In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Geoffrey Garrett: Modern Leadership, Business Education and Perspectives on Global Economy

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

What does it take to be a great leader in today's complex world? In this episode, Nicolai Tangen talks with Geoffrey Garrett, Dean of USC Marshall School of Business, about modern leadership principles. They discuss the importance of being "human" rather than "heroic" as a leader, balancing technical skills with people skills, and the value of curiosity in complex environments. Geoffrey explains why avoiding micromanagement helps develop stronger teams and why leaders should strive to be both humble and confident. Tune in for valuable insights on effective leadership!In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday.The production team for this episode includes Isabelle Karlsson and PLAN-B's Niklas Figenschau Johansen, Sebastian Langvik-Hansen and Pål Huuse. Background research was conducted by Une Solheim and Kristian Haga. Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everyone, I'm Nicolai Tangjian, the CEO of the Norwegian Southern Wealth Fund. And today I'm in really great company with one of my favorite people, Jeff Garrett. Now Jeff is the Dean of the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business and has an incredible track record. And I know him from when he was the Dean at the Wharton School. Actually, he was the first person I called when I got the job in the Norwegian Summer World Fund to ask him, you know, what am I going to do? Also Jeff has held very important roles at Oxford, Stanford and Yale.

So Jeff, big welcome. Hey Nikolaj, it's great to be on with you. What's the number one skill a leader needs today? So you know, I think the world of leadership is changing a lot. You know, for me, maybe it's a bit glib, but I would say we used to think about leaders as heroes and now we need to think about leaders as humans. So I think my answer would be to be more human. Can it be taught? A classic business school question. My classic answer to that is you might not be able to teach leadership, but our students can certainly learn to be leaders. And I think that means that leadership education has to be very experiential.

What does that mean? Experiential, I think, means in the first instance, learning about who you are as a person, who you want to be. Then second, how do you interact with others, become self-aware and self-reflective. Then once you've done those two things, you can think about leading organizations. For me, it's very much inside out these days. Start with the human and go from there. How does a business school teach that kind of thing?

How does it help you to become more self-aware and to explore your inner self? Well, again, maybe this is a bit heretical to say, but I think a lot of the value of business education has always been outside the classroom. And I think that's more true, it's probably more true of leadership and entrepreneurship than anything else. Those are both learning by doing skills. And so you've got to do them a lot. And you know how this works in business schools.

Not only do we do a lot of team-based work, but our students run a lot of clubs, they're involved in not-for-profits, they do lots of things outside the classroom that, sure, it might add another line to your CV, but what it's really doing is building your leadership muscle. Now, the increased complexity you are seeing in the world now, how does that change the leadership role?

Everything is much harder, right? And if you think about that, I think what we're saying these days is that agility has become a very important skill, right? You can't just be on some standard operating procedures pathway because the world can, can change in an instant. Um, so then that, that of course just begs the question, how do you develop agility? And for me, you know, there are two C words that matter a lot. And I think you embody both of these, by the way.

Um, the first one is curiosity. I don't, you know, yes there are a whole bunch of technical skills that people need to succeed in a technology-enabled world, but you've got to be curious about broader stuff. And the second thing, the second c-word for me is context. I think context really, really matters. You know, culture, history, language, all the things that, as I said, you embody as a person, those are incredibly important too. You can't think you know everything and you can't live in your own little world. You've got to be more externally oriented and really externally aware, I think.

Where do you find curious people with a sense of context? Where do you find them? I mean, how do you screen for them? How do you? Well, I mean, you know, I think the admissions answer these days in higher education would be that we kind of use objective indicators, you know, test scores, grades, exam results. They're the first filter, but the reason that most of elite higher education now focuses on essays and interviews is that we really want to know the full person. So you're looking for more than test takers when you're looking for people

who you want to be emerging leaders. And you know, I think this is also a one-two, right? What do employers want? Employers want people who on day one can do the job, but can grow into becoming leaders in year five or year 10. And that's going to be hard to find if you just look at, you know, objective indicators. What's your time in life where you change your view on what good leadership is? Well, you know, I'm old and I've been around, so I've had lots of experiences, but I can tell you that COVID really had a big impact on me in maybe three

senses. The first one is that I learned about myself, that I'm probably better suited to strategy and strategic thinking than I am to instantaneous operational challenges, right? The whole COVID world was constant fire drills and I wasn't as well suited to that. So that was the first observation. But the second one, which really struck me was that in an environment like COVID and maybe in any crisis, it kind of crowds out strategy. It's inappropriate to be thinking about the medium term if people are concerned about tomorrow. So operations crowded out strategy for me in COVID.

