Ian Bremmer: Who Is Actually Running the World?

22:03Yeah, they decided who's who. If they were on your side, they would give you a loan as a country. They would decide where your military goes or doesn't. Do you think we, is it that or do you think it's even - I think it's even bigger than that. This is terrifying.

22:14Ian Bremmer:The reason I think it's bigger is because if we imagine just a few years down the road, and you and I have both seen some of these presentations before - Yeah, yeah, we have. By the way, together. um and and and the fact that you're going to have ai that is trained on our data which means it will know us better than anyone better than any government knows us better than any any spouse member of our family doctor lawyer accountant what have you and we're going to spend all of our time being intermediated by that ai yeah well the company that controls that ai is going to have much more influence over us individually and anyone else in a society that is deployed with that AI than any government will.

23:01Ian Bremmer:And I think that now that may cause a reaction. It may cause a revolution. It may break a state. It may force the state to nationalize them. I don't know, but that is the trajectory we are presently on. And that's way beyond talking about any East india trading company that's like you're not just your citizenship your entire humanity you're going to become more than or less than homo sapiens you're going to be programmed by this thing you'll become kind of a hybrid human being in some ways um but it won't be because of your relationship with the government a passport of citizenship it's going to be because your relationship with that ai which is owned by a company which is created by a company that's a That's a wild evolution of a geopolitical model that you and I have grown up with, just kind of not even questioning what the assumptions are.

23:52This is why you should always lie to your AI. I encourage people all the time. To lie? As much as you can. Tell me more. As much as you can. Every time you type into your AI, like whatever you use, I always encourage people to just throw it off the trail sometimes. Just be like, I'm a father of seven and this is my life and this is what's happening. But you are a father. of seven. Yeah, but if you're not a father of seven, you get what I'm saying? Just be like random things. I live in Bulgaria and this is my story and this is my world.

24:21Ian Bremmer:But you do live in Bulgaria. Oh, I mean. You just don't tell people that. You know, I thought I was worried about the future. I should be worried about the present. I've got two state actors here. I'm trying to help you. What you mean is a gen provocateur. What you're saying is actually very interesting because in South Africa on the 16th of December is a day of reconciliation. which has been Denghans Day before, it was commemorating the Zulus turning on the Dutch, on the Africana, basically, after they sent them on a conquest to go fetch cattle from the Sutu king. But one professor was interviewed on radio, and he was saying that it is not about the history itself.

25:02It's that the history being taken away from the curriculum of a schooling system makes people lose their culture. Now, when everyone in a country that has 11 official languages starts speaking one language, it's going to be very hard for them to believe that they are different. And he says that mistake was done by Japan at some point where they focused too much on math and science, all those damn subjects. And he says they paused and hit the brakes and were like, we're introducing arts and culture back into society again. And as you say now, our interaction with America and how we know America is through pop culture, right?

25:37fast food movies music cigarettes alcohol and that's all we know and for a long time that was American culture but you fast forward to 30 years from now I mean from then to now if a South African visits America there's very little that they see in fact we sometimes criticize other things and go we are far far far ahead we are far ahead of this yes and that was always never the case and also you go to South Africa and more and more kids speak less of their home languages or indigenous or vernacular. And I think what you're speaking to is, it's almost like, and like Trevor's saying, we're feeding into this homogenous society that we're going to end up being, which will not need the state.

26:19The AI runs. Exactly. We'll not need a president to tell people what to do. They'll just find it from a computer. Yeah, the algorithm that you have

26:27Ian Bremmer:may be the thing that most determines your community, your connectivity, who you are, how you think, not your nation, not your actual physical community. Your authority in your house does not lie with you anymore as the parent. It lies with the computer because they can ask the computer what the story is. And one of the great values of the United States that I have always found has been the locality. Like when I grew up in Chelsea, Massachusetts, my entire world was my family and just a few blocks around me. There's the public school that I could walk to and all those kids. And they came from different countries, but we were really, really tightly knit.

27:01Ian Bremmer:That obviously is going to be blown apart when each of those individual kids has AI. Yes. Which is one of the reasons I think that this new Australian law that is saying under 16, no mas. Yeah. I think that's clearly that should be global. No mas is a boxing term for when you've been, you're like, I can't take anymore. You say what? No mas. No mas. Is that someone trying to say no more? Yeah, like no mas. How did that start? I guess when you bend the knee. No mas. No mas. No mas. I don't know how it started But it's a boxing term right Oh okay If you've had enough You're like ah Do you think it's too late though Like Some people say Oh the cat's out the bag It's too late for Australia To say Kids can't have social media And that Because now Because now there's the kids No no I'm just asking No no yeah yeah Too late for hope Never too late for hope Never yeah I don't expect a question like that From Trevor No no I'm asking you I know I'm asking this I was so disappointed in him as well Were you I looked at him I can feel it From both of us From seven Yeah From Bulgaria From Bulgaria And no hope I mean, look what he's made of himself from those humble backgrounds.

28:08It was actually a man by the name of Ian Bremmer who taught me to ask questions that you yourself wouldn't necessarily ask and to think in ways that you wouldn't necessarily think to get a better strategic understanding of how the world might work. Wow. That's what he taught me. That's extraordinary. Yeah, you should meet him. I should meet him. I was going to say, you should meet him. He sounds like a great guy.

28:30Ian Bremmer:He really does. I don't think we can do it. Of course we can. Now, can we do it in the United States? Yeah, can anything happen anymore in the United States? And I don't mean this in a facetious way, but like, can anything happen in the United States? People believing that the US was so broken, that the political system was so corrupt, so sclerotic, is what got us Trump. Most people that voted for Trump thought that democracy was more important than the people that voted against it. Right. Because for them, the idea, and it's in the polls. Most people didn't think that the election was about democracy.

29:10Ian Bremmer:But for those that did, more of them voted for Trump than voted for Kamala in the last election. And it's because those people thought that the deep state, the administrative state. The system. The system was so broken, just like my mom used to. My mom, when she was alive, she didn't finish high school. She cared a lot about me and my brother. That was her whole life. And she's like, these guys will never take care of you. not not the government officials not the ceos not the bankers not the media none of those fancy people i gotta fight for everything and if i have to steal i'll steal because it's my kids right yeah and and i you know the you have so many americans over the past decades that feel that way about the government that's what got you bernie it's what you got your mom donnie it's what got you trump it's the same thing why did trump decide that he was going to welcome mom donnie in the White House because fundamentally he gets that that's part of what got him there.

30:02Yeah.

30:03Ian Bremmer:He was saying, he said, like, we agree on a lot of stuff. Sure. You know, both in principle saying we want to stick it to the man. Now, Trump, of course, is also the man. So he's sticking it to himself. It's really impressive. It's amazing that he's able to occupy both roles. He tries. Yeah. No, in people's eyes is that he goes, I am the persecuted and yet I exist in the realm of the persecutor. Like it's an interesting dichotomy that he gets to occupy in that way. When I saw the felony convictions and the mugshot, that's when I was convinced Trump was going to win. Wait, really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

30:41Because that made him seem like it is the deep state is a thing

30:46Ian Bremmer:or the system was out to get him. Like all of the bad things that he did, of all of the real political cases that were out there and should have been brought, of the impeachments that were real, of the Republicans that said, no boss, right? It was the most ridiculous case that would not have been brought up as felony charges against another American that was politicized against Trump. That's where he got his felony convictions. And, you know, his entire election was a grievance-based election. It's like, you know, they're coming after you. I'm standing in front of them. You know, let them come after me.

31:21Ian Bremmer:And they do want to take him down, right? And he was almost assassinated. And it was this close. It's this world of like everything. It's interesting that you say the thing about Sam, because I've seen people bristle at that comment. If you say Bernie and, and they go, how can you say? But AOC had a live on her Instagram, I think it was after, I think it was the midterm. I forget which election it was, but she had done really well. And most Democrats hadn't. And then she asked, just her followers online, she said, have any of you voted for me and for Donald Trump? And if so, please tell me why.

32:05Because, you know, she was sort of posing this question. She went, it seems like we're completely different. How would you vote for me and him? I don't understand that. And it was fascinating to see the responses that people gave. They said, while the two of you are not politically aligned, you both agree that the system is broken. The system is broken. And you both present yourselves in an authentic way. Not honest necessarily, but authentic, which was an interesting semantic difference. And they were like, and we like that you both disrupt what was because it wasn't working for the rest of us.

32:40And that was an interesting insight to get from people themselves to say, oh, we're now living in a time where America especially, but in the rest of the world you're seeing it as well. the system has pushed people so far that they're no longer incentivized by what's safe because it hasn't brought them safety it hasn't brought them security it hasn't brought them

33:05Ian Bremmer:the american dream no longer works for them yeah so they've gone more chinese believe in a china dream today than americans believe in an american wait is that true it's absolutely true and that was not true when you and i were kids so that's a radical transformation we started this part of the conversation by you saying, can you still do things in the United States? Trump is living proof you can still do things in the United States. Number one, him personally, with the greatest political comeback in American history. But beyond that, I would argue that we are in the middle of a political revolution right now.

