Conversation with Jared Cohen — The Macroeconomic Environment + Life After Power

23:50Right. And so the book is organized with each of them kind of representing a different model. And so the idea is that certain models speak to some of us more than others. To me, there's a couple of really powerful lessons. If you look at William Howard Taft, there's so many people and many of us will encounter this in our lives where, you know, an opportunity or a job or something we want to do passes us by because the timing isn't right or the circumstances aren't right. And William Howard Taft never wanted to be president, but his wife, Theodore Roosevelt, and his three brothers desperately wanted him to be president.

24:21And so he deferred his own dream of serving on the Supreme Court to suit their wishes. And in his last decade of life, he ultimately ends up as chief justice of the Supreme Court. And so the powerful lesson of William Howard Taft is a dream deferred does not necessarily need to be a dream denied and a dream deferred can still be a dream that's achieved. But for me, I think the one that impacted me directly the most was sitting down with George W. Bush. And, you know, listeners might be surprised that I include President Bush in this, but when I looked at the act of living presidents, there was only one whose popularity had doubled since leaving office.

24:55And it was the man, George W. Bush, who'd done less to invest in his legacy and reputation than any of his active contemporaries. And what I really wanted to understand was what that was all about. And there's lots to unpack. I'm shocked. I thought you were going to say Carter W's brand has improved more. So I say active living presidents because Carter, since he went into hospice a little over a year ago, his active post-presidency has done. But what's interesting is you're right to look at them side by side because both of them have experienced a renaissance in their popularity after both leaving office with historic unpopularity.

25:30And Carter aggressively invested in his legacy, aggressively meddled. He was a nuisance to both Democratic and Republican successors alike, whereas George W. Bush completely moved on and both of them managed to achieve kind of double digit improvement in their post-presidency. Bush has actually done it faster than Carter did, and I include both of them, but very, very different paths. The thing that for me was very interesting about Bush is, you know, I spent about eight hours interviewing him on the record during COVID. It's the longest interview he's given about his post-presidency since leaving office.

26:04And we discussed this issue of legacy, and he has a very quarrelsome view towards trying to actively influence your legacy. It's not that he doesn't think legacy matters, but he cannot for the life of him understand why somebody would sacrifice the present to invest in something that they're not going to be around to see. And so he sort of jokes with me. You know, I read three books about George Washington last year. By the time they get around to the other George, I'm going to be long gone. And he just doesn't believe that legacy is something that you can shape for sort of, you know, hundreds of years through the actions that you engage in immediately after leaving office.

26:40How has the type of person who runs for president and the type of character it attracts, how has that changed in the last 50 years? So to me, what's interesting about the types of figures that emerge in leadership positions, and this is true for the president of the United States, but it's increasingly true for the leaders of revolutions and any leadership position in general, which is, if you look at the advent of social media, what it's done is it's accelerated the pace of movement making, and I think it's actually slowed down leadership development. And so what that means is we used to see leaders emerge and refine their leadership skills long before they achieved any kind of public celebrity.

27:22And now it's the reverse. We'll never see a young leader emerge again in any corner of the world without first meeting them as kind of a flash-in-the-pan social media celebrity. Just the sequence in terms of how our information environment operates won't allow for it. Well, what are those attributes? People who tend to be more terse, more inclined to dunk on other people, funny. if social media is the new electorate. Look, it's a different, if you think about, you know, people like FDR and some of the sort of great leaders in American history, it was a different type of charisma to stand in an auditorium with a microphone that barely worked and ignite a crowd.

28:04You know, enter the television, John F. Kennedy, you know, really sort of appreciated and understood how to utilize, you know, the television. If you look today, you know, it's all about these kind of, you know, creating these viral moments, creating these relatable moments on social media that translate to the masses. It's a very different skill set. And it's a skill set that, interestingly, if you look at the two presidential candidates for the 2024 election, it's kind of ironic that you actually have one of them on the Republican side who actually, despite his age, has figured out how to exploit mass media to his advantage.

28:43But if you look at some of the candidates in the primaries, some of them have seemed like they emerged out of nowhere. And one of the things that social media allows a new batch of leaders to do is to kind of find their way onto the presidential stage without following the conventional path. So I want to talk a little bit about you and your role at Goldman. You're the co-head of the Office of Applied Innovation and president of global affairs. I have literally no idea what that means. What is success? When they sit you down at the end of the year to discuss your bonus and your review, what does success look like in that role?

