The Collapse of American Virtue — with Fareed Zakaria

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Speaker 2 Episode 372. 372 is the country code for Estonia.
1972, HBO began broadcasting. So TruStoy, my son, said that he was uncomfortable watching Game of Thrones with me because of all the sex.

Speaker 2 And I said, well, look, boss, just turn up the volume so you can't hear us.

Speaker 2 Go, go, go!

Speaker 2 Welcome to the 372nd episode of The Prop GPod. What's happening? It's a big week for me.
I'm in New York. I turned 51, 61.
And my new book, Notes on Being a Man, is out now.

Speaker 2 And we are number one on Amazon today. We'll see how long that lasts.
How did I get started in Books?

Speaker 2 You might ask. You didn't ask, but I'll tell you.

Speaker 2 Essentially 2002, I thought I was going to be rich. My company, Red Envelope, was going public, and I thought, oh, I'm done.
I'm rich. What do I want to do? And I'd always wanted to teach.

Speaker 2 I'd initially thought about possibly getting a PhD.

Speaker 2 Mom got sick, capitated an MBA, whatever,

Speaker 2 and gave myself 10 years in the private sector to try and make some money. And then I thought, I'm going to go, I'm going to teach someday.
So I thought I was done.

Speaker 2 Red On Pope was supposed to go public. And I thought, okay, there's two things I really want.
I want a jet and I want to teach. And I'm going to get both of those things.
And then

Speaker 2 simply put, things didn't work out that way.

Speaker 2 I don't know if you heard, there was this thing in this, around the turn of the millennium where internet stocks went down a great deal.

Speaker 2 Anyways, that hurt me. That hurt me substantially.
By the way, there's an enormous lesson I didn't learn until I was well into my 40s called diversification. Just trust me on this one.

Speaker 2 Ask your financial advisor about diversification.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I joined the faculty at NYU, and I thought, I really want to be a world-class academic. And I asked my marketing department chair, what should I do? And I also talked to the dean.

Speaker 2 And they said, well, you can either do peer-reviewed research. And I'm like, so I got a bunch of these journals,

Speaker 2 the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing. I'm like, this is just bullshit.
None of this means anything. No one cares.
This is all a bunch of

Speaker 2 PhDs and a giant circle jerk trying to get citations such that they can get tenure, which is like the most inefficient union ever. Too much? Too much.

Speaker 2 Anyways, so he said, well, you should write a book then. So I wrote my first book in 2015 or 2016 called The Four, the Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.

Speaker 2 And it started out as a love letter. I really, I thought these terms were incredible.
I thought their leadership was incredible.

Speaker 2 And by the time I was done with the research and the book, it sort of turned into a cautionary tale.

Speaker 2 And the book did really well. And I thought, okay, I like this.
I'm good at it. And it creates a certain level of heft

Speaker 2 that creates sort of the umbrella for credibility.

Speaker 2 When you write a book, producers on TV shows are usually pretty generous and will bring you on because most of them have written a book and they know just how fucking hard it is and how poorly it pays.

Speaker 2 I get good money now for my books because they sell well.

Speaker 2 But a couple of interesting things. One, it's cloud cover.
Most people don't make their living from books or authors. They make it from speaking fees or it drives consulting revenue or something else.

Speaker 2 Essentially, it takes about, I don't know, it takes me about six months to write a book. I try and put one out every 18 months.
Then it takes another six months for them to.

Speaker 2 Publishers do quote unquote strategy or social media. I don't know what the fuck publishers do, quite frankly.
They'll give you an editor. Hopefully they don't fuck up the book too badly.

Speaker 2 I've been pretty fortunate. I've had two really solid editors.
But the book publishing business, interestingly, is holding strong.

Speaker 2 Think about Amazon has wrecked so many businesses or put them out of business by selling $100 worth of retail for $90, at least for the first 20 years in business.

Speaker 2 But the business that's actually held pretty strongly in terms of the publishers, the retailers, the ecosystem,

Speaker 2 authors' fees is books, which is sort of ironic given that Amazon has been

Speaker 2 such a wrecking ball. And

Speaker 2 just just a little bit on writing. I write late at night.

Speaker 2 I like when the dogs, or it's just me and the dogs, dogs are asleep, kids are asleep. And I'll try and bang out the beginning of a chapter.
And it creates a bit of an ecosystem.

Speaker 2 And for us, the newsletter, No Mercy, No Malice, if it resonates, serves as sort of one or two or three legs of a stool of a chapter, try and create a narrative arc and then try and piece it all together.

Speaker 2 And then the real magic happens in editing. And to anybody who's thinking about writing a book, I would say a a couple of things.
One,

Speaker 2 stop talking about it and just do it. I wish I'd started much earlier.
And that is, have a theme or a positioning. You know, answer the question, what am I going to say that no one said before?

Speaker 2 And why does it matter?

Speaker 2 And then put together a brief statement of the positioning of the book, a table of contents, and then write two or three chapters and then go out to some publishers or an agent.

Speaker 2 My agent, Jim Levine, I think, is the best in the business. And he essentially saved my book.
My book, Notes on Being a Man, was originally called The Algebra of Masculinity.

Speaker 2 I like the idea of algebra of, I have algebra of happiness, I have algebra of wealth, and I want to do algebra of masculinity.

Speaker 2 And I started off, you know, chapter one, testosterone, talking about the end utero surge and testosterone, then it happens again at two or three in a boy, and then again at 16 or 17.

Speaker 2 And I realized I'm not an endocrinologist, I'm not an adolescent psychiatrist, and that I was way out over my skis.