33:39Ian Bremmer:Trump is intending to ensure that there are no more checks and balances on his behavior as the executive of the United States. We see that with the way he is trying to weaponize the so-called power ministries, the IRS, the FBI, the Department of Justice to do his will in a way that he thought they were weaponized against him. You see that with his efforts to ensure that the principal enemy to the United States are his political adversaries. That's a political revolution. I don't know that he's going to be successful and personally i hope he's not but i do hope he's successful in eliciting sufficient pushback from people that want to really change things okay that's interesting just this idea of inspiring some sort of movement some sort of idea some sort of help us help us understand like how to even begin thinking about these things you know like you're a big fan of strategic thinking and what i like is how you how you break this down i think a lot of people would consider themselves strategic thinkers and based on your um definition they wouldn't fall into the category because i think most of us would think that if you ask anyone are you a strategic thinker and we're like yeah i think should i walk on 42nd street or 45th street i think about that all the time it's my strategy and you're like no no no how you see the world is a strategic help us understand why you think it's so important to be a strategic thinker regardless of what station you occupy in life well let's start with what it is i i think um it's wanting to first define a problem before you act in response to it right that the idea of something is uncomfortable and therefore i lash out that's not strategic thinking right That's pain reaction.

35:37Ian Bremmer:There are lots of problems, lots of challenges, lots of opportunities in the world, right? You couldn't respond to climate change until you had a population around the world that recognized, oh, here's the science. Here's what's happening. Okay. We've got the following carbon in the atmosphere and it's leading to these changes. You can choose to decarbonize. You can choose to invest in new technologies. You can choose to adapt. You can even say, actually, we're getting so much benefit from the economic outcomes of globalization with oil and coal that we don't want to do that other stuff. Maybe there are lots of different effective ways to respond, but you can't even start to respond until you have identified the environment that you're in, the real honest to God environment you're in.

36:23Ian Bremmer:And that is true in climate. It's true in technology. It's true in geopolitics. It's true in the economy. It's true in life, I would say. It's true in life. Even in a personal relationship, it's first understanding what the situation is, who you are, where you are. Yeah. Where you are. So, the terrain and then have a battle plan. Yeah. Because too many people want to get into the debate about what we should do before they've actually discussed where we are. And so, this whole discussion of Trump good, Trump bad. Let's first understand how we got to the point of Trump. Because Trump is not the reason the United States is in the present situation.

36:58Ian Bremmer:Trump is a beneficiary. Trump is a symptom. and Trump is an accelerant. But Trump only happens in a political environment where very large numbers of people believe that the system is already broken. So to be a strategic thinker about what needs to happen in the US, you have to understand that. And that makes you then think, well, maybe the political establishment as we've been dealing with it for the past decades is not the answer. We're gonna continue this conversation right after this short break. Picture this. You're about to take off for a long flight and suddenly you realize the Wi-Fi is out.

37:40Ladies and gentlemen, the Wi-Fi is not working. You've already seen most of the in-flight movies and the book you brought feels more like homework than pleasure. This, my friends, is when you'll love having YouTube premium. Downloading videos before a flight is a must. You can be sitting 30 ,000 feet in the air halfway through a fascinating interview, a travel documentary, or a cooking series you've somehow become emotionally invested in. No Wi-Fi? No problem. You also get ad-free viewing and background play. So if you need to shut off your screen to rest your eyes or devote your attention to eating those little Biscoff cookies without getting crumbs everywhere, you can still keep listening to your content.

38:21And honestly, a long flight might be my favorite time to have YouTube Premium because suddenly you have something you almost never have on the ground. Hours to yourself. So before a flight, you can almost build your own entertainment system. Maybe there's an interview you've been saving because it's two hours long. A documentary somebody told you about, a live performance you never got around to watching. Something completely random you've always wanted to understand. That's the fun of it. You get on the plane with this little world you've chosen for yourself, and for the next few hours, you can go wherever your curiosity takes you.

38:52If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com slash premium. Terms apply. Cancel anytime.

39:03Ian Bremmer:Hey, this is Will Arnett, host of Smartless. Smartless is a podcast with myself and Sean Hayes and Jason Bateman, where each week one of us reveals a mystery guest of the other two. We dive deep with guests that you love, like Bill Hader, Selena Gomez, Jennifer Aniston, David Beckham, Kristen Stewart, and tons more. So join us for a genuinely improvised and authentic conversation filled with laughter and newfound knowledge to feed the smartless mind. Listen to Smartless now on the SiriusXM app. Download it today. After living with type 1 diabetes for more than 20 years, Naomi wanted a better option for low blood sugar, something that worked quickly but actually tasted good too.

39:48So she created Glow Gummies, delicious glucose gummies made with fast-acting dextrose to raise blood sugar quickly they're vegan gluten-free dye-free and don't melt or stick to your teeth made by someone who gets it because she lives it too head to glow gummies.com that's g-l-o-w gummies.com and use code podcast 20 for 20 off people are always hopeful of younger leaders having better ideas is that true in politics and um do you think it will be true for the u.s as well um well i think younger um people

40:26Ian Bremmer:are increasingly the majority so whether or not they have the answers they will be the answers so understanding those demographic changes super super important right like saudi arabia i was just in saudi arabia a little bit ago what's it like it's so different than 10 years ago than 20 years ago i mean it's it's literally they're going through like a a reverse iranian revolution now now they have leadership which is of course deeply confident and it's a monarchy yeah and it doesn't brook political opposition but they are transforming how societies work it's not just that women drive it's that they work it's that they're educated they're going out they're like there's a dating culture in Saudi Arabia.

41:12Ian Bremmer:Now it feels normal to an outsider in a way that 10 years ago, it felt like an alien repressive society. Now, you see, this is something that I feel like you're the perfect person to speak to about this because you have to think of it. This is literally your job and this is what you consult on and this is what you work in, this is what you write about. How do you think any given person in any given country should think about other countries and the journey that they're on in terms of getting to the place that we think they should get to. I know that sounds like a word jumble. It's like a word salad.

41:47There was a lot there, Trevor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 5.07. Yeah, from Bulgaria. I haven't slept in a long time, guys. So I think of it like this. Many people in the United States would say, nobody should do business with Saudi Arabia. No one should go to Saudi Arabia. No one should do anything in and around Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia doesn't have free speech and they oppress gay people and it's a terrible place for women, etc. They'll say all these things, right? They'll say them. Some of them being very true. Some of them may be outdated. They've changed, but people haven't changed knowing what has changed, right?

42:20I remember asking someone this question, not being pro-Saudi Arabia at all, by the way. I just said, but America wasn't always pro-gay rights, right? Correct. Obviously. So do you think America should have been boycotted and sanctioned then? and people were like, well, no, but I'm... But sanctions on South Africa, of course, worked, right?

42:46Ian Bremmer:Because here was a country that really didn't want to be isolated. Yes. And helped make them anti-apartheid. But did it work? Or did the apartheid government at some point realize they were just running out of steam? Both. No, they started no mass, but because of the sanction. No, but that's what I'm asking. It accelerated the process. There's no question. Without that international pressure, it wasn't going to move so much. And look, Americans, young people in America feel a lot differently about Israel and Palestine today than they did 20 years ago. I'm growing up in the United States, Israel, principal democracy, and still a whole bunch of forefathers, parents, you know, saying, hey, what happened in World War II, that's why they have a state.

43:24Ian Bremmer:That can never happen again. You have to support that. Today, you've got Israel as by far the strongest country militarily in the region, able to determine outcomes with comparative impunity against its adversaries and you have palestinians who are living with next to nothing and they feel like the little guy they feel like the oppressors there are a lot of young americans that automatically are just not going to align with the stronger power right irrespective of where right and wrong and history and the rest play so the point is these things change and and this i think this is kind of like a throughput of the conversation that we're having the entire time.

44:04Ian Bremmer:It's not just how you think about other countries. It's also about how you think about other countries in your own country over time. What's the trajectory? Are you making progress? No, the arc of history isn't always towards progress. It has to be moved by people, by leaders towards progress. And right now in the United States, we're living through a very uncertain time. If you'd asked me, 1989, if you'd asked me in 1989, when Gorbachev was in the Soviet Union, asked me to describe the Soviet Union as a country. Is it a dictatorship or not? Is an empire or not? And I would say, I don't know. Because it was in process, right?

44:44Ian Bremmer:It was going through an extraordinary political revolution. And it could have collapsed. It could have not. It was all pregnant with possibility. The United States today is like that. Damn. Yeah. Same with South Africa with the sanction. It could have gone either way. Could have gone either way at the time. And most people think apartheid lasted very long. It wasn't actually very long because obviously for it to become a republic from the British giving it to the Afrikaners, they realized that sanctions will take them back half a generation actually, because they had just acquired all this wealth.

45:12And for a way to keep the wealth was to obviously relinquish power, but still keep the levers of power. And we're dealing with it now, 30 years after the first elections. So nothing much has changed. And you're right, it's just people adapting. And I think it was just young ideas of the people who were in government at the time of the apartheid government who said, look, strategically, if we think about this, if we relinquish power, appease the West, and then put these people in power, we can still control the money. And it was true. And it was true for a long time, actually.

45:41Ian Bremmer:And Becky, it was certainly true. 100%. And even to your point of that is like Nelson Mandela had to be, it's funny when you talk about people's perceptions of things changing over time. Nelson Mandela was widely seen as the person who orchestrated the impossible. He threaded a needle that was impossible to thread because he said, power is going to shift over from a minority to a majority. There will be no widespread bloodshed. There won't be any war. There won't be any purging of people. So there can't be pogroms against these people. Yeah, there won't be any Idi Amin. There won't be anything like that.

46:19They will still be involved in the echelons of power. Yeah. And at the time people went Oh this is the only way it could be done Because The West for instance might just shut South Africa off It might sort of do like Turn us into a Haiti for lack of a better term Where they go like no they would though They could have just shut down South Africa and go like we're putting sanctions on you Even though you have freed yourself We're putting sanctions on you And he did that But it's interesting to see how like a generation Later there are many people who go He did the wrong thing It should have been a revolution He Mandela affected us Yeah Because if you think about it properly After the first elections There were two terms that ran concurrently And two races heard them differently The first one was transitional government So white people still understood That they still had the levers of power You had FEWD flag Sting being a secondary president And then Rainbow Nation was for the black people All of us were together in this whole thing One had power, one had no power And guess which one we went with I love the rainbow nation.

