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Episode 295. 295 is the country code belonging to San Marino. In 1995, People magazine's sexiest man alive was Brad Pitt and the dating site match. Com launch. True story. My favorite pickup line when I meet a guy I'm into, there's only going to be seven planets after I destroy Uranus. Oh, my God. Why does that make me so happy? I don't know. I don't know. Go, go, go. Welcome to the 295th episode of the Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Jared Cohen, the co-head of the Office of Applied Innovation and President of Global Affairs at Goldman Sachs. We discuss with Jared his latest book, Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House. We also hear his take on the broader macroeconomic environment. Okay, what's happening? Before we get going, just a quick favor, a favor. Our news Our newsletter, I'm so bad at asking for help, except when I need it, and then I'll ask for it over and over and over. Our newsletter, No Mercy, No Malice, has been nominated for a Webby Award in the business news and technology category for best email newsletter.

Follow the link in our show notes to vote, and we'll love you forever, and we'll surround you with white light. We spend a lot of time and energy. The newsletter, as much as I love the pod, the newsletter is my home base. It's the thing I work the hardest on, and it's, I don't know, the closest to my heart. If you would, please to the link and vote for us for Best Business News & Technology email newsletter. We want that web. Daddy needs affirmation from strangers. I'm addicted to alcohol, Sort of. Sort of. Am I addicted to alcohol? I'm not physically addicted. I think I'm psychologically addicted to alcohol. I am definitely a full-blown act to other people's affirmation. So please, just one more boost, Daddy. Anyways, lastly, we are about two weeks away from the launch. Got a lot of ass here. We're about two weeks away from the launch of my forthcoming book, The Algebra of Wealth. What a thrill. You're welcome. And we'd appreciate it if you pre-ordered the book. And if you like it, please write a review. If you hate it, please buy another one and send it to an enemy.

Also, if you post that you purchased it on our system or a receipt of it, I will donate $50 to Charity Water, which is bringing potable water to sub-Siren Africa. Wonderful charity. Anyways, thank you for that. Enough of that. All right, I'm just back from the Nile. Daddy hates culture, but it's something I felt like I needed to do. Take the kids to see pharos and nefertiti and see... We could all sit around and go, How did they build the pyramids 3,000 years ago? Something to do with ropes and leverage and polly and sandstone or whatever the hell it was. Anyways, awake, listening during the tour, and that was great. Then I went to Israel for a few days where I did a tour of Kibbutz Faraza, which was one of the 22 kibbutz that was attacked on October seventh. I'm trying to do more and say less, which isn't easy for me, which means I have a lot of doing to do. I talk a lot about Israel, and whenever I talk to someone and say, How can I help? They say, Come to Israel. And so anyways, I decided to do that. And that was very rewarding on different dimensions.

So a different type of trip, if you will. And also my other podcast, Coheas with Kairas Fisher, has been nominated for the best podcast in business. The voting link is also in the show notes. From Egypt to Israel to vote for fucking me. There you go. And lastly, what's going on? Disney continues to be in the news for its proxy fight with activist investor Nelson Pelt. Peltson is investment firm Trian Partners. I'm trying Tryon. Tryon. Tryon. Try this on. I'm trying it on. Tryon Partners have been asking for two board seats for months after a lengthy and expensive fight. Disney shareholders rejected Tryon's bid. Despite this proxy battle loss, Tryon Partners will still profit off of Disney, at least so far. The Wall Street Journal reported the firm has garnered 300 million in profit on its 16-month investment. They invested 800 million in 2022. So we predicted this, and this was an easy one, that he wouldn't get a board seat because I was an active... I'm literally the world's worst activist investor. When I moved to New York in 2000, I just totally changed my life. I quit tech, quit my job, sold my interest in profit, my brand strategy firm, got divorced.

I remember even said to my ex, an incredibly impressive person who I'm still friends with. Don't know why I felt the need to say that, you can have our friends. I just want out. I want to hit the restart button in my life. It wasn't I didn't like my life. I just wanted more, I guess. Moved to New York and decided to press the reset button. And I had gotten into a full scale proxy fight and a war with the board of the company I'd started Red Envelop. And it was covered in the press, not on the same scale as obviously Disney and Pelts, but it did get quite a bit of press as it was crazy, Scott Galloway versus Sequoia Capital. I think I own 10% of the firm. What happens is instead of one person, one vote, it's one share, one vote. I propose a new slate of directors. They propose their incumbent slate. We all call shareholders or basically have a public debate, run media, and then they vote at the annual shareholder meeting. Anyways, I think I owned my partner in about 10% of the company, and we ended up with 13% of the vote.

My proxy solicitor said that the 3%, in addition to us, was probably a mistake. I was being kicked out of the band that I had started. Basically, the whole world had told me I had no future in tech, and I'd wasted about a half a million bucks on the proxy side of my own money. It was a very strange time in my life. I was living at home with my mom who had been diagnosed with cancer the third and final time. I moved in with her at the Del Webb Active Living Community. My favorite part is when I moved in with her, we got a note from the HOA Association saying, It's come to our attention. You are cohabitating with a man under the age of 55, which is a direct violation of Del Webb rules and regs. They thought my mom was shacking up with a 34-year-old guy, and they weren't down with it. Of course, I walked down and said, No, this is the situation. They were obviously Very cooperative. But during the day, no joke, this isn't in the script, but I'm going to go here anyways because it's a chance to talk about me.

