The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Raging Moderates: Trump Spirals as Iran Blockade Triggers Recession Fears (ft. Sen. Chris Murphy)

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

Big news! We’ve just been nominated for a Webby Award for Best News & Politics Podcast! Now it’s time to bring it home — and we need your help.  Cast your vote HERE: ⁠⁠https://wbby.co/57448N⁠ Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov break down the escalating crisis following the Trump administration’s Iran blockade—and what it could mean for the global economy. As tensions intensify in the Strait of Hormuz and negotiations stall between the U.S. and Iran, markets are flashing warning signs that a broader economic shock may already be unfolding. Senator Chris Murphy joins the show to discuss the legality of the administration’s actions, Congress’s inability to assert War Powers authority, and whether the U.S. is being pushed toward a wider conflict without meaningful checks and balances. The conversation also explores growing international backlash, shifting alliances in Europe and the Middle East, and the potential fallout for global trade and energy markets. With the IMF warning of slowing global growth, rising inflation, and increased recession risk, the panel examines whether Trump’s Iran strategy could trigger a broader economic downturn—and what, if anything, can be done to stop it. Follow Jessica Tarlov,⁠ @JessicaTarlov⁠  Follow Prof G,⁠ @profgalloway⁠  Follow Raging Moderates, ⁠@RagingModeratesPod⁠  Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@RagingModerates⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Together we talk about the NCAA semifinals, the crazy activity in the transfer portal, and of course, the final matchup for the NCAA championship. Check out the latest episode of a touch more, wherever you get your podcast and on YouTube. What should we make of the Iran War ceasefire announcement and where do things go from here? If anything has surprised me over the last 24 hours, it's that Iran agreed to a ceasefire, and particularly that Iran agreed to a ceasefire after that outrageous message that President Trump put out. I'm Jake Sullivan. And I'm John Feiner. And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we break down the latest news on Iran and share our net assessment of where things stand for the U.S. The episode's out now. Search for and follow the long game wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway. And I'm Jessica Tarlov. Today we're joined by Senator Chris Murphy from the great state of Connecticut. By the way, Yukon absolutely destroyed my my March Madness bracket. But anyways, Senator, thank you so much for making the time to join us today. Yeah, yeah, that's great to be with you guys. Yeah, we're, we're psyched to be back in a world where it's not just the women's team that is awesome, but the men's team as well. That's right. If you aren't already, please make sure to subscribe to our YouTube page to stay in the loop on all of the political news.

All right, let's get into it. Senator, with the war in Iran, you've been outspoken about U.S. involvement calling it illegal and warning it could cost trillions of dollars. It appears the situation is escalating on multiple fronts. The U.S. military has begun enforcing a blockade of Iranian ports in the strait of Hormuz, though its scope remains unclear with reports that some ships are still getting through, raising questions about how effective or enforceable the strategy really is. At the same time, negotiations have restarted. Iran is reportedly offering to suspend uranium enrichment for five years while the U.S. is

pushing for a 20-year halt, and President Trump is demanding guarantees Iran will never develop nuclear weapons. and the International Monetary Fund is now warning that the conflict could slow global growth, drive up inflation, and even tip the world toward recession as volatility and oil market ripples through the economy. So given all of this, where do you think we stand right now? And what is your recommendation on a go-forward strategy? I think our instinct is often to apply previous lenses to sort of modern, very unique problems. And so, you know, we look at what the president is doing in Iran, and we look at these negotiations, and we try to apply a conventional rationale. I just don't think that works.

I think that we underestimate the degree to which this is just basic incompetence, that we have people who literally have no idea what they are doing, who are applying no lessons from the past, who are drawing on no one who has any experience in doing diplomacy in and around the Middle East. And what you are getting is, you know, just gross incompetence. The latest is this plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by closing the Strait of Hormuz. The idea that Trump has is that because Iran right now is letting, at the very least, its ships through if we stop, Iranian ships from getting through, then Iran will magically open the straight to everyone.

I think it fundamentally misunderstands the way that Iran thinks about this war. They believe they are winning the war. The regime does not feel any threat internally, and thus they think they can just wait us out, that the pain on the U.S. economy will break Trump's will before the pain on the Iranian economy breaks their will. Same thing with negotiations. You know, we're trying to find a logical thread of these negotiations. I don't think there's any logical threat.