47:21Yeah, we're in a transitional government, whether we like it or not. And all 30 years later. Again, it's the domestic and the international. And you have to look at the internal and the external.

47:30Ian Bremmer:And, you know, if the United States is going to be Israel's protector no matter what, then the behavior of the government and the way that the people react is going to be different than if suddenly they had the view that, oh, my God, the Americans might actually be turning against us. And then we're in real trouble at that point because we no longer have that support. Right. And that's true for so many different countries around the world that are going through significant transitions. The reason why the United States is so unusual is because the U.S. is going through a political revolution at the same time that it is the most powerful country in the world.

48:01Oh, that's interesting. That's really interesting. Because commonly it would happen when things aren't going well.

48:12Ian Bremmer:So many countries around the world are not happy with what the U.S. is doing, but they don't want to get into a fight. because it's dangerous for them. And not just Mexico, not just Canada, but the Europeans, right? I mean, when publicly, when they're meeting with the Americans, they're trying to find a way to, oh yes, you're brilliant. And we got to find a way to work with you. We appreciate all your efforts and we'll get to the right peace deal with Ukraine and we'll get to the right trade deal between the two countries. Only the Chinese have hit the Americans back hard and the Americans backed off.

48:44So when we're looking at that world, you know you said that first rule first understand the lay of the land first understand the situation before you react or respond to it we are currently in a situation where as you said you know powers diffuse people can work in different worlds like you know a good example is america being like the number one exporter of like soy to china and then brazil i think basically taking that spot from them and then the americans taking it back yeah now yeah because now going like we're going to work that deal. We're going to find who we pay with that. It's such an interesting, complicated puzzle that's constantly moving.

49:23So what is step two? When you have the information that's only applicable to now in this moment, what is step two of strategic thinking?

49:30Ian Bremmer:Well, let's first recognize why step one is so hard today. Because if you're living in an environment where the basic, like the block and tackling of just what the information is, is completely divided on the basis of your political tribal affiliation, then you can't get to step two. How many times have we had this conversation? Can I tell you, it doesn't matter who we've spoken to, whether it's comedians, whether it's news anchors, whether it's politicians, whether it's analysts, whether it's political science, it doesn't matter who it is. Almost everyone has agreed on one thing. And that is one of the greatest threats facing society today is the fact that we are not getting the same information.

50:10Not that we don't agree on it,

50:12Ian Bremmer:just that we're not getting the same information so you can't do strategic thinking if you are not together at least able to understand the lay of the land yeah not what the solutions need to be just the basic issues the facts around a vaccine and its efficacy the facts around an election and its outcome and the fact that it was or was not free and fair these are fundamental things that Americans today are incapable of agreeing on because their information ecosystems are completely different, are politicized, are treating them like products. Because we're not going to do strategic thinking as an American nation absent that.

50:51Ian Bremmer:Not possible. And we will therefore slip farther behind our competitive environment, our competitive advantage to other countries that can do that strategic thing. So when you see something like that as somebody who studies the journey that countries are on and and how nations rise and fall is it absurd to think that america could sort of like eat itself from the inside out if everyone believes that nothing is real and nothing works and nothing because at some point what people stop doing is they stop believing they stop caring and then they just they sort of just like give that power to something or someone else you know what i mean people just walk away i mean i think as someone who's traveled all over the world and has spent most of my life studying other countries that have gone through transitions, when the U.S., as I've grown up, has been much more stable, and so people think, oh, it's always going to be this way, you recognize that these are ephemeral points, that the U.S.

51:52Ian Bremmer:could go in a very, very different direction, that the institutions that you think are strong might not stand, that the leaders that you think will stand up for something might not stand up for something. And that could lead to widespread social movements in the United States, but it could also lead to wide repression and violence. I don't think that those things are imminent or likely today, but I recognize their possibility. You have to, anyone that has studied Latin America or the Middle East or Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia, anyone that has studied any of those countries, even like Brazil has gone through so much similar politically from what the United States has recently.

52:29Ian Bremmer:And very few Americans would say, oh, our country's like Brazil. No, actually, these political dynamics are very similar. And if you end up with a political class that feels like if they lose, they lose everything. You heard Steve Bannon say this the other day. If we lose, we're all going to jail. If they really feel that way, if it's not just about losing an election, but if we lose, they're investigating us, they're throwing us in prison, ourselves, our families, maybe even violence. Now you don't even want to allow an election to become, why take the chance now? You have to control the outcome when it becomes about everything.

53:03Ian Bremmer:Yeah, that's terrifying. It's terrifying. And that happens in so many different countries. You cannot tell me that there is something so exceptional about the United States, so unique in human history that it could not happen in the United States. It's a country that had a civil war where it literally tore itself apart over ideas. And it could happen again. of course it could there's that phrase that always scares me the political class and what it breeds right I think we don't talk enough about that yeah what elements of it does breeding make you uncomfortable which part once you have people that will cling on to power by any means necessary then they start determining about I mean how the culture of that country is going to be like the one person that's going to get into power who's going to slip in after all is said and done is going to want to stick in there and we see it in this country right someone brings in their relative, they get power.

53:56Then they have the people that are around them that have political power as well. Then it becomes a little cabal in the class that goes and negotiates deals with other countries, but they're not necessarily acting for the country. Then they start determining who's a figurehead that stands in there, but they're the ones who control the levers of power. Yeah, I mean, in South Africa, we see that as well, where it's like one of the great fears of any leader is losing the power, not because they want to do things for the country, but because they're scared of what will be done to themselves. Because of what they've done.

54:21Yes, but obviously in our country, it went with it was political struggle credentials first. And then it became political dynasties. You know, children of people who went and struggled. And then obviously there's billionaires. I mean, President Trump was clearly willing

54:36Ian Bremmer:to go a lot farther than I think anyone around him, his advisors, the Republican leadership, had imagined that he would at the end of the first term when he lost to Biden. When he lost a free and fair election, both in terms of calling the Georgian election officials and saying, you've got to do something for me in terms of January 6th, all of these things, which is why so many Republicans turned against him with that second impeachment unprecedented in U.S. history. That is exactly the sort of thing that people underestimate. And it's not just about Trump. When you see some of the decisions that are being made by the attorney general right now, it's inconceivable in today's environment that the U.S.

55:16Ian Bremmer:attorney general would open an investigation against a member of the Trump administration in good standing. And yet that's exactly what an attorney general is supposed to do. That's only changed in the last year. And yet there are so many examples of that happening in other countries around the world. when you're analyzing a lot of this i've noticed in in a lot of your work you you sort of you sort of take the approach that i feel like a doctor does with with medicine or with surgery where they they they almost don't have like an emotional feeling towards a cancer for instance or they just observe the thing oh yes do you get what i'm saying i do get what you're saying yeah a lot of the time i'll i'll i'll read your work or i'll i'm a little disturbed about it but i get what No, no, no.

56:01Because I wonder if you, it feels like you've had to find a way to observe something unemotionally and then respond with your emotions if you wish to. But first go, this is what I see is happening. Yeah, I'm glad you put it that way.

56:16Ian Bremmer:Because I mean, at least the doctor analogy, doctors are human beings. They're not robots. They're not automatons. They actually really care about their patients. But first, they have to do no harm. Exactly. First, they have to try to understand and respond to what it is they're dealing with. Now, I could never be a doctor because I can't handle blood. And so many people say that. But it turns out I can actually emotionally handle all sorts of political distress. I don't get wound up about it at all. A lot of people can't. And I have no problem. By the way, I personally believe, and I've said this publicly, that Trump is unfit for office.

56:51Ian Bremmer:I believe that for reasons we can talk about if you want. But I have no problem. When Trump does things that are legitimately successful, when he does things that are more successful than Biden, and there are many of them, I have literally no emotional problem saying that publicly. Because it's obvious that that is the case. And people get mad at me. People that think that, well, wait a second, hold on, hold on. You can't say anything positive about Trump. But what do you mean? If he's successful, then you want me to call balls and strikes, right? Don't you want me to tell you what I actually think?

57:21Ian Bremmer:You just want me to be your monkey, as John Stewart used to say? Yeah, but where do you think you got that from i mean So, living in a country where, as you said, it's become more and more tribal in and around politics. But where do you think you got that from and what do you think you're holding on to? Well, first, I grew up with nothing, right? I grew up in the projects. I wasn't part of some political elite in the United States. So, I didn't feel connected to that. Secondly, I traveled all over the place starting when I was a kid. At 16, I went to the Soviet Union. Why? Because I was in college.

57:50Ian Bremmer:I was pushed ahead when I was younger. And it was an opportunity to go someplace for someone that had never been anywhere. and the Soviet Union behind the iron curtain. And then you find out, wait a second, the kids that are here are a lot like me. And I get really offended. Like I know that there are a whole bunch of people out there like, you know, you shouldn't think that just because you're black, you think this way or just because you're a woman, you think this way. A lot of people think that because you're an American, you think a certain way. And I get hugely offended by that personally.