During the day, I was managing my mom's health care. My mom said to me, I said, This is it. She had decided to decline treatment. She was She was just exhausted. I said, Well, what do you want to do? She said, The only thing I want is I want to die at home. I said, I can do that. I have some resources, and I'm talented. We'll figure that out. That involved nurses and a decent amount of effort and some resources. But we were able to keep her at home. During the day, we would watch Jeopardy, and Everyone Loves Raymond, and Friends, and we'd go through old photos, and we'd listen to music that I'd like, and then she'd listen to music that she liked. It was just actually a really wonderful time for both of us. My mom raised me on her own. It was me and her against the world. I'm just so blessed. One of the things that economic security has provided me, obviously, I can do really fun things, but I appreciate or I think the thing that the biggest payoff of some economic security was I had the flexibility to take care of my mom.

That was something that was just really wonderful. Anyways, it was a very A strange time, though, in the sense that during the day, a bored young man who's angry, who just been kicked off at the board or the company started is a dangerous thing. And so I took a half a million dollars of my money and spent it on this proxy fight, which was unsuccessful. So during the day, I was managing my mom's health care, spending time with her. And she lived in Summerland, Nevada, which is a lovely place. I think it's a great place to retire. Anyways, during the day doing that. And then at night, I would go down to the strip and I would get shit-faced and party with strippers and other entrepreneurs, other guys. Then sometimes if it got really late and I was really fucked up, I'd get a hotel down on the strip and wake up, ridiculously fucking hangover, and then go to the Four Seasons, which has this great breakfast restaurant called The Veranda. I would eat a greasy breakfast and then head back and wash, rinse, repeat. I did this for about nine months. Death is a persnickety thing.

It was difficult to time it. You can't time death. It shows up when it wants to. It's like a celebrity. Anyway, so I would get calls from the nurses saying, This is it. I had some rules, and one of those rules was I would leave every Thursday night and go back to New York or to Miami to have some semblance of a life or try and focus on a little bit on work, no matter what. And that would be one piece of advice I'd have for people taking care of dying parents is you have to have, if you can have, some boundaries to have some semblance of your own life. I think my mom wanted that. And it came at a cost. It ended up, I was there Sunday night through Thursday night, and I came home one Sunday night, and she'd passed about an hour before, which was very disappointing for me, but it was the right thing to do. I didn't plan to talk about this, but now that we're on a roll, the other advice I would give to anybody who's taking care of a loved one who's in their final months or weeks or what have you is take care of the caregivers.

And that is my mom's sisters and her best friend, Carson, came in to help her because there were just certain things I couldn't do for my mom. And what I would do is try and make sure that they were somewhat happy. I even remember my aunt, Frances, taking her to go gamble one night because that's what she wanted and just making sure that they had some semblance of a, I don't know, a decent life while they were taking care of my mom. Go through old media. Also, I think it's okay to be very transparent with your parents. I used to sit and hold my mom's hand and just tell her how upset I I was that she was dying. And that sounds very morbid and very upsetting. I'm getting emotional just thinking about it. But I think it was really cathartic for her, for her to see very visibly how much I cared about her. Anyways, I wasn't planning to go here. Anyways, back to Iger and Disney. How did they know you were going to... Or how did they know? Or how did I know he wasn't getting a board seat? If it goes to a shareholder vote, that means the company is going to win.

The company has a proxy solicitor and has more insight into the shareholder base, and they wouldn't let it go to a shareholder vote unless they knew they were going to win. And once it was clear they weren't going to come to some settlement or accommodation, I knew that, okay, the pelt is fucked. What's going to happen from here, it's pretty straightforward. If the stock goes up, pelt will go away. If it goes down, he'll file another D and nominate directors, except this time, Bob will get on a plane, fly to Florida, kiss Nelson's ass, and try and negotiate for one or two seats. When I purchased 17% in the New York Times, I knew we had one when Janet Robinson, the CEO, showed up in our office and started negotiating. I said to my capital partner, We should for all four seats because they wouldn't be here unless they knew they were fucked because they've clearly called all their shareholders, and the shareholders have clearly said, We want this guy or these guys on the board. And my capital partner said, I said, Ask for four seats. He said, No, let's settle it two. And they said, We'll give you two.

And this is my favorite part, as long as Scott Galloway is not one of them. That was one of their big negotiating points. They didn't want me on the board. And my capital partner said, No, Scott has to be one of the board members. Anyways, that was a weird fucking time. And I went on the board in the New York Times, literally in 2008. Bad timing. Bad timing. By the way, keep in mind, a lot of your success and your failures are not your fault. I went on the board. We'd bought stock at, I think, share price of 16. And within seven months, the stock was at three. I was literally losing $15 million a trading day of other people's money. A little bit stressful. A little bit stressful. I'm watching my own networth decline 110 %, just as my oldest son had the poor judgment to come marching out of my girlfriend. A stressful time. Kind of a stressful time. I'm not going to lie. Anyways, that proxy fight is over, and I do believe Disney is a great buy right now, even after it's 20 % a cent. It's my stock pick of 2024.

Why? I think that effectively, Disney stock is going to go up because of Netflix. Now, why would I say that? Is Netflix a competitor? Yes. But for the first time in Netflix's history, for the last two years, they have not increased their content budget, and the market is consolidating, and Netflix Netflix. While cutting the budget on production, they have raised prices. Now, Netflix is the tail that wags the entire streaming markets dog, if you will. And Disney has carved out a very solid niche and brand positioning because of their unprecedented IP and library around family. So I think Disney will be a consolidator, not a consolidated E. And I believe Netflix has given cloud cover to Disney and Time Warner, specifically, HBO, to raise prices while leveling or even reducing their content spend, which all adds up to two things, Ka and Shin, meaning that for the first time, I believe Disney's streaming revenues will be profitable or that business unit will be profitable. They sit on top of this EBITDA Cash juggernaut called the Parks. The Parks are singular. Netflix, Google, Meta, they spend $10, $20, $50 billion. There's no way they could build anything rivaling these parks in less than $10, $20, $20 years.

