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Chapter 1: What themes are explored in this episode?
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Welcome to the final Prop G episode of 2024. Jesus, can you believe that? 2025, really? In today's episode, we're taking a look back at some of our favorite conversations throughout the past year. We've been fortunate enough to have some of the world's leading experts on all sorts of interesting topics, including geopolitics, psychology, wellness, and tech. Let's bust right into it.
So, in a mediumente, basta rundo. First up, we have a clip from Admiral James Stavridis, a retired four-star U.S. Naval officer. I'm a big fan of the admirals. And 2024 certainly won't be the last time you'll hear from him on this show. Back in February, we discussed the state of global affairs and what we can do about the fragmentation of the U.S. Let's have a listen.
We need to do more to incentivize and celebrate the idea of service. And by the way, this is not confined to the armed forces. There are a lot of ways to serve this country, and we need high-quality people who are diplomats, CIA officers, Peace Corps volunteers, Teach for America, Volunteer for America, police, firefighters, EMT. There are a lot of ways to serve the country.
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Chapter 2: Who is Admiral James Stavridis and what are his insights?
I think we are underweight in incentivizing that with taxes, educational benefits. But above all, we are underweight these days in celebrating it in particularly the non-military. We do a reasonably good job these days with thank you for your service. We had to broaden that whole concept.
and create more of an idea of what it means to be a citizen and what are the positive incentives that can come out of this. Business can help at this.
Again, that was Admiral James Stavridis, a frequent guest on the pod and one of the leading experts in geopolitics. Next up, we have a clip from Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist, political strategist, philanthropist, and writer. We discuss a number of topics, including the state of politics and why the public is fundamentally unhappy.
Chapter 3: What does Bradley Tusk say about political dissatisfaction?
Look, I think that we may be entering a world of one term presidents, governors, mayors, because the public is fundamentally unhappy, right? So a few things. One is social media, I would argue, is basically the unhappiness machine. It does two things. It forces you to compare your life to someone's fictional life, so you feel inadequate immediately.
And then it shows you everything bad happening everywhere in the world all at once, compounded by the views of a million idiots. So you feel bad about your own life, you feel bad about yourself. Then the next step is existential risk. So when you and I were kids, there was one major existential risk, which was nuclear war. That risk still remains.
It's probably worse right now because the proliferation of nukes is getting there, and eventually Iran's going to have it, North Korea has it. But now you layer on top of that climate change, the risk of a real serious pandemic. I mean, COVID... had a major impact, but while it's highly transmissible, it wasn't that lethal.
But I am sure that a version of COVID that is much more lethal exists in a lab in China or the US or Russia or Israel or the UK or somewhere, or more likely all of them. And so the risk of any of those getting out. And then with AI, I'm a believer in AI, but none of it's too early for any of us to really know yet what it's going to be. So the amount of existential risk has increased significantly.
That was Bradley Tusk, a former deputy governor of Illinois and campaign manager for Michael Bloomberg, among many other things. Next up, we have a clip from our good friend Jonathan Haidt, colleague at NYU who has taken the world by storm this year with his book, The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
If you listen to this podcast, you know I'm an enormous fan of Professor Haidt's and his work surrounding the effects of social media on young people's mental health. Here's the clip.
The solutions that I propose are all things we can do together to liberate our kids from the social action problems. Very briefly, four steps, four norms. No smartphone before high school. Just give them a flip phone. The millennials were fine with flip phones. Two is no social media until 16. Social media is just not suitable for minors, frankly. It certainly isn't suitable in early puberty.
Let them get most of the way through puberty before you invite them to stick their head in a toilet bowl and flush every day forever and ever. Third norm is phone-free schools. The phone is the greatest distraction device ever invented. Kids text during class, they watch videos during class, they watch porn during class.
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Chapter 4: How does Jonathan Haidt suggest we address youth mental health?