58:19Ian Bremmer:Like the idea that I would hold certain political beliefs and values just because of what country I happen to randomly be born in. That's like a crazy thought, right? Well, your grandmother will argue the random part, but... But that was my grandmother. I'm not my grandma. I didn't make that decision. Can I tell you, it is so funny. I remember talking to somebody about this once, and I said, one concept that has truly, truly, truly always evaded a certain part of my brain is like patriotism in the sense where people are, you know, they go like, my country. true then i'm like i'm not saying don't love your country but you also have to admit it is pretty random that you didn't choose it for the most part people didn't choose it yeah i'm catholic not my fault at all and there are a lot of weird things about catholicism that i do not support but i grew up as a catholic and i don't want to renounce it that's what i'm saying it's like this world where you go just this random thing happened and i'm willing to accept parts of it and be proud of it but also I admit the randomness of it.

59:20I am American which is random but it doesn't mean I have to only think one way because of that. I'm an American. I'm also a Scorpio. Right? Oh no, that explains a lot though. I know it does. No, that explains a lot. I'm a Scorpio. Classic Scorpio. Yeah, I knew that. Classic Scorpio as well. Yeah, see? But equally random. I don't know what any of these things I don't know. I just learned you must just say that. When anyone tells you their star sign, the first thing you must do is like, ah, classic and then you say the star sign. It doesn't matter what it is. Classic Sagittarius. You just say that.

59:50See that? That's what you did there. Classic Sagittarius. Classic Sagittarius.

59:53Ian Bremmer:But I am a New Yorker. And that I chose. There you go. And I put a lot of time into that. And I really believe in being a New Yorker. And I was offended at the beginning. You remember that guy that was on LinkedIn who Seinfeld called some asshole on LinkedIn? I don't know this. Wait, what happened? At the beginning of the pandemic. Yeah. And one of the, like this influencer on LinkedIn. And that was actually what he was known for, was being influenced on LinkedIn. he was well known, said that he was, that New York was never going to come back. This was it for New York. Oh, I remember this. I remember this.

1:00:21Ian Bremmer:And I was so personally offended by that. Yeah, I remember this. You know, like if you told me that America was over, I could be clinical about that. I am passionate about New York. If only people knew there was a chink to your armor. If you're politics and mass murder, man, I'm not emotional. But New York. New York, ah! Yeah. Lincoln! Kill! Kill. Kill Lincoln. Who is that asshole? I couldn't believe it. I mean, this is such an amazing city. Yeah and Jerry wrote this whole thing About like go out And see what it's gonna be It's like one Just one cycle Of experiencing this And it was actually A beautiful like piece Like an F you Go out there And see what it's like Once you've lived in New York You can never live anywhere Was the idea behind it Oh I see what you're saying Yeah because this guy was like New York's done And Jerry was like Okay go Go somewhere else Go anywhere else Yeah And when you've had a few weeks of this And a few You're gonna see what's gonna happen to you You're gonna come back to the city You're gonna And honestly Almost everyone who left Came back Anyone who could Sort of came Everyone went to Miami Everyone went to Florida Everyone came back to New York I agree that Look there is a real Affordability crisis Yeah but that's not saying The people who could afford It is a hard place to live You're poor But I came here as poor And I still loved it Yeah the people who could afford Were the ones I don't like it And it's like You're gonna come back But maybe what you guys Are explaining is why The world has fallen in love With America Because we think The whole America is New York Like a melting pot Of cultures and ideas and it's fast and it's moving and anything is possible.

1:01:47If you make it here, you can make it anywhere. Do you feel like that about New York? Is that why you -

1:01:50Ian Bremmer:Because I think New York is everywhere. It's everybody's here and everyone walks and everyone takes the subway and it's a pain in the ass and it's smelly and sometimes it's a little dangerous and there's grit. But we all, but America, human beings, it's, we want to overcome, right? We give our best when there's some pushback, when there's some resistance in the band. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's not, New York does that every day all the time. It does it when you're sleeping. It's still noisy. It does it when you wake up in the morning. There's nothing easing about this place. But every single thing, every piece of progress that you make in New York, you earned it.

1:02:28Ian Bremmer:You had to work for it. It's a grind. It's a grind. Places are grind. Yeah, the places are grind. But it's rewarding as hell. Yeah. And the people are so cool. And they're from everywhere. You have no idea what they do. You don't know who they are. You can bump into anyone in New York. It doesn't matter. I've said one of the things that I think makes New York such a special place is the fact that you can't opt out of many of the shit things of New York. And so because of that, like in South Africa, I noticed, I know it's a crazy thing to say, but we had load shedding, right? The power blackouts and like the government because of corruption, they didn't build up the power stations the way they should have.

1:03:01It's a whole long thing. Long story short, we have these scheduled - You said you can't say that.

1:03:06Ian Bremmer:What do you mean? Long story short. You're right. You said long story long. Literally before we started No but you can't say Long story short No You can't No Oh I can't You can't But you can't You're our guest I will still expand on the story You can't say You can't say Literally it's the one thing you said This is the rules of an administration It was the rule There was only one rule No one is above the law Except you Except the lawmaker That's how it works Political elite It's kind of like the United States That's what it is It's a revolution I've just pardoned In the house I've just pardoned myself I see That's what I've done So We started having these Rolling blackouts in South Africa Terrible thing for the country Economically Terrible thing for people Couldn't get around Traffic lights were out You name it Stores would go down But it It created the strangest thing That I think most South Africans Never considered Chinese solar panels That too Oh And it was By the way China's killing it Because of that Everywhere in the world Even internally They're just like The solar farm game Is on another level Shout out to China The The thing it created was a commonality that you couldn't escape.

1:04:10Every South African, rich, poor, young, old, black, white, Indian, you named it, experienced the electricity going out. At the same time. At the same time. It was this thing that all of a sudden connected you and that's what I think New York does. It's like, you can't escape the traffic. You can't escape the subway. You can't escape the walking. You can't escape the cold or the hot or the humid or the smells or the sounds or the, you can't, the people. Do you remember when Jeff Bezos Remember when Jeff Bezos wanted to build, he wanted to build a helipad on his apartment building or something. And New York was like, where?

1:04:45And he was like, no, I want my helicopter. And they're like, nah, buddy. Come through the tunnel like all of us. No, no. They're like, nah, buddy. There's no helicopters here. No helicopters are flying over the city like that. And 9-11 was that, of course. Yes, that changed everything. They're like, nope, none of this. No, no. But that's my point is like, I think what it's created is a city where, while they're still definitely class will determine what you can and cannot do in different ways. But still, members clubs haven't really blown up in New York like where you pay to be part of because the coolest like the thing.

1:05:18You know what I mean? You go to a bar where people want to stay in line. Exactly. You know, if it's a really cool thing. Half of New York is just people waiting in a line for a bagel they've heard about. I stood in line today and I was like, I don't like this poverty mentality. You think of it as that. Around the corner from my house. In New York, it's sort of like a cool thing. It's an experience.

1:05:34Ian Bremmer:There's a bagel placed around the corner from my house. One of the most well-known bagel places in New York. It's called Apollo Bagels. Shout out to Apollo Bagels. They just opened like six months ago. And there's always lines around the block. And so when Mamdani won as mayor and people said, there's going to be bread lines. I went outside and I took a photo of the bread line and everyone's smiling and there's like dogs and everything. I'm just like, oh my God, bread lines in New York. The Mamdani effect is already in place. And of course, because it's social media, people think I'm serious. Oh man Like well what do you mean He's not even mayor yet You idiot I'm like yeah You gotta stock up Oh man There isn't even gonna be bread When Mamdani becomes mayor Oh man People We need more of a sense of humor Can I tell you I wish there was like A joke filter That you could put on the internet To tell people Other than writing This is a joke At the end of I don't know It's just lost its You know You have to just Own it You have to own it You have to just get right in And let people come at you This is a man who's not worried About being shot in the streets I will own none of these things That's fair I will own none of them.

1:06:36I tweet far and few between now. Because no one, literally, to your point of not understanding a reality, that has become part of the reality fracturing. Is that humor has lost its context. Humor has lost its, oh, you were making, and then I've even seen people go, even when they find out it's a joke, well, you shouldn't make that joke. Because someone might not have a sense of you. Because it might be a bread line. And it's like, yeah, but that was the joke. that was the thing that we're living in. But I don't want to forget, wait, what's step two? Because we said step one is understanding the lay of the land.

1:07:12What do you do then when you're strategic thinking? Once you all have a common thread.

1:07:18Ian Bremmer:It depends on who you are and where you want to go. The reactions of different actors once you understand what the problem is or what the opportunity is. So you just make your choice. What's your discount factor? How much does 10 years in the future matter to you compared to tomorrow? How much flexibility do you really have as opposed to do you pretend you have? Is this how you live? How much do you apply this to your daily life? A lot. A lot. Give me an example of just like. My man was in a queue for a bagel. He wasn't in the queue. He took a picture of the queue. I was in the queue. Oh, he was in the queue.

1:07:52Ian Bremmer:I took it as a participant. Oh, okay. Yeah. I feel like it's good to participate. No, no, no. I don't know. Well, you called it. Exhibit one. Yeah, yeah. No, you called it. He was in the queue. Yeah. Was the bagel worth it? yeah absolutely some people say that these things feel like they're worth it because of the queue because of the queue others say that that's not true what do you think I am I believe that the experience is part of it yes absolutely so it's like a theme park right yeah like if you buy a nice bottle of wine and people tell you it's a nice bottle of wine you're going to feel it's a better bottle of wine because of the experience having gone through that when they tell you there's only 400 of these in the world yeah it's like I went to a theme park I went to Six Flags and I used to go to Six Flags all the time before anybody knew who I was why is it called Six Flags I have no clue why they call it six There's just six flags there There are six Literally There are six flags What's on the flags?