29:20So sort of a two-part question. So the first part is what that is. So let me start with that. So look, you have two megatrends, the most significant technology invented since the Internet with generative AI and the most unstable geopolitics that we've seen since the end of the Cold War. And these two separate trends are they're separately and together turning every business in every sector and geography upside down as they try to reflexively navigate a changing geopolitical and technological moment. But then opportunistically, all that volatility in both contexts creates unique opportunities for a number of businesses.

29:55And when I say businesses, I don't just mean multinational corporations. I also mean, you know, sovereigns and institutional investors to take advantage of some of these changes and seek out new opportunities. So that's kind of my remit is to kind of navigate those two worlds. In terms of how I'm evaluated, there's kind of a two-step process with this. One is, you know, these are areas where Goldman Sachs is leaning in and making sure that our opinion is expressed about where all this technology is going and what's happening geopolitically. And, you know, part of the reason we do that is we, you know, there's two ways that we go about pursuing business.

30:30One is, you know, there's certain mandates that we're pursuing and they're the traditional type of business that you would expect us to go after. But increasingly, what we're doing is we're recognizing that the entire world, ourselves included, we're all asking the same kind of roughly 12 questions about what's happening technologically and geopolitically. And they're the same questions that our clients are asking. We have expertise and they have expertise. And what we find is by tying all our expertise together and showing up to engage with our clients, the combination of those two allows us to generate mandates from scratch together that don't exist about how they can lean into the geopolitics and the technology to pursue new commercial opportunities.

31:08So that's kind of the essence of what I do. So if the head of private wealth comes to you or the head of alternative investments comes and says, what are the two or three geopolitical trends that we should be thinking about in terms of its impact on the markets? What are those two or three things? You know, to me, the number one issue that's impacting the markets right now is in the U.S.-China context, but specifically about shifts in supply chains. So I would say Taiwan and the South China Sea end up getting all the oxygen. I'm much more worried about some of the dynamics around supply chains because the U.S.

31:40has called out four or five different supply chains as geopolitically important, critical minerals and rare earths, pharmaceuticals, microelectronics, energetics, et cetera. None of those supply chains can be decoupled. And within each of those supply chains, we've not defined where the integrated economy stops and the decoupled economy starts. And so my concern is where all the volatility comes from is that the United States' geopolitical appetite to diversify those supply chains gets out, you know, way out in front of the economic realities of what's possible. So if you take critical minerals and rarests just as an example, essential to the energy transition, essential to all technology, okay, so you find a new lithium mine or a new graphite mine or a new cobalt mine, that's just one piece of it.

32:23You still have to crush the minerals, you have to, you know, purify the metal, you have to chemically treat them, and then you have to refine and process them. 92 % of that refinement and processing happens in China. And there's only five refineries ex-China in the entire world. You cannot diversify that supply chain. And so the problem is, if you get overly excited about one part of the supply chain being diversified, China has all the cards and all the economic leverage to retaliate. And so I worry about an escalation in supply chains where if China ends up on the ropes, they have any number of economic levers that they can pull, again, from critical minerals, legacy chips, pharmaceuticals.

33:02These are all supply chains that are impossible to decouple completely, partially, or even substantially. And so that, to me, those supply chains are what have the ability to completely shake up the global economy. I think on Taiwan and the South China Sea, again, you get a lot of military speak in each of these contexts. I'm more worried about an accident and lack of diplomatic crisis management infrastructure to cool temperatures down. But it's the supply chain issue that is what impacts every type of business. And even if you're not impacted directly by exposure to Chinese supply chains, you're impacted indirectly.

33:38And every business is at risk of getting hit by the geopolitical equivalent of shrapnel. So if that's true, that everyone's at risk of shrapnel from this kind of this new Cold War, my sense is the greatest tax cut in the history of the world would be a thaw in U.S. Sino relations. And it just seems like there's so much, the incentives are just so strong. I mean, we don't get along with Russia. Okay, we got to find another place to buy gas or Europe has to find another place to buy gas. Maybe we don't get as much caviar or good vodka, but I just don't see, I don't see our economy taking a huge hit.