It's completely insane that there are schools in this country, namely most of them, almost all of them, that allow kids to keep their phones in their pockets during the day and they just say, They take it out during class, but they do take it out during class. And the fourth norm is far more free play, independence, and responsibility in the real world.
This is the harder one because we have to overcome our own anxieties. But if we're going to take away the phones from, especially in middle school, if we're going to reduce their time on screens, We have to give them something to do. And the healthiest thing they can do is hang out, play with each other unsupervised. Let them learn how to work out conflicts and choose activities.
If we do those, I'm confident that we would see these lines, these incredibly surging lines of anxiety and depression. They just go up, up, up. They never go down since 2012. If we do these four things, I'm pretty confident we're going to see those lines come down. We're going to actually reverse the mental health epidemic.
That was total gangster Jonathan Haidt, a professor of ethical leadership and bestselling author. Moving along, we have a clip from another gangster, this one in geopolitics, one of our favorites, Fareed Zakaria. We discussed with Fareed his latest book, Age of Revolutions, Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, the Effects of the Industrial Revolution and Modern Geopolitics as a Whole.
The nature of the digital revolution, if we can just call it that for a moment, is that it has created a whole new economy and a whole new mental world for us. Marc Andreessen's famous blog post where he talks about software eating the world gets it exactly right. The world used to be run, it was a world of atoms.
And what happened is the digital revolution came and it created a world of bits and bytes that now control those atoms. So actually the internal combustion engine is kind of irrelevant now. What a car is becoming is software on wheels. And it's the software that controls that. And now what's going to happen is you're going to have AI that controls the software. And those things become paramount.
And the point I'm trying to make in the book is not so much about the economic effect. It's the sort of social and psychological consequences of these changes, which you know and care a lot about. It is mind-blowing in every way to think about that. You know, human beings have never had the power to multiply their minds the way that AI is going to be able to allow them to do.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the digital revolution according to Fareed Zakaria?
What does that do to our conceptions of who we are as human beings?
That was Fareed Zakaria, a close friend of the pod and host of CNN's flagship international affairs show, Fareed Zakaria GPS. Now let's listen to a clip of our episode with Matthew Hussey, a leading dating expert and author of the book Love Life, How to Raise Your Standards, Find Your Person, and Live Happily No Matter What.
For so many people, I would argue universally, whatever form it comes in, we are looking for love. We want that feeling of having a mate. We want that feeling of being attractive to the people we're trying to attract. We want to feel fulfilled in our love lives. So that desire to find that becomes so important.
in some cases, anxiously driven, especially when time is running out or it feels like time is running out. That's true on a very literal level for everyone who's looking for a family of their own biologically and for women more than men, although for men too, more than a lot of them realize.
That fear of time running out amplifies this feeling of, God, I have this really important position that I want to fill in my life. I'm trying to fill the position of my life partner.
And we get so obsessed with how important it is to fill that position that the moment we go on a date and we see even the faintest hope that this person could represent a candidate for that position, which by the way, Scott, normally is not based on any deeper character traits because how many of people's deeper character traits can we really ascertain on a one hour first date?
Next up, we have Jesse Itzler, a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author, and part owner of the Atlantic Hawks and ultra marathon runner. We had a great conversation about success, fitness, and maintaining balance.
I've been super lucky and probably way more lucky than good, but I put myself in situations where I can attract that luck. I used to come home, Scott, from like, you know, I'd walk into Marquee Jet and I'd be like, I got a sale last night. We had a bell. I would ring the bell. They'd be like, what do you need? You're at the bar. The same bar I was at. I'm like, yeah, but you left at 11 o'clock.
I stayed till 2. And I got the sale. Oh, you're so lucky the guy came. I'm not lucky. I put myself in that situation. You know, luck doesn't happen Sunday night watching the Kardashians on your couch. It happens when you put yourself in an environment where the universe can reward you for being there. And then you have to be good at what you do and take advantage of it.
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Chapter 6: What relationship advice does Matthew Hussey offer?