1:08:37Ian Bremmer:Different colors actually Yes different colors Oh okay okay It's not like flags of countries It's just little triangle flags Okay But I used to go all the time And you know you wait And then you ride the roller coaster And you do your thing After I got the daily show Once I was going And then they like Saw that I was coming And they're like Hey are you You're coming to six flags They're like Oh you don't have to wait In any of the lines And I was like Oh I mean now I've achieved This is what I've worked for in life And it didn't mean as much to you Can I tell you? one of the worst experiences I've ever had for a few reasons one I didn't realize how much of a theme park was fun because you stand in line with your friends with your friends for hours and just talk and laugh and you get bored together you hear screams the whole time and you keep going like I wonder what this is going to be like for me and then when you walk to the next ride or back from it now you're decompressing you're thinking about it we went on rode the same ride like four times back to back only rode the best rides didn't stop at any other rides along the way.

1:09:32We had headaches and we learned nothing more about each other as friends. It was the shortest theme park day I've ever had. Wait, why headaches?

1:09:41Ian Bremmer:Did you read that wonderful? Do you know what happened? You can't just go on a roller coaster. No, I'm talking about this. Too many things. Back to back to back to back to back to back to back. There was the New York Times interview with the woman who had, she was a little disabled and she wanted to take her, like she couldn't walk properly so she needed to have like, you know sort of a walker or something okay okay um and she would wanted to bring her daughter to um to disney and it was a huge huge thing and she had to save up and it was and and it described her entire experience yeah compared to the experience of the guy that brought his family that could like pay to make sure they have you know a guide in advance and talked about how disney in america when disney was started it was the great equal i was the one place that like you was meant to be this idealist experience that everyone together could have together.

1:10:30Ian Bremmer:And now it's not. Once you put on the Mickey or Minnie ears, we're all equal. And it's not. And it's not at all. And that is, there's still a few bits of it. Like, for example, the fact that the characters run around and everyone can take photos with them. But for most of the experience, it's become completely segregated. It has. And so, and that, and people, people don't like that. Shocking. They don't like that in aviation. Shocking. They don't like it in sports. Shocking. And New York is one of those places, which is a great leveler. There's so much about the city that no matter how much money you do or don't have, how much power.

1:11:04Yeah, there are fewer things you can escape in New York. There are fewer things you can escape.

1:11:07Ian Bremmer:But I do think that there's self-selection. I think a lot of people that like this are people that have decided that is strategically interesting for them. Yes, that's what I was about to say. And I'm not sure that's true for everybody. Exactly that. I'm sure people who are in a position of privilege can complain about those kind of things. Like a poor person who's gotten two days off to take their family there and they've been saving for a year, they would love to go on all the rides. But for you, because you're cosplaying and you're thinking, I love the struggle of waiting in line and having one turkey leg at a time.

1:11:39That's not what I'm saying. First of all, that was a poor impression of me. I'm sorry, I felt it. I think you could do much better. Yeah. I've seen you do much better impressions of me. That was a terrible one. First of all I'm so sorry That's not bad That's not bad No This is what I'm saying

1:11:54Ian Bremmer:It's not about It's better than any impression I would have attempted Which would get me cancelled In a lot of places No I hear what you're saying But I don't think it's that I'll disagree with you on this I don't think it's that It's not about Idealizing a struggle It's not that Cosplay Yeah It's rather understanding Okay so Think of it like With parents You and I have spoken about this one of the strange gifts that comes from having a parent who doesn't have money is that when they say no to you for something that you want, it's because they don't have money. Mom, can I have that toy? No. Why?

1:12:33We can't afford it. Mom, can I have that cereal? No. Why? We can't afford it. Those clothes? No. Why? We can't afford it. It's a really simple response to a request, right? It is hard to think that there's a world that exists that would create some sort of friction or terrible relationship when you have to explain the no for no reason. Does that make sense? Yeah. So there's people who have money and the kid goes, can I have that? No. Why? Because no. But why? Because I said so. Wow. Because I said. Now, I'm not saying that one is a gift in the nicest sense. Yes. But everything in life comes You know my motto is Every gift is a curse Yes No matter what you say A big country Good for you Also bad for you Good luck uniting a big country Yeah Oil A curse Exactly It's a curse It's a curse Yeah you've got oil It's like you know And we've got to talk about Venezuela's oil by the way I want to know what you think about this whole saga But like But what I mean about these things is I didn't realize I don't want to wait in lines more But I didn't realize What I was getting By being in the line Does that make sense?

1:13:42Yeah yeah I genuinely didn't realize it. And I think the same holds for like a New York or one of those places is you don't realize what the hassle of having to be on the subway does for you as a person until you don't have it. Most things that are a hassle have some sort of benefit that you aren't able to appreciate until you remove the hassle. And then you go, oh, shit. There was a side of this that I didn't know.

1:14:05Ian Bremmer:So this brings me back to the strategic thinking question. Yeah. And how one goes the second step. and the fact that New York has this great equalizer forces people to behave in ways that are somewhat similar. There's one thing that I can think of that is a great equalizer, no matter who you are, no matter what your station in life is, no matter how rich, how poor, how powerful, how powerless, there's one thing we all have. Dandruff. We have the same exact amount of it as well. There's time. Time. It's all we have. It's all we have. That's the great equalizer. And so really, once you understand the environment, the opportunity, the challenge, the thing that you most need to key on is how do i respond to that in terms of how i want to be spending my time oh oh i like that and i spend a lot of time personally thinking strategically about that what are the things that i want to be doing how much do i want to travel yeah how much do i want to engage in the following ways with the following people what do i want to spend my time doing i've organized my company that way i organize the people that work with me that way the kinds of things I work on and I don't work on.

1:15:08Ian Bremmer:Yeah. It's all about the time that I'm actually spending. Don't go anywhere, because we got more What Now after this. Hi, I'm Gabby Windy with Long Winded, and I'm not going to lie, I'm desperate. I'm desperate for your attention in any way possible, so listen to my podcast, won't you? It has great insights, exceptional humor, and plenty of pop culture to fill your dark souls. and some even say it's a great way to fall asleep due to my soothing voice. And I don't take that personally. Fall asleep. A listen is a listen, even when you're sleeping, and a view is a view, even with your eyes closed.

1:15:50If you dare, and it doesn't take much gumption, enjoy! Listen to Long-Winded wherever you get your podcasts. Ever start a workout and feel like you've got nothing in the tank? When you need energy, you need carbs. But not all carbs work the same. Meet Glow Gummies, delicious glucose gummies made with fast-acting dextrose for quick energy when you need it. They're vegan, gluten-free, and made without artificial colors or flavors. Plus, they don't melt in the heat or stick to your teeth. Toss them in your pocket and go. Head to GlowGummies.com. That's G-L-O-W-Gummies.com and use code PODCAST20 for 20 % off.

1:16:28Finding the right size rug can be hard. Enter Ernesta, designer-quality, custom-sized rugs cut to the exact size of your room and delivered in as little as two weeks. Not sure of the size or the material? Start with five samples for just$10 today to see them in your own light and match to your decor. Plus, get$50 toward any rug of your choice. Visit Ernesta.com today. That's E-R-N-E-S-T-A dot com.

1:17:00Do you ever have to advise governments? I know you work with companies, but do you ever have to advise governments?

1:17:06Ian Bremmer:I talk to foreign leaders all the time. Do they take your advice or do they just listen to you? You know, I think for many of them, I'm kind of like a geopolitical therapist. Because these are people with no time. That's a good one. What a line. They're the busiest people. Geopolitical therapists. They're the busiest people. They have no time. The fact that they're giving you an hour or half an hour if you're a head of state is like the most valuable thing they could possibly give you. And what they spend most of their time working on is really, really pressing, immediate, narrow problems. And what they really want to be doing because they're head of state or they're a foreign minister or they're what have you in a position of real authorities, they want to be able to spend a little time thinking about how the world is changing.

1:17:52Ian Bremmer:And that's really what I think we end up spending most of our time doing, is giving them a little bit of that that they don't have. And I'm not blowing smoke up their ass. I'm not telling them what they want to hear. I'm very happy if we have disagreements on stuff because I don't need anything from them. You know, I'm not working for them. I'm not taking money from them. It's just a, it's a sharing of information. For a person like you who's met every sort of powerful person in the world, I suppose this question might be a bit weird because revealing our strategy when we do this podcast, we always think our guests must not feel the transition between them having a normal conversation with just anybody and being interviewed.

1:18:31It's not an interview. So they must get through a pathway. They can get through what they do and then we can just also understand who they are. So what strategy did you think you're going to use to get through to who we really are as hosts of this podcast? When you're thinking about it, what's going on?

1:18:47Ian Bremmer:I feel like I know Trevor a little. Yeah. Both as a public figure, but also because we've met informally a few times. I feel like we're simpatico. I certainly have a warmth towards his curiousness and his knowledge and interest in policy and global stuff, which meant that I didn't have a strategy. I'd have much more of a strategy, but someone I've never met before. I don't know who they are. I don't know what engages them. I don't think that there might be a gotcha, that kind of thing. Here, it's much more, no, no, I'm going to show up and I'm going to see what Trevor's going to talk about. And I want to be maximally open to that.

1:19:24Ian Bremmer:and I want it to go whatever direction is going to be most interesting. And that's okay. And that's what I do on stage with an audience. Like I don't necessarily know exactly what I'm going to talk about, but I see the audience, I see what they react to, and then I move, you know? And so, I mean, we moved a lot because I said something early on that I saw really touch Trevor, right? And that was really interesting. That was a moment where suddenly he was like, oh, wait a second, technology does this. I hadn't considered that before. It changed his worldview a little bit. Let's mine that because that's a point of friction, but also curiosity.