34:12If things continue to get worse with China, everything in the United States gets more expensive. So it seems like the incentives are just so strong to figure this out. What are your thoughts? Yeah, no, I think that's a correct observation, Scott, except that there's a significant paradigm shift that's happened. So in the past, let's call it before COVID, you could count on both the U.S. and China having their economic interests drive their geopolitical interests, right? And so as tough and tense as things could get geopolitically, at the end of the day, neither country would engage in substantial actions that risk one or both economies.

34:47And so So that kind of governed the geopolitical dynamic. Coming out of COVID, there was a real paradigm shift in the geopolitics where the geopolitical center of gravity moved from the Middle East to this escalating tension between Washington and Beijing. And it turns out that the U.S. and China, the two big winners of the chapter on hyperglobalization, were both pretty altogether unhappy with the outcome, right? So the U.S. found itself with an over-dependency on China for supply chains. China wanted to revise the liberal international order, but at the end of the day is stuck in a world where the dollar is for the foreseeable future, the global reserve currency.

35:23And I actually don't think this is a Cold War. It has very few of the attributes of the Cold War in the sense that, you know, we've never been in a situation where the U.S.'s most formidable adversary is also its second or third largest trading partner. It does not have the same ideological dimensions. We're not fighting military proxy wars with them all around the world. And the economies are so intertwined that we're not trying to destroy each other. Despite that, the paradigm shift has created this dynamic where the domestic circumstances on both sides are driving short and medium-term geopolitical goals that are impacting the longer-term economic outcomes.

35:59So both countries are capable of doing things in service of these short-term geopolitical goals that are incredibly hazardous to one or both of the economic circumstances. And again, it starts with the domestic side. So China's domestic economy is lagging. That's driving a growing geopolitical appetite to, let's call it, kind of use the geopolitics to wag the economic dog. In the U.S., you know, being tough on China and protectionist on China is just about the only thing the two parties agree on. And as we get deeper into an election, both parties are going to try to out China each other. You know, the Biden folks will be more focused on technology export controls.

36:37You know, the Trump folks are more focused on trade and tariffs, but there's actually not a lot of daylight between, you know, the two sides on China. And so my concern is, you know, in a tit for tat, you know, the geopolitics just keep getting more tense. And because we're used to both because as you as you mentioned, Scott, it's incredibly logical not to mutually self immolate on the economic front. We sort of assume it can't happen. But from what I'm seeing, all evidence suggests that, you know, in service again of these short and medium term geopolitical goals, both countries can end up doing something quite foolish on the economic front.

37:10We'll be right back. Learning through play starts with Lego Duplo. With Lego Duplo, toddlers can develop real-life skills while having fun with colorful bricks made just for them. Large, easy to grip, and safe to explore. When children express themselves with Lego Duplo, they build patience, problem-solving, and empathy. See your child learn perseverance and self-expression with everything they imagine and create. Visit lego.com slash preschool to learn more. There is a lot to talk about when we talk about Donald Trump and Jimmy Kimmel. One big question I've got is why in 2025 are late night TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel's show still on TV?

37:57Even in our diminished times, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, they're just some of the biggest faces of their networks. If you start taking the biggest faces off your networks, you might save some nickels and dimes, but what are you even anymore? What even is your brand anymore? I'm Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, and that was James Ponowozik, the TV critic for The New York Times. This week, we're talking about Trump and Kimmel, free speech, and a TV format that's remained surprisingly durable for now. That's This Week on Channels, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Think of, we've been talking a lot about China, think of every nation as a stock.

38:45Which three or four stocks are you most bullish on and most bearish on? Yeah, so there's, so one of the things that's interesting, if you look at, I expect U.S.-China tensions to get worse for the balance of the decade, probably longer. And so the question is, under those circumstances, are there any winners, right? And that's kind of one question you're getting at. I write a lot about the rise of these geopolitical swing states. These are countries that are led by individuals that have a global agenda that's independent of Washington and Beijing. And they have certain economic leverage that allows them to lean into those positions.