So the motes around parks are enormous, and they do a great job. And if you don't take your kids to a Disney park by the time they're 10, child services is going to show up at your door. So you go and you want to know what monopoly power looks like? Go to a Disney hotel. It's literally the shittiest hotel with the shittiest food with some Disney music, and it's $1,100 a night. And then go to the seventh Ring of Hell called the Disney Park, where you wait for sometimes 2 hours to get on a goddamn ride. Do you realize the Avatar ride that they could hand out an iPad with the movie Avatar, and you would watch the whole movie before you got through the line? The line was over 3 hours long. Now, granted, I leaned into my privilege and got one of these tours, but it was borderline uncomfortable and embarrassing to walk by all these Americans, decent people, trying to show their kids a good time with their kids asleep on their shoulder. Jesus Christ, come to think of it, Bob. You want innovation? Figure out a way that people don't have to wait in line for two or three hours.

Anyway, these parks are singular. They do about $10 billion in EBITDA. That's their cash. So now it's all about the multiple expansion. And the multiple expansion will come from Disney plus Hulu showing that they can run a profitable business. And the stock is trading at a 10-year low or probably it's bumped up a little bit. But I just like this company. I've also taken a more defensive posture because I think the Magnificent Seven, my big stock pick for '24 was, or for '23 was meta. I think these companies just seem to me to be very fully valued. Anyways, sharing memories about my days as an activist investor. The other week, flex, I was an activist investor in, get this, sharper image, no joke. I don't know what I was thinking there. I did it at a company called United Retail. That was the first activist play I ever did. I invested what for me seemed like a lot of money, like six or $700,000, and the stock tripled in three months. Basically, my entire strategy was, let me build you a website because plus size clothing, which I love, based on the fact that America is getting fatter and fatter every year.

Although, hopefully with GLP-1 drugs, it'll get thinner and thinner. I thought this is a great business, but it needs the anonymity of online shopping. So I said, the management, I'll build your website. And then the stock tripled and I just sold and thought, wow, activist investing is a lot of fun. So then I went and bought 17, was it 17? Maybe 14% of Gateway Computer, WeekFlex, I know. And my strategy was nice brand, remember the Couspots? And they had the most shelf space of any PC manufacturer at Best Buy. I thought, this is a distribution play. Let's sell our shelf space and our brand. Got on the board, did this big presentation on the power of the distribution in Best Buy and the brand, and that they were fucked and they were subscaled and they needed to sell. And they said, they were listening, they were very polite. And they said, Scott, just FYI, we engaged Goldman Sachs two years ago to sell the company, and we haven't had any buyers. And it was an important lesson for me at a fairly young age. And that is whenever you go into a strange situation, have some humility, because what I have generally found is that they are not, or you are not as smart as you think, and they're not as dumb as you hoped.

I still make this mistake all the time. Something happens and I get all angry. In my podcast pivot, there was a sound error, like a hard cut, and I immediately sent an an angry flame via text to the team like, Does anyone actually listen to this shit? And it ends up that it was the wrong upload or it was only unique to one platform. But generally, when you find... You know how when you can't find something, you sometimes think, Oh, someone's stolen it, and it's never stolen. It at least with me, it's this that I have dementia, I can't fucking find anything. Anyways, recognize that whenever your worst instincts or your fast thinking, according to Kahneman, it would make you seize up and get angry. Just keep in mind, you're not as smart as you think, and they're not as dumb as you'd hoped. We'll be right back for our conversation with Jared Cohen. Support for Prop G comes from Mint Mobile. Imagine you see an ad for a new luxury sports car. It seems perfect. All the latest automotive technology, plus beautiful leather seats and a gorgeous, gleaming exterior in your favorite color. To top it all off, it's on sale for $2,000.

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Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Jared Cohen, the President of Global Affairs at Goldman Sachs, and author of Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House. Jared, where does this podcast find you?

I am in the Caribbean.

Hence the- Say more.

With my three daughters and my extended family. It's their spring break.

No, good for you. So let's best write into it. In your latest book, Life After Power, you examine the lives and Influence of Seven former Presidents, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Grever Cleveland, William Howard Tabb, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George W Bush. Tell us why you decided on these seven presidents.

I mean, look, The book tackles this elusive question that I think all of us get irritated, constantly grappling with or being asked about, which is, what are you going to do next? So that was a real life annoyance for me, but I have a real passion for presidential history. What I realized is my entire life I've been reading these biographies, and I close them when the presidency is done. I was just curious, is life after the most dramatic transition in the world interesting for any of them? As I canvassed through the 45 men who have been President 46 times, I found that it was mostly a tragic story or a pretty uneventful story, but there were really seven that stood out in the sense that each of them managed to find something more purposeful after they left the White House, and each of the seven did it in a very different way, revealing the fact that there's really no blueprint for how to do this. I think what was fascinating is you take these seemingly unrelatable figures, presidents of the United States who you'd think we have nothing in common with, and you take them out of the political stratosphere and bring them back down to Earth and return them to ordinary civilian life.

It turns out there's a lot of lessons to be derived for the rest of us.

Of the seven, who do you think will go down in history as having the biggest impact?

