gave a speech and he basically said, we’ve entered this,
0:41:45 he was kind of giving Americans a talking to.
0:41:47 And he said, we’ve now become a nation
0:41:50 where people aren’t judged by what they do,
0:41:52 but by what they own.
0:41:55 And he kind of predicted very early,
0:41:58 this what I call this era of idolatry of money,
0:42:01 where any of this type of behavior,
0:42:03 I was at a conference and we were in Q and A,
0:42:06 I’m like, look at what money has done to us.
0:42:08 And that I was, I was speaking about Elon Musk,
0:42:09 people always ask me, what do you think Elon Musk?
0:42:13 I’m like, if you had a son who had been married
0:42:15 three times and had 13 kids or 12 kids
0:42:16 and it wasn’t living with any of them.
0:42:18 If you had a son who slept with a loaded gun next to his bed,
0:42:19 if you had a son that was addicted to catamine,
0:42:23 if you had a son that was accusing people
0:42:25 erently and incorrectly of sex crimes,
0:42:27 such that they had to move.
0:42:30 You know, if you had a son that was behaving this way,
0:42:34 you’d call your son and you’d try and do something,
0:42:36 you’d be embarrassed for him, you’d be embarrassed for yourself,
0:42:38 you would think you were a failed father.
0:42:42 But if he’s worth $400 billion, all is forgiven.
0:42:45 It’s just as if we have absolutely decided the cash
0:42:49 can replace any semblance of character.
0:42:50 And he saw that.
0:42:52 And also, he has defined what it means
0:42:54 to be a post-presidency.
0:42:56 Like, I really like, these people,
0:42:58 are you generally more likable post-presidency?
0:43:00 I would argue that Clinton has not had a great post-presidency
0:43:03 because of some of the shit that’s come up about him
0:43:05 or that’s haunted him.
0:43:09 I think George Bush has had a great post-presidency, you know?
0:43:12 – I mean, it seems nice, he draws.
0:43:16 – Painting, seems like a nice man, but Carter really–
0:43:18 – But it’s not as impactful.
0:43:20 – I mean, it’s all well and good to hang–
0:43:22 – None of them are building houses.
0:43:23 – Right. – Right.
0:43:24 – With their own hands. – For the poor.
0:43:25 – Yeah, there’s a–
0:43:27 – With their wife of 77 years, you know,
0:43:31 holding the toolkit or him holding her tool belt.
0:43:33 Yeah, this guy, yeah, he really did.
0:43:36 – It’s, he’s the anti-commercialization
0:43:38 of the post-presidency.
0:43:40 And everybody else has been.
0:43:41 And the Obama–
0:43:42 – A quarter of a million dollar speaking fees,
0:43:43 a big book, book contract.
0:43:44 – I don’t think so.
0:43:46 And, you know, all the more power to you, I think, you know,
0:43:48 if the market can work in your favor,
0:43:49 go and take advantage of it.
0:43:52 But no, I think if we looked into the tax returns,
0:43:56 we would see, you know, modest incomes living very similarly
0:43:59 to the way that they did when they put that peanut farm
0:44:02 in a trust, so that the American public
0:44:04 could trust him when he came into office.
0:44:08 And I look at, and maybe this is just my estrogen talking,
0:44:09 since I already said, I love, you know,
0:44:10 their marriage and their love story.
0:44:12 The Obamas also have an incredible love story.
0:44:13 – Fantastic, yeah.
0:44:16 – But their post-presidency or his post-presidency
0:44:18 is much more commercial than the Carter’s, right?
0:44:21 And that’s not to say they aren’t doing a world of good,
0:44:24 but we’re as likely to see them as a habitat
0:44:28 for humanity site as we are to see at the Oscars.
0:44:30 And Jimmy Carter is not showing up anywhere.
0:44:32 Well, no, he’s really not showing up anywhere,
0:44:34 but he’s not showing up anywhere to talk about anything.
0:44:36 – For a while, we hope, we hope.
0:44:38 – But eradicating guinea war, right?
0:44:41 And that’s a real marked difference.
0:44:43 I will say in Clintonian defense,
0:44:46 I think the Clinton Foundation has done a lot of good,
0:44:49 but obviously as pillars of society,
0:44:53 the Clintons, no one holds a candle really to the Carter’s.
0:44:57 And you see that the way that his passing
0:45:01 and his last year in hospice has been covered,
0:45:03 you know, from local press, people who knew him.
0:45:06 I mean, this is someone who was part of a community
0:45:11 in a way that someone who went on to the presidency never is.
0:45:13 – Right, like this is the local guy who’s sitting
0:45:16 at the end of the counter when you show up at the diner.
0:45:22 And I don’t know how we would ever get that back again.
0:45:26 I can’t see anyone on the horizon who would be like that.
0:45:30 I think times maybe demand that it’s not possible anymore,
0:45:31 right?
0:45:33 It costs too much to get elected.
0:45:35 You need to be too famous.
0:45:37 You need to be too good on a podcast.
0:45:37 – Too polarizing.
0:45:38 – Too polarizing.
0:45:41 You need to have a partner that does something swanky
0:45:42 and cool.
0:45:44 You need to have kids that fit into a certain bucket.
0:45:45 All of these things that didn’t exist
0:45:47 when Carter got elected.
0:45:50 But it feels like a real loss for humanity
0:45:54 and dignity in politics that he’s gone.
0:45:58 And I hope that we’ll consider the full raft
0:45:59 of accomplishment.
0:46:00 And obviously there’s some things that he did
0:46:02 that were not fantastic.
0:46:05 And there’s a reason that, you know, Reagan came in
0:46:06 in that kind of fashion, right?
0:46:10 He opened the door big time to conservativism.
0:46:14 But a really decent and good person.
0:46:17 And it was sad to see him go.
0:46:19 But, you know, he said, I want to live to vote for Kamala.
0:46:21 And I don’t want to live to see Donald Trump
0:46:21 as president again.
0:46:22 – Sorry.
0:46:23 – So he got out on time.
0:46:25 – Bakshak James Earl Carter.
0:46:29 Dead at a hundred years of age, rest in peace.
0:46:32 Before we wrap, let’s dig into the state of the Democrats.
0:46:33 In a recent New York Times op,
0:46:36 that James Carvel admitted Democrats lost in 2024
0:46:39 because they failed to connect with voters on the economy
0:46:40 for our previous comments.
0:46:43 Despite solid GDP growth and easing inflation,
0:46:45 many Americans felt the party wasn’t addressing
0:46:46 their struggles.
0:46:48 Trump capitalized on this by making the economy
0:46:50 a central message, winning over middle
0:46:52 and lower class voters.
0:46:54 Carvel says Democrats need a clear, relatable
0:46:56 and urgent economic narrative to win them back.
0:46:58 At the same time, younger generations are delaying
0:47:01 or skipping milestones, including home ownership
0:47:02 and parenthood.
0:47:04 Some by choice, others because of rising costs
0:47:06 and societal shifts, researchers warned this trend
0:47:10 could be permanent, reshaping families, communities
0:47:11 and the economy.
0:47:13 What do you think Democrats can do to try
0:47:16 and reclaim the economic narrative here?
0:47:22 – I’d head to, and maybe I’m too conciliatory in some ways.
0:47:24 And I think part of that is a function of working
0:47:26 in conservative media that I’m around people
0:47:28 that I disagree with all the time.
0:47:31 And I can see what place they’re coming
0:47:32 to the table from, right?
0:47:34 I think most people are actually generally motivated
0:47:36 by wanting good outcomes.
0:47:39 And we just have different approaches for how to get there.
0:47:43 But Tom Swazi, who’s a conservative Long Island Democrat
0:47:44 who we’re gonna have on the podcast
0:47:46 at the end of the month, had an op-ed
0:47:49 in the New York Times that came out on New Year’s Day
0:47:52 where he talked about where we can work together,
0:47:54 where we have to push back.
0:47:57 And I think that employing some of that thinking
0:47:59 and making sure that we’re coming to the table
0:48:02 with our own ideas, especially working
0:48:05 against this super slim majority on their side
0:48:06 will benefit us.
0:48:10 But I wanted to double-tap on the Carville op-ed
0:48:12 because he says it’s about the messaging problem.
0:48:15 And there was a 538 Politics podcast
0:48:17 about the 1992 election that came out
0:48:20 that I was listening to of like how Clinton and Carville did it.
0:48:21 And they were talking about, you know,
0:48:24 it’s the economy stupid and they just kept repeating
0:48:27 very simple marketing phrases over and over again.
0:48:30 So then no one forgot what their campaign was about.
0:48:32 And the Democrats, we didn’t have that, right?
0:48:36 We had like 10 slogans that people were going for
0:48:38 for Clinton, it was putting people first
0:48:40 and it’s the economy stupid.
0:48:42 And that’s what anyone really remembers, right?
0:48:44 From the 1992 election.
0:48:49 But making it just about the way that we message things
0:48:52 ignores the fact that there are real fault lines
0:48:55 in the way the American economy is working for people.
0:48:58 And I’m scared that we’re gonna try to paper over
0:49:02 those real problems with rhetorical flourishes
0:49:05 and think that we should win in 2026,
0:49:08 which by the way, a midterm, it turns out more people
0:49:10 who are like us that are paying a lot of attention
0:49:14 versus a regular American that showed up in 2024
0:49:15 to vote for Trump.
0:49:16 So what do you make of that?
0:49:18 I mean, I wanna bring up credit card debt again.
0:49:19 I mean, this number is staggering.
0:49:23 So it’s at 1.17 trillion now of credit card debt.
0:49:26 So everyone is basically living off their plastic
0:49:27 at this point.
0:49:29 Like that’s a real indicator of how the economy
0:49:31 isn’t working for people, right?
0:49:33 And how do you square that with Peter Baker
0:49:37 writing in the New York times that Biden is handing off
0:49:39 the best economy that anyone has gotten
0:49:42 since Clinton gave George W. Bush the economy
0:49:43 at the beginning of 2001.
0:49:47 – Yeah, the numbers are just, there’s perception
0:49:50 is reality, but the perception is much different
0:49:53 than the reality in the sense that in terms of the economy,
0:49:54 we have the strongest growth in the G7,
0:49:57 the lowest inflation, something like 50 or 60%
0:49:59 of all GDP growth on a gross level globally
0:50:00 is gonna come out of the US.
0:50:03 Our stock market represents half the value
0:50:05 of the entire world stock market.
0:50:08 Low unemployment, I mean, the problem is similar
0:50:10 to the future of what William Gibson said about the future.
0:50:12 It’s here, prosperity is here.
0:50:13 It’s just not evenly distributed.
0:50:14 And people really feel it.
0:50:17 Now, I would argue this is a referendum on young men.
0:50:18 It was supposed to be a referendum on women.
0:50:21 It wasn’t where women’s rights.
0:50:24 But the messaging I think has to,
0:50:26 I’m a fan of trying to keep it simple.
0:50:28 And that is it needs to move, in my opinion,
0:50:30 from identity politics.
0:50:32 I really hope there’s a reckoning here.
0:50:33 My biggest fear around Democrats is that they say,
0:50:36 “No, we weren’t progressive enough.”
0:50:37 – Yeah.
0:50:38 – And that they say we,
0:50:41 and there’s very articulate, compelling people on the left
0:50:43 will say, “No, we need to stick to our values.
0:50:44 It’s because we weren’t starting about our values.”
0:50:45 And I’m like, Jesus Christ,
0:50:49 that’s, you wanna talk about things getting worse for us.
0:50:52 I think they need to move dramatically away from,
0:50:54 it just really frustrated me
0:50:55 at the Democratic National Convention.
0:50:58 I felt like this is a special interest group on parade.
0:51:00 All right, do we have an Asian Pacific Islander
0:51:02 to speak to other Asian Pacific Islanders?
0:51:05 And assuming that, oh, because I’m Asian
0:51:08 or Pacific Islander, I wanna hear the following things
0:51:12 and feel seen around issues related to me as opposed to,
0:51:13 that’s not how I identify myself.
0:51:15 And I think we really saw that with the Latino vote.
0:51:18 They said, look, being Latin does not,
0:51:20 it doesn’t define me and what I care about.
0:51:24 And the example that really struck me,
0:51:27 and I’m a huge fan of Sam Harris and he brought this up,
0:51:29 was that, do you remember the court case
0:51:31 or the court case that just happened
0:51:33 where the young man was dealing
0:51:35 or there was someone who appeared to be mentally?
0:51:37 – Daniel Penny.
0:51:40 – Yeah, basically was on trial for-
0:51:42 – Murdering Jordan Neely.
0:51:46 – Well, yeah, he was accused of murdering,
0:51:47 but acquitted.
0:51:50 And what they found in surveys was how you felt about it,
0:51:54 was if you found out who was white and who was black,
0:51:56 that because it was a white man
0:52:00 who had people would argue in self-defense
0:52:01 or doing what he thought was the right thing,
0:52:03 ended up killing this individual,
0:52:06 how you felt about it, especially among Democrats,
0:52:10 was knowing the identity and race of each of the parties.
0:52:12 And it strikes me that,
0:52:15 and I think it’s a fair accusation of Democrats,
0:52:18 is that we’re in many ways more obsessed with race
0:52:19 than Republicans.
0:52:21 And I think we need to get away from this.
0:52:24 I would fly, I would exit identity politics
0:52:26 as aggressively as possible
0:52:29 and move right into the discussion around inflation,
0:52:30 around the economics argument.
0:52:31 But until we move away
0:52:33 from everything in the Democratic Party being around,
0:52:37 we’re here to protect and advance the rights of this group
0:52:40 as identified by their race, their religion,
0:52:42 their ethnicity, their nationality.
0:52:46 I think we’re stuck in this inexorable downward spiral.
0:52:51 – Yeah, I mean, to some degree it’s a good thing
0:52:54 that society has moved in the direction that it has.
0:52:57 It is a bad thing for Democrats politically
0:52:59 that we’ve been slow on the uptick about it.
0:53:03 And you look at someone like an AOC
0:53:05 who split district, right?
0:53:06 South Bronx went for her
0:53:09 and they went for Donald Trump or Jared Golden in Maine.
0:53:11 And this happened all over the country, right?
0:53:16 Where people said, I want to choose my fighter.
0:53:18 And that was the key theme of this.
0:53:19 If you are going to be fighting for me,
0:53:22 I don’t really care if you have a donkey or an elephant
0:53:25 sitting on the other side of your name
0:53:27 or your party affiliation.
0:53:30 And I think that that’s probably a net positive for us.
0:53:32 But I would expand off of,
0:53:34 you have to talk about the inflation
0:53:35 and the economy for sure.
0:53:38 But I think the Daniel Penny example
0:53:39 is a really important one.
0:53:43 And we covered that case day by day over at Fox.
0:53:44 – Fox would love that story.
0:53:46 – Well, but it’s a great story.
0:53:48 It’s not just because it’s a Fox red meat story.
0:53:49 – When I brought it up.
0:53:51 – Yeah, you brought it up.
0:53:51 – There you go.
0:53:54 And the only interview that Daniel Penny has done
0:53:57 is with Judge Neampiro who’s on the five with me.
0:54:02 And he, you know, he served the country honorably.
0:54:05 He, you know, studying to be an architect.
0:54:09 He was on a train where a mixed race group of people
0:54:13 were all expressing fear of Jordan Neely,
0:54:16 someone who was on this list of the top 50
0:54:19 most vulnerable homeless people in the city.
0:54:21 And arguably shouldn’t have been able to be on the streets.
0:54:25 And you see Kathy Hochul now pushing
0:54:28 for some involuntary confinement for people
0:54:30 who are public safety threats.
0:54:32 And she’s only doing that because Richie Torres
0:54:35 is going ballistic on her on basically a daily basis.
0:54:36 But while you were away,
0:54:38 I don’t know if you saw this story,
0:54:42 a undocumented man who had been deported multiple times
0:54:47 set a woman on fire on the F train in Coney Island here.
0:54:52 And that kind of stuff has taken this so far
0:54:55 beyond partisanship where you just think
0:55:00 my quality of life is not up to standard.
0:55:01 You know, we are paying–
0:55:03 – When you pay the highest taxes in the nation
0:55:05 and people are being lit on fire on public transport.