39:19Maybe it's a differentiated part of the supply chain. Maybe they have a differentiated amount of capital that they can deploy at will. Maybe they're attractive for near-shoring, off-shoring, and friend-shoring. So look, I mean, India is kind of the ultimate geopolitical swing state here. If you look at how they've behaved vis-a-vis the United States, they have a huge amount of labor, huge amount of the pharmaceutical supply chain, tons of advantages economically. The U.S. has telegraphed their long-term commitment to India as an alternative to China. And if you look at what India has done, they've sort of swung on an issue by issue basis.

39:53So the U.S., when Russia invades Ukraine, wants to couch it as the great battle between democracy and autocracy. And then India, the world's largest democracy, stays neutral because they're buying Russian crude for$12 a barrel and then reselling it to Europe. They have increased trade with Russia by more than 400 percent, and it's not changed the U.S. posture towards them at all. Right. So India is a big beneficiary from sustained U.S.-China tensions because they basically pick and choose which parts of the U.S.-China position they want to align with and which parts they want to separate from.

40:26So as it pertains to their regional disputes with China or their land disputes with China, they're all in with the U.S. As it pertains to the U.S.'s ambitions in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, it's sort of more strategic ambiguity. And as it pertains to the U.S.'s ambitions in Europe, they basically stayed neutral and they've made themselves the big redistribution winner in the sort of shifts in energy commodities. Another part of the world that I'm quite bullish on is actually the Gulf. And it's interesting because if you look at the war between Israel and Hamas right now, it's the first geopolitical test for the region since, you know, Saudi Inc., Qatar Inc., and Abu Dhabi Inc.

41:04have been having an economic renaissance. And to me, what it reveals is that the Middle East today is kind of a tale of two countries, countries that are adjacent to, you know, Israel, you know, that don't have and countries that are besieged by Iran's proxies that don't have the luxury of extricating their economic futures from the geopolitical baggage of the past. And countries, again, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE, whose economic futures are completely untethered from what happens geopolitically. There's been no impact on them in terms of their touch points with the global business community.

41:36There's been no impact on them economically, despite everything that's happening in the region. And so I think that, you know, in a lot of respects, I view what's happening today as kind of Iran's penultimate temper tantrum. But, you know, the Middle East that is sort of a bastion of geopolitical instability, that part of the Middle East is actually getting much smaller. And the more stable, economically viable part of the Middle East is made up of these three geopolitical swing states that are increasingly asserting leverage in every corner of the world from Asia to Latin America and Africa. And they're increasingly connected with the global business community.

42:11So I'm quite bullish long term on what I call the inks of, again, Saudi and Qatar Inc. and Abu Dhabi Inc. Japan is another country that I think is benefiting tremendously from what's happening, as is Australia. You know, these are two countries that are getting, you know, the attention that they've always wanted from the U.S. as the U.S. has finally made that pivot towards Asia. And look, you know, they have the geographic proximity to China that makes them an attractive destination. It's just around the Gulf. First of all, I thought you were going to say Mexico. I was on the board of Urban Outfitters, especially retailer, and we woke up one day and realized a disproportionate, uncomfortable amount of our tops were being produced in a small region in China.

42:51The supply chain had been so optimized for efficiency that there was no slack in it. So I think the majority of boardrooms are thinking about supply chain heterogeneity, right? And Mexico, it strikes me this is just Mexico is just the, a lot of their success is not going to be their fault, that they're going to be a big recipient of additional trade. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I would. So I would add, so there's two other countries that I would add that I'm quite bullish on. One is Mexico. The other is Vietnam. Although I think Vietnam will have a ceiling, right? Vietnam surpassed the UK as America's seventh largest trading partner about a year ago.

43:24We do more trade with Vietnam than the UK? Yeah. So it's— I love that stuff. But that's not something that happened overnight. That's been a sort of a decade-plus investment on the part of Vietnam to make themselves attractive for nearshoring and friendshoring. In the case of Mexico, I could not agree with you more. In general, Latin America should be a huge beneficiary of the shifts in these supply chains. The problem is most of the governments keep flipping right or keep flipping left on different cycles. You see this in Brazil. You see this in Colombia. You see this in Chile. You see it in Peru.