1:19:54Ian Bremmer:Yeah. Open-mindedness is a big part of strategy, right? Open-mindedness is essential to strategy. Yeah. Again, not necessarily open-mindedness in understanding yourself, but open-mindedness in the fact that everything external is changeable. And any opinion that you hold about the rest of the world, you better be open to having it change because even if it's not changing now, it will change in the future. You will. You're going to be wrong about almost everything over time. that's what they say about predictions either make a prediction or offer a time frame never give them both right and and so like these things change i wrote a book called the j curve and it was about a relationship between the company the country's openness and its stability and at the time countries that were most open were also most stable a big piece of that was because technology was helping to drive that the communications revolution okay like if you had access to the internet that was a threat to authoritarian states but it was a strength for democracies.

1:20:52Ian Bremmer:Today, top-down technologies are much more consolidating and much more powerful. The surveillance revolution, the data revolution, if you're a big monopoly platform or a government with access to data, you have a lot more influence and you can create a lot more stability. You have a lot more power. The J-curve today looks more like a U. This was a seminal thing that I spent years of my life on. It was really important to my career. I teach it now and I tell my students, it's no longer applicable. It's changed. It's wrong now. And so every single thing that I've written about I have to be ready for it to be wrong at some point it will be because the world's changing.

1:21:30I feel like this is such a liberating it's just a liberating viewpoint to have in life if we all felt like that because I think it's kind of geopolitical Buddhism. It really is though because if we hold on to our ideas as if our ideas are us Then we are afraid to let go of our ideas Because we feel like we're letting go of a piece of ourselves If somebody challenges our ideas We feel like they're challenging us But if you can, as you say, separate yourself From the idea Then it can change, it can be challenged It can be wrong, it can move It can shift, do you know what I mean? It's essential It can create a world where I think also interpersonal relationships are a good training ground for that I think for you at that age To go all the way to the Soviet Union and meet other young people and exchange ideas.

1:22:19I'm sure when you came back to New York, to your peers, you were someone else, right?

1:22:22Ian Bremmer:Well, at the time it was going back to Boston, which is where I was living back then. Yeah, it was completely different. I felt like I had this huge experience that had opened my mind to something that I thought was impossible before. What was the thing that shocked you the most? I know you said when you were there, the kids were the same as you, but what do you think shocked you the most? From what you had been told about the Soviet Union, what changed Ian's mind when he was actually there? um i think the fact that they knew as little about me and us as i knew about them i thought that somehow because i hadn't traveled anywhere and because i knew how cloistered i had been again projects public school just a few blocks i thought that would be true of other kids that they'd know a lot more because they were like i was going to moscow and i was a big city with millions of people absolutely nothing so for example do you remember the sharper image the The gym?

1:23:11Ian Bremmer:The store. What was the - The Sharper Image. It was a weird little store that sold - Everything. Gimmicks, gadgets. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Little gadgets. Nicknets. So we used to have in the days before smartphones and all the rest, we had cordless phones. And the Sharper Image sold a cordless phone that you could probably talk. It had a little antenna. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you could probably talk 50 feet away from the base. but this cordless phone was not only cordless, but it also was waterproof and it floated so that you could have a phone call in your pool. Yeah, in your pool. In your pool. And I remember having a conversation about like the different stuff because they all wanted like Levi's jeans or Marlboro cigarettes.

1:23:58Ian Bremmer:That was like the big thing, access to that kind of stuff. Bring ballpoint pens because their pens suck. You know, all that kind of thing. And I was telling them, I said - Can you bring for me ballpoint pen? Ballpoint pen. And Moschner. Please, Ian, I need the ballpoint pen. Would be very nice. I pay much money for ballpoint pen. Wait, what pens did they have? Oh, my God. I mean, they were like skill craft pens, but down three notches. You remember those? My brain can't imagine a world without a ballpoint pen. I know. And it hasn't changed very much. Like, we still make those. They're still cutting edge in 2025.

1:24:32Ian Bremmer:Yeah, they really are. Ballpoint pen, they really work. See, we were early to that game. They were late, apparently. So, and this is why they're in Ukraine today. To go get ballpoint pen. They have all the ballpoint pen extraction. I can only imagine you had customs. Two suitcases full of ballpoint pens and blue jeans. So we were, you know, we're talking about all this stuff. What is the reason for your visit here? And I tell them. I'm a perfect of goods. Let me see your pockets. So we're talking about this. And so I told them about this store. There's a store at Faneuil Hall, Quincy Market. Quincy Market, as we'd say back in Boston.

1:25:03Ian Bremmer:A little touristy area. And there was a sharp image there. And I said, you know, they have this store. It's not cheap, but they have all this crazy stuff. It's all kind of stuff. So I told him about it. I said, well, there's a light, there's a lamp. And if you touch the lamp and it's a metal lamp, it'll turn on. They didn't believe me. Didn't believe me. I had no way of showing it in the photo. I told him about this phone that you could use. First of all, the idea, phone has to have a cord. Yes, of course. Okay? And you wouldn't use a cordless phone in your bathtub. Yeah, of course not. But there are people, my aunt had a pool.

1:25:31Ian Bremmer:My aunt, she built a house and she was like the one middle class person in the family. She built a pool. I told him about this. The one aunt with the pool. Always the one rich aunt or uncle They did not believe that this was possible That a private home would have a pool In your backyard and you'd have a phone call And it wasn't, like this blew their minds I love that you thought you were blowing their minds With the phone, it's cordless You can talk anywhere, in the pool even And they were like, wait, wait, you have your own body of water In the back of your house No, no, no Look, Ian, you can fool us With some things How can man-made lake just be at the back of the house?

1:26:06See? You have tank of traffic on this. It is a crazy concept when you think about it. Yeah. But having a swimming pool is one of the most ridiculous ideas ever. One of the things that I found out about that like blew my mind was you can draw a direct line between places that have a shit ton of swimming pools in their houses and the racism laws that were in the country. Really? Yeah. In the United States, almost nobody had a swimming pool. And then they changed the laws and they said black people could swim in public pools. And then remember like -

1:26:46Ian Bremmer:And then suddenly white people said I'm going to have pools. Yeah. And then obviously there was the fights and there were, you know, people - Was it Mr. Rogers who had his friend's feet in the pool with him? If you remember that. And people were like, Mr. Rogers, how could you do this? You're going to have a black man in this little pool thing with - And then pools did this in America. All of a sudden people were like, all right. I'm not going public anymore. Not only did private pools blow up, public pools started getting shut down. People were like, well, maybe we shouldn't fund public pools.

1:27:11South Africa as well. Public pools used to be like the thing. I grew up swimming in a public pool. And then after like democracy fully, like when people were like, maybe we just swim at home. Everyone just swims at home. The cordless phone. And yet another thing. We need civic spaces.

1:27:28Ian Bremmer:We need civic spaces. Yeah. Places where we can meet these people, these kids. Public phone. I mean, floaty phone. Yeah, so you're with the Russians. You're telling them about the public phone. No, it just blew their minds. And the fact that I hadn't... There were so many different components of that story that I hadn't remotely considered would be strange or interesting to them. And it allowed us to have this wild, open moment about how different we were, but we were the same kids. Having that experience, combined with you doing what you do, what do you think we misunderstand about Russia right now in this moment in time?

1:28:03And I say this as somebody who has always... not always, maybe for like the past like six years, been fascinated by how America has misread Russia over the years and then acted based on that misreading. Is this something that you think the world doesn't understand about Russia right now?

1:28:23Ian Bremmer:Just how disrespected they feel. I mean, this is a country that's lost empire. This is a country whose total economy is smaller than Canada. This is a country that used to take such pride in having the best culture of anyone in the world, that all of their college kids had read all this incredible literature and knew all the top arts. And now the government has stopped investing in this completely in science. They have the world class scientists, Soviet Union collapsed and all these American companies would go and IBM and Boeing and they'd hire the best scientists, mathematicians. And they don't have that anymore.

1:28:56Ian Bremmer:and and it you feel this sense they have the such pride such russian pride in their nation in their history it's not about money it never was about money you know remember this is the whole system of you know they pretend to pay us we pretend to work yeah right but the personal connections and the history and this is a place that yes there's a lot of suffering there's a lot of tragedy but you get through it because there's a sense of responsibility and greatness and they have lost so much of that i know you can't predict another reality but do you think it would have been different if the u.s and the world had done a better job of bringing russia in post of course you think it would and i also think it would have been different if their own um oligarchs that were connected were not so rapacious were not so kleptocratic did not rip everybody off and take that money out of the country for themselves both of those things So the economic shock therapy that the Americans offered to them was nowhere near what was useful for them given the ability to strip out the wealth.

1:29:57Ian Bremmer:And also the fact that the Soviet Union dropped in America's laps. You kind of won it. You didn't fight over it. It wasn't like World War II where you almost lost your way of life for everybody. Here it was like, well, we don't need to rebuild these guys. We rebuilt the Japanese. We rebuilt the Germans. These were our enemies. It wasn't just our allies. We rebuilt them. And then we created the UN. That was American. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of funny because now you have Americans saying, UN, globalists. Those were actually our morals. They were our ideals. I'm very proud of the UN. The League of Nations.

1:30:27Ian Bremmer:I love having it in New York. And I think that one of the reasons why Americans today don't like the UN, especially elites, is because we feel a sense of shame that we no longer are living up to the values and standards that we create. And so, yeah, I think those things really matter. And I think that we did not cover ourselves in glory in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed because we were doing so well. We were kings of the world. Everyone just was going to be like America. So we didn't have to do anything. Let them come nuts. When you look at Venezuela today, I was joking with Eugene about this the other day.