0:55:06 – Right.
0:55:08 People, you know, who she was an alcoholic
0:55:11 at times finally has a big piece about her
0:55:13 ’cause they were able to figure out who she was
0:55:15 because she was incinerated, you know,
0:55:17 to the level that we couldn’t do DNA testing for a while.
0:55:20 And you have that image of also a police officer
0:55:22 walking in front of her burning body
0:55:23 and not doing anything.
0:55:25 – People just walking by, yeah.
0:55:26 – People just walking by.
0:55:28 But New York City has a plea out right now,
0:55:30 we need 1600 new cops.
0:55:31 Right now we don’t have enough New Orleans,
0:55:33 the terror attack there.
0:55:35 There was a point when New Orleans just a few years ago
0:55:38 only had something like 700 beat cops.
0:55:40 You can’t protect New Orleans.
0:55:41 – No, but to find the police.
0:55:42 – Right.
0:55:47 You know, all of that we can’t lose sight of
0:55:50 because that was part and parcel of the message
0:55:52 that the Republican Party was able to put out there.
0:55:55 And I don’t say message in that it wasn’t rooted
0:55:56 in real life.
0:55:59 I mean, people that we know are walking around saying like,
0:56:01 I don’t feel as safe as I should.
0:56:03 I am taking the subway less.
0:56:05 I mean, congestion pricing is coming in
0:56:10 as to solve a problem of having everyone in Ubers and Cabs
0:56:11 because they’re not on public transport as much.
0:56:14 I’m the only person, at least on air at Fox,
0:56:16 I take the subway in and out.
0:56:18 I am very different on the subway now than I used to be, right?
0:56:23 Like not both AirPods in, lost on my phone, right?
0:56:25 I’m paying attention to what’s going on
0:56:29 and I’m going from Tribeca to Times Square.
0:56:30 – You’re seeing that wave though.
0:56:31 It’s checking back in San Francisco.
0:56:34 They’ve said, okay, no more.
0:56:36 It used to be if you stole less than $900
0:56:37 then we’re gonna prosecute.
0:56:38 – Yeah, Prop 36.
0:56:41 – Yeah, that shit has gone away.
0:56:46 And it’s, by the way, just to end here on a positive note,
0:56:50 I absolutely love Representative Torres.
0:56:51 – Oh, he’s the best.
0:56:54 – And I just, I did, one of the things I like about him too
0:56:56 is the far left, just to know what the fuck to do
0:56:58 with this guy, ’cause the intersectionality
0:57:02 of a gay Latino black Democrat who is also-
0:57:03 – Millennial.
0:57:05 – Very millennial, but also very pro-Israel
0:57:06 and wants to get away from identity politics.
0:57:09 So like, oh wait, we wanna like you,
0:57:10 but you’re making it hard to.
0:57:12 – I think he’s exactly kind of a Democrat.
0:57:14 – Well, I’ve told you that Brian,
0:57:17 my husband’s dream ticket, Fetterman Torres.
0:57:20 He’s like, give me Fetterman Torres for 2028.
0:57:24 And I mean, Richie Torres has a huge Jewish community
0:57:27 that’s part of his district and my friend lives there.
0:57:29 And he says that he’s at the synagogue every week.
0:57:32 He shows up at his kid’s religious school.
0:57:34 They know him, they’re like, oh, Richie’s here.
0:57:36 I mean, he’s doing public service in a way
0:57:38 that feels more Carter-esque, right?
0:57:42 And it feels like what today’s current looks like.
0:57:43 – He’s fantastic. – We have a lot of work to do.
0:57:46 – So just, we gotta wrap up here.
0:57:50 Just before we go, Biden is gonna give
0:57:54 his kind of last conversations here.
0:57:59 Any thoughts on, you know, any advice for him
0:58:02 or do you think, what can we expect here?
0:58:02 Does it matter?
0:58:07 We’ll be, and this is sort of his last shot here.
0:58:08 Any thoughts?
0:58:13 – I’m hopeful, but resigned to the fact
0:58:15 that it’ll probably feel like a lot
0:58:17 of what we’ve heard before,
0:58:19 and of going over accomplishments.
0:58:21 And a lot of them were what you were just talking about,
0:58:24 right, with the success of the economy on a global scale,
0:58:26 right, and taking us from where we were
0:58:29 with, you know, 15 million people losing their jobs,
0:58:31 losing over a million lives to COVID, et cetera,
0:58:32 and where we are today.
0:58:35 And those are legitimate victory laps to be taken.
0:58:40 But I really want, especially as there are
0:58:41 very real questions, and a lot of people
0:58:43 who are huge Biden supporters
0:58:45 who now feel very differently about him
0:58:48 and the presidency and his cognitive abilities,
0:58:50 I wanna see the empathizer in chief
0:58:54 come out for one last hurrah and to talk about,
0:58:57 not necessarily say, you know, why Kamala lost
0:58:58 or why the Democrats lost,
0:59:01 but to show some of that humility
0:59:02 and that connection to the average person
0:59:04 that makes him more Scranton Joe
0:59:07 than the 46th president of the United States of America.
0:59:10 And I was listening to Anthony Blinken
0:59:12 on, he was on the Sunday interview on The Daily.
0:59:13 – I listened to that as well.
0:59:15 – Yeah, and I was not impressed.
0:59:18 – God, it’s so funny you said that.
0:59:19 I was so angry. – Funny slash,
0:59:20 we were both crying. – Ironic.
0:59:22 – I was like, this is a disaster.
0:59:23 – Why didn’t you get back in her face
0:59:27 when she was basically so outraged at the Israelis?
0:59:29 I’m like, how come the New York Times
0:59:31 and this individual doesn’t appear to be that outraged
0:59:32 about what happened on October the 7th?
0:59:35 How come he’s not back in her face
0:59:37 saying, what on earth?
0:59:40 Why, it just struck me so by nest
0:59:43 that he was playing defense and being very thoughtful
0:59:46 and understanding her as opposed to saying, what the fuck?
0:59:47 This is our ally.
0:59:49 Of course we came to their defense.
0:59:51 Of course we were gonna provide them.
0:59:54 Would you rather us have 10, 200 pounds?
0:59:55 There’s no elegant way to kill someone
0:59:58 and you keep citing statistics from Hamas,
1:00:00 better known as the Gaza Health Ministry
1:00:03 is you keep taking their word and not the word.
1:00:05 He just did not get back in their face
1:00:08 and give in to a certain extent,
1:00:10 Biden should be able to take a victory lap
1:00:12 around the US’s support of Israel.
1:00:13 And instead they were milling mouth about it
1:00:15 ’cause they wanted to have it both ways.
1:00:18 They fucked up so badly on Israel
1:00:21 because they did the right thing
1:00:23 and they refused to take credit of it
1:00:25 by having it both ways. – Or to just talk about it
1:00:26 in normal terms.
1:00:27 I mean, that’s the thing.
1:00:29 I mean, the electorate has made it clear
1:00:32 that they don’t care if you say it fancy.
1:00:34 They just wanna hear it.
1:00:36 And I felt like- – And stab me in the front,
1:00:37 not in the back.
1:00:39 Don’t give me a bunch of bullshit and say why.
1:00:40 We feel for the people.
1:00:41 Yeah, of course we do.
1:00:42 We all do.
1:00:44 It’s the greatest concentration of child amputees
1:00:45 in the world.
1:00:46 It’s tragic.
1:00:47 And you know what?
1:00:50 That can be laid at the feet of Hamas
1:00:53 and the 70% of Palestinians who still support Hamas.
1:00:55 And that’s what they believe.
1:00:59 Their actions support that view.
1:01:02 They deploy two carrier strike forces right away.
1:01:04 In my opinion, the Biden administration has been very good.
1:01:06 But what’s the point of doing good
1:01:07 if you’re not seen doing good?
1:01:09 And so they said, well, we can’t lose
1:01:10 the Islamic vote in Michigan.
1:01:11 And guess what?
1:01:13 They voted more than expected for Trump.
1:01:15 And the general view was I’d rather be stabbed
1:01:16 in the front than in the back.
1:01:17 Anyway, I-
1:01:19 – Well, that’s not gonna pan out that well for them either.
1:01:22 They’re gonna be plenty pissed within a few months.
1:01:26 But we are, I mean, I thought Blinken
1:01:28 was a great representation
1:01:31 of how mealy-mouthed our electives have been about this.
1:01:33 And that’s not to say that I agree
1:01:35 with everything that they’ve done, right?
1:01:37 I think that there is a strong case that you could make
1:01:42 that we are more involved in global wars or conflict
1:01:44 than we should have been.
1:01:46 And one of the promises was this return to normalcy.
1:01:47 We’ll make sure we’re bringing everyone home.
1:01:49 You know, him saying I wouldn’t have changed anything
1:01:50 about the Afghanistan withdrawal.
1:01:51 Excuse me.
1:01:52 – Come on.
1:01:53 – Like that’s pathetic.
1:01:57 – But he sounded just like your average poll.
1:01:58 And no one wants that.
1:01:59 – It’s hard to end a war.
1:02:02 We fucked up on the whole.
1:02:03 We got some stuff right.
1:02:04 We got some stuff wrong.
1:02:05 And he made the mistake.
1:02:08 I think Vice President Harris did when she was on the view
1:02:09 and asked what would you do differently.
1:02:10 And she said nothing.
1:02:14 Anyways, this is going to be an exceptionally interesting week
1:02:17 and an exceptionally interesting year.
1:02:19 Jess, I’m thrilled that we’re doing this.
1:02:22 Please subscribe to our Distinguishing Moderates feed.
1:02:25 We are, we’ve had it fantastic for six months.
1:02:28 We want to carry our momentum into 2025.
1:02:30 That’s it for this episode.
1:02:32 Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates.
1:02:34 Our producers are Caroline Chagrin and David Toledo.
1:02:36 Caroline is leaving property media.
1:02:37 – So sad.
1:02:39 – I hate it when people leave voluntarily.
1:02:40 I don’t-
1:02:41 – You prefer to just fire them?
1:02:42 – Yeah, no, I don’t mind that as much.
1:02:45 – Caroline, would you like to change your exit strategy?
1:02:48 – Caroline is going to the dark side.
1:02:51 She’s joining the Sith Lord known as Alphabet.
1:02:54 So I hope that-
1:02:55 – Good luck.
1:02:57 – By the way, we’re going to break their ass up.
1:03:00 We’re going to spin YouTube just cause I’m angry at them.
1:03:01 I’m about to go into my next podcast
1:03:05 where I’m going to suggest that we break that shit up.
1:03:07 And by the way, I wish you the best of luck.
1:03:09 I think it’s important you go to work for Crack Dealer
1:03:10 sitting outside junior high schools,
1:03:13 getting them addicted to video and social platforms.
1:03:14 – Can you be nice?
1:03:15 Caroline, this is awesome.
1:03:16 Congratulations.
1:03:17 – I hold a grudge.
1:03:18 I can’t believe she’s leaving.
1:03:19 How can you leave all this?
1:03:20 – She’s been with you forever.
1:03:23 – You’re leaving all this.
1:03:26 But Caroline, you’re been a fantastic culture carrier
1:03:27 in addition to being very confident.
1:03:28 We wish you the best.
1:03:29 I think you’re going to be great there.
1:03:30 – It was great getting to know you
1:03:31 these past few months.
1:03:32 – You’re always welcome back.
1:03:34 You have that when you’re leaving Disneyland
1:03:35 and this is fucking Disneyland.
1:03:38 This is the matter horn of careers.
1:03:39 This is space mountain.
1:03:40 This is good stuff.
1:03:43 – People vomit on space mountain all the time.
1:03:44 – You are leaving the park
1:03:46 but I am stamping your wrist in case you decide to return.
1:03:47 You are always welcome.
1:03:49 You just have to flash your wrist and say,
1:03:51 I was wrong.
1:03:51 I was wrong.
1:03:53 I want to stay with Scott.
1:03:55 The most generous, loving person professionally
1:03:58 in the history of modern society.
1:03:59 And I screwed up by leaving the park early.
1:04:00 You’re always welcome back.
1:04:02 Your wrist is stamped.
1:04:03 Caroline Shagren, best of luck to you.
1:04:04 Thanks for all your good work.
1:04:06 All right.
1:04:08 Our technical director is Drew Burroughs.
1:04:08 He’s staying.
1:04:09 I’m not saying anything about true.
1:04:12 You can find raising smart guy.
1:04:13 You can find Raging Moderates
1:04:14 on its own feed every Tuesday.
1:04:15 That’s right.
1:04:17 Raging Moderates on its own feed.
1:04:20 Please follow us wherever you get your podcasts.
1:04:22 Have a great rest of the week, Chast.
1:04:23 – You too.
1:04:25 (upbeat music)
1:04:35 [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00:05 Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home.
0:00:11 Out, uncertainty, self doubt, stressing about not knowing where to start.
0:00:17 In, plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done.
0:00:21 Out, word art, sorry, live laugh lovers.
0:00:26 In, knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire.
0:00:29 Start caring for your home with confidence.
0:00:32 Download Thumbtack today.
0:00:37 With respiratory illness season here, how do we help take care of ourselves?
0:00:39 Practice healthy habits.
0:00:42 Now’s the time to get your flu and updated COVID shots.
0:00:45 They help protect against severe illness and hospitalization.
0:00:51 Also, remember to stay home if you’re sick, cover coughs and sneezes, and clean your hands frequently.
0:00:56 Healthy habits make a difference, helping to protect you and the people in your life.
0:01:03 We can all do our part. Learn more at healthyhabitsbc.ca, a message from the government of BC.
0:01:05 Today’s number, 37 million.
0:01:10 That’s how many times a PropG episode was downloaded in 2024.
0:01:12 How do you know I have a podcast?
0:01:14 I tell you.
0:01:26 Welcome to PropG Markets.
0:01:28 That was the best I could come up with.
0:01:30 I couldn’t come up with something.
0:01:31 That’s good.
0:01:33 We’re just basking in the glory of it.
0:01:34 It’s pretty incredible, no?
0:01:36 I was pretty happy with that number.
0:01:38 Yeah, this is the way I think.
0:01:40 I’m like, why wasn’t it 38 million?
0:01:41 Like, it’s Ed’s fault.
0:01:43 I’m a glass half empty kind of guy.
0:01:49 By the way, I think Joe Rogan does that, I don’t know, in about seven, eight minutes.
0:01:51 Yeah, true.
0:01:52 You put it that way.
0:01:54 We got some work to do.
0:02:00 Yeah, that’s why we’ve raised your salary from $7.75 to $7.85 an hour.
0:02:03 You’re really bringing home the bacon here.
0:02:04 That’s right.
0:02:07 Well, let’s get to it, Scott, for our first episode of the year.
0:02:10 We’re going to walk through your predictions for 2025.
0:02:14 So we’ll cover your thoughts on what’s in store for tech and markets and media.
0:02:17 And we’re also going to try to address some of the audience’s questions
0:02:23 and their comments from your predictions live stream that happened in December.
0:02:24 Sound good?
0:02:25 Yeah, that sounds great.
0:02:26 Let’s do it.
0:02:27 Let’s jump in.
0:02:28 So your first prediction here.
0:02:30 A new duopoly is forming.
0:02:35 Open AI and NVIDIA will be the power couple of 2025.
0:02:39 Give us your thoughts on the open video prediction.
0:02:43 Well, just as there was Wintel, you have what is effectively somewhere
0:02:51 between 88 and 90% of traffic to and the percentage of AI searches
0:02:56 or queries powered by open AI and powered by NVIDIA.
0:02:58 And while there’s a few players we talk about,
0:03:02 whether it’s Claude or we don’t really talk about anyone in the chip market,
0:03:05 although we talked about IBM, but that was quantum computing.
0:03:09 These guys have more dominance, I would argue, than Wintel.
0:03:13 But this is the new duopoly of the age.
0:03:16 And what’s so striking is these are fairly new companies.
0:03:20 But between the two of them, they have, I guess, NVIDIA is about 3.2 trillion.
0:03:23 They have about a 3.5 trillion dollar market capitalization.