For For me, it's John Quincy Adams. Here's a man whose presidency was an intermission between two of the greatest acts in American history. The first was architected for him by his famous parents, John Navigal Adams. It was an act architected without a purpose other than making the man the President. He didn't have a cause of his own. He was, for lack of a better way of putting it, what we would see today as a hyper-ambitious kid that's trying to deliver for their parents. When his presidency becomes a political stillborn because of a corrupt bargain that he strikes with Henry Clay when the election gets thrown to the House of Representatives in 1824, he gets defeated for re-election in 1828, much like his father in 1800. He doesn't really know what to do with himself. The only thing he knows how to do is serve. He's already been a senator. He's already been a president. He's already been a very famous secretary of state. So he takes the one position that he hasn't had, which is he gets elected to the House of Representatives. As an ex-president, he goes on to serve nine terms in the House of Representatives, where in a much lower station, he finds a much higher calling, and he finds himself as becoming the leader of an abolitionist movement that, frankly, would not have been ready to mainstream for another decade.

He inadvertently mainstreamed it by stumbling into a cause that he believed in but didn't feel the country was ready for. It's ultimately the attempt of the slaveocracy in Congress to thwart the right to petition and to essentially silence him and cancel him in Congress that excites his energy. He's just so much smarter and so much more savvy than the other members in the House, and he just runs intellectual circles around them. It's amazing. Here's this man. He starts his career appointed for his first job in the George Washington Administration. And he dies in 1848 on the floor in the House, serving alongside a freshman congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. He's this living connection between two generations that barely coexisted.

As you study these presidents, what lessons do you take for your own career? What advice do you glean from this for someone trying to make their way, if you will?

Look, I think each of the presidents that I feature in the book has a different prescription. The book is organized with each of them representing a different model. The idea is that certain models speak to some of us more than others. To me, there's a couple of really powerful lessons. If you look at William Howard Taft, there's so many people, and many of us will encounter this in our lives, where an opportunity or a job or something we want to do passes us by because the timing isn't right or the circumstances aren't right. William Howard Taft never wanted to be President, but his wife, Theodore Roosevelt, and his three brothers desperately wanted him to be President. And so he deferred his own dream of serving on the Supreme Court to suit their wishes. And in his last decade of life, he ultimately ends up as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And so the powerful lesson of William Howard Taft is a dream deferred does not necessarily need to be a dream denied, and a dream deferred can still be a dream that's achieved. But for me, I think the one that impacted me directly the most was sitting down with George W Bush.

And listeners might be surprised that I include President Bush in this. But when I looked at the active living presidents, there was only one whose popularity had doubled since leaving office. And it was the man George W Bush, who'd done less to invest in his legacy and reputation than any of his active contemporaries. And what I really wanted to understand was what that was all about. And there's lots to untouch.

I thought you were going to say Carter W.'s brand has improved more.

So I say active living presidents because Carter, since he went into hospice a little over a year ago, his active post-presenting has done. But what's interesting is you're right to look at them side by side because both of them have experienced a renaissance in their popularity after both leaving office with historic unpopular. And Carter aggressively invested in his legacy, aggressively meddled. He was nuisance to both Democratic and Republican successors alike, whereas George W. Bush completely moved on, and both of them managed to achieve double-digit improvement in their post-presidential. Bush has actually done it faster than Carter did, and I include both of them, but very, very different paths. The thing that for me was very interesting about Bush is I spent about eight hours interviewing him on the record during COVID. It's the longest interview he's given about his post-presidential since leaving office. We discussed this issue of legacy, and he has a very quarrelsome view towards trying to actively influence your legacy. It's not that he doesn't think legacy matters, but he cannot, for the life of him, understand why somebody would sacrifice the present to invest in something that they're not going to be around to see.

And so he jokes with me, I read three books about George Washington last year. By the time they get around to the other George, I'm going to be long gone. And he just doesn't believe that legacy is something that you can shape for hundreds decades of years through the actions that you engage in immediately after leaving office.

How has the type of person who runs for President and the type of character it attracts, how has that changed in the last 50 years.

To me, what's interesting about the types of figures that emerge in leadership positions, and this is true for the President of the United States, but it's increasingly true for the leaders of revolutions and any leadership position in general, which is the If you look at the advent of social media, what is done is it's accelerated the pace of movement making, and I think it's actually slowed down leadership development. What that means is we used to see leaders emerge and refine their leadership skills long before they achieved any public celebrity. And now it's the reverse. We'll never see a young leader emerge again in any corner of the world without first meeting them as a flash in the pan social media celebrity. Just the sequence in terms of how our information environment operates won't allow for it.

What are those attributes? People who tend to be more terse, more inclined to dunk on other people, funny. If social media is the new electorate.

Look, it's a different... If you think about people like FDR and some of the great leaders in American history, it was a different type of charisma to stand in an auditorium with a microphone that barely worked and ignite a crowd. Enter the television, John F. Kennedy really appreciated and understood how to utilize the television. If you look today, it's all about creating these viral moments, creating these relatable moments on social media that translate to the masses. It's a very different skillset, and it's a skillset that, interestingly, if you look at the two presidential candidates for the 2024 election, it's ironic that you actually have one of them on the Republican side who actually, despite his age, has figured out how to exploit mass media to his advantage. But if you look at some of the candidates in the primaries, they've Some of them have seemed like they emerged out of nowhere. And one of the things that social media allows a new batch of leaders to do is to find their way onto the presidential stage without following the conventional path.

So I want to talk a little bit about you and your role at Goldman. You're the co-head of the Office of Applied Innovation and President of Global Affairs. I have literally no idea what that means. When they sit you down at the end of the year to discuss your bonus and your review, what does success look like in that role?