Speaker 2 And my agent said to me, make this more, use your personal stories, your successes, and your failures to talk about what you've gotten right and what you've gotten right as a man or or trying to become a man.

Speaker 2 And that was just such an easier framing for me rather than trying to pretend that I'm an expert on any of these things, which I'm not.

Speaker 2 But writing books, I find is if you want to be quote unquote a thought leader, an academic, or someone who's taken seriously in the media, there's just a level of hept and appreciation for it because hands down, it's the hardest thing I do.

Speaker 2 When you flip open your

Speaker 2 laptop and you write a chapter called Google and try to say something about Google that no one said before that they can't find in a magazine article for free is pretty challenging.

Speaker 2 But it's also like anything in life, the hardest things are the most rewarding.

Speaker 2 And when I, at the end of a book, when I've written something that I think feels right, at that moment, you have this feeling of satisfaction and power that at that moment you know more about that specific topic than almost anyone in the world for a good 15 or 30 minutes if you've researched it well.

Speaker 2 And you've spent a lot of time trying to review your ideas and make them compelling and easy to understand.

Speaker 2 Anyways, the other thing that's really interesting and sort of depressing about writing books uh is similar to every other business you try to start and that is publishers now look at one thing unless you're just one of these writers that is always sells a ton of books and you're just a genius uh with with written prose uh they look at your social media following and that is

Speaker 2 As my social media following has grown, so have my book sales. That's the bottom line.

Speaker 2 So if you want to start, before you start writing a book, if you want your book to sell a lot, you need to start building your social footprint.

Speaker 2 and it's sort of pathetic to say but that's kind of the whole shooting match right now and i believe the first thing your agent and publishers will look at if they're thinking about uh signing up your book and the size of the advance is based on how big your social following is and if you look at this week's bestsellers uh peter atia andrew huberman big podcast platforms big social media following uh so it is um one exceptionally hard, exceptionally rewarding, and unfortunately, it's become all about your social media following.

Speaker 2 And I thought that was going to be more insightful than it was.

Speaker 2 All right. In today's episode, we speak with Fareed Zakaria, an author-host of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN and columnist for the Washington Post.

Speaker 2 We discuss with Fareed rebuilding America's alliances, confronting its moral and economic decay, and how the idolatry of money has replaced virtue. I first ran across Fareed.

Speaker 2 I've been an enormous fanboy of Fareed. I find that he has what I would describe as a beautiful mind.
I think key to a society or a democracy is an objective truth. But

Speaker 2 the operative term there is objective because who is the arbiter of truth? And I find that he just goes after data and logic, and it is sometimes difficult

Speaker 2 to understand where he stands politically. And I love that.

Speaker 2 I love people where you can't guess their political leanings because their work comes across as so objective and they're sort of willing to piss off both sides.

Speaker 2 And I've known Freed now for a good five years, met him during COVID, and just get so much reward out of him.

Speaker 2 And also, quite frankly, his interviews and podcasts have been some of our most downloaded in the history of the pod.

Speaker 1 So with that, just a note that we recorded this conversation with Fareed on Monday. So if there's any news that's shifted since then, please forgive us.
Ladies and gentlemen, Fareed Zakaria.

Speaker 1 Fareed, where does this podcast find you?

Speaker 3 In New York.

Speaker 2 So we were talking off-mic, my book was 375th on Amazon, and then I went on Fareed Zakaria and immediately jumped to like 90th. So Fareed is a kingmaker in addition to all the other things you do.

Speaker 2 So thanks for having me on, Fareed.

Speaker 3 It was a huge pleasure. Your segment did fantastically for us.

Speaker 3 And I do think one of the things I'm very proud of with our show is, you know, we have pretty good numbers, but most importantly, we have an attentive audience of people who like to listen to smart people like you and buy books.

Speaker 3 I can't promise you they read the books, but they do buy the books.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, that's unusual. A lot of programs get smart people.
Very few get people who buy books anymore. I read this crazy stat that 1% of people buy 99% of the books.

Speaker 2 Anyways, and I know you have a new book or have a book out. I wanted to get, to kick things off,

Speaker 2 it feels as if as disappointed as people are in Trump's administration so far and as unpopular as he is, there's a lot of evidence evidence showing that if the election were held again today, he would still win, and that it's difficult to find a group of people who are less popular than the current administration, but we found one, and that's Democrats.

Speaker 2 It definitely feels, and I say this as a progressive, it definitely feels we're lost in the wilderness, really looking for a North Star.

Speaker 2 If, and maybe they have, if the Democratic National Committee brought you in and said, what is our North Star? What do you think we need to do to find our center of gravity at the Democratic Party?

Speaker 2 What would your advice be?

Speaker 3 It's a great question, Scott, because you really are hitting on something that's very, very important, because it's not just the Democrats.

Speaker 3 If you look around the world, the left everywhere is in ruins. Look at France, the Socialist Party of France, one of the great left of center parties in the world.

Speaker 3 all destroyed. You look in Germany, the German Social Democrats, again, one of the original great social democratic parties, in ruins.
You look in Italy, the Democrats,

Speaker 3 the left of center that ran the country for most of the last 70 years, in ruins. So what is happening? Why is it that the left is facing this,

Speaker 3 you know, this kind of collapse?

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, one of the things I try to argue in my book, The Age of Revolutions, is that we are going through a huge backlash against 30 years of globalization and technological change and cultural changes.

Speaker 3 But what's fascinating about these phenomena, and I go back hundreds of years in history, is that

Speaker 3 when they happen, when people feel this sense of existential anxiety about the world they're in, they tend to move right culturally, not left economically.