0:03:28 Moving on to the future of AI, software as a service and service as a software.
0:03:29 What did you mean by that?
0:03:32 If you think about software as a service, it’s basically the cloud.
0:03:37 And that is, you rent out the cloud to such that people can build applications on top of it.
0:03:41 But AI, I think, is where the next iteration of AI is.
0:03:45 We got some of the infrastructure plays figured out or full body contact.
0:03:47 We got the LLMs.
0:03:55 I do think that this new technology is going to create a bunch of new unicorns around very specific applications
0:04:00 where people build a thick layer of innovation on top of the GPU, on top of an LLM,
0:04:11 and offer, for example, a specific application that leverages an LLM and a GPU to create a very specific niche form of AI
0:04:16 that helps people stay with back end compliance for the banking sector,
0:04:22 or that figures out a way to offer certain types of personal injury law firms,
0:04:27 a specific type of AI that helps them write contracts more specifically.
0:04:32 I think there’s going to be a bunch of niche applications, specifically in the enterprise, in the back office.
0:04:37 I think it’s going to create a bunch of kind of AI apps, if you will, or AI driven apps.
0:04:39 I think there’s real opportunity in travel.
0:04:43 There’s real opportunity in health, but they will be branded.
0:04:49 They will use open AI and Nvidia will benefit because they’ll be built on top of them.
0:04:55 But there’ll be little niche applications that focus on specifics.
0:04:59 Just think about how Craigslist kind of picked apart newspapers or classifieds.
0:05:03 They went after the movies, then they went after car sales.
0:05:08 These applications will start kind of picking apart, if you will, various niche applications.
0:05:11 So I called it services of software.
0:05:17 Moving on to your technology of 2025, which you have chosen is nuclear.
0:05:23 Well, the stopgap or the friction and the growth of AI isn’t, or at least the smartest people in AI
0:05:29 or the biggest players don’t feel that it’s customers or capital or even employees or human capital.
0:05:38 It’s the energy to power these queries, which are 10 times more energy consumptive than a similar query on Google.
0:05:44 Whether it’s Altman trying to raise money or thinking about investing in nuclear startups
0:05:49 or it’s Bezos partnering with Constellation to reconnect or fire up Three Mile Island again,
0:05:52 which would have just been unthinkable only a few years ago.
0:05:57 It’s clear that they’ve figured out that the choke point here will be,
0:06:02 we’re going to run out of energy pretty quickly, and that we’ve got to bring new energy online.
0:06:08 And even Meta just announced, they’ve put out an RFP looking for somebody to show up and build them
0:06:13 a giant nuclear power plant to power their business operations specifically,
0:06:15 I would imagine their plans around AI.
0:06:20 And for me, most roads, if not all roads, lead to what is arguably, I believe,
0:06:23 some of the most cleanest, reliable energy and that is nuclear.
0:06:26 So I think nuclear is going to have a big year in 2025.
0:06:29 We’ve got to listen to a question here from Steve who asks,
0:06:33 “What are the best ways to invest in nuclear?”
0:06:38 I mean, I can just list a couple good nuclear energy stocks.
0:06:40 Go ahead, Ed. You probably know more about this than I do.
0:06:46 Constellation energy is a big name that we’ve been talking about, Vistra is a good name.
0:06:51 Another stock you can invest in investing in nuclear, also Entergy Corporation.
0:06:53 I mean, there are a lot of nuclear energy stocks out there.
0:06:56 Those are probably the biggest three or probably the most promising.
0:07:02 But we’ve also talked about how big tech is investing in their own nuclear operations.
0:07:03 I feel like a very safe play.
0:07:07 You’re going to get some of the nuclear momentum if you just stay in big tech, to be honest.
0:07:09 I mean, they’re all investing in that anyway.
0:07:15 What I would want to do, so I’m pretty sure all the stocks you mentioned are up pretty massively in 2024.
0:07:16 The word is out.
0:07:17 That’s definitely right.
0:07:21 And I would say if you’re going to do this, try and find a fund that has a bunch of them.
0:07:27 I just think it’s dangerous to bet on any one of these because I think the run up has been pretty violent here.
0:07:34 What I think is more interesting is, I remember when we started talking about GLP-1 18 months ago
0:07:36 and how it was going to be revolutionary.
0:07:44 And then about the time that podcasters are on to an idea, the smart money has piled in about six months before that.
0:07:45 No, we’re early.
0:07:46 We’re always early.
0:07:47 We’re early.
0:07:50 And Nova Nordisk was up dramatically as was Eli Lilly.
0:08:00 But Mia Severio, our analyst said she found little publicly traded companies that, for example, made syringes for semi-glutides.
0:08:06 So I think if you were a fund manager, if you’re a consumer, don’t spend your time on this shit, buy index funds.
0:08:12 Or if you’re really fascinated by nuclear, there’s probably a nuclear ETF that’s likely to be a little bit more,
0:08:14 I don’t know, diversified, if you will.
0:08:19 But if you’re a manager and you really want to do some homework or you want to take a little bit of your capital,
0:08:27 I think what you want to find is the materials or the basic boring companies that build stuffs, materials for nuclear.
0:08:32 So I would imagine there’s a certain type of paint resin that you got to put on these reactors
0:08:38 or there’s a certain type of shelving or a certain type of composites or minerals or some people are saying the play is in uranium now.
0:08:45 So I think you’re going to have to do more work and go further downstream and look at some of the materials and the suppliers
0:08:50 or even the vendors that should benefit from an explosion of nuclear because words out.
0:08:51 Word is out.
0:08:52 That’s definitely right.
0:08:56 I definitely wouldn’t recommend it as if I were stockpicking.
0:09:02 Let’s move on to your investment of 2025, which would be emerging markets.
0:09:10 If you look at over the last 40 or 50 years, there’s kind of eight to 15 year periods where the US outperforms the rest of the world.
0:09:13 And then the rest of the world outperforms the US.
0:09:16 And it’s basically all about flows of capital.
0:09:24 And even if you’re Argentina and you have good companies, everyone has been so negative on Argentina for so long that there’s just flows of capital out.
0:09:30 And basically about 5% of institutional money has gone into some of these emerging markets or bricks.
0:09:32 And it’s usually around eight or 9%.
0:09:34 So there’s been a massive flow out of capital.
0:09:41 So even if the company is performing well, the flow of capital out of that market means there’s just fewer people wanting to buy stocks.
0:09:45 And you’ve seen these markets underperform the US market substantially.
0:09:52 And now the US market represents 50% of total market capital of all stocks globally, which is what you would call a cyclical high.
0:09:59 And everyone from Goldman Sachs to JP Morgan have said when stocks are this high, usually returns go down.
0:10:10 And I believe that what we’re going to see is that after a 15 year bull market run for US stocks, we’re going to start to see the river or the flow of capital reverse.
0:10:15 And we’re going to see more people go hunting for cheaper stocks in emerging markets.
0:10:21 Even for example, Argentina stocks have boomed the last few months under new leadership.
0:10:24 I think that’s likely going to infect Brazil.
0:10:26 People are going to start looking at stocks in Brazil.
0:10:29 Stocks there actually look quite cheap still.
0:10:37 You can buy pretty solid companies there, including their biggest bank, their biggest iron ore producer for a PE of about five.
0:10:45 So I believe we’re in a kind of a cyclical moment or a high in terms of capital flows into the US.
0:10:51 In some, I’m rotating out of US centric investments into other markets.
0:10:57 I think the world X, the US is going to likely outperform the US over the next five to 10 years.
0:11:01 And so I think there’s a lot of opportunity in some of these beaten down markets.
0:11:03 Emerging markets is such a weird term.
0:11:05 It feels so outdated at this point.
0:11:06 Yeah, non-US.
0:11:08 I don’t know what to say.
0:11:12 But then it’s like there should be multiple different categories among emerging markets.
0:11:13 It needs a brand.
0:11:14 It needs a brand, exactly.
0:11:17 You said platform of 2025.
0:11:19 I love this take is YouTube.
0:11:20 Why is that?
0:11:26 Well, when you think about streaming media, if you ask people what’s the premier streaming video platform, they would say Netflix may be wrong.
0:11:30 It’s 8% share of total hours on streaming video.
0:11:31 YouTube’s 11%.
0:11:33 YouTube, I believe, has 50 billion in revenue.
0:11:35 Netflix has 38.
0:11:41 And if you look at the numbers and just the trends, YouTube continues to take share from almost everybody.
0:11:44 And they have a paid offering.
0:11:48 They also, I think, are the most elegant ad-supported medium.
0:11:49 What do I mean by that?
0:11:51 Podcasts do host readovers.
0:11:52 Those are kind of elegant.
0:11:56 And there’s a skip button, so it’s not quite as obtrusive or it’s more palatable.
0:12:02 But I find the ads on YouTube less obtrusive than any other ad-supported media.
0:12:04 When ads come on TV, I just can’t even tolerate it.
0:12:05 I’m like, oh, shit.
0:12:09 I somehow ended up watching Goodfellas on the TNT Networker.
0:12:10 And I’m like, that’s it.
0:12:11 I’m done.
0:12:13 I’ll see Joe Pesci get whacked next week or something.
0:12:18 But the ads on YouTube, I think are really well done in terms of the skip now, because
0:12:20 they say, okay, if you’re not interested in this, you’re not going to watch full ads.
0:12:22 You might as well skip now.
0:12:29 And also, just in our business, it feels like overnight, whereas Apple and Spotify kind
0:12:35 of controlled where the primary distribution mechanisms for podcasts, now it’s YouTube.
0:12:38 And we’re scrambling to figure out a YouTube strategy.
0:12:46 And what just struck me was Joe Rogan got 15 or 18 million downloads on traditional podcasts,
0:12:50 listening devices, and he had 40 million or 50 million views on YouTube.
0:12:54 So it strikes me that YouTube is just going from strength to strength.
0:13:02 Young people seem to be really intoxicated with YouTube, increasing their time on the platform.
0:13:10 So it’s got an exceptionally strong ad supported or more elegant ad supported business model.
0:13:17 And I love ad supported mediums right now that are working, because while more and more
0:13:22 consumers are exiting the advertising ecosystem, the majority, the reason why our CPMs continue
0:13:27 to go up pretty dramatically here at Property Markets is that we attract a young, wealthy
0:13:28 male.
0:13:34 That is a great white rhino of advertising right now because those individuals are not
0:13:36 watching ad supported mediums.
0:13:38 Most of them don’t even have a TV.
0:13:41 They’re on Netflix and Spotify and YouTube.
0:13:46 And YouTube is the only place where you can reach them if you’re Pepsi or your Warner Brothers
0:13:49 launching a Marvel film.
0:13:55 It’s one of the few places you can still reach this group that is largely abandoned ad supported media.
0:13:59 So I’m just exceptionally bullish on the YouTube platform.
0:14:01 I totally agree with that.
0:14:02 And I’ll just add one thing on.
0:14:08 I think as I’ve said before, I think one of the big strengths of YouTube is the comment section
0:14:13 because of its ability to just facilitate socialization and interaction.
0:14:16 And there are many other features on YouTube that are about that.
0:14:24 The idea of having a subscriber base and having live streaming functionality.
0:14:29 When YouTube is all about interaction, it’s not just about watching the content.
0:14:34 And what I will say is the platforms I believe are going to succeed alongside YouTube are
0:14:37 the ones that take notes from YouTube.
0:14:41 And there is one platform that is doing that really well right now and it’s Spotify.
0:14:47 Spotify over the past few months has unveiled all of these new features that are definitely
0:14:49 taken out of the YouTube playbook.
0:14:51 They’re now doing a comment section.
0:14:54 They’re incorporating video into the platform.
0:14:56 We just saw this recently.
0:15:00 They’re letting us as the podcaster put out polls to interact with the audience.
0:15:02 Spotify has gotten the memo.
0:15:09 It’s all about engagement and interaction because just watching and consuming is not interesting enough in 2025.
0:15:15 I think the other thing I love about the comments is it’s sort of like a reality check from the audience.
0:15:20 If I were to go on there on CNN and just spew some bullshit that didn’t make any sense,
0:15:22 I would never hear any feedback from it.
0:15:24 Who does that?
0:15:27 That was not directed at you.
0:15:30 You’re incisive on CNN and people say that.
0:15:34 But if I were to go on TV and just say a bunch of nonsense,
0:15:38 I would never get the feedback I need to learn actually that didn’t make any sense.
0:15:43 What’s beautiful about YouTube is every week we are held accountable by the audience.
0:15:48 If we say something that is dumb or rude or aggressive or something that people don’t like,
0:15:50 they’re going to tell us in the comments.
0:15:52 And that’s one of the things that I love about it. It keeps us honest.
0:15:55 I agree. And you’re right around consumer engagement.
0:16:03 And I invested in a company called OpenWeb and all it does is help these media platforms organize their comments
0:16:07 such that they’re less toxic and the better comments rise to the top.
0:16:14 And it makes that entire, if you will, it’s its own media, comments are its own kind of media vehicle.
0:16:20 It makes them advertiser friendly and then they help monetize the comments for media companies.
0:16:27 Anyways, I think comments were sort of the last monetizable media in Big Tech.
0:16:29 We’ll be right back.
0:16:37 [Music]
0:16:39 There’s a hostile situation in the Olympic Village.
0:16:41 You’re in sports. You’re in way over your head.
0:16:44 People can’t stop talking about September 5th.
0:16:45 It’s a madhouse down here.
0:16:47 It’s one of the best movies of the year.
0:16:48 What’s happening?
0:16:49 Oh, God.
0:16:53 September 5th and select theaters December 13th.
0:16:58 Why do so many of us get happiness wrong? And how can we start to get it right?
0:17:03 I mean, I think we assume that happiness is about positive emotion on all the time, right?
0:17:08 Often very high arousal positive emotion, but that’s not really what we’re talking about.
0:17:12 I’m Preet Bharara and this week, Dr. Laurie Santos joins me on my podcast,
0:17:16 Stay Tuned with Preet, to discuss the science behind happiness.
0:17:20 We explore job crafting, the parenting paradox, the arrival fallacy,
0:17:25 and why acts of kindness might be the simplest path to fulfillment.
0:17:30 The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts.
0:17:40 We’re back with Prof. G. Markets.
0:17:44 Your media of 2025 is, no surprise here, podcasts.
0:17:45 Take us through it.
0:17:52 Podcasts are going to grow faster, granted off a lower base than Metta or Alphabet, I believe, in 2025.
0:17:59 And I think a big, the catalyst for that, tsunami or the rivers reversing and the capital,
0:18:03 the tsunami of capital, I think it’s going to go into podcasting, is the election.
0:18:05 I mean, politics are the ultimate in branding.
0:18:10 You have a candidate, you have a product, and they need to get 50.1% market share on a given day,
0:18:14 and the other person gets zero. It’s win or take all.
0:18:17 It’s about messaging. It’s about advertising in the right places.
0:18:23 And one of the things we learned from Trump is cable news is dead and dumb.
0:18:26 Knocking on doors makes no fucking sense.
0:18:30 It’s all about flying into podcast, straight into podcast.
0:18:38 And podcasts, MSNBC and cable news, average age of viewers between 65 and 70, mostly female.
0:18:43 I think it’s hard to sell those people products unless it’s opioid-induced constipation medications
0:18:47 or restless legs or life alert or reverse mortgage.
0:18:53 Whereas the average listener to a podcast is a 34-year-old male who is more persuadable,
0:18:58 who is in his mating years and makes stupid purchases, is buying a home, is forming a family.
0:19:04 And whereas 15 years ago, one in 10 people had listened to a podcast in the last 30 days, now it’s one in two.
0:19:06 So this is where the people are going.
0:19:11 This is where people who you ordinarily can’t reach via ad-supported mediums are going.
0:19:15 I mean, this isn’t a proxy for advertising, but it’s a proxy for influence.
0:19:22 Since the election, all of these individuals who may or may not be running for president
0:19:25 have reached out to me and want to know my views on things.
0:19:26 No, they don’t.
0:19:32 They want to come on our podcast and they’re running for president or they’re running for senator
0:19:41 and they realize after watching Trump, the next kingmakers are going to be podcasts.
