The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Conversations in Review: AI, Geopolitics, and Lifestyle Revelations

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

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

Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. If you struggle just to get your customers to notice you, Constant Contact has what you need to grab their attention. Constant Contact's award-winning marketing platform offers all the automation, integration, and reporting tools that get your marketing running seamlessly, all backed by their expert live customer support. It's time to get going and growing with Constant Contact today.

Ready, set, grow. Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca Support for PropG comes from NerdWallet. Starting your slash learn more to over 400 credit cards. Head over to nerdwallet.com forward slash learn more to find smarter credit cards, savings accounts, mortgage rates, and more. NerdWallet. Finance smarter. NerdWallet Compare Incorporated.

NMLS 1617539. Welcome to the final PropG episode of 2023. What a thrill! For our final episode, we'll be sharing the highlights from the Blue Flame thinkers who provided us with rich insight on topics including big tech, that's a shocker, AI, heard of it, heard of it. It's the new thing. Social media, it's the old thing. Still depressing your kids though. Still depressing your kids and spreading misinformation.

Geopolitics, nothing going on in the world of geopolitics. Finance, work ethic, and modern masculinity. Anyways, here we go. I love our guests. I learn a lot. I used to interview guests just to hear myself speak and try and sound smart. And now I'm actually trying to be a better interviewer and actually listen and ask questions. So again, back comes from our conversation with Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO and co-founder of Inflection AI. Mustafa has a more positive going to reduce the cost of decision-making and reduce the cost of synthesizing, interpreting, and predicting, which is basically the essence of intelligence. What makes us capable, what makes you so capable as an individual, your expertise, is consuming

vast amounts of data and making speculations or predictions about the past and reflecting on those, whether they turn out to be true or not, and then updating and iterating on what you say next. We do that in pretty much every role that we do in professional life. And that is exactly what these AIs now do. In many respects, it will make us more productive and make us more efficient. So on the face of it, I think that is an incredibly positive story about what's going to happen over the next few decades.

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

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

see what the detrimental effects are. You know, I worry about children's ability to pay attention, to be able to enjoy the outdoors, to be able to get enough physical exercise, to be able to interact socially with other people. Again, that was Nita Farahani. And speaking of social media, we also spoke with Representative Ro Khanna, huge fan of Representative Khanna's, and marched to hear his thoughts regarding TikTok and ByteDance. Well, I think it's a mistake to have TikTok owned by ByteDance and that we should force the sale of TikTok. And I'll tell you a couple of reasons why. One, you could have the Chinese CCP at any point use the platform for subtle propaganda. So imagine there's an American candidate who has a more pro-China policy. Could they manipulate videos to have that come up first for the millions of users?

Two, even though right now I don't believe that any of the data is compromised at a future point, you could have Xi Jinping or someone compromise it. And three, I don't think we owe the Chinese much reciprocity. It's not like they allow Google or Facebook or Amazon to operate there. Again, that was Representative Ro Khanna, an American politician and lawyer who has been representing California's 17th congressional district since 2017. And now, this wouldn't be an end-of-the-year review if we didn't mention Ian Bremmer. He's clocked in on the pod a record eight times, the latest being back in September, from the Russian-Ukrainian war to U.S.-China relations. We've covered a lot with Ian this year.

There's a wide variety of scenarios that you can imagine with the most positive for Ukraine is they're able to get all the ammunition they need. They're fighting like hell, really well trained. The Russians have internal fights between the Wagner Group paramilitary and the defense guys. They start falling apart. The Ukrainians break the land bridge between Russia and Crimea. The Ukrainians are plausibly threatening supply chain to Crimea and Putin faces a very significant situation at home.

And he's got to think about whether he wants to escalate in terms of use of weapons of mass destruction just to try to keep Crimea from falling down the road. That's the best possible scenario for Ukraine. Also could lead to the Russians being willing to more strongly accept peace talks led by the Chinese. At the global stage, the economy is no longer driven by the U.S. The economy is not driven by anyone. It is multipolar. And some of that is because China's bigger than it used to be. Some of it is because they're consolidated state capitalists under one leader. Some of it's because

the Americans are so divided and no longer have a trade policy and can't provide market access. There are lots of reasons for it, but it's a frustration. It's a frustration for Americans in part because the reason why China was brought into and welcomed into American institutions for the last 40 years, part of it was because the U.S. knew it would make Americans wealthier, American corporations wealthier. But part of it was a mistaken assumption that as the Chinese became wealthier and more powerful that they'd become Americans. And they're not. They're still authoritarian.