1:31:08And I said, as much as America will say certain things, it is funny how half of the stories slash all of them sort of end in oil. Doesn't matter what it is. They'll be like, oh, Iran, terrible regime and the plotting and the oil. Oh, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, this evil person, weapons of master, oil. You know what they're doing? Gaddafi. Oil. Gaza. Oil. Oh, my God. Nigeria. Oil. Not really. No, no. But that's why we don't care as much.

1:31:39Ian Bremmer:That was the counterpoint. That's true as well, though. But I'm saying being in there, if there's somewhere America goes into, though. Oil. Oil. Yeah. I'm sure it's not that simple. I'm sure it's not that simple. But if you are, and you are literally, somebody who studies this for a living, what do you make of this situation? Are these the actions of a country that might end up fighting another war with a country that happens to have oil? No. No, you don't think so? First of all, because Trump, I think, really does fundamentally understand that the U.S. has gotten involved in a lot of very expensive long wars, and he's willing to do anything to stop that.

1:32:21Ian Bremmer:He doesn't want boots on the ground and many years on him. Yeah. I mean, he ended the war in Afghanistan by cutting a really crappy deal with the Taliban, but at least he ended the war. Yeah. Right. And then Biden was kind of stuck, actually, ending the war. But Trump made that happen. and and so i think the likelihood that that trump under any circumstances would say okay let's send a whole bunch of young men and women to go and fight in another country i don't think you're doing that the funny thing though they'll send them in the u.s i think it's yeah the funny thing though is i think it's more money thing i don't know did you do you remember the the i think it was around syria when bashar al-assad was he launched one of his one of the one of many of like his most heinous campaigns.

1:33:02It was just like a moment. Was this chemical weapons or you mean before that? I think it was around that time. But there was an image of a young child on the cover of the New York Times, I think it was, on the front page. This child in his like ashen face just post like a strike or something. And I think it was Ivanka Trump who showed the image to Donald Trump. And he was so moved by her being so moved that he said he's going to respond. And then they bombed a few parts of Syria, right? and then afterwards he came out and they were like oh is this going to be a full scale and he came out and he was like he's like we're not we're not he's like we bombed them and he's like you know how much it costs one one rocket i can't believe he's like had i known i wouldn't have i wouldn't have sent it i wouldn't have shot it one of these i wouldn't have shot i wish i could take it back he's like i wouldn't and it was interesting to me that he from what i observe of him is more against war because he doesn't like the country spending the money on it?

1:34:02Ian Bremmer:I think he's gotten more used to it, as we've seen with Iran and the 12-day war. I think he's gotten more used to it with all the rockets against the ships, the little tiny boats that are bringing the drugs. I also think that personally, this is a guy who did everything he could using his personal connections to avoid the draft. The bone spurs. Yes. And he understands that that was something that one should avoid, that war was scary for him. and war is scary for a lot of young men and women. So I think he comes to that honestly, historically, whatever it is. I think there are lots of reasons why they're talking about going in.

1:34:40Ian Bremmer:I think that for Marco Rubio, who comes from Florida and has a very strong Cuban constituency and a bunch of Venezuelans too, and they see this as a dictatorship and they see Cuba as a dictatorship and he's always wanted to remove these brutal leaders. And he thinks if you get rid of Maduro, then you can start the dominoes with Cuba. But he might not be completely wrong about that, but it's not an immediate direct effect. I do think that the oil matters. Rick Grinnell, who was the special envoy without portfolio for Trump and was involved in the first administration as well as ambassador to Germany for a while.

1:35:18Ian Bremmer:You may remember tall guy was a Fox News guy. um he was engaged uh on the venezuela brief at the beginning of the administration had been talking to the oil companies in the u.s and was trying to see if a deal could be made that you know would allow them would have them you know crack down on the drugs but would get the americans to actually invest more broadly in venezuela also a lot of illegal oil going evading sanctions from venezuela using these uh ghost tanker fleets oh yeah through cuba to china right by the way same tankers that the Russians and the Iranians use, which is why Putin called up Maduro to support him after the Americans seized a tanker.

1:35:58Ian Bremmer:Because it was like, wait a second, we use that tanker. So it was kind of interesting. I absolutely think that because the Grinnell effort didn't work, that now, you know, you're seeing this country has more oil reserves than any other country in the world. Geez, I don't know that. More proven oil reserves, more than Saudi Arabia, more than the United States. Geez, I didn't know that. And so Trump certainly, if Maduro is gone, with whatever military government is immediately in charge and maybe some transition eventually to someone that could be elected, the deal he's going to, he doesn't care about democracy in Venezuela.

1:36:31Ian Bremmer:He cares a lot about cutting an investment deal where the Americans are going to get a big piece of that oil. Just like the critical minerals deal that he forced Zelensky to sign if he was going to keep providing intelligence and defense support to the Ukrainians. So yes, I do think the oil plays, but I don't think it's been the principal driver. I wonder when I hear some of these stories, if, I mean, I don't know if it was ever true, but I sometimes wonder if America has given up its moral authority and moral superiority to be able to like say these things in the world. I actually think to, I think it was Israel's prime minister or somebody high up in the government who came and gave a speech at the UN.

1:37:17You know, when people were complaining, they're like, oh, Israel did this when they bombed in Qatar. And they were like, oh, to do this on another nation's soil. And then they were like, well, America did it. And they listed off like a few other countries and like, they did it. They're like, so how are we different? And it was an interesting moment because it was weird that the response to why did you break the international law was, we all do.

1:37:45Ian Bremmer:Do you know what I mean? Of course I do. And it is, on the one hand, the fact that the United States has historically held itself up as some exceptional, indispensable nation. Yeah. means that even though the Americans have given so much more in foreign aid, even though the U.S. have played so much more of a leadership role in the IMF and the World Bank and doing so many things that really matter and philanthropy also and promoting Americans to do that. But when the hypocrisy happens, and let's face it, for the U.S., the hypocrisy happens at huge scale in Iraq, you know, or in Abu Ghraib, right?

1:38:21Ian Bremmer:And, you know, or in Guantanamo and so many examples of this or with the global financial crisis, you know, so many examples of this, then suddenly all of these other countries are pointing fingers. And, and, and the Americans were never as much of a shining light beacon on the Hill as we put ourselves out. And let's face it, we almost didn't get involved in world war II. And that would have been a huge mistake. We were late to the game and it was only because of Pearl Harbor. And, and, and, you know, it was The America first concept started then with Lindbergh and the movement of why would we care about these Europeans way over there?

1:38:56Ian Bremmer:Has nothing to do with us. Here's shades of that today, right? In the national security strategy document, for example, and with Trump saying, you guys have your problem. Ukraine's far away. um but still if you had to compare the united states with what the chinese would do globally or what the russians would do globally over the last 50 60 70 years you would unbalance take the u.s now the question is today would you still make a strong call for that not as clear a lot of countries around the world would say that the united states has become actively adversarial A lot of countries would say that.

1:39:35Ian Bremmer:The Canadians would say that, which is crazy. Yeah, Canadians never say anything mean. Yeah, and now they do. And they won an election on that. And their population is saying, we've got to find a way to just work more with the Europeans, work more with everybody than the Americans. And they're so incredibly integrated with the U.S. economy. It's not like, and security. It's not like they have much of a choice, but it's hugely popular in Canada to say, we can never go back to the trusted relationship we used to have with the U.S. Damn. And their tourism down to the U.S. has fallen off a cliff. they're really upset because they feel like we no longer stand for the things that they thought we stood for.

1:40:09Ian Bremmer:And if the Canadians feel that way, who are basically Americans, just a little colder, right? Then how do you think the other people feel that don't have those relationships with us? That's sad. What are some of the questions you have now that you haven't yet found the answers for? In the world? Yeah. Just things that you're pondering and puzzling through, but you haven't yet struck on a satisfactory answer? I want to know when artificial intelligence can provide answers on a large number of topics that are as good or better than human beings. I want to know what that does to political power. I want to know how the Chinese Communist Party deals with that when Xi Jinping is supposed to be like the oracle from which all information comes down.

1:41:00Ian Bremmer:Is it repression? Does it change their system? I'd love to know that. Maybe they'll just have like a, they'll just, their AI, I think their solution is the easiest. They just have to make sure that their AI just says, like you say to AI in China, hey, what's happening here? Or what do you, how do I fix this? And then their AI must just be like. She says. I just asked she. And she was saying that you should put your, yeah, put the cupboard together like this. You know, she actually told me how this works. Chat CCP. I like it. Look at this. Sometimes it would be like, That's what she said. That's a nice one.

1:41:34Ian Bremmer:That's what she said. That also works. That actually works. Together. Look at this. We've got a show here. I mean, this is doing something. No, honestly, I genuinely think this is just me with my just wandering through the streets brain. I have no company, nor do I have any credentials. I think AI is going to be a greater detriment to free nations than to nations that have a stranglehold on their politics and their populations because there they can work to constrain the thing whereas in the other one they're like ah it's like let it go and see what happens and then it's like oh okay well that was the whole point that's why the j-curve became you that's that is the whole point that's what I'm saying they I think I'm not sure those are free nations for very long if it turns out that the companies control the algorithms the ai and suddenly you're not a citizen you're actually just a product of a business model okay okay so that's one thing you're pondering an elected leader all of sudden yeah you do i mean a second big thing i want to know is what happens with the social contract when people that are white white collar knowledge labor um increasingly no longer has productive stuff to do can i tell you that is one of the biggest ones that people take for granted because it's exactly that it's a social contract that keeps us all moving along and when it's gone think of everyone in an office whose job is only about moving information around and remembering it and dispersing it and if your company makes a system that does that everywhere i maybe you can tell me this because i i i i've never gotten a satisfactory answer from ceos and from companies i go why would you do this as i understand why would you do what as i understand business the point of a business is to provide some sort of service to somebody who will then pay you for it but like henry ford understood you need the people that can buy your car yes so he paid his workers a certain amount of money and he made his car a certain price so that they themselves could buy it yeah his first consumers yeah but if if companies are gonna make themselves fully ai ai will advertise ai will plan trips ai will do the work then where where's the business yeah well that is a huge that's what i'm saying it's a huge question and you know you worry that first of all some of these people um are so racing ahead are so short-term in their orientation that they're not worried about that just want to get there first and cash out because because the The models and the money that's being raised is so extraordinary.