0:19:46 And I think where we’re going to get a lot of that capital is from these local news stations
0:19:51 or local broadcast stations that have had this unnatural sugar high every two years from political spending
0:19:56 because campaigns are like old people vote, they watch the local news.
0:20:00 So these local news stations lose money 21 months every two years.
0:20:07 And then for three months, they quintuple their ad rates and sell to the, for local and statewide and federal races.
0:20:10 I think that capital is about to transition.
0:20:18 The water flowed out during the election and a tsunami is coming in of revenue into podcasting.
0:20:21 I think you’re going to be the rush limbo of this next generation on the left.
0:20:22 It’s going to be great.
0:20:28 That’s scary, which means we’re going to make a lot of money and you’re going to get a presidential medal of freedom.
0:20:33 I like that. Yeah. And yeah, I don’t, I don’t, I wasn’t a huge fan of rush.
0:20:39 But just in the spirit of transparency, I’m so, I’ve decided I was so freaked out by this election.
0:20:40 I decided to take a break.
0:20:44 I’m like, okay, I’ve been traumatized by this thing and I’m sick of being coarse and being angry about it.
0:20:46 I’m just going to go dark on politics for a while.
0:20:50 What? You do a politics podcast every week?
0:20:52 Yeah, but that’s friendly and nice.
0:20:55 That makes no sense.
0:21:01 That’s me basically asking Jess Tarlov questions because she’s actually knows what she’s talking about as opposed to me.
0:21:02 Shit posting Trump.
0:21:05 Okay. So you’re just not going to put your opinions out there.
0:21:12 Yeah, it’s different, but this medium is going to, it’s going to be unfortunately, it’s the definition.
0:21:15 So kids, this doesn’t mean go out and start a podcast.
0:21:19 There’s 1.6 million podcasts, 600,000 put out regular content.
0:21:24 I think 400,000, 600,000 put out something every week.
0:21:30 I don’t think, I think outside of the top two or 300, I don’t think it’s economically sustainable.
0:21:34 Like the top 10 podcasts are responsible for a third of all downloads.
0:21:37 I think the top 100 are responsible for two thirds.
0:21:39 So I did the math.
0:21:43 There were 2,800.
0:21:50 So 2,800 people have been oarsmen or oarswomen at UCLA and road crew.
0:21:52 10 went to the Olympics.
0:22:00 So at 19, when I was on crew at UCLA, I was three times more likely to go to the Olympics than have a self-sustaining podcast.
0:22:02 I love that.
0:22:04 That’s amazing.
0:22:07 Generously 600 podcasts are self-sustaining economically.
0:22:08 That’s not to say don’t do it.
0:22:10 That’s not to say it’s not worth it.
0:22:15 McKinsey probably has 10 podcasts that highlight their commitment to green energy or whatever it is.
0:22:19 Or it’s fun or you enjoy it or you’re building another business, fine.
0:22:27 But if you’re looking for an independent self-sustaining business, this is right up there with the likelihood a high school player is going to end up in the NBA.
0:22:31 It is winner take all at this point.
0:22:36 Next up on this list, we’ve got IPO of 2025, Sheehan.
0:22:43 I looked at time on site times number of visitors to the site to come up with an attention index.
0:22:51 And relative to its most recent round of public funding at $65 billion, it’s the best value.
0:23:03 And that is, if you look at traffic times, the amount of time people spend on the site, it’s a great value compared to the market cap of other retailers relative to their valuation and how much time people spend on their site.
0:23:10 Also, the growth this year it’s going to surpass Amazon is the second biggest apparel retailer.
0:23:15 Next year it’ll likely surpass Walmart and become the biggest apparel retailer in the world.
0:23:17 It’s also profitable.
0:23:19 It’s growing 23.
0:23:21 It’s growth sold to 23%.
0:23:23 It’s going public on the London exchange.
0:23:31 And if you look at the companies that have massively outperformed the market, you can bifurcate them into two categories, capital intensive or IP intensive.
0:23:34 So you have invidias in design.
0:23:36 They don’t own any factories.
0:23:37 Intel does.
0:23:39 One does about $400,000 per employee.
0:23:40 One does $2 million.
0:23:51 If you look at Coca-Cola versus Monster, if you look at Marriott versus Airbnb, the IP intensive low-cap-back company does three to four times the revenue per employee.
0:23:58 And the same is true of Sheehan versus Zara or Indotex, which I think does about $400,000 or $500,000 per employee.
0:24:00 And Sheehan is doing $2 million.
0:24:05 The average retailer does about 100 styles a week.
0:24:10 Fashion company, Fast Fashion does, I think, $700 a week.
0:24:13 And Sheehan does something like $7,000 a day.
0:24:18 They own no warehouses, no factories, no trucks, no planes, no stores.
0:24:35 It’s just software, using machine learning and AI to anticipate activity on the site and then, excuse me, examine activity on the site and then anticipate and predict demand and then send out those orders to the best factory or best supplier and then put in motion all the transportation.
0:24:37 So it’s all software.
0:24:38 There’s no cap backs.
0:24:40 And those are the companies that have overperformed.
0:24:50 I think it’s going to get a lot of attention because it’s going public on the London Stock Exchange, which will hopefully kind of ignite a moribund market, which has been the London Stock Exchange disclosure.
0:24:55 I’m an investor here, but the reason I invested is I think that the IPO market’s coming back.
0:25:06 And despite all the valid concerns about Fast Fashion and Sheehan, I think that capitalism and greed will overwhelm any concerns.
0:25:08 And this will be the IPO of 2025.
0:25:13 Question from Doug, but what about tariffs, i.e., let’s say Trump does impose tariffs.
0:25:15 That seems like a potential risk for Sheehan.
0:25:20 Well, first off, I think tariffs are not going to be nearly the boogeyman people think they’re going to be.
0:25:22 I just don’t see how — I’ve said this.
0:25:29 I think the moment inflation ticks up and someone says it’s because of tariffs or the threat of tariffs, I think they go away.
0:25:35 And to a certain extent, the bond market and inflation are the adult supervision now in politics.
0:25:40 If Trump wants to run up the deficit and the bond market starts spiking, he’s going to roll back those plans.
0:25:44 If you look at what happened with the — what was her name?
0:25:45 Truss.
0:25:46 Truss.
0:25:51 Basically, what kicked her out of office and what was the ruling party was the bond market.
0:25:55 And the currency market had said, wait, okay, girlfriend, fine.
0:26:02 If you want to have a plan that explodes the deficit, that’s your business, but we’re going to take interest rates up and your currency down.
0:26:05 And overnight, she was out of office.
0:26:09 And to a certain extent, I think the bond market is sort of the adult in the room with Trump.
0:26:17 And that is, despite the fact that the Fed’s been cutting rates, rates haven’t come down a lot because the bond market is worried about potential deficits.
0:26:28 The moment he gets anywhere near implementing a tariff on China anywhere near the time zone of what he’s talking about, you’re going to see the bond market go up.
0:26:31 You’re going to see people freak out about inflation.
0:26:37 And the moment inflation takes up month on month and people say it’s because of the tariffs, they roll these things back.
0:26:42 And I believe that companies like Xi’an and Timu have such an incredible cost advantage.
0:26:53 I mean, one of the cost advantages people don’t talk about is because the shit’s so cheap, you know what is the plague that the nightmare of retail returns?
0:26:58 If you ship a couch to somebody and they return it, it’s right then and there unprofitable.
0:27:07 That transaction has gone from making money to losing money, taking shit back, restocking it, the customer service, cleaning it, and then selling something again.
0:27:09 It just turns everything bad.
0:27:14 And the percentage of returns is a forward-looking indicator of the margins on the business.
0:27:16 It’s like churn for a software company.
0:27:25 And these companies have almost zero returns because it’s like, “Oh, I don’t love it. It doesn’t fit. Who cares? It costs $11.”
0:27:29 So I think that A, the tariffs won’t be nearly as bad as people think.
0:27:39 And B, I think the margin, the disparity in pricing and the value they offer is so dramatic that I think they could survive a tariff.
0:27:47 They’re talking about eliminating the loophole around $150 a less. They’re not subject to a certain excise tax or tariff.
0:27:50 No doubt about it. That’ll damage their profitability.
0:27:55 But I think they have just such an enormous price disparity to play with. I think they’re still going to be fine.
0:28:00 Next up, we have business trend of 2025. M&A. Why is that?
0:28:08 Corporations have record profits. They’re running out of growth. And if they’re in challenged industries, they want to bulk up.
0:28:18 You’re just going to see tons of M&A here. M&A has been largely more abundant because the Biden administration was enacting more FTC and DOJ reviews,
0:28:26 which by the way, I think was the right thing to do, but you’re going to have a much more M&A friendly head of the FTC and the DOJ now.
0:28:31 And these companies have so much money on their balance sheets, they’re just going to go shopping.
0:28:39 And if I were an investment bank, I would be staffing up my M&A group after just a deep freeze of the last several years.
0:28:45 I think the bankers and the corporate development folks are like, “Oh my gosh, it’s open season again.
0:28:49 There’s a lot of stuff out there that’s been beaten up that’s cheap that we consolidate the back end.
0:28:54 And we’re not going to have to go through this. We’re not going to have to pass chair con.”
0:28:58 So I think M&A is absolutely going to boom.
0:29:03 You also predict that we’re going to see the largest take-private or buyout in history. Can you say more about that?
0:29:09 Private equity firms have almost $3 trillion in capital that they need to deploy.
0:29:15 Some big names have gotten beaten up so badly in the market that I think they’re attractive.
0:29:16 Such as?
0:29:26 My favorite targets for the biggest take-private in history are Boeing, Intel, Nike, Target.
0:29:33 These are giant carcasses kind of waiting, I think, to be taken private.
0:29:40 I think they would benefit from being taken out of the limelight or the scrutiny of the public markets to make the requisite cost cutting they need to make
0:29:43 or the changes or the investments they need to make.
0:29:51 And there’s so much money on the sidelines that you could see a club deal assemble the kind of capital you would need to take one of these behemoths private.
0:29:58 I think biggest take-private in history is going to happen in 2025.
0:30:14 Stay with us.
0:30:17 We’re back with ProfG Markets.
0:30:21 Let’s move on to the tech movement of 2025, which is banning phones.
0:30:27 Australia has banned social media for people under the age of 16. New Zealand and Lithuania, I think, are banning phones.
0:30:35 The United States are banning social media and phones and schools and the evidence is the following.
0:30:41 Nobody regrets it. Test scores go up. Student engagement goes up.
0:30:49 And these tech companies try to make this bullshit argument like, oh, you’re suppressing the free speech rights of a 13-year-old. What?
0:30:53 My favorite is you’re suppressing entrepreneurship.
0:30:58 Kids go online and they learn how to set up, get scrappy and make deals.
0:31:05 And meanwhile, every tech executive, the one rule in their house is no one is allowed near these devices until they’re 16.
0:31:12 This is breaking out all over the world. And whatever I say, you know, I think academia is actually a wonderful career.
0:31:19 And I just look at what Professor Hyde has accomplished in the last two years with his book, The Anxious Generation.
0:31:29 And he’s so reasoned and thoughtful and bipartisan and shows up with so much work and is so measured.
0:31:37 He’s just having this, he’s literally having a global impact on the mental health of teens around the world.
0:31:45 And I actually, I think it’s really, really inspiring, but you’re going to see phone bans and social media bans and age gating break out all over the world.
0:31:49 Unfortunately, it’s a little late for my kids, once 14, once 17.
0:31:57 But I think eight and 10-year-olds aren’t going to have to deal with the same shit that we put up with for the last 15 years.
0:32:04 Question from Brian, would love to hear Scott’s thoughts on how we can mobilize Gen X to provide mentoring services to Gen Z.
0:32:11 At the end of every one of my presentations, I talk about, you know, one of our big themes has been how young men are struggling.
0:32:18 And I think one of the keys to happiness is that you have guardrails in the forms of relationships.
0:32:23 And I think that what really plagues young men in America right now is an absence of relationships.
0:32:29 Women, when they don’t have a romantic relationship, will pour that energy into their work or other relationships.
0:32:31 They’re much better at maintaining a social fabric.
0:32:36 And I know this firsthand, if I wasn’t in a relationship, I would very rarely go out.
0:32:43 I don’t like people. I’m lazy. I would stay home and do edibles and watch Netflix all the time and probably die in a couple of years.
0:32:50 But my partner forces me to be really social and engage and that’s just really healthy.
0:32:52 And I think that’s the way it is for a lot of men.
0:32:58 And I think young men, where they really come off the rails, is when they lose a male role model.
0:33:01 And one of my big, I have the same six slides at the end of every presentation.
0:33:10 And that is, I think that men need to take more responsibility for getting involved in the life of a young man or a boy that isn’t theirs.
0:33:12 I think that’s the ultimate expression of masculinity and success.
0:33:17 And you don’t have to be a baller. You just have to be living a virtuous life or trying to.
0:33:24 Because as a father of two boys, 14 and 17, it’s striking how easy it is to add value.
0:33:28 No, you should wear shoes if you’re going to go to school, right?
0:33:34 A young man the other day, I got into MIT, but I have a basketball scholarship to Joey Bagadona to you.
0:33:38 And I’m thinking about taking it. No, go to MIT.
0:33:41 Trust me on this. Go to MIT.
0:33:44 And then in 30 years, buy a basketball team.
0:33:55 It’s just kind of showing up and trying to be a good role model and listening and, you know, convincing them they have value because you’re taking an interest in their life.
0:34:05 And unfortunately, you know, Michael Jackson and the Catholic Church have fucked it up for all of us because there’s huge suspicion in a cloud that surrounds you.
0:34:10 If you become interested in engaging in a young man or a boy’s life, that isn’t yours.
0:34:14 People have weird suspicions around you and it’s really too bad.
0:34:23 In New York, there are three applicants for big sisters or three times as many applicants for big sisters of New York as male applicants for big brothers.
0:34:34 So what do we need to do? We need to create a zeitgeist in our society where a man who is doing well should feel a certain level or a certain obligation.
0:34:41 There’s a wonderful zeitgeist in the corporate community that if you’re a successful woman, you have an obligation to mentor a younger woman in the organization.
0:34:45 That zeitgeist is out there. They have all these mentoring programs.
0:34:58 We need that same kind of cultural shift to say that a successful good man needs to be involved in the life of a young man or a boy.
0:35:06 That just is part of our society and the wonderful thing is, or the easy thing I should say, is these young men and these boys are everywhere.
0:35:11 You talk to a single mother you’re working with, “Hey, would your son like to come with me to a ball game?”
0:35:13 I mean, they are just everywhere.
0:35:21 These young men, especially single mothers, are looking for men to engage in their lives or even the sons of your friends.
0:35:28 Because sometimes, and this is a natural thing, boys, teenage boys will listen to their dad’s friends more than they’ll listen to their dad.
0:35:35 So I think we need a cultural shift. I think we need more organizations that pair people.
0:35:45 More than anything, though, we need to get past this bullshit of believing that men who have fraternal and paternal love to give but don’t have their own kids or maybe they do,
0:35:52 they have more resources and more goodwill that somehow that isn’t anything but wonderful.
0:35:56 So I think this is an enormous unlock in America.
0:36:06 We need to give these young men more role models and more relationships and also just a recognition that you don’t have to be an amazing dude.
0:36:09 You just have to be a nice man trying to live a good life.
0:36:15 And that brings us to our final prediction, and this is a first for the Prof. G. Predictions Deck.
0:36:20 We have a chemical of 2025, and that chemical is testosterone.
0:36:27 Well, other than I’m sticking it in my ass every seven days, I don’t know if you noticed the hair on my eyeballs.
0:36:31 Oh, my God. Brought to you by Blue Chewables.
0:36:36 Let’s get to why this is the chemical of 2025 versus hairy eyeballs and erections.
0:36:41 Everyone thought this year was going to be, or this election was going to be a referendum on women’s rights.
0:36:46 It wasn’t. It was a referendum, I believe, on young people not doing well, specifically young men.
0:36:53 And if you look at the cohort that most aggressively shifted from blue to red, it was people under the age of 30.