Sort of a two-part question. So the first part is what that is. Let me start with that. Look, you have two mega trends, the most significant technology invented since the Internet with generative AI and the most unstable geopolitics that we've seen since the end of the Cold War. These two separate trends, they're separately and together, turning every business in every sector and geography upside down as they try to reflexively navigate a changing geopolitical and technological moment. But then opportunistically, all that volatility in both contexts creates unique opportunities for a number of businesses. When I say businesses, I don't just mean multinational corporations. I also mean sovereigns and institutional investors to take advantage of some of these changes and seek out new opportunities. So that's my remit is to navigate those two worlds. In terms of how I'm evaluated, there's a two-step process with this. One is these are areas where Goldman Sachs is leaning in and making sure that our opinion is expressed about where all this technology is going and what's happening geo-politically. And part of the reason we do that is there's two ways that we go about pursuing business. One is there are certain mandates that we're pursuing, and they're the traditional type of business that you would expect us to go after.

But increasingly, what we're doing is we're recognizing that the entire world, ourselves included, we're all asking the same roughly 12 questions about what's happening technologically and geopolitically. They're the same questions that our clients are asking. We have expertise, and they have expertise. What we find is by tying all our expertise together and showing up to engage with our clients, the combination of those two allows us to generate mandates from scratch together that don't exist about how they can lean into the geopolitics and the technology to pursue new commercial opportunities. That's the essence of what I do.

If the head of private wealth comes to you or the head of alternative investments comes and says, What are the two or three geopolitical trends that we should be thinking about in terms of its impact on the markets? What are those two or three things?

To me, the number one issue that's impacting the markets right now is in the US-China context, but specifically about shifts in supply chains. I would say Taiwan and the South China Sea end up getting all the oxygen oxygen, I'm much more worried about some of the dynamics around supply chains because the US has called out four or five different supply chains as geopolitically important. Critical minerals in rare earths, pharmaceuticals, microelectronics, energetics, et cetera. None of those supply chains can be decoupled. Within each of those supply chains, we've not defined where the integrated economy stops and the decoupled economy starts. My concern is where all the volatility comes from is that the United States's geopolitical appetite to diversify those supply chains, gets out way out in front of the economic realities of what's possible. If you take critical minerals and minerals, just as an example, essential to the energy transition, essential to all technology, you find a new lithium mine or a new graphite mine or a new cobalt mine. That's just one piece of it. You still have to crush the minerals, you have to purify the metal, you have to chemically treat them, and then you have to refine and process them.

92% of that refinement and processing happens in China, and there's five refineries ex-China in the entire world. You cannot diversify that supply chain. The problem is if you get overly excited about one part of the supply chain being diversified, China has all the cards and all the economic leverage to retaliate. I worry about an escalation in supply chains where if China ends up on the ropes, they have any number of economic levers that they can pull, again, from critical minerals, legacy chips, pharmaceuticals. These are all supply chains that are impossible to decouple couple, completely, partially, or even substantially. And so that, to me, those supply chains are what have the ability to completely shake up the global economy. I think on Taiwan and the South China Sea, again, you get a lot of military speak in each of these contexts. I'm more worried about an accident and lack of diplomatic crisis management infrastructure to cool temperatures down. But it's the supply chain issue that is what impacts every type of business. And even if you're not impacted directly by exposure to Chinese supply chains, you're impacted indirectly, and every business is at risk of getting hit by the geopolitical equivalent of shrapnel.

If that's true, that everyone's at risk of shrapnel from this this new Cold War. My sense is the greatest tax cut in the history of the world would be a thaw in US-Cina relations. And it just seems like the incentives are just so strong. I mean, we don't get along with Russia. Okay, we got to find another place to buy gas, or Europe to find another place to buy gas. Maybe we don't get as much caviar good vodka, but I just don't see our economy taking a huge hit. If things continue to get worse with China, everything in the United States gets more expensive. So it seems like the incentives are just so strong to figure this out. What are your thoughts?

I think that's a correct observation, Scott, except that there's a significant paradigm shift that's happened. In the past, let's call it before COVID, you could count on both the US and China having their economic interests drive their geopolitical interests. As tough and tense as things could get geopolitically, at the end of the day, neither country would engage in substantial actions that risk one or both economies. That governed the geopolitical dynamic. Coming out of COVID, there was a real paradigm shift in the geopolitics where this geopolitical center of gravity moved from the Middle East to this escalating tension between Washington and Beijing. It turns out that the US and China, the two big winners of the chapter on hyper globalization, were both altogether unhappy with the outcome. The US found itself with an overdependency on China for supply chains. China wanted to revise the liberal international order, but at the end of the day, it stuck in a world where the dollar is for the foreseeable future of the global reserve currency. I actually don't think this is a Cold War. It has very few of the attributes of the Cold War in the sense that we've never been in a situation where the US's most formidable adversary is also its second or third largest trading partner.

It does not have the same ideological dimensions. We're not fighting military proxy wars with them all around the world, and the economies are so intertwined that we're not trying to destroy each other. Despite that, the paradigm shift has created this dynamic where the domestic circumstances on both sides are driving short and medium term geopolitical goals that are impacting the longer term economic outcome. So both countries are capable of doing things in service of these short term geopolitical goals that are incredibly hazardous to one or both of the economic circumstances. And again, it starts with the domestic side. So China's domestic economy is lagging. That's driving a growing geopolitical appetite to, let's call it, use the geo politics to wag the economic dog. In the US, being tough on China and protectionist on China is just about the only thing the two parties agree on. And as we get deeper into an election, both parties are going to try to out China each other. The Biden folks will be more focused on technology export controls. The Trump folks are more focused on trade and tariffs, but there's actually not a lot of daylight between the two sides on China.