Speaker 3 So when they feel like my world is disappearing, they search for those people who say, I'm going to make it all better. I'm going to take you back.

Speaker 3 I'm going to give you tradition and religion and the way things were.

Speaker 3 And that's what the right does.

Speaker 3 It's a politics of cultural nostalgia. The left says, we've got three more government programs for you.
We've got free health care. We've got free daycare.
We've got free child care.

Speaker 3 And it turns out that people at that moment, they're not looking for another government program. They're angry.

Speaker 3 They're feeling like their world has been turned upside down.

Speaker 3 The right is much better at addressing what is fundamentally a kind of cultural anxiety than the left, which tends to always want to solve these problems by saying, hey, we're going to throw more money at you.

Speaker 3 Give you one simple example. Joe Biden spent more money on Red America than any Democrat has in the last 50 years.

Speaker 3 All his bills, infrastructure, IRA, everything was targeted almost at spending money in red counties. I think by one estimate, 80% of Biden's spending plans went to red counties.

Speaker 3 They voted more against the Democrats, more against Kamala Harris, more against

Speaker 3 the left in 2024 than they had in 2020 after $2 trillion was spent on them.

Speaker 2 So I want to put forward a thesis. I really am asking this for illumination, not for confirmation.
But

Speaker 2 as a hammer, everything I see is a nail.

Speaker 2 But my thesis around this pivot from blue to red is largely explained, or at at least partially explained, by the struggles of young people and specifically young men.

Speaker 2 If you look at the groups that went furthest from the left to the right, it was one Latinos, two

Speaker 2 people under the age of 40 who are just less wealthy

Speaker 2 than people our age and are angry about it. Maybe they're not good at math, but they can do math.

Speaker 2 And then the third group I found most interesting that pivoted hardest from blue to red were women age 45 to 64. And my thesis is that's their mothers.

Speaker 2 And there's still a lot of women, I think, in the West who will vote for who they perceive as being in the best interests of their husbands and sons.

Speaker 2 And you don't care much about territorial sovereignty or social programs or transgender rights when your son isn't doing well. That a lot of this move towards a strong man or the chaos candidate.

Speaker 2 And Trump does represent, I call it chaos, some people would say represent change, that a lot of it can be reverse engineered to young people's struggles and specifically the struggles of young men.

Speaker 2 Where do I have that right and where do I have that wrong?

Speaker 3 Oh, I think you're entirely right.

Speaker 3 You know, it's the funny thing is these things all work together, right? Like economic anxiety translates into cultural anxiety, translates into a desire to kind of burn the house down.

Speaker 3 But, you know, to just clarify in a way,

Speaker 3 if you look at and say to yourself, well, it's all about income inequality or something. Well, you know, Sweden has very little income inequality, right?

Speaker 3 This is one of the countries that has the most advanced social safety nets in the world. They have a huge right-wing populism problem.
If you say, well, it's because we lost our manufacturing base.

Speaker 3 Well, Germany preserved its manufacturing base. They've got a right-wing populism problem.
You say it's about we haven't looked after our workers enough.

Speaker 3 France coddles its workers more than any country in the world, and they have a right-wing populism problem.

Speaker 3 So there's something going on, and you're right to focus in on this sense of like, you know, helplessness. My world has disappeared.
My prospects look bleak.

Speaker 3 And what happened, I think, in the phenomenon you're describing, as I see it, the women, as you say, in a sense, voted more again for nostalgia, for tradition, for a return to some kind of more traditional, settled way of life.

Speaker 3 The young men was really interesting, as far as I can tell, it's young Hispanic and young black men, as you say, moving right.

Speaker 3 What's happening there is the Democrats are saying to them, vote for us because of your identity, because of your race, your ethnicity.

Speaker 3 The Republicans are saying, vote for us because of your social and educational class. You are, you know, a non-college educated folk.

Speaker 3 And the Democrats are a party of elitists who believe in transgender rights and

Speaker 3 all this woke ideology.

Speaker 3 We're simple, traditional. We're the party

Speaker 3 of common sense.

Speaker 3 I thought trump one of trump's geniuses in the last uh republican convention was to put hulk hogan on and have him tear his shirt out a lot of us looked at that and thought what is this weirdness right what trump was signaling to young men uh particularly i think young non-college educated men is the democrats are the party of unisex bathrooms we're the party of hulk hogan Who do you feel more comfortable with?

Speaker 3 So there's a lot of that. Again, Trump knows how to play these cultural notes so much better than Democrats do.

Speaker 3 And you can see, again,

Speaker 3 I come back to culture just because I think, you know, it's economics translating into culture.

Speaker 3 Because if you look at pure economics, you know, the right-wing populism in Europe, for example, it's happening in Sweden. They don't have an income inequality problem.
It's happening in Germany.

Speaker 3 They don't have a loss of manufacturing base problem, right? So there's something deeper going on here than just economics.

Speaker 1 We'll be right back after a quick break.

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Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 2 this isn't an outrageous thesis or scenario, but when we have talk show hosts who are now the Secretary of Defense, I refuse to call it Secretary of War.

Speaker 2 I want you to imagine that Farid gets a call and says it's time to serve the country that's been so good to you, the United States, and you're going to be Secretary of State.

Speaker 2 And the first thing I need you to do is to brief the President on the state of the world, looking at, say, different countries as stocks or as assets that have gone up in value and down in value.

Speaker 2 Where do you think the balance of power lies? Who's accreted power in the last 10 years? Who seeded it? And what would be the two or three most important things you would recommend that the U.S.