0:36:59 And if you’re not doing well, you’re not doing well as your parents, which is, that’s the first time that’s happened in our nation’s history.
0:37:03 You don’t want change. You don’t even want disruption. You want chaos.
0:37:08 I’m making as much money as my parents are my age. I don’t have that. I don’t have any prospects.
0:37:12 Groceries have gone up. I can’t afford my rent. I haven’t had a raise.
0:37:16 And yeah, I don’t want to, incumbents are being kicked out everywhere around the world.
0:37:21 It’s a function of inflation and social media that convinces everyone to hate everyone else and hate the incumbents.
0:37:24 But what did Trump do? He flew into the manosphere.
0:37:31 He said he basically picked the highest T podcast, whether it was Rogan or Theo Vaughn.
0:37:37 Old boys, Aiden Ross flew right into it. MSNBC, seven-year-old woman. I don’t give a shit.
0:37:45 Fox, 140-year-old men. I don’t care. I am flying straight into testosterone or testosterone. Excuse me.
0:37:48 And granted, I’m the hammer that everything I see is a nail.
0:37:55 But the second group that showed one of the biggest pivots from blue to red was 45 to 64-year-old women.
0:38:00 And I believe that that’s their mothers. But there’s just no getting around it. It was a brilliant strategy.
0:38:06 And so this is, I think this continues into this year. I think this is the year of testosterone.
0:38:13 That does it for our predictions for 2025. We do have one last prediction here from one of our listeners.
0:38:16 This is from Evan. His prediction for 2025.
0:38:22 Ed Elson creates own independent media network. Scott, your reactions to Evan’s prediction.
0:38:30 Well, sure. So there’s also a prediction that Prophetic Enterprises sues the shit out of Ed Elson.
0:38:40 Now, we’ve had such a good year in large part because of your efforts and the efforts of Claire and all of the other good folks at Prophetic.
0:38:44 And I’m not going to remember all of them. So I’m not going to try and list them all.
0:38:49 But greatness is in the agency of others. And we have just had such a wonderful year.
0:38:57 And it’s also, it’s super exciting. It’s hard time I give you. I love the fact that we’re creating more voices, especially young voices.
0:38:59 What are you, 25?
0:39:00 25.
0:39:11 I mean, think about how remarkable that is. You can’t understand, you’re going to look back on this and you’re going to think, how on earth did I not only achieve this, but also get this opportunity.
0:39:19 When I was 25, I was living at home with my mother trying to figure out if I should go to business school. And that was, that was my accomplishment.
0:39:31 You know, occasionally, you know, I mean, I got, I would occasionally, I would get like seven, seven stamps on my subway card or my subway, you know, restaurant card.
0:39:40 That was my big kind of accomplishment. It was, anyways, my point is I didn’t, I hadn’t gotten anywhere near your achievements at this age.
0:39:52 And also our, our crew is so young. And the fact that we can build a media company with so few people, it’s just been exceptionally rewarding going back to these feelings of being paternal.
0:40:01 One of the most rewarding things about 2024 for me was seeing all these young people in our organization do well and be able to pay them well because we’re in the right place at the right time and we’re executing well.
0:40:12 But I’m, I’m encouraging everybody and I’m also trying to encourage myself to stop at the end of the year and take pause and reflect on first and foremost, I don’t have ask cancer yet.
0:40:18 So that’s, that’s key, but also just how rewarding it is to work with so many talented young people who are building something.
0:40:20 I’m really, I’ve had such a wonderful year.
0:40:26 So thanks to everyone at Prop G yourself included, this has been so rewarding.
0:40:42 And Catherine, my business partner here, we just consistently, we’ve built companies together and we’re like, it’s just so rewarding to build something that’s of a similar or greater success than our other companies with like 90% less fucking brain damage and drama.
0:40:46 It’s coming. It’s coming. Once the money comes in, the drama is coming too.
0:40:52 There you go. But thank you, Ed. You’re, you’re an impressive young man. Thank you, Claire, the producer here.
0:40:58 She’s just done an amazing job. I feel so fortunate and blessed to be, people ask me, where do you get for information?
0:41:07 I’m like, I have a bunch of muses called young people I work with who inform me, update me, give me just a better view of the world.
0:41:14 But yeah, I feel very, I feel very fortunate to be in this seat and to be surrounded by so many talented young people.
0:41:24 So it’s, yeah, thank you, Scott. This has been an incredible year. I’ve loved it. And I’m very excited for 2025. I think it’s just going to be incredible.
0:41:34 I think we’re going to do amazing things. And I hope people keep listening and I hope they keep watching and I hope they tell their friends to listen to this podcast because I’ve said it to you before.
0:41:41 But I’ll say it again, I think we’ve got the best podcast on the market and I hope the audience agrees. So I’m very excited for the year ahead.
0:41:50 Word. Word, son. Word, my little brother slash stepchild I inherited from my seventh marriage.
0:41:56 This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Arsene Weiss.
0:42:04 Mia Silverio is our research lead. Jessica Lange is our research associate. Drew Burrows is our technical director. And Catherine Dillon is our executive producer.
0:42:14 Thank you for listening to ProfG Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Join us on Thursday for our conversation with Ramit Seti only on ProfG Markets.
0:42:23 Lifetimes
0:42:27 You help me
0:42:30 In kind
0:42:34 Reunion
0:42:40 As the world turns
0:42:44 And the dark lies
0:42:48 In love
0:42:56 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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0:00:33 This isn’t your grandpa’s finance podcast.
0:00:37 It’s Vivian too, your rich BFF and host of the net worth and chill podcast.
0:00:42 This is money talk that’s actually fun, actually relatable, and will actually make you money.
0:00:45 I’m breaking down investments, side hustles, and wealth strategies.
0:00:46 No boring spreadsheets.
0:00:49 Just real talk that’ll have you leveling up your financial game.
0:00:51 With amazing guests like Glenda Baker.
0:00:54 There’s never been any house that I’ve sold in the last 32 years.
0:00:57 That’s not worth more today than it was the day that I sold it.
0:01:00 This is a money podcast that you’ll actually want to listen to.
0:01:03 Follow net worth and chill wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:01:04 Your bank account will thank you later.
0:01:08 Scott, why are there so few unicorns in Europe?
0:01:10 Yeah, wow, we’re going to need a bigger boat.
0:01:12 I get asked that a lot here.
0:01:14 One, it starts with immigrants.
0:01:17 And that is the example I use on an asset in London
0:01:21 is that my father in Glasgow and my mother in London,
0:01:24 in their, you know, like when they were 19 and 23,
0:01:27 left and took a chance to come to America.
0:01:35 So risk taking a crazy idea that willing to kind of give up a good career
0:01:38 or great prospects and take a chance on a crazy idea
0:01:39 that might become crazy genius.
0:01:42 We just have more of that secret sauce than anyone in the world.
0:01:45 We have the best universities in the world.
0:01:50 I’ve said often that you can’t find a $50 billion plus company in tech
0:01:54 that isn’t a bike ride from a world-class engineering university.
0:01:55 And we have most of them.
0:02:01 You have more kind of hardball full-body contact competition
0:02:06 where the government ops for a lack of regulation
0:02:08 and capitalism over regulation.
0:02:13 We have a much greater risk appetite.
0:02:19 There’s $5 million in venture capital for every one startup in the United States.
0:02:22 And there’s $1 million for every startup in Europe.
0:02:26 And there’s five times as many entrepreneurs per capita in the United States.
0:02:29 So we’re more risk aggressive.
0:02:31 We have stronger IP.
0:02:32 We have more capital.
0:02:38 And it just kind of all adds up to what is an ecosystem
0:02:41 where there’s been more wealth created in the last 24 months
0:02:45 in a seven-mile radius of SFO International because of AI
0:02:47 than in the last 10 years in Europe.
0:02:52 These are big, big issues baked into the DNA of America.
0:02:54 And I don’t quite frankly,
0:02:57 I don’t see anything really changing in the short or the medium term.
0:03:03 Welcome to First Time Founders.
0:03:05 I’m Ed Elson.
0:03:08 The European startup scene is struggling.
0:03:13 Last year, Europe produced only seven new unicorns.
0:03:16 Meanwhile, America made 71.
0:03:20 My next guest, however, is a rare success story.
0:03:22 Born and raised in Germany,
0:03:26 he is one of the few Europeans who is leading the world in software and technology.
0:03:30 His company, valued at $13 billion,
0:03:33 is the second most valuable startup in Europe.
0:03:35 What does the company do?
0:03:38 Something called process mining.
0:03:40 And we’ll get to what that actually is in a moment.
0:03:44 This is my conversation with Alex Rinker,
0:03:46 co-founder and co-CEO of Solonis.
0:03:49 [Music]
0:03:50 Welcome, Alex.
0:03:50 Thank you for joining me.
0:03:51 Thanks for having me.
0:03:53 You came in from New York, right?
0:03:54 You’re around.
0:03:55 Came on the subway.
0:03:56 On the subway, exactly.
0:03:58 So we’ve got a lot to get into,
0:04:04 but I want to just start off with what Solonis actually is and what it does.
0:04:08 So Solonis is a process mining company.
0:04:10 And what does that mean exactly?
0:04:15 So basically, big companies hire you to do an x-ray,
0:04:17 essentially, of all of their business processes.
0:04:22 Yeah, it could be manufacturing processes or compliance processes,
0:04:25 or financial reporting processes, et cetera.
0:04:27 Any process that has multiple moving parts,
0:04:33 you come in, you visualize the process, you do that with data,
0:04:36 and you identify all of the inefficiencies in that process.
0:04:38 Have I gotten anything wrong?
0:04:40 Yeah, I think that’s where we started.
0:04:44 And we’ve built a lot more around it.
0:04:46 We call it a process intelligence platform.
0:04:48 So it doesn’t just mine the process.
0:04:50 It gives you real-time insights in it.
0:04:53 It flags when things are going wrong.
0:04:55 It helps you orchestrate and optimize processes.
0:04:57 But you captured the essence of it, 100%.
0:05:02 And it turns out that this is process mining or process intelligence,
0:05:05 a highly valuable business.
0:05:08 So you’ve worked with more than a third of the Fortune Global 500.
0:05:12 You have unlocked more than $5 billion in value for your customers.
0:05:15 And your company is now worth, or at least at its latest valuation,
0:05:20 $13 billion, which makes it the second most valuable company in Europe.
0:05:29 So my first question to you, what drew you to processes and process mining,
0:05:34 and how did you know that this was going to be such a big business opportunity?
0:05:39 So when we started, we really, it started, we got fascinated by the technology.
0:05:44 You know, we were all students at university and we didn’t know much about business processes.
0:05:49 And in some ways, when I look back, I’m happy how little we knew,
0:05:50 because we were pretty naive.
0:05:54 But one thing we didn’t know, so first we got fascinated with the technology.
0:05:57 And then we talked to some prospective clients and some, you know,
0:06:00 the university at these businesses that you could cooperate with.
0:06:04 And there was all sorts of programs at the university to work with businesses.
0:06:10 And we very quickly found out that processes are one of the most horizontal opportunities.
0:06:14 Right. They really are the fabric that run every business.
0:06:15 Yeah.
0:06:19 Right. The way you sell, I mean, the way you produce this podcast is a process.
0:06:22 Everything a business does can be described and expressed as a process.
0:06:27 So when we look at a company, whether it’s a bank or an automotive company,
0:06:29 or, you know, packaged consumer goods,
0:06:34 we look at it as a collection of interwoven and inactive processes.
0:06:36 I guess what I’d love to know a bit more about from you
0:06:41 is why companies have such a hard time with their processes.
0:06:46 Like, how is it that a company can get to a point where they,
0:06:51 they don’t even understand their own business or how their own business works.
0:06:55 And they need to hire someone like you to come in and tell them,
0:06:56 this is how your business works.
0:06:58 Like, how does a company get to that point?
0:07:00 So I have two stories about this.
0:07:01 Right. When is the story how it happened?
0:07:03 And then the story how we found out about it.
0:07:06 So the first is the story how it happened is very simple.
0:07:09 So my grandfather, you know, he was a farmer,
0:07:13 and he grew up as a farmer and then he had a potato trading business.
0:07:16 He just passed away at 96 years old.
0:07:17 So, you know, he got pretty old.
0:07:21 So back in the day, you could see the whole process, right?
0:07:23 You would go there, you could see how the potatoes coming,
0:07:25 trucks coming in, everything being sorted, it’s going out.
0:07:29 You know, and if there was an issue, you could see it and quickly fix it.
0:07:32 But then obviously companies grew much, much bigger than that.
0:07:35 And you had ERP systems, you know, people said,
0:07:39 hey, we want to digitize our processes in ERP systems.
0:07:44 In many ways, these ERP systems, our processes had to fit these systems.
0:07:47 So we had to like fit our processes into these systems,
0:07:49 which generated quite a bit of friction.
0:07:52 And then you had more and more systems come along.
0:07:55 So it doesn’t just stay with the ERP system, like SAP and Oracle.
0:08:00 You had CIM coming along, you had the cloud revolution, you know.
0:08:01 So you had CIM systems coming along.
0:08:06 And you had a lot of cloud applications, HR, IT service management.
0:08:09 So over time, we added more and more systems.
0:08:13 This really happened from the, you know, in the last 50 years,
0:08:16 you know, sort of from the 70s, 80s, all the way to today.
0:08:20 And now companies have, you know, they have an ERP system.
0:08:26 And I think on average, big companies over 250 core systems that operate
0:08:30 the different parts of their business, supply chain, HR, finance,
0:08:34 you know, inventory, warehouse management, you know, all sorts of processes.
0:08:36 Banks, I mean, when I talk to our big banking clients,
0:08:39 they have thousands, they’re even more complex.
0:08:45 And in many ways, our processes had to sort of be stitched together
0:08:46 across all these systems.
0:08:48 And then you have changing products, you have globalization,
0:08:49 you have acquisitions.
0:08:52 So over time, these businesses tend to get quite complex
0:08:54 and you can’t see the process anymore because it’s in systems,
0:08:56 not like with my grandfather, we could see it.
0:09:00 And in many ways, we also had to change our organizations,
0:09:02 our processes to accommodate the way these systems were set up.
0:09:05 So companies have a huge opportunity.
0:09:08 We say that every process out there is waiting to be optimized.
0:09:09 Yeah.
0:09:13 And now with AI coming in, you’re going to have a huge wave
0:09:15 of what we call process re-engineering.
0:09:19 Because you want to reimagine your processes in the age of AI
0:09:21 and we can talk about how we think it’s going to play out
0:09:23 and how we see it playing out.
0:09:26 The story of how we found out about it is also quite interesting.
0:09:30 So when we started, we actually thought the same as you.
0:09:33 We thought, well, process mining is kind of an interesting technology,
0:09:35 but that’s a little bit boring.
0:09:36 We’re excited about processes.
0:09:40 But we said, well, but if we could simulate processes,
0:09:41 so if we could basically take the mining
0:09:44 and then build simulation models where people then could say,
0:09:48 hey, if I hire like five people here, or if I automate this,
0:09:49 you know, how does it change?
0:09:53 And we built a simulation product that was based on process mining.
0:09:54 We took that to market.
0:09:57 It didn’t work because it was way ahead of its time.
0:10:00 So we were about ready to give up until someone said,
0:10:03 you know, we explained how technology works.
0:10:05 And they said, well, this process visibility part,
0:10:06 that’s really interesting, right?
0:10:07 That’s where I would like to start.
0:10:08 Right.
0:10:10 And even though we do way more today, it’s like,
0:10:12 we really found out, and there was a home run,
0:10:15 that people need that x-ray of understanding exactly
0:10:17 how their processes operate.
0:10:20 What’s like the worst process you’ve ever seen?
0:10:24 Like you go to a client and you look at how they do anything,
0:10:26 whatever it is, and you’re like, oh my God,
0:10:28 this is the slowest, most inefficient,
0:10:29 most ridiculous process I’ve ever seen.
0:10:32 You don’t have to name them by name.
0:10:36 So often, very successful companies,
0:10:37 it’s very high margin,
0:10:39 actually don’t have very efficient processes, right?
0:10:40 So you have that.
0:10:42 I mean, we’ve seen crazy stories.