My concern is in a tit for tat, the geopolitics just keep getting more and because we were used to both... Because as you mentioned, Scott, it's incredibly logical not to mutually self-immolate on the economic front, we assume it can't happen. But from what I'm seeing, all evidence suggests that in service, again, of these short, medium term geopolitical goals, both countries can end up doing something quite foolish on the economic front.

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One of the things that's interesting, if you look at... I expect US-China tensions to get worse for the balance of the decade, probably longer. The question is, under those circumstances, are there any winners? That's one question you're getting at. I write a lot about the rise of these geopolitical swing states. These are countries that are They're led by individuals that have a global agenda that's independent of Washington and Beijing, and they have certain economic leverage that allows them to lean into those positions. Maybe it's a differentiated part of the supply chain. Maybe they have a differentiated amount of capital that they can deploy at will. Maybe they're attracted for near-shoring, offshoring, and friend-shoring. Look, India is the ultimate geopolitical swing state here. If you look at how they've behaved vis-a-vis the United States, they have a huge amount of labor A huge amount of the pharmaceutical supply chain, tons of advantages economically. The US has telegraphed their long-term commitment to India as an alternative to China. If you look at what India has done, they've swung on an issue-by-issue basis. The US, when Russia invades Ukraine, wants to couch it as the great battle between democracy and autocracy.

Then India, the world's largest democracy, stays neutral because they're buying Russian crude for $12 a barrel and then reselling it to Europe. They've increased trade with Russia by more than 400%, and it's not changed the US posture towards them at all. India is a big beneficiary from sustained US-China tensions because they basically pick and choose which parts of the US-China position they want to align with and which parts they want to separate from. As it pertains to their regional disputes with China or their land disputes with China, they're all in with the US. As it pertains to the US's ambitions in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, it's more strategic ambiguity. As it pertains to the US's ambitions in Europe, they've basically stayed neutral and they've made themselves the big redistribution winner in the shifts in energy commodities. Another part of the world that I'm quite bullish on is actually the Gulf. It's interesting because if you look at the war between Israel and Hamas right now, it's the first geopolitical test for the region since Saudi ink, Qatar ink, and Abu Dhabi ink have been having an economic renaissance. To me, what it reveals is that the Middle East today is a tale of two countries, countries that are adjacent to Israel and countries that are besieged by Iran's proxies that don't have the luxury of extricating their economic futures from the geopolitical baggage of the past.

Countries, again, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and UAE, whose economic futures are completely untethered from what happens geopolitically. There's been no impact on them in terms of their touchpoints with the global business community. There's been no impact on them economically despite everything that's happening in the region. I think that in a lot of respects, I view what's happening today as Iran's penultimate temper tantrum. But the Middle East that is a bastion of geopolitical instability, that part of the Middle East is actually getting much smaller. The more stable, economically viable part of the Middle East is made up of these three geopolitical swing states that are increasingly asserting leverage in every corner of the world, from Asia to Latin America and Africa. They're increasingly connected with the global business community. I'm quite bullish long term on what I call the inks of, again, Saudi and Qatar ink and Abu Dhabi ink. Japan is another country that I think is benefiting tremendously from what's happening, as is Australia. These are two countries that are getting the attention that they've always wanted from the US as the US has finally made that pivot towards Asia. And look, they have the geographic proximity to China that makes them an attractive destination.

It's just around the Gulf. First of all, I thought you were going to say Mexico. I was on the board of Urban Outfitters, especially retailer, and we woke up one day and realized a disproportionate uncomfortable amount of our tops were being produced in a small region in China. The supply chain had been so optimized for a efficiency, that there was no slack in it. So I think the majority of boardrooms are thinking about supply chain heterogeneity, right? And Mexico, it strikes me, this is just... Mexico is just a lot of their success is not going to be their fault, that they're going to be a big recipient of of additional trade.

Would you agree with that? Yeah. So there's two other countries that I would add that I'm quite bullish on. One is Mexico, the other is Vietnam, although I think Vietnam will have a ceiling. Vietnam surpassed the UK as America's seventh largest trading partner about a year ago. That's crazy.

We do more trade with Vietnam than the UK?

Yeah. I love that stuff. But that's not something that happened overnight. That's been a decade plus investment on the part of Vietnam to make themselves attractive for nearshoring and friend-shoring. In the case of Mexico, I could not agree with you more. In general, Latin America should be a huge beneficiary of the shifts in these supply chains. The problem is most of the governments keep flipping right or keep flipping left on different cycles. You see this in Brazil, you see this in Colombia, you see this in Chile, you see it in Peru. So that's part of the challenges with South America. The advantage of Mexico, what's actually interesting is every time there's been an election and the parties have changed over, people have predicted some catastrophe that hasn't happened. I remember when Penya Nieto came to power, everyone said, Oh, the PRI being back in power, this is going to be a disaster because of the relationship with the Sinaloa cartels and so forth. And you know what? Things didn't end up changing that dramatically. And at the end of the day, the size of the Mexican economy, its proximity to the US, the need to do something around the border, and the fact that there's already so much activity between the two countries.

It's so the obvious place to move certain elements of the manufacturing sector. I think it's much more viable than South America. I think it just doesn't have the same political unpredictable ability that you see south of Mexico.

I'll put forward a thesis, and it's based on anecdotal observations. Just because it's anecdotal, It's total. It doesn't mean it's not true. But I went to Micaunos this last summer and went to all these clubs. People get tables, and the tables are extraordinary. It's the lifestyle of the rich and famous, right? I thought, This is the best thing that could happen to us. What do I mean by that? I noticed that almost every table since the last time I was there three or four years ago was inhabited by kids, young adults from the Gulf. I thought, They're turning West. They're turning to capitalism. Distinctive how bad his brand is, MBS is actually a reformer. I thought, I'd be shocked if the kingdom doesn't normalize relations with Israel and they're choosing capitalism over Islamism or fundamentalism or terror, whatever word you to put on it. I thought, money wins and money is winning here, and this is going to play out really well for the West. Your thoughts?