Speaker 2 does to recapture or strengthen its position globally?

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 the balance of power, I think, is pretty clear that China has gained ground and we have lost ground.

Speaker 3 You can see this, for example, an economist had

Speaker 3 a study of Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is probably the most pivotal part of the world because it is at the heart of the contest in Asia and economically, it's deeply tied to China, right?

Speaker 3 China is the dominant market. It's, you know, in many ways, they have to get on with China.

Speaker 3 And yet, in security terms, East Asia, Southeast Asia has always been very close to the U.S., Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam. What has happened over the last

Speaker 3 really

Speaker 3 year, but it's been a longer-term trend, is they have all moved closer to China.

Speaker 3 And that is because the tariffs have played, you know, have wrecked havoc on our alliances. Because, you know, rather than building up and helping our allies, we're punishing them.

Speaker 3 Because what ends up happening is Trump uses the leverage he has to punish people. We have leverage with our allies because they're the ones we trade the most with.

Speaker 3 So they're the ones, of course, with whom we have the most trade and they're the ones Trump says, I can squeeze more.

Speaker 3 So I would say the fundamental thing that the United States needs to understand is we are in a contest for global influence, power, for technology platforms, for the future of technology with China.

Speaker 3 China is the first real peer competitor the United States has had, perhaps ever, because the Soviet Union was never really a peer competitor economically and technologically.

Speaker 3 So the question is, how do we engage in this competition?

Speaker 3 We have one great superpower, and you've talked about this a lot, Scott. You understand it very well.

Speaker 3 We have about 50 countries that are among the richest, most advanced countries in the world that want to ally with us, that believe in our values, that believe the United States is a great

Speaker 3 kind of ringleader.

Speaker 3 If we can strengthen that alliance and create a kind of ecosystem, we can match and beat China in everything, even in rare earths, even in critical minerals, because we have Europe, we have Australia, we have Japan, we have India, we have Israel.

Speaker 3 You know, we have this extraordinary ecosystem. You know how many treaty allies China has? One, North Korea.
And let's throw in Russia as a de facto ally.

Speaker 3 So we've got 50 odd countries and they're the richest countries in the world. And they've got these two decrepit countries, right? That should be the way we think about this.

Speaker 3 Instead, what Trump is doing, and this is really the central flaw of Trump's foreign policies, he's turned on our allies so that the Canadians are asking themselves, how do we think about our future for the next 30 years, distancing ourselves from America?

Speaker 3 The Europeans are thinking, how do we think of our future for the next 30 years, developing independent alternate strategies towards China, Russia, India?

Speaker 3 The Australians are worried we're going to abandon them on this nuclear submarine deal.

Speaker 3 So that's the fundamental mistake, which is to not realize the Allies are the greatest force multiplier the United States has, the greatest peacetime alliance in history.

Speaker 3 Almost every other alliance in history, Scott, ends when the war, the contest for which it was created, ends. We created an alliance system during the Cold War.

Speaker 3 We won the Cold War, and the alliance system grew rather than shrinking.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's just.

Speaker 2 I'm reminded of what Churchill said, the only thing worse than fighting with your allies is fighting without them. I mean, it just, it just, it seems like

Speaker 2 the prosperity is so enormous that we decided to engage in self-sabotage. I'm going to use this as a bridge.

Speaker 2 You wrote this great op-ed, I think it was in in the Washington Post, saying that we can't beat China by becoming more like China. We beat them by becoming more like the U.S.
Say more.

Speaker 3 So, you know, one of the fascinating things about the last 10 or 15 years is that people have all kind of been talking about how the U.S. made this terrible mistake.

Speaker 3 It thought that China was going to become more like America. And in fact, it didn't.
You know, it stated a dictatorship. It stayed landless.
That's a fair critique. But what's ironic is the U.S.

Speaker 3 is becoming more like China. We are adopting state control of the economy.
We're adopting the idea of industrial policy and restricting trade.

Speaker 3 And most importantly, we are politicizing the economy so that the administration gets to pick who are the technology leaders, who gets special treatment.

Speaker 3 Okay, you ban chips, but if Jensen Huang comes to you in the White House and makes a case, and by the way, maybe it makes a donation to your ballroom,

Speaker 3 you will allow him to sell the chips, but you take a 15% cut. This is all entirely the opposite of the way the United States economy is meant to run.

Speaker 3 You know, I grew up in an India where that was how the economy ran. The politics was more important than economics.

Speaker 3 The market was less important as a signal setter than what was happening in the corridors of power.

Speaker 3 And when I came to America, what I loved about the United States was that the market was not run by politicians. It was run by the market, by businessmen, by entrepreneurs, by investors.

Speaker 3 And we are politicizing the economy to an extent to which it is going to breed corruption, it is going to breed inefficiency, and most importantly,

Speaker 3 We don't play this game well. That's China's game.

Speaker 3 If the game is going to be who can better absorb pain, restrict critical minerals, put in export best, the Chinese will beat us every time time because they have no rule of law. They have no courts.

Speaker 3 They have no elections to worry about in terms of inflicting pain. Xi Jinping doesn't care if the stock market goes down 20%, right? So we're sort of weirdly playing their game.

Speaker 3 What we should do is out-innovate them, out-compete them.

Speaker 3 And we have all the tools at our disposal, but we're engaging, as you said, in a kind of weird self-sabotage.

Speaker 2 So you brought up something. I want to put forward another thesis and have you respond to it.
And that is between the U.S. and Europe, about $50 trillion economy, Russia's $2 trillion.