And then the third thing was, as you know, I was doing a job transition from Wharton to Marshall, from Philadelphia to LA. And I had to get to know a whole bunch of people in Los Angeles. And what I learned is there's something unique about three-dimensional humans. You know, you and I can have, I think, a very good conversation remotely today because we know each other. If this was the first time you and I had ever met,

I think the tenor of our conversation would be different. It would be much less rich. So, you know, on the one hand, I think all the gains in technology that help us do Zoom meetings and do this kind of podcast incredible, but there's still something about in-person. Now, I think the bar to that clearly is much higher than it used to be. And we should be, particularly since it's much more costly in all senses to do stuff face to face, we should have a higher bar to doing it. But the value to me, the intrinsic value, I just felt in COVID, I was missing so much trying to get to know people in a two-dimensional world rather than touch

and feel in a three-dimensional world. So what's the first thing you do when you get a new leadership role? You know, you got one, I got one. What is the advice you give to people? How should they approach a new position? So I think the piece of advice that I give to people in a university context is don't read management books that tell you you've got 100 days to change everything. And the reason for that in an academic context, and you can tell me if you think it generalizes, the reason you don't do that in an academic context is even if you think you know something about your domain expert, right? I'd been a business school dean for 10 years when I became the dean here, but I didn't know the way Marshall worked in a cultural sense in terms of the individuals.

There are always those nuances. So I think the management cliche these days is the right one, which is to be an active listener, right? The management cliche these days is the right one, which is to be an active listener. You're questioning things in your own head, but you don't ask questions of other people, because that can be a bit intimidating and scary. But in your own head, you're asking questions, and the way to do that is just to be a very active listener, so you can get up the knowledge curve as quickly as possible. Do you think CEOs are good listeners?

Whether they are or not is... You know, there's research showing that the higher up, the higher you are in the system, the more endorphins you get by hearing your own voice. You know, it's something not great about that. Absolutely. And I think we just have to be, anyone in a leadership position has to be aware of that You know the the thing that I've learned is that if I ask questions of anybody They who works for me. They view it as a leading question if I

Throw out a thought bubble people take it really seriously even if I'm just trying to provoke Conversations, so I think you've got to have a, you need to have some kind of balance between confidence and humility to make that work. And you know, one thing that somebody said to me 20 years ago with a kind of wry grin on their, on their face was something that, that just sounds right to me, which is if you're in leadership position, you know, there's a chance you're the smartest person in the room, but you should do everything you can not to show that. Because if you just strut your stuff, you're going to crowd out

everything else in the room. And so the collective intelligence doesn't increase. Now we, we have a fund with 9,000 holdings across the world. And of course, we can't be on top of all of that. You run a business school with lots of different professors, topics, all that. How do you stay on top of a complex situation like that? So I'd love you to tell me how you think about it in terms of your managing these massive global investments that you have. But in a managerial sense, what I feel all the time is that I don't want to micromanage the people who work in my organization for two reasons one if I micromanage stuff it ends up on my desk and the

Pile just grows higher because I've got limited bandwidth But the second reason not to micromanage I think is that it doesn't give people an opportunity to grow in their jobs So I I want to support people but I want to support them to become bigger, richer people, not just do their job narrowly. Now, of course, that comes with a risk, which is if you delegate a lot of authority, somebody might fail. So, the way I try to balance that is to allow people lots of opportunity to grow, but have some guardrails around that so that if somebody, look, and we all do make mistakes,

if you make a mistake, you don't want it to be really damaging for your organization or for the individual. You want people to grow, but in an environment in which some of it has been de-risked a little bit. But can I ask you, Nikolai, I mean, you're in this world where you've got, you literally, as the podcast shows, you have access and real investments in the biggest companies in the world in every sector. I mean, what's the discipline that allows you to manage that? that allows you to manage that? Well, I guess pretty much the same as you say, right? So first of all, I don't make investments myself. I have great colleagues. We have 700 people.