43:57So that's part of the challenges with South America. The advantage of Mexico, what's actually interesting is every time there's been an election and the parties have changed over, people have predicted some kind of catastrophe that hasn't happened. So I remember when, you know, Pena Nieto came to power and said, oh, the PRI being back in power is going to be a disaster because of the relationship with the Sinaloa cartels and so forth. And you know what? Things didn't end up changing that dramatically. And at the end of the day, the size of the Mexican economy, its proximity to the U.S., the need to do something around the border and the fact that there's already so much activity between the two countries.

44:33It's so the obvious place to move certain elements of the manufacturing sector. And I think it's much more viable than South America. And so I think it just doesn't have the same political unpredictability that you see, you know, south of Mexico. So I'll put forward a thesis, and it's based on anecdotal observations. And just because it's anecdotal doesn't mean it's not true. But I went to Mykonos this last summer and went to all these clubs and where it's very, people get tables and the tables are extraordinary. It's kind of lifestyle of the rich and famous, right? And I thought, this is the best thing that could happen to us.

45:12And what do I mean by that? I noticed that almost every table since the last time I was there three or four years ago was inhabited by kids, young adults from the Gulf. And I thought, they're turning west. They're turning to capitalism. and distinct of how bad his brand is, MBS is actually a reformer. And I thought, I'd be shocked if the kingdom doesn't normalize relations with Israel and they're choosing capitalism over Islamism or fundamentalism or terror, whatever word you want to put on it. I thought money wins and money's winning here. And this is going to play out really well for the West.

45:46Your thoughts? Yeah, so I agree with that. Look, it's always been the case that the elites in these countries have kind of mixed with the elites in, you know, the sort of various party islands in South of France and so forth. That part's not new. But what's new, since you mentioned Saudi Arabia, MBS did something quite interesting, which is, you know, you know, for decades, everyone always said, you know, reforms have to happen really slowly. You know, the religious ulama will never allow it. You know, half the country, you know, you know, will never tolerate. And he basically called that bluff.

46:16And people can say. He's going fast, no? I think he's Are they liberalizing faster than anyone else? Well, and part of it, there's two reasons why they're doing it. And I think, you know, there's, you know, to me, Saudi Arabia is, I've been traveling there for 20 plus years. You know, the pace of the change, you know, it'll be three months since I go, you know, between two trips. And you see the change even in those three months. What you see with Saudi Arabia and what makes them distinct from, you know, Qatar and UAE, the sort of the two other inks, is they actually have a sizable population, right?

46:45There's between 39 and 40 million people in Saudi Arabia. It's a very young population. The risk that they have is if they can't build a meaningful private sector that creates a destination for that population's future, they're going to experience a brain drain. And so there's sort of two parts of this. There's building the infrastructure and the ecosystem of a modern private sector so that the talent germinates and stays in country. But then, two, there's the social reforms that are necessary to also keep that population there. So, one, the place needs to be the type of society they want to live in.

47:22And two, there needs to be opportunities there. And so the social reforms and the investment in the private sector go hand in hand. The issue is historically Saudi Arabia, it's been more kind of a merchant economy. It hasn't been a place of entrepreneurship and thought leadership, and they're trying to change that very quickly. But until it's going to take some time to do, and in the meantime, what you're seeing is the state apparatus is actually stepping in and subsidizing a lot of that. And in a lot of respects, they're trying to position themselves as a country that sort of thinks like an entrepreneur, which is you don't have a lot of countries taking major sovereign risk.

47:57If you look at the infrastructure projects that Saudi Arabia is building, a lot of these are pretty risky. They're capital intensive. They may or may not succeed. And a lot of what they're doing is they recognize that that's what they need to do in order to get ahead. If you look at UAE and you look at Qatar, they have a different thesis. So Qatar is a country of 350 ,000 people. People think that they built all that infrastructure for the World Cup. And it's like, no, they wanted the World Cup because it gave them gave them an excuse to build all that infrastructure. Because if you're a country of 350 ,000 people, you can't modernize unless you can get businesses to move there and you can get people to people to move there.

48:34In order to do that, you need the infrastructure of a modern country. So now what they're working on is their kind of post-World Cup thesis about why businesses should move to Doha. And it has to be a thesis that looks different than the one that the UAE has, because the UAE has a significant first-mover advantage. They're the regional headquarters for every major business. They've set up the regulatory infrastructure. They have a first-mover advantage on AI. And a lot of what they're focused on is leading into that first-mover advantage to achieve greater geopolitical mobility, as well as not lag on sustaining that first-mover advantage.