Speaker 2 They should be ⁇ if we get into kind of a

Speaker 2 confrontation or a war and the U.S. and Europe decide to be on one side together,

Speaker 2 you'd logically think that Russia should be a net running up against a windshield. It should just be a splat and oversoon, and yet it's not.
And

Speaker 2 my thesis is that Russia hasn't a core confidence that we don't have.

Speaker 2 While Europe has refused to put a single boot on the ground, a million men perish or injured, and yet they continue to fight the war. If AWS goes out for a day in the U.S.

Speaker 2 and people lose their Netflix, they freak out here. Isn't one of the problems in going to solutions, one, do you agree with that?

Speaker 2 And two, going to solutions, quite frankly, hasn't America just become fat and happy and not used to sacrificing or believing that we can go to wars and cut taxes and that we might want to wave our hands and talk about the injustice of what's happening in Ukraine, but we aren't really willing to do what the Chinese and Russians are willing to do, and that is have

Speaker 2 really significant sacrifice. Have we become fat and happy?

Speaker 3 Yes, in a word. I think you have it exactly right with Ukraine, which is this is...

Speaker 3 an existential challenge because it's an existential challenge to the idea of a kind of liberal rules-based world that the United States and Europe have created.

Speaker 3 Russia is trying desperately to break that world and it's trying to break it at this point that it has enormous leverage because it is right next door to Ukraine.

Speaker 3 And as you say, because it is willing to suffer pain, you know. And our solution to it has been, oh, let's sanction them.
Putin doesn't care about sanctions.

Speaker 3 He doesn't care about the welfare of his people. If he did, he'd be running a completely different country.
What he cares about is Russia's imperial power, the imperial might of the Russian state.

Speaker 3 And he's got enough petrodollars to fund that for time immemorial. The place where he would feel the pain is on the battlefield.

Speaker 3 And that's why, you know, to my mind, we're in this kind of crazy situation in Ukraine, where we do agree for the most part it's existential. We do agree that Russia is trying to do this.

Speaker 3 We do agree that we want to win, but then we don't do what it would take to win, right?

Speaker 3 Like if you've decided this is, you're in the fight, there are only two options: you're going to win or you're going to lose. Losing with moderation, you get no prizes.

Speaker 3 Losing with restraint, you get no prizes. So, you might as well win.

Speaker 3 And if we were to give Ukraine all the weapons in the world they need, all you know, I would argue some air support or things like that, if the Europeans were to put boots on the ground, this would be over.

Speaker 3 The Russians have lost. I mean,

Speaker 3 if you think about what Russia has lost compared to, say, for example, during during the Cold War, they lost, I forget the number of troops in Afghanistan, but I think it was in the range of 20,000, 25,000, something like that.

Speaker 3 They've lost 200 or 300,000 in Ukraine.

Speaker 3 There may be 300,000 injured. 500,000 young men fled the country.

Speaker 3 Putin can't keep this up forever. Economically, he can because he's turned it into a fortress militarized economy.
But

Speaker 3 you have mothers whose children are dying, and that is the pressure point.

Speaker 3 And, you know, with Trump, you're not quite sure why, but for some reason, he's never been willing to put real pressure on Russia.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, we talk a lot about the importance of the soccer mom in Wisconsin.

Speaker 2 And because of our electoral structure, there's just a small number of people who have a disproportionate amount of impact on our elections, the quote-unquote swing voter.

Speaker 2 And I would argue that the new swing voters globally that are, you know, could look east, could look west, are the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, because of their economic power and also india and it feels again and the biggest on goal in history or recent history is

Speaker 2 that we have turned we have thrust india into the arms of she and putin

Speaker 2 that image of seeing she putin and modi looking like they were brothers i thought was the most chilling geopolitical image i'd seen in a while talk a little bit about the relationship between a do you agree and talk about a little bit about the relationship between the U.S.

Speaker 2 and India, and what do you think India,

Speaker 2 how they perceive America and their new kind of strength and relationships, and any advice you would have for the State Department as it relates to India?

Speaker 3 So this is a real extraordinary transformation that has taken place in the last year in India. If you polled a year ago and asked, you know, just countries, forget about the governments,

Speaker 3 attitudes towards America, India

Speaker 3 was usually among the top three most pro-American countries in the world, the top three, top five. You know, it was up there with Poland, Israel.

Speaker 3 And this is astonishing because India's government through the entire Cold War was siding with the Soviet Union, right?

Speaker 3 So the Indians have a very strong natural affinity and inclination towards America. They admire America.

Speaker 3 All Indian businesses admire America. Young Indians want to come to America for education.

Speaker 3 There's nothing more glamorous in India than saying that you have a degree from an American college and things like that. So there's a huge amount of cultural power and attraction that the U.S.
has.

Speaker 3 It's flipped. It's flipped because of a real sense that Trump is trying systematically and consciously to screw India.

Speaker 3 India has the highest tariffs in the world now, laid on it. So you look at that and you say, you know, why are you doing this to us? And then Trump went out of his way to favor Pakistan.

Speaker 3 You know, so there's a kind of weird element to it all. And what's strange about it is this has been one of America's great foreign policy successes, and it's totally bipartisan.

Speaker 3 So at the end of the Cold War, the United States starts to woo India to, you know, come become part of the kind of American, you know, if you will, sphere of influence, our ecosystem.

Speaker 3 It's a democracy. It's, you know, 10% of the country speaks English.
It's all these connections to the West. Clinton begins it, a massively successful state visit.

Speaker 3 George Bush, probably Republican, makes the most important shift, which is he accepts that India is a nuclear power and stops sanctioning it.