So I've got colleagues who run it. Very clear mandates, huge accountability, delegation. And I agree totally on the micro-managing point of view. It's just totally unbelievably destructive because you kill pleasure and you just kill the whole meaning of life. I just think it's one of the worst things you can do. So I just totally agree with you.

So it's interesting that you responded there with very personal stuff as well as professional. I mean, I think the merging of personal and professional is something that's happening, particularly with younger people today. But I'm wondering how you think about that. I mean, I know from your personal background that you're super interested in really diverse stuff, right?

You have an art history degree, you have a psychology degree. Of course you went to business school at Wharton. But how do you think about your employees as full people? Are there any difficult trade-offs there? Is it positive sum? What's your approach? Well, for sure you need to look at them as whole people. You would love for them to continue to take education, to expand the skill sets. I agree, curiosity is really, really important. Now, one of the fun things by working with finance is just like the most interesting thing you can do, I think. Everything you eat and wear and drive is made by a company. You need to understand psychology, corporate culture, you know, macro, defense, geopolitics,

currencies, and it's all changing, you know, 100 times a second. So I can see, I can see how much you enjoy that, right? In terms of the interviews that you do with the people who come on the pod. Totally, totally. Now, when you when you then interview MBA candidates, are you looking for different things than you did in the past?

Yes, we are looking for different things. And not only in MBA students, in undergraduates, in all business school students. And the way I think about it is there are two tracks and students need to be really good on both of them. And you wanna make sure that the tracks run in parallel and don't diverge. So the first track is technical skills, right?

So it used to be statistics and econometrics, now data science is everywhere. You've got to have students who can be, even if they're not geeks, they've got to be able to talk to the geeks. They've got to be able to use AI tools. So the whole kind of technical skills track, I think has been dialed up. You know, you

look at Wharton or you look at Marshall and the data science, finance used to be the biggest thing by far now data sciences is rivaling it. And so you have these two different versions of technical skills that are incredibly important. But, you know, in an AI world in which machines are doing lots of the technical things that humans used to do, what's left for the humans? I think it's to be human. That's what we do best. And so I would say kind of technical fluency plus human leadership, that's the combination that we're always looking for in people. And it's what we try to develop while students are in school. Do you think there are some pockets of genesis which you are not getting hold of?

Of course. And where could they be? Are you tapping enough into the cultural sector, the art sector? Are we just perhaps missing out on some incredible sources of talent? Yes. I mean, I think there's a kind of search costs problem that exists in the world, but it exists in higher ed where we can't find necessarily either the best people or the best opportunities for them and they can't find us. That's a real challenge in anything that's kind of industrial scale. I think technology helps us there. But your second point about the importance of broader thinking, this is actually, I think this is the biggest question in higher education. Because on the one hand, everyone wants ROI from their degrees, right? And the simplest definition of ROI is,

can I get a good job when I graduate? So ROI, return on the investment, right? So you get a payback. Yeah, right. It's ROI in a different sense than you think about it, but I think for our students, it's very real, right? If you have the opportunity cost of being a full-time student, plus the financial cost, you've got to

make a calculation of is it worth it. And in the American context, and you know this, you came from Norway to the US, you know, there was this old idea that people could afford to go to college to find themselves and do really cool stuff. And, you know, I don't know, be a protester or a musician or whatever it is, the pressure today because of just the cost side is this return on investment. So I think that the challenge for us, but the opportunity is to really respect that

ROI position and take careers and launching our students into careers really, really seriously without turning our back on the creative side. Because we know that both are not only important to being a good person, but they're really important to being a successful professional too. So how do you change the curriculum or the coursework in order to give them a better return on the investment they make? And to make them better able to run companies and societies? So I've mentioned two of the things.