I think this is J.D. Vance, who's never negotiated an international deal in his life, a real estate developer, who has no experience in negotiations and a bunch of hangers on to the president. J.D. Vance was in Islamabad for 24 hours and left. That's not how negotiations work. You have to sit down and negotiate for weeks, especially with a complicated adversary, like the Iranians, and the fact that we only are willing to give it 24 hours of negotiation tells you just how nonsensical all of this is. So I think this war is going to drag on for a really long time unless Trump just decides to end it unilaterally, which I still think is the best of a bunch of bad options moving forward. I don't see a big diplomatic settlement. I don't see Iran

reopening the straight absence, Trump ending the war. But his pride and his hubris and his ego is probably for the foreseeable future, going to stop him from ending it unilaterally. What do you think we should do? If the White House called you today and said, what outline a strategy given where we are right now at this moment, what would your strategy be for handling the situation right now? Unilaterally end the war. Just withdraw. Yeah, withdraw. Withdraw. Concede, concede control the Strait of Hormuz to Iran? So there's no military means for us to take Iran's control of the strait away. So let's just start there.

The fastest way to get into a conversation with Iran about how to reopen the strait is to permanently end the war or the threat of military action. Trump believes that his threat to restart bombing or this current plan to sort of lay Iran an American blockade. of the Iranian blockade will change Iranian behavior. Again, in the Middle East, there is not a lot of evidence to suggest that escalatory behavior ultimately achieves U.S. war aims. I would advise him to stop the war, and I think that is the fastest way, ultimately, to get Iran to reopen the strait. If they take control the Strait of Hormuz and J.P. Morgan estimates they're going an additional $90 billion, potentially in revenue by charging a tax on any ship to come through. And they basically have what I would argue is more powerful and enriched uranium through control.

And we acknowledge and concede control. What incentive do they have to ever give it back and seed control of it? Yeah, I mean, that's the disaster that Trump has wrought here. I mean, let's just go through his war aims. He said he wants to destroy their missile program. There's no evidence we've come anywhere close to them. that, destroy their drone program. There's no evidence we will ever ever be able to destroy their drone program. He wants to get rid of their nuclear weapons ambitions. They retain all of that

enriched capacity and you can't really destroy knowledge. And now you've made them a true global player by giving them control of the Strait of Hormuz. Again, the alternative is to just continue bombing Iran and hope that eventually the destruction that we wrought, the number of civilians that we kill, will cause the Iranians to reopen the strait. I don't think that that's a likely path forward. And so let's end the conflict and then with our regional allies be in a conversation with Iran about reopening. It may be that Iran is going to toll that straight for the short and medium term. I just don't know right now that there's any way around it. So do you want that to be the reality in addition to spending $200 billion of taxpayer money on a war that likely won't end up

with the straight being open? That sounds like a pretty horrific exercise in fiscal malpractice. What do you think Russia and China are telling Iran right now? Because we know what our allies, you know, our NATO allies and also what our Gulf allies are saying about it. But Russia and China have been, you know, close allies, obviously of Iran and beneficiaries of this conflict themselves. You know, Putin suffered a big defeat in Hungary with the election a couple days ago. But, you know, he got some sanctions relief, which I'm hoping that Secretary Besant is going to hold to this and put those sanctions back on. But this two-week period has felt like a gift to the Iranians that they can essentially rearm and, you know, conference up with China and Russia for the plan going forward.

So what's your feeling about what Russia and China want Iran to do? I think this conflict accrues to the benefit of both Russia and China. For Russia, these high oil prices and the easing of sanctions on Russia, it just fills the Russian treasury. For China, I think there's, you know, a longer-term play here. for China, you know, they don't really mind that that straight stays closed as long as Chinese ships and Chinese energy move through the straight. And so there's a pretty simple deal for the Chinese and the Iranians to do moving forward, which is that Iran will let Chinese ships and

energy bound for China move through the strait. And then China will help Iran rebuild its missile program and its drone program and probably broader destroyed infrastructure when the United States stops bombing. That is just a reality that I think is very sort of hard to confront right now. And it just, for me, makes me pine for the days in which the United States, China, and Russia were aligned on Iran policy. I know, like right now, that's hard to imagine. But that's what existed when we signed the JCPOA, that's the Iran nuclear deal. That was an agreement not between the United States and Iran. That was a deal between the United States, Europe, Russia, China, and Iran.

We had the ability to basically build on the JCPOA with the United States, China, and Russia on the same side to confront Iran's other malevolent activity. We gave that up, and now we are in a world where, you know, we ultimately may have to accept that there's a more deeply integrated access, especially between Iran and China, but also between Iran and Russia. Yeah, I'm glad that you brought up the JCPOA because I've been thinking a lot about the sunset clauses, which if we had stayed in it versus Trump taking us out in 2018, we would be coming up, you know, near the end of the deal and there was this opportunity to hopefully renegotiate.