49:06And so kind of gone are the days where we think about the Gulf writ large. What's interesting is you're seeing countries that used to be thought of in a regional context deregionalizing. And then you're seeing countries that used to be thought of individually regionalizing. Right. So the U.S. now talks not about made in America, but made in the Americas, to your point about Mexico. go. You served, was it on the board of the National Counterterrorism Center? Is that correct? Yep. Is it specific countries, specific groups, domestic terrorists? Where do you see if our security apparatus reaches out to you and says, what are the threats we should be focused on?

49:41What do you tell them? So to me, rather than regurgi, look, there's all the obvious threats, right? But let me answer your question with where I think that there's a less obvious threat that's really germinating, which is if you look at the Middle East, we knew who the spoilers were before October 7th, and we knew who the spoilers were after October 7th. They're the same set of characters. But there's a headwind or a sort of a more abstract spoiler that I think is not getting enough attention that ties directly into your question, which is the social mediafication of this war in the Middle East right now means that you have more hours of footage uploaded to various social media platforms than you probably have minutes or even seconds of the entire war.

50:21And all of that content is being algorithmically targeted. It's being taken out of context. It's being distorted, manipulated, you know, and amended and augmented with additional disinformation. And it's being targeted to a group of young people that has no geographic, you know, proximity necessarily to the war. You combine that with a backlog of migration from COVID that picked up into Europe after COVID, with the fact that you've had four coups in West Africa in the last year and a half, which has pushed more migration from the Western Sahel into the Maghreb into Europe, and an additional wave of migrants that are coming out of this current war in the Middle East, I would remind anybody that was listening that the 9-11 hijackers were radicalized by watching far less content that had no algorithmic dimension of what was happening in Bosnia in the 90s.

51:13And so you look at this reservoir of content that's coming out of the Middle East right now, plus all of these migration movements. And I think you have a really dangerous new wave of homegrown extremism and spread of extremism that is being particularly concentrated in Europe. But if you look at what's happening on campuses in the US, I mean, this is just, to me, a very bad recipe, right? And then one other piece that I'll say about this, Scott, is, you know, to me, October 7th, that was the surprise that should not have been a surprise, right? We spent 20 years obsessively fighting a war on terror in every corner of the globe.

51:46And then COVID happened. We went inside. We reemerged, decided that, you know, the new threat was from China. And we acted like, you know, the terrorists just kind of retired and gave up. Right. That's just not that's not how it works. Right. And so I wasn't surprised that a major terrorist attack happened. I wouldn't have been able to predict that it would happen in the way that it did where it did on October 7th. But we shouldn't be surprised that terrorism is very much alive and well. So it's the obvious questions that are the most difficult. I would imagine you get asked on a frequent basis to handicap the race for the White House.

52:20As we stand here today, how would you outline it? Look, I'm not a pollster, but just my impulse tells me it's kind of a coin toss, right? And to me, the real question is, what are the inflection points or what are the variables that I'm looking at that I think could impact the outcome? And here I'll sort of wear my historian hat, which I think is much better than my not even amateur pollster hat. So my historian hat tells me that third parties matter because they take away votes from somebody. And so I think that RFK Jr. probably takes away from Trump. I think all the other third party candidates would likely take away from Biden.

52:58And so the question is, will that happen in the five or six states that matter and in the districts that matter? That's one variable I'm looking at. The other is the war in the Middle East. I do think, again, has an impact on voter turnout in in Michigan in particular, but not just Michigan. Third, I think that there's the inflation numbers, which are useful for sort of economists and wonks. And then there's sort of the psychological inflation, which is how do people feel about the price of food and gas? You know, the prices spiked so fast that even though they've come down, do they come down to a level that still feels higher than what people's recency bias causes them to remember a couple of weeks before the election.

53:37So psychological inflation, very hard to measure, and you certainly can't quantitatively measure it. So I'm worried about that. I do think this issue at the southern border is going to be a major, major issue that impacts voter turnout in November. And then, of course, all the indictments, right? The only historic precedent we have for this is Eugene Depp in 1920, running from his prison cell as a socialist and getting a million votes. All we can really derive from that is that it's a reminder that if you're an indicted and incarcerated presidential candidate, there's nothing that prevents you from running for office.