Speaker 3 Obama makes the pivot to Asia, which in large part is a strengthening of the relationship with India. And Trump, in Trump 1.0, he continues that process.

Speaker 3 And again, somewhat inexplicably, he's turned on India and undone Ford administration's work bipartisan 25-year project of bringing India closer to the United States. And

Speaker 3 to underscore your point, Scott, there is only one country in the world that has the scale

Speaker 3 to replace China. And

Speaker 3 if you're trying to create a non-Chinese ecosystem, if you want to make massive amounts of

Speaker 3 consumer electronics or iPhones, only India has the scale to be able to do that. If you want to make massive amounts of pharmaceuticals, only India has the ability to do that.

Speaker 3 If you want to, you know, for the next pandemic, you don't want to be reliant on China, because many of these things we're talking about are low-margin goods where you need to make them in massive scale.

Speaker 3 That's not going to be done

Speaker 3 in Texas or California. That's not even going to be done in Europe.
Only India can play the role of the next China with regard to that kind of manufacturing. It can be crucial in processing of

Speaker 3 critical minerals like rare earths because India, you know, it has lower environmental concerns. So with all that being, you know, that's the price.

Speaker 3 To screw it up.

Speaker 3 And the strange thing is, I still have not heard a coherent reason why this has happened. You know, why does India have the highest tariffs in the world? It makes no sense.

Speaker 3 The U.S. in India trade is not even that great.
So you're trying to look for a reason. And unfortunately, we're living in a court.

Speaker 3 And so you're just trying to understand, was the emperor in a bad mood that day?

Speaker 1 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 2 We're back with more from Freed Zaccaria.

Speaker 2 So try and put us in the head of the current administration's decision to strike Venezuelan boats allegedly carrying drugs.

Speaker 2 Do you see this as an attempt to try and secure additional energy supplies as performative masculinity distraction from

Speaker 2 Epstein?

Speaker 2 I can at least make an argument for some, if not most, of the things he does, even if you don't agree with them. This to me just seems so

Speaker 2 such a non-sequitur, an anomaly. What do you think is in the heads of Hegseth, Rubio and Trump striking these boats?

Speaker 3 Look, you're trying to explain something that doesn't make a lot of sense because actually

Speaker 3 the vast majority of the drugs are not coming on Venezuelan boats. Like the stated rationale doesn't quite make sense.

Speaker 3 Maduro is a bad guy. It's a bad regime.
They've done terrible things to their people. But why are we doing this? Why now? Part of it, I think, is that Hexet and Vance

Speaker 3 and that whole core MAGA contingency really do believe that the United States has been spending its military power too much in the kind of distant corners of the world, and it should be retreating to a kind of fortress America.

Speaker 3 And that our hemisphere, it's a very 19th-century kind of conception. Our hemisphere is where

Speaker 3 we should be primarily engaged. So, okay, that means that, okay, you're going to find some, you've got to find some issue or problem

Speaker 3 in the Americas. So you look at Venezuela, they're the bad guys.
I think the oil part is an important part of it.

Speaker 3 My understanding is that one of the things that the Trump administration has been trying to do with Venezuela is say to Maduro: if you will make a special deal with us on energy,

Speaker 3 we will relax. relax.

Speaker 3 So, part of this is the stick, which is meant to get Maduro to agree to do some kind of energy deal, which would mean that he would have to in a fence,

Speaker 3 you know, cancel his energy deals with Russia and China and

Speaker 3 other players.

Speaker 3 Apparently, he has not been willing to do that. And so, this part of what's going on here.

Speaker 3 I've also heard one final part to this is that Marco Rubio has been looking for a portfolio as Secretary of State because most of what the Secretary of State does is currently being done by Trump's former real estate partner, Steve Witcoff.

Speaker 3 Steve Witkoff is the real Secretary of State. So Marco Rubio is looking for things to do.
And one of them is, you know, he's a big Venezuela hawk.

Speaker 3 He always has been, to be fair to him. So it's a strange collection of reasons.

Speaker 3 You know, you just always wonder with this kind of thing, have they thought through the fact that

Speaker 3 you could end up with some kind of igniting a civil war in Venezuela, right? I mean, if something,

Speaker 3 some part of the regime collapses, as we've learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, it doesn't mean you get liberal democracy and your Thomas Jefferson

Speaker 3 candidate comes and takes control. What you end up with is the remnants of the old regime fight back.
There is a new government in place. The place

Speaker 3 goes through a multi-year civil war. I'm not sure that's great for the United States.

Speaker 2 It feels as if, or again, another thesis, is that

Speaker 2 Trump is able to kind of run these red lines or color outside the lines as long as the market keeps going up. And the thesis is that what's replaced the importance

Speaker 2 or value placed on character, fidelity, patriotism, decency, has been replaced with if you make a lot of money, everything's forgiven.

Speaker 2 And as long as the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are up and to the right,

Speaker 2 whoever's in the office can pretty much do whatever they want.

Speaker 2 And America, it feels like to me, has become a giant bet on AI, where almost our entire economic growth is based on investments and the market increases in value in AI.

Speaker 2 One, do you think there is something to the notion that we have a moral failing around the idolatry of the dollar? And how do we restore more substantive values in America?

Speaker 2 And two, just very curious to get your take on AI and what potential it represents to the upside and the downside.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's a bunch of very important questions. So on AI, look,

Speaker 3 I feel like it's above my pay grade to know whether or not

Speaker 3 when we get to

Speaker 3 AGI, it's going to be a complete transformation of the world as we know it and all.