And I'm curious as to what our diplomatic team, besides Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner, looks like if we do manage to get Iran back to the table, even in the next year or two, before President Trump is out of office, and hopefully we have a Democratic president coming in. I mean, listen, I don't know what they're looking for, but when they describe the deal they want, it sounds a lot like the JCPOA. I mean, one of the things they talk about is a firm commitment from the Iranians not to develop a nuclear weapon. That's exactly what the JCPOA said. Iran in that agreement promised to never develop a nuclear weapon and gave the Americans and the Europeans the ability to do in-depth inspections every single day on Iranian territory to make sure that they were only pursuing a civilian nuclear weapons program. So if at the end of this, you know, we just get a slightly different version of Obama's nuclear deal, that would be, A, ironic. and B, it would be a ridiculous outcome with a dozen or more Americans having been killed,

and billions of dollars of American taxpayer money wasted just to come out with basically the same agreement that we had before Trump became president. It took 18 months to negotiate the JCPOA, and we're talking about, you know, this idea that deals can be done with these people who are quite emboldened at this moment in, like, you know, You have 10 to 14 days to sort this out. And again, I just, I just like want to underscore that these guys have no idea what they're doing. I mean, this is buffoonery, Vance flying over there for 24 hours, right? When John Kerry negotiated that deal and the Secretary of Energy, you know, they would sit

at these negotiating tables for weeks at a time. And so there's no incentive for the Iranians to really negotiate. when they get to see J.D. Vance for 24 hours and then he leaves. So they're not setting up any construct in which there's likely to be a meaningful negotiation. And the Iranians know that. The term, I think, the best describes it from my vantage point is operational excellence, but strategic incompetence. Do you think that if the president and his cabinet or some members of his cabinet member had consulted Congress, had tried to enlist the help of some Gulf and European allies

and said this is a unique moment in time to further neuter their ability to support proxies, which have been wreaking terror across the region, to take out additional missile launch capability, to potentially tip over what appears to be a wobbling regime. Do you think, one, would you have been more supportive and clear objectives that said, we're in, we're out, this is a military operation, not a war. Would you personally have been

potentially supportive, and do you think that this might have had a greater likelihood of success and that we wouldn't be in, quote, unquote, this feels like the definition of a quagmire? And I would argue that what has happened here, there is some justification for a military operation, but not getting any support from Congress or our allies basically doomed this from the get-go. Would you personally have been more likely to be supportive of some sort of military action, had he enlisted or at least consulted Congress and enlisted some allies? No, because I don't see an objective, at least amongst those that have been articulated by the president, that has a military answer. So you cannot bomb out of existence knowledge. So yes, you can

set back their nuclear program, likely only for a handful of months, but not much longer than that. What we're learning is there is no way to eliminate their missile and drone program through air strikes alone. Heggseth goes on TV and he lies. He says, well, we destroyed their missile program, 90 percent of his gone. That's just not true. It is likely that we've gotten far less than half. And we knew from the beginning that a major military operation was going to cause them to close the straight. And that is the primary reason why both Democratic and Republican presidents prior to Donald Trump had not undertaken a military action of this size. We knew that it would draw them closer to China, ending up in China benefiting. And regime change is not something you can achieve

without a ground invasion, as we have now seen definitively. The Ayatollah was a bad guy, but he was a dottering old man. It is now possible that we have put in charge of that nation much more competent, much more provocative leadership. So, no, I don't think that for me there was any argument that they could make that a military campaign was going to end up achieving any of our goals. Yeah, I want their missile program gone. I want their drone program gone. I want Iran to be a democracy. But I don't see any of those being achieved by a short-term targeted.

military intervention. And you don't, you don't worry that if we exit now, we, one, leave our allies sort of naked and afraid. We broke it. They have to fix it. And two, that we suffer from sort of a glass jaw syndrome where despite $1.4 trillion of your proposed military budget, we become the ultimate paper tiger that a decent amount of pain, or some would argue relative to other conflicts, not that much pain, and we cut and run. You're not, I mean, I think that your arguments are really, I don't know, I have a ton of veracity, compelling, hard to argue with around the incompetence that's gotten us here and now. But if we were to exit, who takes us seriously when we show up with any sort of military campaign and doesn't believe that just inflict a little bit of pain

and they'll run? But who takes us seriously when we respond to a catastrophic mistake with another catastrophic mistake? I mean, you know, this is like trying. out a Little League team, you know, in a major sporting event and hoping that if you just keep playing, they'll win. I mean, these guys are embarrassing the United States. This latest move of closing the strait ourselves in order to respond to Iran closing the straight that makes us look like a laughing stock. This is just going to get worse and worse because these people do not know what they're doing. And listen, that argument has been made before, right? I heard our leaders make that argument to Congress on Afghanistan over and over and over again. Give us more time.