I mean, first of all, I don't believe leaders are born. I think that some people have an education when they're younger. They have a coach, they have a parent, they have a guardian, somebody in their life, a teacher who does something right. They model themselves after that person and they seem to learn it younger.
Or they have some trials and tribulations and they learn to overcome and rely on other people, whatever it is. But, you know, even some of the great leaders that we admire, if you look back, whether it's Steve Jobs or Mahatma Gandhi, like... you see that they were learning, and they didn't get it right a lot of the time, especially when they were younger. They learned those skills.
Young people, you know, for me, fundamentally, the single best thing a young person can do is really learn to be a friend.
That was Simon Sinek, author of the books Start With Why, The Infinite Game, and Find Your Why. Up next, our conversation with Andrew Huberman. Andrew is the host of the Huberman Lab podcast and a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University. He shared his insights on all things physiological health.
Optimization is, you know, something that we have to think about on a day-to-day basis. So it is true, I did rounds of sauna and cold this morning. You know, I did, I did. I got up really early. A friend came over, I haven't seen in a while, got up earlier than I would have liked and did sauna and cold. And I did train yesterday, but there are days, you know,
miss days, you know, and it happens and, you know, life. So I don't want to give the impression that, you know, my entire life is, is geared around protocols to the point where I don't do other things. I went out to dinner with friends last night. You know, I experienced stress in life. We could talk about that, uh, like anyone else.
So I would say this, um, figure out the minimum amount of alcohol that you're happy to drink it, that makes you feel like you're living life. So maybe that's a drink a night, maybe that's two a week, maybe that's stacking a few more toward the weekend, whatever's gonna work there.
And provided that your sleep is good, meaning, we know it's gonna disrupt your sleep architecture somewhat, but provided that you don't have excessive daytime sleepiness, Provided that you are not getting an increased frequency of colds and flus, you're accomplishing your work. I would say you're doing great, especially since you're visibly fit.
If you can do the three cardiovascular training sessions and the two orthostatic training sessions that I just described without dissolving into a pile of cells on the floor afterwards, even when you're doing a 80-95% of intensity or let's say 85% intensity of what you could do, you're doing great. You're doing great.
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Chapter 7: What lessons on success does Jesse Itzler share?
So there's a lot of certainly like psychology and economics and politics and policy, et cetera, and culture all at play here.
That was Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, author of the new book, What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures. Moving along, we have a clip from our interview with Rory Stewart, the former UK Secretary of State for International Development and co-host of The Rest is Politics.
Liberal democracies haven't been delivering well enough for people. I mean, for about 200 years from the early 1800s, it... we could tell a story where we convinced ourselves that democracies were naturally more prosperous, and as people became more prosperous, they became more democratic. And partly because of the rise of China, but partly because of the success of other authoritarian regimes.
we've broken the link in which democracies are not necessarily delivering for people and in certain years it feels as though non-democratic states are delivering quite effectively. So that's one problem.
I think the second, and that is a big problem because I think the reason why people buy into democracy is not only because they believe in human rights and liberal values, it's also because it was making them wealthier. I think the second threat is I'm afraid social media.
I think it's not a coincidence that the rise of social media from 2003-4 onwards and its explosion with the Arab Spring in 2010-2011 is part of the story of the rise of populism and the rise of authoritarianism because I think those are algorithms that drive people into polarized states and I think they are
have been extremely bad for the key bits of democratic discourse, in particular compromise, meeting in the middle, explaining, having a shared frame of reference.
That was Rory Stewart and his thoughts on modern democracy. And last but not least, let's have a listen to our episode with Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Angela shared the attributes of gritty people and tips for raising resilient children.
I think grit is forged in a crucible, half of which is... I mean, what is challenge? Challenge is being asked to do something you cannot yet do, right? You know, 2,000 meters instead of 800, like, whatever it is, right? I can't do it. The challenges exceed my resources or my abilities. So I think that is half of it.
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