0:10:46 One of our clients found out that they paid hundreds of millions
0:10:48 worth of invoices twice.
0:10:50 Okay.
0:10:52 By the way, a lot of clients do that.
0:10:54 Usually it’s more than millions to tens of millions,
0:10:55 what you can save.
0:10:57 But one, it’s in the hundreds.
0:10:58 It happens in every company.
0:11:02 If you don’t have a system, you get an invoice,
0:11:04 someone gets a copy, maybe it gets into the system
0:11:06 with slightly different data.
0:11:09 You’re from the UK, so the date format is different in the US.
0:11:11 So people type it the wrong way,
0:11:12 and someone gets in the system twice,
0:11:14 system thinks it’s two invoices, gets paid twice.
0:11:19 So that’s just one example of a process that’s ridiculous.
0:11:21 But it happens.
0:11:22 We see a lot of friction,
0:11:24 or where companies really pay attention
0:11:26 is friction in customer-facing processes.
0:11:30 Like, if it takes you days to book an order,
0:11:32 we had one client once
0:11:34 that was in a complex business to be fair,
0:11:37 but they on average changed the date
0:11:39 that they confirmed to the customer 13 times.
0:11:40 Wow.
0:11:41 So imagine that, right?
0:11:43 I mean, they were very successful companies.
0:11:44 So their products were so unique that customers
0:11:46 would put up with it.
0:11:47 We helped them fix it.
0:11:50 But imagine on Amazon, you get on average 13 emails.
0:11:51 It’s like, “No, we’re not coming on Monday,
0:11:52 we’re coming Tuesday.”
0:11:52 You sometimes get those emails,
0:11:54 but you don’t get them 13 times on average.
0:11:59 You know, we have lots of customers that shipped products,
0:12:00 but never invoiced them, right?
0:12:02 So they had revenue leakage
0:12:04 because they shipped products that they never invoiced.
0:12:08 We have lots of customers that negotiate contracts
0:12:09 with their suppliers,
0:12:12 but then they actually don’t take advantage of them.
0:12:13 So they buy off of prices
0:12:15 that actually higher than what they negotiated.
0:12:16 Yeah.
0:12:19 So it’s like, you know, it’s a really exciting space
0:12:20 because you can see the impact.
0:12:21 And what’s particularly exciting,
0:12:24 you know, we do projects with Northwestern Medicine.
0:12:26 They are looking at, you know,
0:12:28 as patients go through the imaging,
0:12:31 like a mammography or other imaging techniques,
0:12:32 how long is the wait time?
0:12:33 How can we cut that cycle time down?
0:12:36 How can we make sure that we get it right the first time?
0:12:38 What do the drop-off rates look like, right?
0:12:41 How can we release patients out of the hospital
0:12:43 faster? How can we move them through faster?
0:12:44 So they started with in-finance and procurement,
0:12:47 but they moved into the core medical operations.
0:12:49 We have customers with a lot of government customers.
0:12:51 Now we’re talking about government efficiency.
0:12:56 So, you know, we saved the state of Oklahoma,
0:12:59 for example, I helped them as they came in and said,
0:13:01 “We want to really understand how are we spending money
0:13:04 and where’s money, taxpayer money going out the door?”
0:13:06 And they were able to save taxpayer dollars
0:13:08 and get more transparency into that process.
0:13:11 So we work with increasing amount of government agency
0:13:14 and we’re excited about how we can, you know,
0:13:17 make sure that government takes better care of taxpayer money.
0:13:22 So there is, you know, no shortage of opportunities.
0:13:26 Ten years ago, this is probably the most boring concept ever,
0:13:28 but suddenly it’s very exciting to people.
0:13:32 And I think a lot of it is because of the renewed interest
0:13:35 in government waste and just the fact that people are so upset
0:13:37 about the idea that we don’t have transparency
0:13:39 into how our government really works.
0:13:41 We don’t know where our money really goes.
0:13:44 And now we’ve got Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy
0:13:46 heading up the Department of Government Efficiency,
0:13:49 which is like the biggest thing in the news right now
0:13:51 when it comes to government.
0:13:53 So you’re kind of at the forefront of that.
0:13:57 Do you think you’d ever work with Doge,
0:13:58 the Department of Government Efficiency?
0:14:03 Is that kind of like the sort of golden use case for Salonis?
0:14:04 Well, we hope so, right?
0:14:05 And it’s not just Doge.
0:14:07 Doge is really facilitating it.
0:14:10 It’s the agencies on the federal level, the states,
0:14:12 and it’s really governments around the world
0:14:16 that I think have a very strong interest.
0:14:20 I mean, with high inflation, with increasing debt,
0:14:21 I think everybody has an interest
0:14:24 to make sure that government money is spent transparently,
0:14:27 efficiently, the same way businesses do.
0:14:29 I think everybody can get more efficient.
0:14:32 It’s the same way that humans always get better.
0:14:35 And the starting points are different for sure,
0:14:38 but often actually the best organizations,
0:14:42 you know, if you want to get better,
0:14:43 if you’re already good,
0:14:45 you need the best and most sophisticated systems, right?
0:14:47 So it’s not that I would say
0:14:48 we work with inefficient companies,
0:14:50 we work with everybody.
0:14:53 And I think that everybody has an opportunity to get better.
0:14:55 So you’ve seen how these processes work.
0:14:58 You’ve probably seen more inefficiencies
0:15:00 than basically anyone in the world.
0:15:00 Yes.
0:15:05 So I feel like you are well positioned to take a good guess
0:15:09 at what is inefficient in the government right now.
0:15:12 I know you haven’t done an x-ray of it,
0:15:16 but if you were to do an audit of the US government,
0:15:18 what would you think are the big problems
0:15:20 that need to be streamlined right now?
0:15:22 Well, I think one, you know,
0:15:24 because you also want to drive impact quickly, right?
0:15:25 So if you want to drive impact quickly,
0:15:27 the first thing you focus on is where money goes out of the door.
0:15:28 Yeah.
0:15:29 Right? So you look at procurement,
0:15:32 you look at invoicing, you look at the controls around that,
0:15:34 all the money flows that go out of the door,
0:15:37 how can we make them more transparent, right?
0:15:43 Where do we maybe have things that we don’t intend to happen like that,
0:15:44 where is potential fraud happening?
0:15:46 How can we increase the accountability of that?
0:15:48 And that’s a complex thing because, you know,
0:15:51 on the federal level and then even on the state level,
0:15:52 you have multiple payment systems.
0:15:54 You have like, you know, hundreds of billions
0:15:56 going out of the door of the government every year.
0:15:58 So I think that’s where I would probably start.
0:15:58 Yeah.
0:16:00 But then you can get into everything else.
0:16:02 I mean, you can get into labor efficiency,
0:16:06 you can get into the efficiency of the core processes of servicing,
0:16:11 you know, the citizens really, in every single department, right?
0:16:16 So you can get into really the corporations of these agencies
0:16:19 that provide these services, right?
0:16:19 Yeah.
0:16:23 Whether it’s you pick up your new driver’s license or you hand in your tax return or,
0:16:27 you know, you can imagine the kind of use cases, right?
0:16:29 As a citizen, you can really go anywhere.
0:16:39 We’ll be right back.
0:16:47 Why do so many of us get happiness wrong?
0:16:49 And how can we start to get it right?
0:16:54 I mean, I think we assume that happiness is about positive emotion on all the time,
0:16:54 right?
0:16:58 Often very high arousal, positive emotion, but that’s not really what we’re talking about.
0:17:00 I’m Preet Bharara.
0:17:03 And this week, Dr. Laurie Santos joins me on my podcast,
0:17:07 Stay Tuned with Preet, to discuss the science behind happiness.
0:17:11 We explore job crafting, the parenting paradox, the arrival fallacy,
0:17:15 and why acts of kindness might be the simplest path to fulfillment.
0:17:18 The episode is out now.
0:17:23 Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts.
0:17:31 We’re back with First Time Founders.
0:17:35 What would you say makes a good process?
0:17:37 I think about this a lot in my work.
0:17:42 I mean, I don’t have massive payment system processes,
0:17:45 but, you know, we write scripts and we work as a team
0:17:47 and we got to figure out how we produce this podcast.
0:17:52 And I find that there are often just processes I just don’t like.
0:17:56 Like they just feel awkward, slow, they irritate me,
0:18:00 but I’m never fully sure how to address that.
0:18:02 Like, you know, sometimes I’ll just be like,
0:18:06 “Oh, let’s have a meeting and like figure out how to make this better.”
0:18:09 But then even that makes it worse because then we start nitpicking everything
0:18:11 and it takes like an hour to have the meeting.
0:18:13 And then it’s like, it’s even worse.
0:18:17 So I guess from your perspective, what is a reliable way
0:18:20 to make a process within an organization better?
0:18:23 It’s a lifestyle that you have to embed.
0:18:30 I think what some people think, it’s like they’re too on and off about it, right?
0:18:33 So you should point like, “Let’s get a meeting, fix this process,
0:18:35 and then never talk about it again.”
0:18:36 That usually doesn’t work.
0:18:39 It’s more about how do you get 1% better every week.
0:18:43 So, you know, one of the things I always tell our teams is,
0:18:44 you know, we’re really selling a lifestyle
0:18:47 and the lifestyle is called continuous operational improvement.
0:18:50 How do you get better all the time?
0:18:51 How do you find these increments?
0:18:56 It’s like there’s little changes that add up to really ultimately a revolution, right?
0:18:58 That’s really how you have to think about it.
0:19:03 And you know, the one thing that, who really figured this out initially
0:19:06 where the, you know, the whole culture of the Toyota Quality Management System,
0:19:10 Kaizen, and optimizing manufacturing processes.
0:19:14 Because manufacturing processes is like, you need perfect quality.
0:19:15 It’s very expensive if you screw something up.
0:19:18 Like if you have a car and you’re missing one little screw.
0:19:21 The whole production line stops.
0:19:28 Okay? So, you know, those companies invented this Kaizen lifestyle, right?
0:19:31 And that’s really not from a technology standpoint,
0:19:33 but culturally what we are evangelizing.
0:19:38 And when you think about it, now with AI, that is exactly what companies need.
0:19:40 Every company needs to embrace this.
0:19:43 I’m like 100% convinced because the way AI is going to manifest,
0:19:46 you’re not going to have this like one AI system.
0:19:49 You’re going to have lots of agents in your processes.
0:19:52 So a company is going to have, I don’t know,
0:19:55 100,000 employees and 100,000 agents, right?
0:20:01 And these agents are going to automate little processes and things and tasks
0:20:04 so that ultimately the whole organization is much more efficient.
0:20:07 You know, one person is going to have way, way more impact
0:20:08 and it’s going to do way more.
0:20:11 And in order to do this, if you think of each of this agent,
0:20:13 it’s a small process change, right?
0:20:16 And you’re not going to do that overnight.
0:20:20 And you’re not going to do this with one big bang or one year sprint.
0:20:24 You’re going to do this by implementing this tool set,
0:20:27 educating the organization to really promoting this as a lifestyle
0:20:30 where people are constantly automating, constantly optimizing,
0:20:33 constantly embedding AI into what they do.
0:20:37 And then two, three years later, they’re going to be way more efficient than before.
0:20:38 That’s how it’s going to work.
0:20:40 Are you doing that within your own company as well?
0:20:45 Are you employing AI agents to automate the processes within Solonis itself?
0:20:48 We have a big Solonis for Solonis program
0:20:50 and that’s exactly how we approach it, right?
0:20:53 How do we get better every day, right?
0:20:56 Like how do we make our customer experience better?
0:20:57 How do we make our customer onboarding better?
0:21:00 How do we make our customer support better?
0:21:01 How do we really embed those?
0:21:04 Supposedly for us, it’s changing because we’re growing so fast
0:21:08 and we have grown so fast that sometimes you take the eye of the ball
0:21:10 even though you are the process company,
0:21:12 you take the eye of the ball.
0:21:14 So it’s something we constantly remind ourselves and go back to.
0:21:17 I feel like this could be an entire sector or a department.
0:21:21 Like I feel like we’re going to see like chief process officers or something, right?
0:21:25 We already see this that organizations are moving from like very functional organizations.
0:21:29 Like think about like the process of getting a lead,
0:21:34 converting it into an opportunity, selling your product,
0:21:38 shipping your product, maybe manufacturing it and then billing it.
0:21:39 It’s called lead to cash, okay?
0:21:40 It’s a very important process.
0:21:45 So today you have like a sales development team, you have a sales team,
0:21:49 you have an engineering team, you have a post sales team,
0:21:51 you have deployments, you have invoicing.
0:21:54 So it’s like seven different departments or so that are involved in this.
0:21:59 And what we see already is that people are embedding process owners.
0:22:02 So chief process owners or you know,
0:22:04 call them different ways, enterprise process owners.
0:22:06 And for end-to-end processes.
0:22:08 So what already a lot of companies are doing
0:22:11 is that they’re moving from a very functional structure
0:22:13 to more of a process-centric structure of the organization.
0:22:16 And AI can automate more of those process tasks.
0:22:18 That makes a lot more sense, right?
0:22:20 So that you can really look at this end-to-end
0:22:22 and say, what’s our customer experience?
0:22:23 End-to-end.
0:22:27 Because if you know, I send them the wrong invoice
0:22:29 or I provision the thing that they haven’t bought,
0:22:32 like that’s those breakpoints really hurt the customer experience, right?
0:22:35 Customer experience is an outcome of a process,
0:22:36 it’s not just your product.
0:22:40 So we see already that companies are sort of pivoting the arc charts
0:22:42 towards more of these process-centric structures.
0:22:47 Hearing you talk about this, you sound both your accent,
0:22:49 but also your philosophy, very German.
0:22:56 You do, I mean, the attention to detail,
0:23:01 the obsession with order, process, structure,
0:23:04 it does not feel, you’re not like an American cowboy,
0:23:06 you’re like an attention to detailed German.
0:23:09 And I want to talk about that,
0:23:11 or I’d like for you to talk about that,
0:23:13 because we’ve been talking about this a little bit on our podcast,
0:23:18 where in Germany, there is a dearth of entrepreneurship,
0:23:21 but that’s also true of Europe in general.
0:23:23 And I’m just going to go through a couple of stats here.
0:23:27 There are 760 unicorns in the US,
0:23:30 and there are only 130 unicorns in Europe.
0:23:32 Salonis is the second largest of all of those.
0:23:35 On a per capita basis,
0:23:38 the US has 13 times more unicorns than Europe.
0:23:41 And when we look at the US stock market,
0:23:44 the US stock market is now three times larger
0:23:46 than the European stock market.
0:23:49 And back in 2010, it was only one and a half times larger.
0:23:50 So the gap is growing.
0:23:54 Why do you think Europe is struggling so much
0:23:59 to build new successful companies such as Salonis?
0:24:03 I think the primary reason is the venture capital infrastructure.
0:24:05 I think it’s gotten a lot better,
0:24:09 but the structure around risk capital in the US
0:24:11 is absolutely phenomenal.
0:24:16 In the US, companies that have a 10% chance of working out
0:24:20 can raise $30 million seed rounds.
0:24:21 Correct.
0:24:22 Right, think about that.
0:24:24 So people are willing to give a team
0:24:26 that doesn’t even have a product yet,
0:24:27 $30 million.
0:24:31 And maybe it has a 1% chance of working.
0:24:32 Right.
0:24:35 But there’s so much capital that goes into technology
0:24:38 and emerging companies that sort of on the whole,
0:24:39 that system works, right?
0:24:42 At least some people are more successful than others,
0:24:45 but on a whole, that’s an incredible infrastructure
0:24:46 that doesn’t exist in Europe.
0:24:49 In Europe, you have an increasing amount of venture capital.
0:24:50 But for example, when we started,
0:24:53 we bootstrapped for almost six years.
0:24:54 Yeah.
0:24:55 With no funding.
0:24:57 And part of that because there wasn’t
0:25:00 enterprise-oriented venture capital infrastructure,
0:25:02 and the few VCs that were there said,
0:25:05 “Oh, early 20s, you’re too young to start a B2B business.”
0:25:06 Thank you.
