The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:07:45 · David Brooks
[00:07:45] S3: Yeah. I I became a conservative in my twenties after being a police reporter in Chicago, and the two heroes for me were Edmund Burke, who was an Irish conservative statesman and philosopher, who believed that in epistemological modesty, the idea is the world is really complicated. And when we do change, we should do it constantly, but incrementally. And my other hero was Alexander Hamilton, who was a Puerto Rican hip hop artist from Upper Manhattan. Now... And so Alexander Hamilton believed that progressives believe in government to enhance equality, and libertarians believe in limited government to enhance freedom. Hamiltonianism believes in limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. And so those are the two north stars for me. And, of course, over the course of the Trump administration, I've come to believe that whatever conservatism is, it's not what Trump is producing. He's producing reactionary politics, something completely different. And so I went back to those books that I used to read from Edinburgh and people like Isaiah Berlin and a guy named Michael Oakeshott, and I loved them all over again. I think the essential conservative truths are still very profound, but they are nothing like what is called conservatism today. There is nothing like Fox News. And I go back to one moment in my formation where now in retrospect, it looks like there's a crucial fork in the road. I came out of the University of Chicago, and I read Burke and Adam Smith and these books. And I worked in National Review, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, The Weekly Standard, and we believed in promulgating conservative ideas. At the same time I graduated from Chicago, there were a couple people graduating from Dartmouth who had worked at the Dartmouth Review. And people may recognize Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D'Souza, they were in this group. And I've come to see they were not pro conservative. They were anti left. They were in elite institutions, but they hated the progressive lean of those institutions. And so they were sort of the rebel bad boys. The defining feature of the Dartmouth Review was in 1986, some progressive students on Dartmouth's campus erected a a shantytown to protest apartheid. And in the middle of the night, the editors of Dartmouth Review, about a dozen of them, descended on the shantytown and took sledgehammers to them.
00:10:02 · David Brooks, George Hahn
And it was attempt to dismantle the left, really. And to me, it was like gestapo tactics. I was shocked and appalled because apartheid really is worth protesting. But I've come to see that difference between being pro conservative, which I would say John McCain was, Mitt Romney was, George W Bush was, and anti left, which is what Laura Loomer is, which is what Pete Hegseth is, what is what Vivek Ramaswamy is. That to me is a crucial difference. [00:10:28] S1: Our allies have been watching all of this too. On Tuesday's special conversations episode, Fareed Zakaria told Scott how countries like Canada and India are rethinking their relationship with The US and why that won't change overnight.
00:10:45 · Fareed Zakaria
[00:10:45] S4: But it gets to a central question, which is, are other nations so burned by the two Trump elections? One could be a fluke, but two, makes them think, look. Do we need to buy insurance? Okay. You guys come in. Some some nice Democrat comes in. He starts saying all the right things just as Joe Biden did. But what happens if ten years from now or even just six years from now, we get another Trump like character. We get JD Vance. We get Don Jr. We need some protection. We need some insurance. And we are gonna... So I see this, for example, with Canada. Canada made a fundamental decision decades ago on Brian Mulroney and George Bush senior to bind The US and Canadian economies together, to almost create a North American economy. And the car industry, for example, is currently a North American car industry. The parts move 15 times across borders to to make the most efficient North American cars. The Canadians are thinking if if that dependence on America has proved to be a vulnerability because America will use it to squeeze us, to punish us, to bully us. We've got to get some leverage back. And so he's making Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, making deals with the European Union, with China, with India. Now I think he's gonna keep doing that even if even if a Democrat is elected in '28. India was going to wean itself off its dependence on Russian arms. But then watching what... The way that Trump behaved towards India, but also the ways... Behave towards Ukraine. I'm sure the Indians... I know the Indians are thinking, well, you know, we'll wean ourselves off the Russians a bit, but maybe slower than we plan to. And we'll diversify. We'll buy... The the big order they placed this year was actually for French fighter planes, not American. And there had been a hope that India would essentially trade its dependence. 80% of Indian weaponry comes from comes from Russia. We trade that for America. And there there were many people in India advocating that. But the Trump administration's attitude has completely changed the way India... Indians at the elite level look at look at America. In general, Indians are still wildly pro American, but at the elite level, it's changed. So this gets to the to the the the question you're asking. I think we have set in place motion, you know, kind of series of motions that people are going to buy insurance.
00:13:21 · Fareed Zakaria, George Hahn
So I think we can get a bunch of it back. I think we can stabilize the system again, but we can't go back to the way it was. Because once you sow that level of mistrust, that doubt, that sense that we need a bit of insurance, it's hard to see how you get... We did the impossible. You know, for fifty years, the second and third richest countries in the world, Germany and Japan, said, we don't need to have, you know, major defenses. You take care of us. We are basically subcontracting our national security policy to you, the number one country. The idea that the number two and number three economies in the world would subcontract their foreign policy to the number one country, again, historically never happened in the world. And it was it was American genius, and it has now been American stupidity and recklessness that has that has wrecked that system. Ad[00:14:18] S1: We'll be right back.
00:14:26 · Scott Galloway
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00:16:33 · Scott Galloway, George Hahn
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