54:11I find it amusing that it just means that you're disenfranchised if you're convicted. So you can, in theory, have a situation where, you know, somebody ends up as president of the United States, you know, while a convicted felon and, you know, wouldn't be able to cast a vote in their own election. But so I think the indictments, though, we've never had indictments. We've never had a major presidential candidate indicted. So we don't know what impact that will have. I have no history that I can draw on for it. Right. It's it's it's anybody's guess. And then, you know, I would say the only other thing that would factor in is age.

54:43Right. You know, these are two very old candidates. A lot is made of Biden's age, but Trump is pretty old as well. If either one of them has a very senior moment on the debate stage, you know, in this era when it's already, you know, such a meme, those senior moments can have quite a significant impact. And so ultimately, again, I don't think there's really any undecided votes in this election. I think, you know, everybody sort of knows where they're leaning and it's a question of who turns up and who doesn't turn up. Jared Cohen is Goldman Sachs co-head of the Office of Applied Innovation and President of Global Affairs.

55:19Jared is also the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including his latest, Life After Power, Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House, and the forthcoming children's book, Speaking of America, United States Presents and the Words That Changed History. He joins us from the Caribbean. Jared, we really appreciate your time. Thank you, Scott.

55:48A job of happiness, a word on parenting, and it's no advice or it's not advice. It's just it's not advice on parenting. It's advice to forgive yourself. I think I've read and seen most TikToks on parenting, and the only thing I figured out is no one has any fucking idea. And my initial thinking with one of my kids who's been especially difficult recently, or I've been especially bad at parenting, is that, you know, I have all these empty threats. I'm going to take your phone away, or if you don't brush your teeth in the next five minutes, you're going to bed 15 minutes earlier. And he's pretty quickly figured out that I'm kind of full of it, and these threats are empty.

56:25and I'm trying to just be more like talk to them and say, all right, you know, up to you. I love what Michelle Obama said. She said, okay, and I've been saying this with my kids. I'm like, you know, you're practicing to be the person you're going to be, right? You're, you know, if your room's a mess and you're not listening and you're disagreeable, you're going to be that person the rest of your life. Is that who you want to be? Is that how you're going to find friends and, you know, meet girls and get a job by just being disagreeable and difficult all the time? I start practicing the person you want to be and also trying to position stuff and gamify things.

56:59And I'm trying different things because they always say parenting is the hardest job. I'm not sure that's true. I bet there are jobs that are harder. I'm not sure I've ever had a job where I have more self-doubt. I'm constantly thinking at the end of the day, like, okay, you'd like to think. It's like being a manager. I always thought I'm smart and I'm a good person or a relatively good person, which immediately makes me a good manager. No, it doesn't. Management is its own thing. And thinking that you're smart and a good person leads to good management is just not true at all. Being smart and a good person doesn't make you a good quarterback or a good violinist.

57:29These things are hard, and sometimes you need outside help, and you need to seek guidance from other people. And I'm at that point because I recognize despite my good intentions, despite how much I love them, sometimes you need to turn to outside sources of information or help just to figure out, okay, what are we going through? Like, what is this child experiencing and how can I be productive? And I struggle with anger. A lot of times when I get angry, I think it's more about me. I get upset that the relationship is not my vision of the father-son relationship. I think I probably, I don't know, mistakenly thought that they would be, you know, at this point, we'd all be really good friends and they'd really admire me.

58:11And that hasn't happened. And I do, and I've said this before, I've got to realize that I'm not their buddy. I'm their dad. But this is all a long-winded way of saying don't be afraid to reach out to other parents or other sorts of information to figure out or get feedback. And what I found is, yeah, you get some good ideas, but for the most part, what you find out is that everyone is struggling with this shit. And you show up, you spend time, you do your best, but also forgive yourself. And my best friend, Adam Markman, said something that's always stuck with me. He has three kids, two boys that are both older and both doing well, but both of them went through everything at some point.

58:50He said the only thing, the only thing that worked was a base of love, but more than anything, the only thing that worked was time. Anyways, parenting, forgive yourself.