0:25:09 And then we were fine bootstrapping,
0:25:11 but that doesn’t work for every company.
0:25:14 So I think that that is the primary reason.
0:25:16 I think there are other reasons, obviously,
0:25:19 you have a huge domestic market, so that helps.
0:25:21 I think you have a very entrepreneurial culture,
0:25:23 a very good culture on failure.
0:25:26 But look, people talk about the entrepreneurial culture in the U.S.
0:25:30 I mean, companies were started in Europe, right?
0:25:33 BMW was started in Germany, right?
0:25:35 There was an entrepreneur there that wasn’t afraid of failing.
0:25:38 And it’s like, I think that the cultural differences
0:25:41 are not the biggest deal.
0:25:43 I think there’s tremendous amount of entrepreneurial history
0:25:44 and heritage in Europe,
0:25:47 and tremendous amount of great talent.
0:25:50 You have a pretty strong education system.
0:25:52 I think the top European schools are just as good
0:25:54 as the top U.S. schools.
0:25:57 I think, and you can actually say that in Europe,
0:25:59 education is more affordable, more accessible for people.
0:26:03 So I think that the infrastructure around education,
0:26:05 the talent in Europe is actually quite phenomenal.
0:26:08 Could certainly be improved a lot,
0:26:09 but I think that’s not the primary reason.
0:26:11 I think the primary reason is that
0:26:15 the venture capital infrastructure is so much less developed.
0:26:18 And for technology companies in particular,
0:26:20 you need capital, right?
0:26:21 It’s a capital-intensive business.
0:26:24 Now with AIs even, in some ways, more capital-intensive.
0:26:26 And I think that’s the biggest gap.
0:26:28 And obviously, because we didn’t have that,
0:26:34 you then have the issue that a lot of, you know,
0:26:35 you are really behind.
0:26:38 So for example, out of Salonis,
0:26:40 you know, I get calls every month
0:26:42 from former Salonis who is starting a company.
0:26:46 I just actually put an angel check into one of them.
0:26:48 And there’s great companies there, right?
0:26:50 I know many of them will work out, right?
0:26:54 But that obviously these successes feed the next successes.
0:26:56 And because we didn’t have that as much of that,
0:26:59 you know, the US gets further and further ahead.
0:27:03 I am bullish on Europe from an entrepreneurial ecosystem
0:27:04 because of the talent.
0:27:06 Quality of life is very high.
0:27:07 I think people want to live there.
0:27:09 I think people from all over the world
0:27:11 still a very attractive place.
0:27:13 So I think Europe has a lot of opportunities.
0:27:15 If Europe is able to use them,
0:27:16 I think there’s a lot ahead.
0:27:19 But I would say the capital infrastructure is the main gap.
0:27:23 I feel like another way to say this is America’s rich.
0:27:27 And the reason I bring that up is because
0:27:30 those guys who are down to put in a $30 million check
0:27:36 for a company that has maybe a one to five percent chance of success,
0:27:38 I feel like the only guys who can do that
0:27:42 are the mega mega billionaires or the mega funds
0:27:45 who can make these bets.
0:27:47 And I’m starting to think maybe it’s just
0:27:50 we’re like a little too comfortable in America.
0:27:52 I think America’s rich for sure.
0:27:53 But Europe is actually also quite rich.
0:27:57 So for example, in Germany, there’s a lot of wealth.
0:28:01 But that wealth isn’t going into risk capital.
0:28:01 Right.
0:28:04 So for example, if you have a pension in the US,
0:28:06 there’s a high likelihood that a portion of that
0:28:08 goes into the top VC funds.
0:28:11 If you ask like the top VC funds who are your investors,
0:28:13 they will say it’s a pension fund.
0:28:14 The teachers, yeah.
0:28:14 Yeah, exactly.
0:28:15 It teaches pension, right?
0:28:16 Right.
0:28:19 In Germany, that actually used to be forbidden.
0:28:22 Pension funds couldn’t invest in risk capital.
0:28:22 Right.
0:28:24 Now they can like a very small percentage.
0:28:28 I think there’s some changes, but it’s a whole different scale.
0:28:32 So actually Europe historically was, you know,
0:28:34 I think we’re falling behind more and more.
0:28:36 But there’s a lot of wealth in Europe
0:28:39 that could be directed towards risk asset classes that just hasn’t.
0:28:42 There are two starts about Germany’s economy,
0:28:43 which I find really interesting.
0:28:45 And I think kind of illustrate your point.
0:28:48 The first is public infrastructure spending,
0:28:51 which is two and a half percent of GDP,
0:28:53 which is one of the lowest rates in the world.
0:28:56 And the second is the debt to GDP ratio, which is 60%,
0:29:00 which is significantly lower than the rest of the G7,
0:29:02 certainly way lower than the US.
0:29:06 And I feel like that is a good illustration
0:29:08 of where Germans heads are at,
0:29:10 which is they’re very afraid of spending
0:29:12 and also very afraid of debt.
0:29:16 And it does paint this overall economic picture of like,
0:29:19 they’re just not willing to take risks.
0:29:22 And I feel like that’s sort of reflected in the VC environment,
0:29:25 where it feels like the entire setup of the German economy is like,
0:29:28 we’re afraid that something might break.
0:29:30 So we want to play it really, really safe.
0:29:33 We’re not going to go out and over leverage ourselves.
0:29:36 And maybe we’re not going to go out
0:29:39 and make bets on young companies that might not succeed.
0:29:40 That’s what everybody says.
0:29:41 I don’t know if I totally agree.
0:29:45 I think when you think about the founder’s epoch in Europe
0:29:48 and particularly Germany, there was a tremendous amount of risk taking.
0:29:50 You look at Siemens, you look at BMW, you look at BSF.
0:29:52 A lot of those companies actually got started
0:29:55 within a reasonably short time window.
0:30:02 So it’s not that like the cultural heritage is totally risk avoiding.
0:30:05 Certainly there’s a different culture around risk,
0:30:08 which starts not necessarily all bad, right?
0:30:11 I mean, some of the good US companies, they took risks,
0:30:15 but they were also built on solid principles of entrepreneurship.
0:30:17 So I wouldn’t expect Germany to have been the leader
0:30:19 in the early days of the crypto industry or something like that.
0:30:20 That is certainly true.
0:30:22 There’s a more conservative mindset.
0:30:24 But if you think about deep technology,
0:30:25 where you need to make long-term bets,
0:30:28 you need to have an engineering-driven mindset,
0:30:31 I think that Germany actually has a great heritage on that.
0:30:33 And there is a lot of risk taking.
0:30:38 I think that the system didn’t enable it.
0:30:40 Like if you say, “Hey, we can’t invest any of our pensions
0:30:41 in the venture capital.”
0:30:43 How would you expect the venture capital industry to work?
0:30:48 So it’s not that there’s like 80 something million people
0:30:50 that are afraid to take risks.
0:30:54 I think there’s a system that didn’t encourage people
0:30:59 to invest money into ventures and technology ventures.
0:31:03 And I think that is the primary challenge.
0:31:05 I mean, SAP was bootstrapped too, right?
0:31:06 And it’s been a long time ago.
0:31:09 Obviously, that was a different time, right?
0:31:10 Venture capital wasn’t the thing then.
0:31:16 But still, I mean, that was the last German big technology company
0:31:18 that went public and went on to be successful.
0:31:22 And there hasn’t been any really big successes since.
0:31:23 Yeah.
0:31:26 It’s like SAP and then a bunch of core companies basically, right?
0:31:27 Yeah, exactly.
0:31:29 And I mean, the car companies got started way, way earlier, right?
0:31:30 Right.
0:31:34 So, you know, hopefully that changes.
0:31:40 But I think the culture and attitude also has strength.
0:31:41 I don’t think that’s the main reason.
0:31:45 I think the system is to blame in other European countries too.
0:31:48 I want to talk about how you built this company.
0:31:50 So you started the company in 2011.
0:31:53 As you mentioned, you spent the first five years bootstrapping.
0:31:55 So you did not raise any outside funding.
0:31:58 Briefly walk us through how you bootstrapped.
0:32:02 And I’d love to know if you would do it again, given the choice.
0:32:05 You know, it was a pretty intense period.
0:32:10 Like you have to be pretty hardcore to which we had $12,500 when we started.
0:32:16 You actually have to form a limited liability company in Germany
0:32:17 to guarantee $25,000.
0:32:20 So we had to promise another $12,500.
0:32:21 But you only have to put up half of it.
0:32:23 So the other half at that time–
0:32:25 Is that the same in America?
0:32:27 No, you can start with $1.
0:32:28 They’ve changed the system in Germany.
0:32:29 You can also start it with that.
0:32:31 By the way, that’s another great example
0:32:32 of what we were just talking about.
0:32:33 Exactly, that’s fair.
0:32:36 In the US, it’s like 500 bucks for the lawyers or whatever.
0:32:40 And you’ve got a Delaware, Ingo, whatever you want.
0:32:40 So you’re right.
0:32:43 So we had $12,500.
0:32:47 And we literally we slept in the car.
0:32:52 We drove around in an old Opel that was my co-phoners.
0:32:53 And we pitched clients.
0:32:55 The good thing of it was it really enforced focus
0:32:56 on the customer.
0:33:01 Because if clients were willing to sign up for salons,
0:33:04 we wouldn’t have any revenue to pay employees
0:33:04 and build the business.
0:33:06 We sent out handwritten letters to people
0:33:10 because we figured out if they get a regular letter,
0:33:11 the assistant throws it away.
0:33:12 But if they get a handwritten letter,
0:33:17 it could be the grandmother or husband or wife or whatever.
0:33:19 So those letters actually got opened.
0:33:22 And when you got a letter from us, it was a great gift
0:33:23 because you got a voucher for free demo.
0:33:25 How generous was that?
0:33:28 So some people actually filled out the voucher
0:33:30 and got a free demo from us.
0:33:33 And we really, I think in the early days,
0:33:36 just really focused on our customers, signing up customers
0:33:39 and then continuously building and iterating on the product
0:33:41 to make those customers happy and grow with us.
0:33:43 And the good news is in our business,
0:33:45 which is focused on enterprise,
0:33:50 you can, if you lend 100 customers, that’s a lot, right?
0:33:52 Whereas, and you get bigger contracts.
0:33:54 So you can actually work in that mode.
0:33:56 I think if you start a consumer business,
0:33:58 so it’s very hard to bootstrap that.
0:34:00 It’s been done, but it’s much, much harder, right?
0:34:02 Because you don’t get these bigger contracts
0:34:04 from your customers.
0:34:06 And then in 2016, we decided,
0:34:08 hey, we really want to take on the US market.
0:34:11 It was actually, a lot of European companies,
0:34:13 when they start in Germany and then go to France,
0:34:14 and then they go to Spain,
0:34:17 and then they go to wherever, UK or whatever.
0:34:19 We said, well, if we’re going international,
0:34:20 we’re going on to the US.
0:34:23 Obviously, then we also went into other countries in Europe,
0:34:24 but we said the first market,
0:34:27 we’re really going to take on as the US market.
0:34:30 So we went to the US and started the business here.
0:34:33 And we figured out it might make sense
0:34:35 to raise some venture funding to do that.
0:34:38 So we raised venture funding partly for the funding
0:34:39 and partly because of the network
0:34:41 that we could get through those VCs.
0:34:43 Yeah, I just want to go through the fundraising.
0:34:46 So you raised 28 million in your first round in 2016,
0:34:49 two years later, 50 million in your Series B,
0:34:52 a year after that, 290 million,
0:34:56 and then later you raised a billion in your Series D.
0:34:59 So you’re kind of a prolific fundraiser at this point.
0:35:03 Is there anything you’ve learned about fundraising?
0:35:04 I mean, you’ve experienced both sides.
0:35:07 I mean, you bootstrapped, you built the business,
0:35:08 and then you went out there
0:35:12 and you did the elevator pitch and raised a bunch of money.
0:35:15 What are some of the learnings that you’ve taken away
0:35:16 about fundraising?
0:35:18 What makes a really good fundraiser?
0:35:21 One thing that’s really important is to have alignment
0:35:24 with your investors on what the journey looks like,
0:35:26 what you want to do, find the right investors
0:35:30 that are really not just excited about the business opportunity
0:35:32 but also excited about the impact that you can create.
0:35:34 We say we make processes work for people,
0:35:36 for companies, and for the planet.
0:35:38 And that’s a really important mission, right?
0:35:40 I mean, I think I’m converting you
0:35:43 into a process evangelist a little bit here, I hope so at least.
0:35:45 And because you realize how important this is, right?
0:35:47 It’s patients in the hospitals.
0:35:48 It’s customer experience.
0:35:50 It’s citizens and their services.
0:35:52 It’s the work that people do every day.
0:35:53 You get frustrated.
0:35:54 Imagine how frustrated you would get
0:35:57 if you were in a higher transactional environment.
0:35:59 I get frustrated cooking breakfast in the morning.
0:36:01 Exactly, you know, you get frustrated with processes.
0:36:05 Imagine if you had to run a UPS logistics hub
0:36:06 or something like that, right?
0:36:08 I’ll stick to talking on a microphone, yeah.
0:36:10 Exactly, but you know, it’s…
0:36:12 So I think you want people excited about what you do
0:36:15 and really bought into whatever your plan is for the future.
0:36:17 And then I think you need to explain your story
0:36:19 in a way that investors can adjust, right?
0:36:21 So you need to talk to investors differently
0:36:22 than you talk to customers.
0:36:23 It’s a different audience.
0:36:26 Then I think you need to also make sure
0:36:29 that you bring your customer proof points, right?
0:36:31 I think that investors are, first of all,
0:36:32 they’re going to call your customers, right?
0:36:34 So that’s clear.
0:36:38 And then you need to really make sure that you have alignment
0:36:41 and set, create the right setup.
0:36:42 I think that’s extremely important.
0:36:43 It’s not just about the money you raise.
0:36:45 It’s a lot about the setup you create
0:36:49 that allows you to really go and be successful afterwards.
0:36:52 We’ll be right back.
0:37:06 We’re back with First Time Founders.
0:37:10 I love the way you say how it’s like, it’s a different audience.
0:37:12 If the customers are one audience,
0:37:14 the investors are another audience.
0:37:19 And I feel like that encapsulates well
0:37:22 how building a company is in a lot of ways like a performance.
0:37:24 Like your job is to kind of put on,
0:37:26 I mean, the handwritten letters,
0:37:28 you’re going to put on a show for the customers
0:37:32 and demonstrate, you know, I know what you like.
0:37:35 You know, I know you want someone who’s taking care
0:37:38 and taking the time out of their day to write this thing.
0:37:43 And we need to know if you see being a CEO as that,
0:37:46 because we talk a lot about that on our podcast.
0:37:50 The way, you know, you’re presenting an image
0:37:52 and you’ve got to spend a lot of time thinking,
0:37:57 you know, what kind of story does the audience want to hear?
0:38:00 Is that something you think about a lot?
0:38:04 I used to think about it more than I do, actually.
0:38:08 I think that the most important thing is that you’re authentic.
0:38:10 And people really feel that.
0:38:14 So I think you need to think about the impact you want to create
0:38:18 and the type of change you want to drive and the mission you have.
0:38:20 And then you need to obviously communicate that
0:38:23 in a simple way that people can understand.
0:38:26 So you can’t, you know, if you’re very technical,
0:38:28 then often people have the tendency to be too technically certain.
0:38:30 So you have to work on storytelling.
0:38:30 Yeah.
0:38:32 But I don’t think it’s a performance.
0:38:35 I think it’s something that you’re really passionate about.
0:38:38 And that you really believe in.
0:38:41 And then, you know, as an actor,
0:38:44 I don’t have to necessarily believe in, you know,
0:38:46 if I’m a good actor, I can play any role, right?
0:38:47 Right.
0:38:52 But so in a way, it’s really a mission where you say,
0:38:56 “Hey, I really have this belief and I’m going to gather
0:38:59 more and more people with me on this journey.”
0:39:01 And that’s why I think it’s so exciting about Salonis
0:39:04 for customers that really embed Salonis into the operations.
0:39:05 They get so much better.
0:39:07 I talked about some of those examples.