Yes, I agree with that. Look, it's always been the case that the elites in these countries have mixed with the elites in the various party islands in south of France and so forth. That part's not new. But what's new, since you mentioned Saudi Arabia, MBS did something quite interesting, which is for decades, everyone always said, reforms have to happen really slowly. The religious will never allow it. Half the country will never tolerate. And he basically called that bluff. And people can say- He's going fast, no?

Aren't they liberalizing faster than anyone else?

And there's two reasons why they're doing it. And I think, to me, Saudi Arabia, I've been traveling there for 20 plus years. The pace of the change, it'll be three months since I go between two trips. You see the change even in those three months. What you see with Saudi Arabia, what makes them distinct from Qatar and UAE, the two other inks, is they actually have a sizable population. Between 39 and 40 million people in Saudi Arabia, it's a very young population. The risk that they have is if they can't build a meaningful private sector that creates a destination for that population's future, they're going to experience a brain drain. There's two parts of this. There's building the infrastructure and the ecosystem of a modern private sector so that the talent germinates and stays in country. But then, two, there's the social reforms that are necessary to also keep that population there. One, the place needs to be the type of society they want to live in. Two, there needs to be opportunities there. So the social reforms and the investment in the private sector go hand in hand. The issue is, historically Saudi Arabia, it's been more a merchant economy.

It hasn't been a place of entrepreneurship and thought leadership, and they're trying to change that very quickly. But until it's going to take some time to do, and in the meantime, what you're seeing is the state apparatus is actually stepping in and subsidizing a lot of that. In a lot of respects, they're trying to position themselves as a country that thinks like an entrepreneur, which is You don't have a lot of countries taking major sovereign risk. If you look at the infrastructure projects that Saudi Arabia is building, a lot of these are pretty risky. They're capital-intensive. They may or may not succeed. A lot of what they're doing is they recognize that that's what they need to do in order to get ahead. If you look at UAE and you look at Qatar, they have a different thesis. Qatar is a country of 350,000 people. People think that they built all that infrastructure for the World Cup. It's like, no, they wanted the World Cup because it gave them an excuse to build all that infrastructure. Because if you're a country of 350,000 people, you can't modernize unless you can get businesses to move there and you can get people to move there.

In order to do that, you need the infrastructure of a modern country. Now what they're working on is their post-World Cup thesis about why businesses should move to Doha. It has to be a thesis that looks different than the one that the UAE has, because the UAE has a significant first-mover advantage. They're the regional headquarters for every major business. They've set up the regulatory infrastructure. They have a first mover advantage on AI, and a lot of what they're focused on is leading into that first mover advantage to achieve greater geopolitical mobility as well as not lag on sustaining that first mover advantage. And so gone are the days where we think about the Gulf at large. What's interesting is you're seeing countries that used to be thought of in a regional context, deregionalizing. And then you're seeing countries that used to be thought of individually regionalizing. So the US now talks not about made in America, but made in the Americas, to your point about Mexico.

You served, was it on the board of the National counterterrorism Center? Is that correct? Yes. Is it specific countries, specific groups, domestic terrorists? Where do you see if our security apparatus reaches out and says, What are the threats we should be focused on? What do you tell them?

To me, rather than regurgit... Look, there's all the obvious threats, right? But let me answer your question with where I think that there's a less obvious threat that's really germinating, which is if you look at the Middle East, we knew who the spoilers were before October seventh, and we knew who the spoilers were after October seventh. They're the same set of characters. But there's a headwind or a more abstract spoiler that I think is not getting enough attention that ties directly into your question, which is the social mediafication of this war in the Middle East right now means that you have more hours of footage uploaded to various social media platforms than you probably have minutes or even seconds of the entire war. All of that content is being algorithmically targeted. It's being taken out of context. It's being distorted, manipulated, and amended and augmented with additional disinformation. It's being targeted to a group of young people that has no geographic proximity necessarily to the war. You combine that with a backlog of migration from COVID that picked up into Europe after COVID, with the fact that you've had four coups in West Africa in the last year and a half, which has pushed more migration from the Western Sahel into the Maghreb into Europe, and then an additional wave of migrants that are coming out of this current war in the Middle East.

I would remind anybody that was listening that the 9/11 hijackers were radicalized by watching far less content that had algorithmic dimension of what was happening in Bosnia in the '90s. You look at this reservoir of content that's coming out of the Middle East right now, plus all of these migration movements. I think you have a really dangerous new wave of homegrown extremism and spread of extremism that is being particularly concentrated in Europe. But if you look at what's happening on campuses in the US, this is just, to me, a very bad recipe. Then one other piece that I'll say about this, Scott, is to me, October seventh, that was the surprise that should not have been a surprise. We spent 20 years obsessively fighting a war on terror in every corner of the globe. Then COVID happened. We went inside, we reemerged, decided that the new threat was from China, and we acted like the terrorists just retired and gave up. That's not how it works. I wasn't surprised that a major terrorist attack happened. I wouldn't have been able to predict that it would happen in the way that it did, where it did on October seventh.

But we shouldn't be surprised that terrorism is very much alive well.

So it's the obvious questions that are the most difficult. I would imagine you get asked on a frequent basis to handicap the race for the White House. As we stand here today, how would you outline it?