Speaker 3 What I can is it's pretty clear that we are in a kind of arms race on AI and that part of the reason these hyperscalers are spending is they don't want to let the other guy win because it's a kind of strange situation.

Speaker 3 Each of them has their own definition of what it means to get to general intelligence. So it's like a shifting goal.
It's a vague, inchoate goal.

Speaker 3 The goalpost is your own, but you have to spend, you have to spend, you have to spend, because otherwise Google will win, or Microsoft will win, or OpenAI will win, or Anthropic will win.

Speaker 3 So they're all engaging in this crazy race. It feels to me like it's not entirely clear that people understand how you would get a return on that investment.

Speaker 3 And unlike a lot of these other booms in the past, you think of the railroad boom, the telecom boom, the infrastructure you're building is not going to last for 100 years because 60% of the cost of building these data centers are the chips.

Speaker 3 And the chips get obsolete every three to four years. So you're going to need a massive cash infusion every three to four years.

Speaker 3 So the whole thing feels very heady. And

Speaker 3 it could easily...

Speaker 3 It seems like you could easily get up one morning and say, wait a minute,

Speaker 3 we're spending trillions and we're expecting only tens of billions of dollars of profit out of this. But it's possible that AI is so transformative that the normal rules don't apply.

Speaker 3 The most interesting thing to me about AI that you can see is that the Chinese are approaching it quite differently. They are going for not this race for AGI,

Speaker 3 they're really going for a much more targeted applied AI.

Speaker 3 How do we transform these various industries and businesses using AI? So it's much more practical.

Speaker 3 And in one particular area, they seem to be ahead, which is they're trying to do real-world AI, that is not large language models, but using robots.

Speaker 3 So, you know, this is a point that Fei Fei Li at Stanford, the great computer scientist, always makes that human beings perceive the world not through language, but through their eyes, ears, you know, and that if robots could sense the world that way, they would be incredibly powerful.

Speaker 3 And Chinese AI is very focused on trying to get these

Speaker 3 marrying robots and AI so that you can automate factories on a scale and with productivity levels that would be just mind-boggling. So it's a very practical way of approaching AI.

Speaker 3 I suspect we are ahead, but I wonder whether this Chinese approach is very ingenious in terms of being able to produce a kind of return on investment and actual transformation of processes, crucial processes within the economy.

Speaker 3 And your final point, which I just want to comment on, because I really agree with it, is this question of the idolatry of money,

Speaker 3 which then makes you ignore lots of other important characteristics that we have for thousands of years thought were important, like honesty, bravery, courage, decency,

Speaker 3 kindness.

Speaker 3 I think that I saw this happen in my lifetime. We're about the same age, Scott.
So I want to toss this back to you and ask if you agree.

Speaker 3 So when I came to America in the early 80s, what I was struck by was it was still a world in which, of course, businessmen were

Speaker 3 admired enormously and people

Speaker 3 thought that rich people were great and all that, which by the way, I thought was wonderful coming from a quasi-socialist country,

Speaker 3 which was India in the 70s. But there was enormous respect for novelists.

Speaker 3 People like Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe were huge figures in the America I came to. There was enormous respect for academics, people who were philosophers,

Speaker 3 people who were, you know, humanists. Elie Wiesel, I remember, once came to college when I was there, and it was a huge event.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 there was a real sense in which there was a richness of society that honored different kinds of people for different skills that they had. The 80s boom, you know, on Wall Street began to change that.

Speaker 3 And then the tech boom just completely obliterated it. And now we only worship rich people and we think that rich people are philosophers, are prophets.
They know everything about everything.

Speaker 3 Peter Thiel is not just a good investor. He's also brilliant about theology and philosophy.
And that's true of all these people.

Speaker 3 We look at what their work habits are, their study. We want to know, do they eat a a banana in the morning? Because it must be that if,

Speaker 3 you know, if Jeff Bezos eats a banana in the morning, that must be the path to his wealth. There's a kind of almost crazy idolatry that we're in right now.

Speaker 2 Oh, it's the example that running through my mind was Principal Jukelson.

Speaker 2 When I was in sixth grade, this big, handsome man used to drive up in his 240Z, which was the the coolest car in the world, and he was a big man, and he used to work out with us and play sports with us.

Speaker 2 He was our principal, and he used used to show up and talk about how wonderful our teacher was. And

Speaker 2 he was just kind and he used to hug people. We all wanted to be this guy.
We all wanted to be this man of service, of generosity, of affection. And now I think their heroes are Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 It just feels as if we have

Speaker 2 the wrong role models. Along those lines, Fareed,

Speaker 2 I know you have kids. What advice would you have

Speaker 2 for dads? Feels like the two of us, Fareed, quite frankly, we have a debt.

Speaker 2 We've recognized so much prosperity, an unfair amount of prosperity being our age and being men in the United States, and that prosperity has not trickled down to younger generations, and young men are really struggling.

Speaker 2 What do you do as a father? And what do you think we can do as a society to try and restore the same type of prosperity, opportunity, mental wellness

Speaker 2 that we have registered so much of, and that young people, specifically young men, seem to be in such short supply of.

Speaker 3 So I think at a societal level, this is something you've talked about, but I 100% agree with it.

Speaker 3 There has been a huge transfer of wealth from the young to the old in almost every Western society, but in particular in the United States. We spend $4

Speaker 3 for every person over 65 compared to one dollar for every person uh under 18.

Speaker 3 and it's because insidiously i don't think anyone consciously did this but we know old people vote and by the way people under 18 don't vote at all and people who are between 18 and 30 vote very little so we have the whole reward system the economic reward system of this massive you know federal government all geared towards subsidizing the old the elderly penalizing the young and you know we have to try and change that.