They're still state capitals. They're just wealthier and more powerful. And, you know, Americans are not prepared to accept that. Keeping on the trend of geopolitics, our most downloaded episode of the year, CNN's Fareed Zakaria. We had Fareed on to discuss the Israel-Palestine conflict shortly after the October 7th Hamas attacks. Really the most important thing that has happened over the last two decades in the Middle East is the withdrawal of American power, you know, in a fairly dramatic sense. The United States had been the kind of dominating outside force in the Middle

East for decades. It used to be the Soviet Union and the United States both had their client states. Then in a kind of amazing move of diplomatic jujitsu after the 1973 war, Kissinger gets Egypt to flip. It goes from being pro-Soviet to pro-American, and that begins the end of the Soviet era or the bipolar era, and it becomes a period of American domination. So the United States had better relations, if you think about it, in 1975 with every country in the Middle East than they had with each other. Coming up after the break, you'll hear from some of our most sentimental guests and lifestyle yodas. Welcome back to the Profiteer Pod's 2023 year in review. Next up, we have a clip from the conversation we had with Morgan Housel back in February.

He told us about the behaviors to consider when it comes to building wealth and the importance of earning, saving, and investing. Most notably for our listeners, he said, You think that everyone's looking at you, but even when people are noticing you, they're imagining themselves being noticed by other people. And it's true for cars. It's true for houses that nobody is thinking about you as much as you are. Nobody cares about your stuff as much as you do. Once I realized like that game, it was like, okay, now I see what the game is. And therefore my aspirations for nice stuff went way down. Again, that was Morgan Housel, a partner at the Collaborative Fund and the author of The Psychology of Money. Moving on, let's hear from Jennifer B. Wallace, an award-winning journalist and author of Never Enough, When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic

and What We Can Do About It. I came across this psychological construct called mattering. Mattering is basically what you're now focused on at home. Mattering is making children feel valued for who they are at their core, by their family, by their friends, by their communities, and depending on them to add meaningful value back to their families, to their friends, to their communities. The kids who were doing the worst are kids who felt like their mattering, their worth was contingent on their performance. The other kids I found who were not doing as well were kids who got those messages that they mattered a lot, but no one ever depended on them to add value to anyone other than themselves and their own resume.

And so what these kids lacked was social proof that they mattered. Again, that was Jennifer B. Wallace, an award-winning journalist and social commentator. Back in April, we spoke with Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the bestselling book Freakonomics, to talk about the role of private equity in our society and his thoughts on the seven deadly sins. In this clip, Stephen comments on the aspects of sloth. Sloth? Really? A sin? I mean, some of the smartest people I know are some of the laziest, self-professed, laziest people I know, because they're smart enough to know that unless something gets inside

your cranium and really, really agitates it in a good way or bad way, you should not pursue it. You're just going to waste your brain cells. Wait until you have the thing that makes you go. And so that can look like laziness. Next up, we have Mo Gadot, who joined us on the pod back in July. Mo is the former chief business officer of Google X and an expert on happiness. While much of this conversation focused on the need to control our response to AI and the impact this technology is having on society, it was Mo's vulnerability around coming to terms with his son's death that still resonates with our team today. Can accept the fact that there is a non-physical element to us, okay? That non-physical element,

by definition, exists outside space-time because otherwise it wouldn't be able to perceive time and the passage of time. It's a simple object-subject relationship, then that non-physical element is not affected by the events of the physical. So my son really never died, okay? So my son's physical form was born, and my son's physical form decayed. But the essence of my son, his consciousness, has never gone anywhere. And when you really understand this, you understand that death is not the opposite of life. Death is the opposite of birth. And life exists before, during, and after. That I don't expect everyone to agree with, okay? But to me, because I see it from a physics point of view more than a religious point of view, I tend to believe that my son is okay. Again, that was Mo Gadot, the former chief business officer at Google X and an expert on happiness.

Back in February, we had a conversation with Baratunde Thurston, a founding partner of the media startup Puck and an Emmy-nominated multi-platform storyteller. If you've been following along with our Algebra of Masculinity series, you'll enjoy his thoughts here on modern masculinity. We built a structure and inherited for most of us, some of us more actively maintained than others, but we all kind of were born into the system that gave us a lot of access and seeming power, but also stole from us an internal access and a different sort of power. Knowledge, the power of being aware of weaknesses, the power of softness, the power of our own feminine. And told to suck it up and never express pain and be aggressive instead of vulnerable. You know, use aggression to shield vulnerability, which doesn't serve us.

You know, we bottle that stuff up and it comes out, you know, sideways. And there's a movement of more awakened manhood that's emerging. And it doesn't mean you can't be strong. Our final, but certainly not the least, clip comes from an August episode featuring Simon Sinek. Simon is a renowned leadership expert, author, and motivational speaker. He joined the pod to discuss his concept of start with why, along with insights on building strong teams, leadership, feeling stuck, and finding your purpose. This was an emotional episode to say the least. I mean, your purpose, Scott, I mean, is clear.

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

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

thanks so much for coming up and saying hi and being just, generally speaking, so lovely. This episode was produced by Gaddy McBain and edited by Caroline Shagrin. Our technical director is Drew Burrows. Thank you for listening to The Profity Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network all year long. We will catch you in 2024.

Here comes the ass cancer. Too much?