1:44:12Ian Bremmer:Yeah. That's driving the economy. And second, of course, there's a collective action problem to it. If you don't do it, someone else is going to. Yeah. Right? So there's the race level of it. And then there's also the disbelief. It's the view that, yeah, there'll be other jobs. There's always other jobs. Something else will come up. I do believe that. But I think the issue, to borrow from what you were saying, is time. And government. Everything can be figured out. The problem is, do you have the time to figure it out? Do you get what I'm saying? If everyone loses their jobs over 100 years, let's say the job of candle maker goes away over 100 years, I think people will be fine.

1:44:53But if tomorrow a job that is done by a lot of people disappears instantly, you don't have time to figure out what the next job is. I hope that's right.

1:45:01Ian Bremmer:And I think that's right. But of course, it didn't work out that way for horses, right? I mean, suddenly you have steam power and the horse population goes down to 10 % of what it was in one generation because horses are then useful. Oh, you think our population might? Well, I hope not. I'm just saying that I know that when you suddenly have technology that surpasses the total productive capacity of that entity, you no longer need the entity. No, but this is where I think, honestly, on a human level, I do think we will create a new thing because all jobs are invented. the issue is I don't know that we'll have the time this is where I'm agreeing with you I go you do it too quickly and then do you understand what I'm saying?

1:45:45what do you think you would do in the revolution? making candles no not genuine like do you do you do you ever think about like Ian what do you think you would do you think you'd be like part of helping no I honestly wonder you don't think about this at all no no I don't think about it like let's say it all goes to shit the thing's falling apart the people now is like where do you see yourself in the mix? I always think front lines planning i'd be a dissident oh you'd be a dissident absolutely because i mean if you

1:46:11Ian Bremmer:think about back in the soviet union before the collapse yeah there were lots of people that tried to do what i do they just didn't do it like for money they didn't do it legally because it was illegal so what did they do i mean they you know they did samizdat literature they do like informal coffeehouse conversations but they still tried to bring truth to people to their fellow citizens I like this. So if that were to truly happen in the United States, I'd still do what I do. I would just do it less effectively and I'd be repressed for it. You'd be on the front lines, Eugene. I think that with everything that changes, things have been changing since the beginning of time.

1:46:45But I think it's the people that have institutional memory that are lamenting the change sometimes. I think the younger generation is not as worried about the changes that we're facing. I mean, there's kids who don't even know what a house phone looks like. Well, I hear what you mean. So what we are lamenting is the world as we know. It is no different from how when you're in a queue, you were lamenting being in a queue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You remember? The world that didn't exist. You don't have an idea of the world that didn't exist. I'm thinking what we are doing now, we are almost, we are here to preserve what was.

1:47:18Even in conversations like this, there will always be a job for these kind of people. It's almost like the books of the future. There'll always be people who remember how things were and will try in their small circles to keep things the same. The person who bakes the bread themselves, although they can hire. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm with you. So this idea sharing will always be, and we've been saying this, that what we're not realizing is the portals to this information for the future is digital media. The podcast, the YouTubes. YouTubes. People in 100 years' time, if they want to really know how things were done, just like how people are making handcrafted binders for books, they will go and listen to how things were done.

1:47:58There'll be a person who's interested in disseminating the information and getting things done. But what we can't stop is things changing. They are always going to change, especially if there's money involved. Change is inevitable. And like you said, it's a race now. If you don't do it, someone else will.

1:48:12Ian Bremmer:did the bob eiger i think was right about this is you you've never no one's ever been successful trying to stop technology from yeah so i mean it's not about saying we're not going to do it it's going to happen the question is being aware of what it is yeah and trying to align yourself with it how do you want to spend your time given how fast it's changing yeah okay and then what's like a third question you have so the first one the second question was about ai yeah the third one is about whether or not we are going to have increasing global governance to respond to global challenges. Right. So you think about how so much of these new technologies, how fast they move.

1:48:58Ian Bremmer:Are we going to have a U.S.-China agreement the way we did after the Cuban Missile Crisis between the US and Soviet Union so that we didn't blow each other up. We created a hotline. We didn't have any arms control until we almost blew up the world. Do we have to wait before we almost blow up the world to have agreements on how we're going to try to manage collectively these new technologies that are incredibly powerful to advance humanity, but also are really dangerous in the hands of the wrong people. Bad actors that would want to create, you know, a bioweapon or that would want to, you know, sort of knock out an economic marketplace or flood the world with disinformation and fake videos.

1:49:44Ian Bremmer:That can't just be handled in a country by country basis. There are adversaries out there. We need to make sure that we're not using them against each other. And right now we don't have any AI arms control. We don't even have the beginning of that negotiation. And so we don't have 20 years for that you know and so this administration is going to have to engage very interesting you probably saw that trump gave this long speech at the un this year back in september yeah the one where he said like basically you guys suck and yeah was it was i mean there were funny parts of the speech yeah it's the one the escalator speech yeah we complain but it was really interesting at one point he actually said there was something he said a new program that he wanted the u.s to start that he asked the un to be a part of which you'd never expect him to do that.

1:50:27Ian Bremmer:I'm really concerned about the spread of bioweapons and we want to have like a new US-led global initial initiative on that and the UN has to play a role. Now, he didn't come up with that, but the point is he didn't kill it and no one around him killed it. You can't do this stuff unless there's some kind of global cooperation. It can't just be America first on protection of the world from these advanced technologies. There are some things in the world we still have to cooperate on and yet we're not moving in that direction right now. Almost none of the big political trajectories are towards more cooperation.

1:50:59Ian Bremmer:It's all towards fragmentation. It's all towards picking a side. There's some stuff that we need to actually work together on. So I'm really interested to see how does that start to happen? And does it require a big crisis? Yeah. Or can we start to actually plant some of the seeds to allow for that without? So just so that you leave us on a good note, what have you seen geopolitically that's given you like a fuzzy warm feeling uh the fact that as the united states is playing less of a global leadership role that other countries around the world actually don't want these institutions to fall apart they're not they may not be able to be the united states themselves but they want these things to work they want countries around the world even china it's like well no we still want the u.n we still want to pay our dues for the u.n we want this or we still want the imf we still want the world bank we still want their programs we still want the world food program we think these things are important we still want trade agreements well so if the u.s isn't going to be able to do all the trade right now well then the eu and mercosur will try to sign something up and india will work with you know australia and there's more of that so there is an effort to create more resilience in the system and it's not everything is not just about oh my god the united States isn't going to be Papa.

1:52:17Ian Bremmer:And so we all have to cower and be on our best behavior. Oh, this is going to strike us. No, there's actually more than just the US out there. And a lot of it is trying to find a way to ensure that we still have stability. I love that. It's what I told my seven kids. Now that I'm not around, you guys are going to step up. You're going to do something for yourselves. I'll take three. He'll take four. Can we move to where? Bulgaria. and you bring a whole lot of ballpoint pens oh man that that's my favorite one is the ballpoint pens and the blue jeans just you doing that did you did you ever go back and meet any of those people oh god yeah of course you did yeah oh man that's amazing yeah it was really cool not on linkedin when did you first no when did you first go back and connect like who did you like oh it would have been i mean probably three years later two years later 88 i think it was yeah you went back and then you yeah yeah i mean i stayed as pen pals with these kids again this is pre-internet that is so cool so you're then writing notes to these kids yeah it was wild with your fancy ballpoint pen yeah right just flossing in their faces yeah dear Vlad I write this to you elegantly and with the smoothest precision that a ballpoint pen can provide and then Vlad was like dear Ian oh man that's I'm glad that's dope that's really beautiful well thank you very much for joining us thank you so much great to see you man and thank you for showing us a new way to see the world yeah I think that's you know that's honestly one of the things that you've changed most in my life which I appreciate is just the idea of like learn to see it meet the people who don't see it the same way you do talk to them about why understand it and then then you go from there I really appreciate that thank you that means something thanks a lot to me this was really fun thank you yeah so much fun that's really cool What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with Sirius XM the show is executive produced by Trevor Noah Sanaz Yamin and Jess Hackle.

1:54:09Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random Other Stuff by Ryan Harduth. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now?

1:54:29Having lots of choices sounds like it would be great. Who doesn't want more flavors of ice cream? It turns out, the answer is us. Too many choices can make us anxious, overwhelmed. I'm Shankar Vedantam, host of the Hidden Brain podcast and YouTube channel. Each week, Hidden Brain brings you fascinating, science-backed insights about human behavior. So the next time you have to choose, choose Hidden Brain on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or hiddenbrain.org. Real talent is defined by what people can do, not where they learn to do it. So by stopping at the

1:55:05Ian Bremmer:education section of a resume, you might throw away the perfect hire. Skills First Hiring helps you see talent others miss, like more than 70 million stars, skilled through alternative routes. Let their story unfold and gain a competitive advantage because hiring managers who start with skills are 60 % more likely to find a successful hire. Hire Skills First. Learn why at tearthepaperceiling.org. Brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council.