I think you've got to nail the technical fluency side. And again, in business schools, I think that doesn't mean all of our students have to be super coders, but they've got to be able to use and leverage the insights that come from the great software engineers, plus develop the leadership muscle. And then I think all that comes together, you know, it might sound a little glib, but for me, it's really important. I would call it real world learning that yes, you know, what's in a textbook is foundational, but it really comes alive when you apply it and you apply it in a real context, in real time that has real impact. And typically you do that in a world of real constraints too, which means typically means

group work. So if it's a triangle for me, technical skills, human leadership and real world learning, if we can do all of that, I think we're giving our students the best chance to succeed in their lives, not just in their professional lives. What role does ethics and social responsibility have? Ethics is everywhere. And just think about the latest example of this in AI, right? In AI, I think we need students not only to be aware of, I mean, let's think about three versions of ethics there, right? One would be, hey, can you use chat GPT to write a better essay or do a better exam? Absolutely, you can.

We've got to be,. We've got to think about our attitude to that. Second version of ethics in artificial intelligence would be all of the somewhere between privacy and dystopia. Are robots going to not only to run the world, but be a challenge to us? And then the third version of ethics, which I think is, you know, we're seeing it on a daily basis there is, is AI gonna be a giant job destroyer or not? And how should we think about that? And can we be proactive in making sure

that the AI revolution looks like all the prior technological revolutions where there's a lot of job disruption and displacement in the short term, but in the longer term, everybody, there are new job opportunities that are created. So that's a very long-winded way of saying, I think ethics is everywhere, but maybe the simple term of ethics is a little bit misleading because it's got multiple dimensions. Jeff, we both have met many successful leaders. And when you abstract and think about what the best ones have in common, what do you find?

So a very successful CEO whose name I won't mention, I once kind of threw this softball question to this person and said, what's it take to be a good CEO? And the person replied with a wry grin, oh, it's really easy. All you've got to do is be able to come up with a vision and communicate it really well. Have a strategy and be in the room with all the strategists and be a good enough person that people want to go on the journey with you. Right. So vision strategy implementation. Easy to say, really hard to do as you know, but I think the, you know, the, the

probably the people who are the best leaders understand those three elements. And they should understand their own strengths and weaknesses. I said, I think I now know about myself. I'm just not as good operationally as maybe I can be at some of the other elements. But I know operations and implementation is critical. So I've got to think about how to compensate for my own limitations there. And so if you're a top, how do you develop the mid-level leaders into superstars? What's the key there?

Well, I think it's what we talked about before. If you want to, of course you can support, as you said, you can encourage and you can financially support people to get more education to do leadership training programs, all that stuff is very, very valuable. But I think the most valuable thing is on the job on the job learning on the job training back to the micromanagement point, you know, as I said, I think there are two problems with micromanagement. One, too much stuff ends up on your desk and the pile gets higher. But the second one is you're just missing the opportunity

to help people who work with you develop into being better at what they do, being better people, being better professionals. So I think that not micromanaging, but also providing enough supports not micromanaging, but also providing enough supports to allow people to grow without risking a lot personally and for the organization. That feels like the right strategy to me. Oh, I think it's great. I think that's why I've got so much time at my hands because I delegate so much. I mean, I've got time to think and time to talk to you, you know. But the time to, I mean, tell've got time to think and time to talk to you, you know. But the time to, I mean, tell me about that too, from your perspective. I mean, you know, I think the risk that we all run if you've got a lot of people in your

organization is that days are just back to back to back to back meetings. You know, I always, I worry that I just get trapped in my office. That's probably bad for my mental health, but it's also not good for my mental functioning because I need time to be thinking in a little more blue sky world. How do you manage your life to make that possible? Well, first I have to say one thing because when I asked you for advice, when I asked you for leadership advice, one of the clever things you said to me was like, Hey, everybody thinks I'm traveling, you know, 75% of my time, but I'm actually only traveling 50% of the time. So it's clear that I need to show everybody at campus that I'm at work and I'm at campus.

So, you know, you just make sure you are a bit loud when you are in the office and walk around and make sure that everybody knows about it. And I think that's a really, really good advice that when you are, you know, at the ranch, people need to know about it. Yeah, and that's hard to do because you know, something that I observed a long time ago, that feels like an iron law to me is if two people decide to have a meeting, the meeting by default happens in the more senior person's office and that has a real negative to it which is

you don't get out. So again you know you asked a question a little while ago about how do you start, how do you start a new position. That was also a good piece of advice I got from somebody a long time ago, and it's hard to live up to it just because of the time constraints. But the advice was, when you first meet people, meet them where they work. First of all, it's respectful to do that. Second, you've got to get there. You've got to figure out the lay of the land physically.