Look, I'm not a polster, but just my impulse tells me it's a coin toss, right? And to me, the real question is, what are the inflection points or what are the variables that I'm looking at that I think could impact the outcome? And here I'll wear my historian hat which I think is much better than my not even amateur polster hat. My historian hat tells me that third parties matter because they take away votes from somebody. I think that RFK Jr. Probably takes away from Trump. I think all the other third party candidates would likely take away from Biden. The question is, will that happen in the five or six states that matter and in the districts that matter? That's one variable I'm looking at. The other is the war in the Middle East, I do think, again, has an impact on voter turnout in Michigan in particular, but not just Michigan. Third, I think that there's the inflation numbers, which are useful for economists and WONX, and then there's the psychological inflation, which is how do people feel about the price of food and gas? The price has spiked so fast that even though they've come down, do they come down to a level that still feels higher than what people's recency bias causes them to remember a couple of weeks before the election?

So psychological inflation, very hard to measure, and you certainly can't quantitatively measure it. So I'm worried about that. I do think this issue at the Southern border is going to be a major, major issue that impacts voter turnout in November. And then, of course, all the indictments. The only historic precedent we have for this is Eugene Debs in 1920 running from his prison cell as a socialist and getting a million votes. All we can really derive from that is that it's a reminder that if you're an indicted and incarcerated presidential there's nothing that prevents you from running for office. I find it confusing that it just means that you're disenfranchised if you're convicted. You can, in theory, have a situation where somebody ends up as President of the United States while a convicted felon and wouldn't be able to cast a vote in their own election. I think the indictments, though, we've never had indictments. We never had a major presidential candidate indicted, so we don't know what impact that will have. I have no history that I can draw on for it. It's anybody's guess. Then I would say the only other thing that would factor in is age.

These are two very old candidates. A lot is made of Biden's age, but Trump is pretty old as well. If either one of them has a very senior moment on the debate stage, in this era, when it's already such a meme, those senior moments can have quite a significant impact. And so ultimately, again, I don't think there's really any undecided votes in this election. I think everybody knows where they're leaning, and it's a question of who turns up and who doesn't turn up.

Jared Cohen is Goldman Sachs co-head of the Office of Applied Innovation and President of Global Affairs. Jared is also the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including his latest, Life After Power, Our Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House, and the forthcoming Children's Book, Speaking of America: United States presents, and the Words that changed history. He joins us from the Caribbean. Jared, we really appreciate your time.

Thank you, Scott.

Attraper of happiness, a word on parenting. And it's no advice or it's not advice. It's not advice on parenting. It's advice to forgive yourself. I think I've read and seen most TikToks on parenting, and the only thing I figured out is no one has any fucking idea. And my initial thinking with one of my kids who's been especially difficult recently, where I've been especially bad at parenting, is that I have all these empty... I'm going to take your phone away. Or if you don't brush your teeth in the next five minutes, you're going to bed 15 minutes earlier. And he's pretty quickly figured out that I'm full of it, and these threats are empty. And I'm trying to just be more like talk to them and say, All right, up to you. I love what Michelle Obama said. She said, Okay, and I've been saying this to my kids. I'm like, You're practicing to be the person you're going to be, right? If your room is a mess and you're not listening and you're disagreeable, you're going to be that person the rest of your life. Is that who you want to be? Is that how you're going to find friends and meet girls and get a job by just being disagreeable and difficult all the time?

Start practicing the person you want to be and also trying to position stuff and gamify things. I'm trying different things because they always say parenting is the hardest job. I'm not sure that's true. I bet there are jobs that are harder. I'm not sure I've ever had a job where I have more self-doubt. I'm constantly me thinking at the end of the day, okay, you'd like to think. It's like being a manager. I always thought, I'm smart and I'm a good person or a relatively good person, which immediately makes me a good manager. No, it doesn't. Management is its own thing. And thinking that you're smart and a good person leads to good management. It's just not true at all. Being smart and a good person doesn't make you a good quarterback or a good violinist. These things are hard, and sometimes you need outside help, and you need to seek guidance from other people. And I'm at that point because I recognize this by my good intentions, despite how much I love them, sometimes you need to turn to outside sources of information or help just to figure out, Okay, what are we going through?

What is this child experiencing and how can I be productive? I struggle with anger. A lot of times when I get angry, I think it's more about me. I get upset that the relationship is not my vision of the father-son relationship. I think I probably, I don't know, mistakenly thought that they would be, at this point, we'd all be really good friends, and they'd really admire me, and that hasn't happened. I do, and I've said this before, I got to realize that I'm not their buddy, I'm their dad. But this is all a long-winded way of saying, Don't be afraid to reach out to other parents or other sources of information to figure out or get feedback. And what I found is, yeah, you got some good ideas, but for the most part, what you find out is that everyone is struggling with this shit. And you show up, you spend time, you do your best, but also forgive yourself. And my best friend, Adam Markman, said something that's always stuck with me. He has three kids, two boys that are both older and both doing well. But both of them went through everything at some point.

He said, The only thing that worked was a base of love, but more than anything, the only thing that worked was time. Anyways, parenting, forgive yourself. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our Associate Producer, and Drew Burrows is our Technical Director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Han, and on Monday with our weekly markets show. Support for this episode of Prop G comes from Listening. Listening makes it easy to convert written text to engaging audio that you can listen to anywhere. With listening, you can work out while absorbing an academic paper or make your family dinner as you take in a newsletter or PDF. The app uses ultra realistic AI voices that manage to express emotion and correctly pronounce complicated technical terms, all while sounding like actual human beings, not robots. The listening app might just transform how you consume reading material, and now you can give it a shot for yourself risk-free. Normally, you'd get a two-week free trial, but listeners of PropG get a whole month free.

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