Give us more troops. That is literally the reason why we stayed in Vietnam for as long as we did, because if we can just escalate a little bit more, if we can escalate in a slightly different way, ultimately the enemy will come to the table. So I just see this quagmire getting worse and worse. I don't disagree with you that this is going to make us look weak. But for us to just continue to perform ineptly for us to just invent new, bold, strategic mistakes on a weekly basis, that makes us look even weaker. And what do we say to our allies there? We've inflamed Iran.

We've put them in harm's way. And you have to pay more as a result of it because they're all getting their energy through the strait. Right. But our allies there, maybe with the exception of Saudi Arabia, begged us not to do this. And Saudi Arabia right now is telling us to at the very least end this nonsensical plan to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, because what they worry about is that that will end up with Iran and the Houthis activating to close or harass traffic inside the Red Sea. The Saudis see our continued escalation as bad for the region. So I don't know that our allies there are doing much else than hoping Trump ends this as quickly as possible so that they can try to put the pieces back together.

It may be that it's going to end up being a sort of broader Sunni-Shi-Shiah dialogue in the region that might get the straight reopened. It's not likely going to be Steve Whitkoff that delivers this deal. And again, this is also a function of our broader. alliance structure being shattered. The success of the JCPOA of real diplomacy with Iran was built on the United States and Europe working together. The fact that we can't do any of this with Europe, it greatly de-leverages our ability to end this conflict in a meaningful way because Europe is basically running their own play in the region right now. Okay, let's take a quick break. Stay with us. Hi, I'm Bray Brown. And I'm Adam Grant.

And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree. And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app

to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. Welcome back. I just want to touch on a key element in this war that hasn't been mentioned yet. and that's the role of Israel in this. So with the Italian Prime Minister's announcement, we're up to 26 of 27 EU member states that now support at least partially suspending their trade agreement with Israel.

We have, you know, Bibi Netanyahu giving press conferences where he says, you know, J.D. Vance checked in with me right after the negotiations. I talk to them every day and, you know, really inextricably linking Israel and the U.S. in this fight, which I think makes sense since it was a joint venture there.

How are you seeing Israel's role in this? And what do you think that we should be doing about, you know, a very clear fissure in American attitudes towards Israel on both the right and the left? Yeah, I mean, I worry about the lack of coordination in U.S. and Israeli operations in Iran. I do not actually think we share a goal set. It's been very confusing to me as to whether regime change is an American goal. Sometimes the administration says it is. Sometimes they don't. That is clearly a goal of Israel. They have been targeting political leadership inside Iran in a way the United States has not. I don't think the United States wants Iran to be a failed state in the long run. I do think that Israel wants Iran to be a failed state in the long run. So there are divergent goals between the United States and Israel. What is more concerning to me right now

is the potential for a massive new conflict between Israel and Lebanon. Obviously, you've seen this bombardment of Beirut and other cities inside Lebanon. We might be days away from a new massive Israeli ground operation in Lebanon. Lebanon is a very flawed country, but a multi-ethnic, multicultural democracy

that was, frankly, for the first time in a long time on its way towards a better day because they had a functional government. And so the idea that we would end up after the conflict with Iran with another long-term conflict between the United States and Lebanon, where tens of thousands of Lebanese will be killed, millions will be displaced, just a disaster for the region. My sense is that the Trump administration has been trying to hold Netanyahu back, but they never seem interested in doing that for more than a handful of days. You know, right now, that's, I think, what we should be worrying most about is another

massive U.S. Lebanese war that might end up with the eradication of democracy in Lebanon. Do you think that the pursuit of destroying Hezbollah, which is what Israel's goal is in Lebanon? They don't want to destroy the Lebanese government, and they are killing a lot of civilians in the meantime, which is completely unacceptable. but the target is a known terror group, right? So is that something that you think is not worth the effort or that Israel should be hanging back from that in general? Well, there was a path, a very viable, a difficult path, but a viable path to get the current Lebanese government into the business of directly confronting Hezbollah. Hezbollah obviously was weak.