And third, you're probably going to bump into a bunch of people that you otherwise wouldn't see. So again, I think it's hard for us to do that if you feel that you've just got to be so productive, and it's really much easier to have all the meetings in your office. But it comes at a big downside. Yeah. As a leader, is there a trade-off between being confident and being humble? Is there a trade off? I don't know, but you know, I always get asked the question I'm sure you do too,

about, you know, back to SWOT kind of analysis, challenges and opportunities. I say, I don't see a lot of challenges. What I do see is a lot of challenging opportunities. And I'd say the same thing about humility and confidence, that you wanna be humbly confident is the right place to be. And I think that means feeling good enough about yourself

and understanding your role, but back to something you said a few minutes ago, just not getting captivated by the endorphin rush of, hey, I'm in charge, right? Because all the negative externalities that come from that in terms of crowding out other people. Now, you have worked in academia, well, most of your life actually. What's the key to good leadership in academia?

Is it different than running a company? So I think historically university leadership and corporate leadership were very different, but my sense is they're converging a bit now. So the key, I think, to understanding academic leadership is that there's no command and control. I can't tell people what to do. What there is in universities is an ongoing set of hearts and minds campaigns. You have to convince people that they want to come together to do something. And you know when I think about that, I just have two words in my head, aspire and inspire, you want to have an aspirational vision that's motivating to people, and then you want to

inspire them to get there. So hearts and minds campaign, yes, command and control, no. And my sense is that the the corporate world is moving a bit in the hearts and minds direction. And that's because younger people are just different. They value meaning and purpose, not only in their personal lives, but in their professional lives, much more than prior generations do. And that creates a leadership and management challenge,

right, that young people aren't gonna do it because you tell them to do it. They've got to want to do it. They've got to buy into your vision. And I think that's a big challenge, but it's a good challenge because in my sense of the, it's hard to make change in universities because I can't just say, let's do this.

But the flip side of that is if you make change, it's actually gonna endure and probably work because people wanted to go on that journey with you. And so, my sense is again, that that's the direction we're moving in the corporate world. I don't know how quickly and obviously it would vary by sector. Do you wish you could control more?

Sometimes, you know, very bisector. Do you wish you could control more? Sometimes. You know, we're speaking in late March in the US, where the Trump administration is creating new challenges for universities almost on a daily basis. And the sort of temptation to say, hey, if we could just centralize power, we could react more effectively and more quickly. The temptation is there. But I just think in an academic context that remains a non-starter because of the need to do hearts and minds campaigns. So yeah, of course, in an instant, you're going to say, God, I wish I could just handle this myself. But when you look more broadly, I think the model that we've got, even though it creates

clearly big challenges for leaders in higher education, I think the upside of our model is not only clear, but it's one that's becoming more relevant to the private sector as well. Do you think there should be closer ties between academic institutions and the private sector? I'm in a business school, so of course I would say yes. And let me give you two versions of why I think, I wouldn't say reducing the distance, what I would say is more two-way conversation, collaboration with the private sector is important. So in a business school sense,

let's think about the curriculum. Let's say you wanna have the latest AI class. The normal way a professor would develop expertise is to spend five years studying it, two years to get the articles published, and maybe the class appears seven or eight years later. We're living in a world where, I don't know, the deep seek says they're going to come out with a version two of their AI next week.

The real world is moving so quickly, the only way we can stay at the frontier is to be in constant dialogue with the private sector. So that's a business school answer. If I think more broadly at the university, the big question, which has been true outside the US but is looking even is looking true now inside the US is that the model of scientific research cannot rely 100% on government funding or on philanthropy. There's going to have to be more corporate supported research and you know, there's going to be a lot of debates about guard rails around that and is this pro you know, is this applied research or pure research? Yes, I think that's a real issue. But if I just look at the financing

of the research enterprise, corporations are gonna be more involved than we're gonna have to figure out how to do that in a way that allows universities to remain true to their values and allows for unfettered discovery of new stuff. Yes, we need all of that, but we also back to the return on investment point.