0:39:12 And they embrace this as a lifestyle, right?
0:39:15 They suddenly don’t just think about their P&L statement.
0:39:16 They think about their process health
0:39:18 and how they can optimize their processes.
0:39:21 How do these outcomes affect customers?
0:39:23 How do these outcomes affect financial outcomes?
0:39:25 How do these outcomes affect our employees?
0:39:29 So it’s a, we are changing the way companies run and operate.
0:39:33 And I think that the, you know, when you attract people,
0:39:36 I mean a lot, a big part of the CEO is recruiting, right?
0:39:38 You want to attract people that are aligned with that.
0:39:44 You know, you want to attract missionaries, not mercenaries, okay?
0:39:46 You want to attract people that are going to wake up in the morning
0:39:48 and be passionate about this, right?
0:39:50 So in a way, you evangelize, right?
0:39:54 And I think as a startup founder, you’re always evangelizing.
0:39:57 You’re always communicating and expanding,
0:39:59 but you need to do it not to put on a show,
0:40:01 but because of what’s in your heart,
0:40:03 what you really believe, right?
0:40:04 And what gets you excited.
0:40:08 You also don’t do it from a purely financial perspective.
0:40:10 Of course, financial is important
0:40:12 and it’s important to make all your stakeholders successful,
0:40:14 your investors, your employees, et cetera.
0:40:16 But that’s not enough, right?
0:40:17 You need to have a bigger mission that you really believe.
0:40:19 And I think that otherwise you’re just not going to persevere.
0:40:22 It’s very hard to start a company and to be successful.
0:40:24 You’re not of a thousand companies that start.
0:40:25 Maybe one is successful.
0:40:27 I don’t know the exact numbers, but you know, it’s not, not a lot.
0:40:31 And I think it’s not because the thousands were bad ideas.
0:40:33 There’s probably a few hundred bad ideas,
0:40:35 but there’s also a few hundred good ones.
0:40:38 But it’s the perseverance you have, really sticking with it
0:40:42 and waking up every day and doing it, right?
0:40:45 And I think that starts with passion and belief.
0:40:48 Yeah, it’s basically like who can last the longest
0:40:49 at a certain point.
0:40:52 I feel like if you’re only in it for the money,
0:40:55 it’s just so much harder to wake up every morning
0:40:56 and try really hard.
0:40:59 I mean, maybe for some people that is just so motivating
0:41:00 that it’s possible.
0:41:01 Hundred percent.
0:41:04 And I think also if that passion and impact is missing,
0:41:08 I think people reflect too much about themselves, right?
0:41:10 I’m going to get caught.
0:41:14 Yeah, I’m going to get, you know, I’m going to do this or that.
0:41:16 You know, I’m going to be on the newspaper or whatever.
0:41:19 I think that’s usually not the right motivation, right?
0:41:21 So I think, and again, it’s hard to be authentic
0:41:23 if you don’t believe something people will find out.
0:41:26 So I think that this vision orientation is very important
0:41:28 when you start a company.
0:41:32 You went from three employees to now 3,000 employees.
0:41:36 You’ve gone through the whole scaling process.
0:41:41 How did your management style change as the company grew?
0:41:44 I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for founders.
0:41:51 You have to basically change yourself completely at least three times.
0:41:57 So when you start, you basically, you are in like block and tackling mode.
0:42:02 You know, you know, every detail, you know, you have to have extreme attention to detail.
0:42:05 You probably can’t afford very experienced people,
0:42:08 but you also have a lot of control, right?
0:42:11 And then you have to become a manager, right?
0:42:12 So you have to manage people.
0:42:13 You have to put team together.
0:42:14 You have to think about an org charge.
0:42:16 You have to, and that’s definitely a transformation.
0:42:24 And then at some point you have to move from being a leader to being a leader of leaders
0:42:26 and then ultimately to being an executive.
0:42:31 And what that means is that you have to abstract from the details.
0:42:36 You have to find a few very simple things you’re going to focus on.
0:42:41 Like you can’t lead an organization of 3,000 people with details, right?
0:42:45 You are like we in every year, we have three priorities or something that may fall, right?
0:42:47 So it’s very, very simple.
0:42:49 You need to communicate a lot.
0:42:53 Again, from a standpoint of authenticity, but you have to communicate a lot.
0:42:57 And you have to really create a team that is aligned with where you want to go.
0:43:02 And then that team executes and they lead their leaders, right?
0:43:05 And you have to really make sure that you empower an organization,
0:43:08 that you are not just trying to manage every detail.
0:43:12 Certainly, you know, if you, and there’s some CEOs that handle it differently,
0:43:14 but certainly if you have a company that’s complex,
0:43:17 I think if you have, you know, very few products,
0:43:21 you might be able to like go into a lot of details sort of.
0:43:24 But if you have like a complex platform, right?
0:43:25 And you want to get broader and broader,
0:43:27 you need to create a culture where people are empowered,
0:43:30 where people can make their own decisions, where people can go fast.
0:43:33 And I think that that is another transformation.
0:43:36 So, you know, you have to really change yourself quite a bit,
0:43:37 I think in that journey.
0:43:39 And I think that’s why a lot of founders actually fail.
0:43:43 I think that’s where I fail in terms of management is just delegating to people.
0:43:45 I find it really hard to do.
0:43:47 How did you manage that?
0:43:49 Especially when you’re just starting out,
0:43:51 like what was the point where you’re like,
0:43:54 okay, I’m going to trust this gigantic process,
0:43:58 even as the guy who obsesses over processes,
0:43:59 I’m just going to give this to this person,
0:44:01 and I’m going to delegate and I trust them to get it done.
0:44:04 At some point, it gets so much that you have to learn.
0:44:04 You can’t trust.
0:44:07 You know, the thing is, I think this transformation,
0:44:10 like if you can’t delegate, you’re not going to get very far, right?
0:44:11 You need to delegate.
0:44:16 The thing is, when you make this change from a leader to a leader of leaders,
0:44:18 an executive, it’s a little different.
0:44:22 Like before, you can run around at the office and you have a microphone like this one.
0:44:23 And you say something in the microphone, it happens.
0:44:26 Because everyone knows you have 300 people.
0:44:28 Everyone knows you, people are still closed.
0:44:30 And as a founder, you say, hey, we should build this product,
0:44:30 or we should do this.
0:44:32 And somehow it happens, right?
0:44:33 So I called the founder microphone.
0:44:35 Company gets bigger, you have more locations,
0:44:36 more people, more senior people.
0:44:40 You’re like, test, test.
0:44:41 You know, this thing doesn’t work anymore.
0:44:46 So then you have to think about org chart structures, leaders of leaders,
0:44:48 you know, how to inspire people around simple priorities.
0:44:51 And then you have to elevate yourself and just say, those details,
0:44:54 I’m going to let my team handle them, I’m not going to get involved.
0:44:56 You know, we have to have a failure culture.
0:44:57 If people screw up, that’s fine, right?
0:44:58 Obviously not too badly, please.
0:45:02 But you know, it’s, and I think there’s, you know, some founders,
0:45:05 they read these stories from Elon Musk and Steve Jobs,
0:45:07 and you know, how they basically have Steve Jobs,
0:45:10 like debugs, you know, a button on an iPhone or something like that.
0:45:13 And I think, you know, when I talk to founders,
0:45:15 I always say, be careful with that, right?
0:45:18 Because first of all, likely you’re not Steve Jobs.
0:45:21 I mean, he was like a once, you know, under generation type of genius.
0:45:27 And then secondly, Apple, he was so good at product management and design
0:45:31 and so visionary that he could create the most valuable company in the world,
0:45:33 or one of the most valuable company in the world,
0:45:36 with basically like a handful of products, right?
0:45:40 You think about the ratio of like products to market cap for Apple.
0:45:43 It’s extremely, right, very, very low.
0:45:46 So most companies don’t work that way, right?
0:45:49 So if you compare Steve Jobs management style to Jeff Bezos,
0:45:54 I mean, Jeff Bezos, Amazon is like, he’s a systems thinker, right?
0:45:58 He says, you know, I don’t actually work very hard.
0:46:00 Like he’s basically, I work from nine to five, you know?
0:46:04 But he created systems and people and accountable structures
0:46:07 that were so good that people could make their own,
0:46:10 and Amazon could be in all these businesses, right?
0:46:15 So it’s a very different model of a company that has a very different needs,
0:46:16 a very different leadership style.
0:46:20 So if, you know, some founders, they run around like many Steve Jobs,
0:46:22 and sometimes I’m a little bit, I’m like, be careful.
0:46:24 That works for Steve Jobs because he was Steve Jobs,
0:46:29 and because Apple created a business model around just having few products
0:46:30 that are absolutely brilliant.
0:46:32 I feel like we glorify these people.
0:46:35 We glorify Steve Jobs, glorify Elon Musk.
0:46:36 And I feel like there’s this founder culture,
0:46:39 especially with the founder mode thing happening,
0:46:44 where we glorify people who are kind of crazy, a little irrational,
0:46:47 they shout at people, we need to do this.
0:46:48 We can’t get it done in time.
0:46:49 We’ll do it anyway.
0:46:50 I don’t care.
0:46:53 Just sort of like, bull in a china shop.
0:46:56 But it’s like, I feel like we don’t respect or have enough time,
0:47:00 or air time for all of the people that make that happen,
0:47:03 who are like, actually very organized with their time,
0:47:08 very calm, very rational, sort of the more Bezos types
0:47:10 who actually build those systems and make it all possible.
0:47:11 Yeah, I think exactly.
0:47:15 I think that there’s different styles that work for different situations.
0:47:17 I think when you talk about founder mode,
0:47:19 of course as a founder, you need to be intense.
0:47:21 If you’re not intense, you’re not going to start a company.
0:47:23 Of course, you need to be very ambitious.
0:47:29 Of course, you need to sometimes think against the crowd and set ambitious goals.
0:47:32 Of course, you can’t accept mediocrity.
0:47:34 So there are elements there that are very correct,
0:47:38 but there’s other elements like this complete micro management mode.
0:47:41 Again, Elon Musk, the bandwidth of the guys is incredible.
0:47:42 We can agree.
0:47:45 But his company is like, he really dives deep,
0:47:47 and he builds these individual products that change the world.
0:47:50 But that style doesn’t work for every company.
0:47:53 I don’t think it would have worked for Amazon.
0:47:54 Would it have worked for Solonis?
0:47:54 Probably not.
0:47:55 I don’t think so.
0:48:00 So if Elon Musk was interested to give us a management coach,
0:48:01 I wouldn’t mind.
0:48:04 I’m just saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
0:48:09 But my point is, I think that some founders run around like this, glorify this,
0:48:13 applied blindly to their companies and think they are mini Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.
0:48:14 And I don’t think that always works.
0:48:19 So I think you need to really ideally collect some different viewpoints
0:48:24 and then form your own independent principles first mindset of what style,
0:48:25 what organizations will work for my company.
0:48:29 And one of the things I talk about is people talk about product market fit.
0:48:33 Someone once mentioned to me, you really need to think about product market people fit.
0:48:35 And I was like, that’s interesting.
0:48:38 So that’s actually a really good point, right?
0:48:42 You have to create a people in an organization that fit your product and your market.
0:48:43 Oh yeah.
0:48:46 So I think that that also looks different for every company.
0:48:48 I’m going to start to wrap us up here.
0:48:52 And I’d like to hear more about processes in your personal life.
0:48:58 Because you’ve built a company basically predicated on studying processes.
0:49:02 So I’d just love to know what role do processes play in your personal life?
0:49:04 Do you have any personal processes?
0:49:08 Morning routine, workout routine, whatever it is.
0:49:12 I have a workout routine that I follow three, four times a week.
0:49:14 I’m pretty disciplined about that.
0:49:19 But other than that, honestly, I’m not like too much of a process guy in my personal life.
0:49:21 I try to leave that to the business.
0:49:25 So what I hate is I hate to do, think about the same thing five times.
0:49:29 So I’m a lazy guy, I’m a mathematician, mathematicians are lazy.
0:49:34 So I try to think about, I don’t like to think about what I wear every day.
0:49:38 So I have like 10 t-shirts and for most, for many occasions, that’s enough.
0:49:39 That’s the process.
0:49:45 But I wouldn’t say I’m like hugely process centric in my personal life.
0:49:48 Well, I feel like wearing the same thing every day is pretty process centric.
0:49:50 Well, it’s not every day.
0:49:51 I always try to have a template.
0:49:57 Yeah, I don’t go to the closet and think like, okay, what are we going to do today?
0:50:00 I try to have like some structure there.
0:50:06 But I’m also a wanderer, like I have a lot of different interests.
0:50:09 Like every week looks different from a personal standpoint.
0:50:12 So it’s not that I follow like the same playbook every day.
0:50:18 I guess what I’m getting at is it feels like I have found in my personal life or just in my life
0:50:24 that if I can figure out a way to automate something or do it so habitually
0:50:29 that I no longer have to think about it and I can just go like kind of on automatic mode,
0:50:30 it makes the rest of my life a lot easier.
0:50:31 Oh yeah, I love that.
0:50:36 I mean, I love that if something just works, you know, you have like, you know, you have this problem.
0:50:38 I cook the same meal every week now.
0:50:42 And like I’m just like, oh yeah, I just make like a bolognese.
0:50:46 And I just like put in a giant pot and I’m like, okay, I’m just going to do this every week.
0:50:50 And this way I can like just not think about this anymore.
0:50:55 And I can just get on with the rest of my life back to me as a start at the Salonis lifestyle.
0:50:58 And it gives you this feeling of like this sigh of relief right there.
0:50:59 I didn’t have to think about that.
0:51:00 Yeah, exactly.
0:51:02 And you have free up some mental capacity for something else.
0:51:09 You know, look, I think that then hopefully gives you some room for creativity and doing
0:51:11 things that are not very process oriented.
0:51:12 But yeah, I agree.
0:51:14 I think it’s nice if things work.
0:51:17 Thank you for taking the time.
0:51:22 What would be your number one piece of advice to I would say entrepreneurs,
0:51:25 but maybe let’s make it a little more open just anyone listening to this podcast.
0:51:31 I think what’s really, really important is that you commit to your passions.
0:51:39 You know, when I decided to study math, I had no idea, you know, what I wanted to do with it.
0:51:43 You know, after my undergrad, I had, I wanted to study neuroscience.
0:51:47 I had the opportunity to do Salonis and then was really passionate about that.
0:51:48 So I jumped on it.
0:51:52 I didn’t have any clarity whether this would work out or something like that.
0:51:55 You know, I was really always glad looking back that I did it.
0:51:59 Now I’m like, maybe neuroscience was a great area to get into, you know, with all the AI.
0:52:00 But just kidding.
0:52:08 But you know, I just think like when you love to do something, you are best at it.
0:52:11 And you’ve got to try to find that and you’ve got to fight for that.
0:52:16 I think obviously, you know, not every day is going to be, you know, the best here of your life.
0:52:19 But I think that as a principle, that’s extremely important.
0:52:22 And to your point, AI is going to hopefully help with that.
0:52:28 This is going to unleash productivity for everybody that will be, can be distributed.
0:52:33 But I think really, especially in your work life, finding something that you really enjoy,
0:52:38 I think is incredibly important and something that people need to commit to.
0:52:43 I think people are still too focused on what how will others perceive this, you know,
0:52:48 what will be, what is the chess game of my next four career moves, you know, and that stuff.
0:52:54 I think that following what you really believe and finding that and searching for that,
0:52:57 I think ultimately leads to better outcomes.
0:52:58 Alex, thank you.
0:52:59 This was great.
0:53:05 Alex Rinker is the co-founder and co-CEO of Solonus, a process mining and process intelligence company.
0:53:07 This was wonderful.
0:53:08 Thank you very much.
0:53:09 Really excited.
0:53:09 Awesome.
0:53:15 Our producer is Claire Miller.
0:53:17 Our associate producer is Alison Weiss.
0:53:20 And our engineer is Benjamin Spencer.
0:53:23 Thank you for listening to First Time Founders from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:53:26 Tune in tomorrow for ProfG Markets.
0:53:47 , you.
0:53:50 (upbeat music)
0:53:53 (upbeat music)