Speaker 3 But at a personal level, look,

Speaker 3 it's a huge challenge, I think, that we need to think more about ourselves, all of us. And I really mean all of us, and particularly parents as role models, and ask ourselves,

Speaker 3 what is the impact we want to leave on the world? And most important in that is not what you say, it's what you do. So, what I've been very conscious of is I have one son who's an amazing kid.

Speaker 3 I have always tried to just show him in what I did that I, you know, that I had these values that I believed in, that

Speaker 3 our friends were the kind of people who embodied those values, that the things we talked about when we honored something, when we disapproved of something was that you gotta, you gotta, you gotta walk the walk.

Speaker 3 You can't just say it. Children are very good at picking up hypocrisy and they will discount anything you say if your actions are not aligned with that.

Speaker 3 And so, you know, in my own small way, I've tried to do that. But I think, you know, you're absolutely right.
We talked on my show about this.

Speaker 3 One of the things Charlie Kirk got right was he understood the young men felt they needed a sense of purpose. They needed a sense of higher purpose.
And he was willing to give it to them.

Speaker 3 And I don't agree with a lot of the things he believed in, but I think he got that right. He said, you know, get out of the bars and embrace your Bibles, you know, be a provider.

Speaker 3 Make sure that you're kind and decent to women. There was, you know, it's a kind of old-fashioned set of moral claims.
But he was giving purpose to young men who need purpose.

Speaker 3 They need to feel that they are special and important and that they have power, but also responsibilities. So if you can do that, you know, look, as I said, I think I lucked out with my son,

Speaker 3 who is amazing,

Speaker 3 but it's hard work and it's ongoing.

Speaker 2 if there was one economic or social policy, magic wand test, that you could immediately implement in the United States, what would it be?

Speaker 3 Gosh,

Speaker 3 that is a great challenge.

Speaker 3 I think what I would do is,

Speaker 3 in some significant way, provide young people with capital. This could be a left and right policy.
Provide young people with capital so they feel invested in the society.

Speaker 3 They feel invested in the success of the society. They understand how to save, you know, make it something that incentivizes saving and things like that.
We basically need to think more long term.

Speaker 3 We need to be able to find a way to understand

Speaker 3 the time horizon of markets and democracy is very short term.

Speaker 3 And the game we're in is a very long-term game.

Speaker 2 And last question here, advice to your 25-year-old self. What did you get right? What did you get wrong? wrong?

Speaker 3 I think what I got right was

Speaker 3 that I was able to find a way to do the thing I loved

Speaker 3 in a way that

Speaker 3 was good for my career. In other words, it wasn't just that I followed my passion.
It's that I found a way to tailor my passion to something where there was a career there.

Speaker 3 I was able to say, you know, if I do it this way, and if I work for these magazines, and if I go on TV, I'll be able to do the things I love and make a living doing it. That's number one.

Speaker 3 Number two, I think what I got right was focus on family and close friends.

Speaker 3 Really, particularly, you and I are in this world, Scott, where a lot of people want to be your friend.

Speaker 3 And I have never made the mistake of thinking that because somebody wants to be my friend, because I have a television show, they're really my friends.

Speaker 3 You know, that I have a very acute sense of if all this went away, my college buddies, the people who you know I've known for 30 or 40 years, they would stay with me, we would still be friends, but a lot of the glamour and the you know a lot of the kind of celebrity friends that I had that that or the acquaintances I have, that would all go away.

Speaker 3 And that's just fine with me.

Speaker 3 I enjoy the ride, but I also know

Speaker 3 what my true north is.

Speaker 3 I think what I probably, I think what I got wrong is I didn't do enough things when I was on the way up that were giving back or that were even just fundamentally of interest to me.

Speaker 3 I was a little too caught up with success, success, success. And when Mike is success, I don't mean financial success.

Speaker 3 I mean, you know, just always moving up and making sure that this was a kind of career-wise, the right thing to do.

Speaker 3 I think I should have done more things that were both interesting, that were, that would have an impact on society.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 I should have had a broader definition of my success. In a way, I was too insecure and anxious climbing the ladder.
I should have realized, you know what,

Speaker 3 you'll be fine climbing the ladder. You might as well stop and smell the roses and help a person

Speaker 3 across the street along the way. I now do it, but I didn't do it when I was in my 20s and 30s.

Speaker 2 How do you just summarize the last 30 years of my life? Stop and smell the roses and

Speaker 2 be kind and have different definitions of success. Farid Zakari is a journalist, author, and political commentator.
He hosts Farid Zakari at GPS on CNN and is a columnist for the Washington Post.

Speaker 2 I don't say that, I don't think I've said this to maybe two people. I think you are a beautiful mind.
I just, I tune in every Sunday, and

Speaker 2 you are literally one of the only shows where I will stop it, rewind it, such that I can parrot your comments because I find you're such an incisive thinker. And really,

Speaker 2 I just

Speaker 2 enjoy you have been able to do something I am not able to do. You are able to puncture through your emotions and the politics to just the truth.

Speaker 2 I think you're a tremendous inspiration for young men and literally a lighthouse in a storm of political anxiety and biases that it is so hard to

Speaker 2 see the forest for the trees. Very much appreciate you.
Appreciate your work and appreciate you coming on.

Speaker 3 As that wonderful Jewish saying goes, Scott, from your lips to God's ears.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much. I'm humbled, but I'll take it.

Speaker 2 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our assistant producer is Laura Janaire.
Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop GPod from Prop G Media.

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