Our students want return on investment. People who support us from a research standpoint also want return on investment. How does that leave your view on undergraduate versus graduate education? So let me answer that question only in the business school context and then maybe generalize it. I do think that the traditional model in the US at least, you know, the one that you knew about when you went to Wharton,

I think that model is changing. That model was do a very broad-based liberal arts degree and then three years later, five years later, go back and get an MBA or become a doctor or a lawyer or whatever it was, right? Broad-based undergraduate, job-oriented graduate degree. I think there are two forces that are reducing that distance and putting pressure to do it all at once. The first one is the one I've already mentioned, which is undergraduate education is really, really expensive and not a lot of people can afford to spend four years

just finding themselves. We have a responsibility to undergraduates to help them launch the next stage of their lives. But the second one at the MBA level is just the opportunity cost story. If you're a 27 year old and you're doing really well in your career, you can't afford not only the price of an MBA, but stepping out of your career for two years. So you know I was a big champion of undergraduate at Wharton.

I am at the Marshall School as well. By the way, it's important for me to say I don't think that means MBA is less important than it used to be. It's just important in a different way. It used to be, the MBA used to be a passport to the next level of success. It was a career accelerator. I think now MBA is incredibly valuable, but it's incredibly valuable to people who want to change what they're doing in the jargon. The career pivot is what the MBA is best placed for. And of course, that then means that you've got to actually rethink your education at the MBA level because it's not somebody like you who's in finance and the way for you to get a promotion is to go back and get a

finance MBA. No, that's not the story today. It's for somebody maybe who was in consulting who wants to move into entertainment or technology. That changes the way you do MBA education. You've been very successful in establishing some combined degrees, which combines on the topics, which weren't historically linked. Tell us about that. So that's a case, you know, I always think that imitation is the highest form of flattery. And one of the things that I was just struck by at Wharton,

and you know this, is that there were some great degrees with other Penn schools. So there was a management and technology degree with engineering, a global business degree, the Huntsman Program, the Lauder Institute. When I came to USC, I saw that the business school was really, really good, but it was pretty self-contained. And so I just wanted to adopt and adapt things that I saw at Wharton.

So we had a program with the film school. USC's got the best film school in the world. Gee, can we create a degree there called Businesses of Cinematic Arts? Yeah, we could do that. The best part of the engineering school at USC is computer science. We were in an AI age, we created a degree called AI for Business. I just thought those were, you know, leverageable opportunities. Yes, you want the business school

to be good at all of the core things that business schools do, but the rest of USC was an opportunity and an opportunity that I hope is win-win. It's not only good for the business school, it's good for students in other parts of the university as well. Let's move tack a bit. The world is changing very fast now and it's becoming more transactional. Countries which previously cooperated are competing to a higher degree. What are the implications for society and for the world here? Well, this is where I'm a classic liberal in all senses. As an economic matter, I think the shrinking of global markets is a big net negative. I think the thing that the tariff debate in the US

is showing finally is that there's a real cost to reshoring stuff, which is prices go higher. You know, I don't think Americans, for example, are sufficiently aware of the fact that globalization reduced prices and reduced interest rates in America for decades. So I, I, I, I worry, I understand the political and other maybe national security imperatives of reshoring, but it comes at an economic cost. And then the other liberal side of me is the Kantian one.

Kant said that if we, to paraphrase, it was in German and complicated German, so I just paraphrase, right? If countries know each other better economically, if they can join activities, they're less likely to go to war against each other. And I think both are true. So I'm a classic liberal and I just feel out of place given the dialogue today. If I was running for public office and I said global markets are good and they reduce the prospect of war. So we should, you know, let's embrace them. I'm not getting very many votes today. So I think the challenge for people who have my predilections about global is good,

is to engage with these new debates in a way that can maybe change some hearts and minds. But it's not going to be easy, obviously. I've heard you say that you can look at the world through the lens of electrical vehicles. Could you explain that? Well, I will, but you've got to tell me how and why Norway was able to essentially to eliminate combustion engines, particularly when we know electric vehicles don't do so well in cold weather.