and there were discussions underway to finally turn the Lebanese armed forces the laugh against Hezbollah, especially in the South, where Hezbollah poses the most direct threat to Israel. There was going to have to be a pretty major investment in the laugh from the U.S. and from the Europeans. But we finally had a halfway competent government in Lebanon, and instead of spending one day trying to pursue a route in which the Lebanese themselves would eradicate Hezbollah's threat to Israel. Instead, we decided to essentially greenlit a new Israeli military operation that has shown in the past no meaningful ability to eradicate Hezbollah's military capacities in the long run. So you think there was a diplomatic solution both in Iran and for Lebanon working with the current

Lebanese government? Well, I mean, it wasn't a pure diplomatic solution because it was going to involved the Lebanese armed forces in some kind of conflict with Hezbollah. And no Israeli forces, though. But no Israeli forces. And that would have been a very difficult proposition. But in the long run, the only way to eradicate Hezbollah's influence inside Lebanon, and remember, this is not just a sort of fringe military operation. Hezbollah in Lebanon is integrated into the government. But the Lebanese people were ready to support. a strategy that would reduce Hezbollah's political and military influence in the country.

We were poised to implement a strategy of that sort. But the Trump administration, you know, again, had no interest in the hard work of doing that. And instead just told the Israelis to do a military operation that, again, has no evidence. There's no evidence in the past that those kind of incursions into Lebanon, of which Israel has conducted many, have a long-term, impact on Hezboa's power. Appreciate how generous to be in with your time, Senator. The race to replace Governor Newsom recently, Congressman Eric Swalwell suspended his campaign,

resigning from Congress, following sexual assault allegations. And we've seen multiple cases like this across Congress, including the resignation of Tony Gonzalez. And supposedly a lot of this, these were quote unquote open secrets. Do you see this as a cultural problem in Congress? And if so, what can be done about it? Yeah, I mean, obviously, this is a

systemic problem, and we've seen, you know, multiple instances in the House of Representatives. I mean, I think you have to have a much more vigorous oversight and ethics capacity in the House of Representatives. That seems to be a process that has ultimately broken down, and you have to have real protection for victims to make sure that they come forward as early as possible. And clearly there's not a belief right now that victims are going to be protected if they step forward. And that's something that I think both the legal system and the internal ethics system can work to address. I want you to imagine that you decide to jump into a crowded field for the Democratic nomination for president. What would be the one or two policies that would be the touchstones of a candidate Murphy's campaign that would be different from a crowded field?

Yeah, I'll, I'll, I knew you were going to do that, Senator. I will tell you my belief, and I think this squares with how you think of the world, is that Trump is not the cause of our American spiritual crisis. He is a symptom of it. What is plaguing America today is a lack of meaning and purpose and connectivity in people's lives. And we need to have an agenda that I think would be surprisingly by, bipartisan and in some ways apolitical to give people greater access to meaning purpose, identity, and connection in their lives. Those are agendas about rebuilding healthy, unique, small cities,

and small towns. That's an agenda about controlling the poisonous technology that robs you of real connection. That's about industrial policy so that there's real dignity and work, a common good capitalism where you can make a profit in this country, but not at the expense. of healthy workers. I just think that we spend all this time in this country fighting over important issues like abortion and immigration and climate and guns, right, things that I deeply care about. And it masks this underlying realignment in this country that is happening around a different kind of less exploitative capitalism and investments in local communities or regulation of technologies, a belief that institutions from unions to churches need to be healthy again.

I think that there's a real ability to scramble the traditional existing fault lines in American politics. If you, you know, run a national campaign based around meaning connection, friendship, companionship, leisure time. I think that would be a fascinating campaign for somebody to run. For somebody to run. There you go. Common good capitalism. That sounds like a pretty good. I haven't heard that one before.

It sounds like a pretty good bumper sticker. Christopher Scott. You know how I like a bumper. Christopher Scott Murphy is an American lawyer, author and politicians serving since 2013 as the junior United States senator from Connecticut. Senator Murphy is a member of the Democratic Party. He served from 2007 to 2013 in the United States House of Representatives representing Connecticut's fifth congressional district. He joins us from our nation's great capital. Senator, we always very much enjoy your level-headedness, pragmatic, yet compelling narrative.

Very much appreciate your service. And you didn't back down to... There you go. Oh, that's not fair. What you asked 80 times. Yeah. Are you sure? Are you sure?

Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? Are you sure? We really are different ways to be. I know. You know, I listen. I mean, restraint is a policy.

And you can't be ashamed of that. Before we go, a reminder that not only is Raging moderate's five days a week. We're also available on substack. I've been getting to know substack better. And I guess people were right. It's like a very cool place to hang out. Subscribers get ad

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