So can you answer that first and then I'll give you my perspective on EVs? Well, I think it's really interesting. The country has spent a lot of money subsidizing electrical vehicles, but with huge success. And so I think the number now is something like 90% of new cars sold are electrical. It came with a huge charging network across the country. So that was not a problem. And you could drive in the taxi lane. And you didn't have to pay, you know, yearly fees to own the car and so on. So to be frank, if you didn't buy an electrical vehicle, you were a total moron, you know? I mean, it didn't make any economic sense not to buy one.

And of course, lots of countries have created subsidies for electric vehicles, but it doesn't necessarily work. So, you know, in the US, right, the US is now a fossil fuel exporter. And as you know, petrol is cheaper in the US than anywhere else in the world. Norway is you're the last person I need to say to that noise, you know, an oil superpower. So it's interesting that that that logic, which I think is making EVs harder in the US, didn't obtain in Norway. But the second point about subsidies and regulatory stuff, I think is going to be so important going forward because the Chinese EV and BYD above all, but maybe Xiaomi as well, that is gonna be, that is a transformative,

I think this is not an exaggeration, that's a transformative force for the global economy, the rise of the Chinese electric vehicle. And the question in Europe, in the US, is what are we gonna do about that, right? And the Trump answer today is maybe, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, I don't know when the podcast will come out. The Trump instinct is if I make tariffs high enough on imported electric vehicles, people have to make them in the United

States. Let's see if that works. If I was in Germany today, you know, where VW for the first time in its history is thinking of closing some plants in this decade, the conversation is even harder because of course, the German government and German citizens want to protect the German auto industry. But they know if they protect it against Chinese electric vehicles, the Chinese, they're not going to have access to the Chinese market, which they need, right? So so maybe back to Y's EVs window into everything in the world, the geopolitical element is clear.

But think about some of the other elements as well. I mean, employment. I didn't realize the employment effects of the fact that electric vehicles are so much simpler to assemble. You just need many, many fewer workers to put together an EV than a traditional combustion engine. So let's talk employment consequences and how we think about the value of manufacturing jobs and auto jobs,

a European conversation, American one too. And then the third element, let's just go with the green energy side. So we know that the entire green energy supply chain now is dominated by China. We also know that a lot of stuff in the green energy supply chain is very dirty, power intensive. You know, I've been spending a bunch of time in Indonesia. Indonesia thinks that nickel mining is their future. Nickel mining is not a pleasant business, but you need it if you're gonna have longer range electric vehicles.

So yeah, I do think that maybe the highest level way to think about this for me is, if we think about the 20th century, probably the internal combustion engine was the most important development about the 20th century, probably the internal combustion engine was the most important development of the 20th century. We could debate that. But if we then, in like a two decade period, do away with internal combustion engines, that'd be pretty amazing. Against the backdrop we've kind of painted here during this podcast,

we've kind of painted here during this podcast. What is your advice to aspiring leaders? Aspiring leaders, I'll think about that in terms of students. So the first one we've already mentioned is my two C words, be curious and really be aware of context. And for young people, I think the context begins with who they are and how they interact with others. And then, you know, I get asked all the time for have wise words of wisdom about planning your career. I just think that that's a folly, right? The life is going to life is not linear for many of us, any of us. I mean, I don't know whether you feel that way, but I certainly, you know, I've lived a life that I couldn't have planned

because I didn't know it existed. So rather than trying to develop a five or 10 year plan, I think you wanna prepare yourself. This is the UCLA basketball coach, famous basketball coach John Wooden said something like, you know, good outcomes are where opportunity and preparation come together. You know, you want to be prepared, but I think you want to go into decisions always thinking about opening up opportunities

rather than closing them off. So having an antenna up for option value, increasing option value, I think optionality just makes a lot of sense to me. Well, Jeff, you for sure are very curious. It's always been fantastic interacting with you. Big thanks for all your advice that I have got personally and now that you have shared with all our podcast listeners. So a big thanks. Hey, the thanks are all to you, Nikolai,

not only for giving me this opportunity, but for all you're doing in the world and all you're doing with the podcast. I mean, something I said at the beginning, I really believe that you have investment relationships with all the greatest minds in business. And the fact that you're now sharing all of that with all the people who consume your podcast, I just think that was a fantastic initiative. So thank you and congratulations for that. And thanks for having me. Thank you.