The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Ukraine and America’s Credibility Crisis — with Anne Applebaum
04 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Episode 375. 375 is the country code for Belarus. In 1975, Jaws premiered. I like to watch Jaws backwards as it becomes a heartwarming story of a shark that helps disabled people put their lives back together. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 375th episode of the Prop G Pod. So I'm very self-conscious about my dirty jokes now.
We had a guest who is a wonderful guest, a very high profile guest who does really well on the podcast, basically say he can't come on again because he was so like rattled, offended. I don't know what the word was. He didn't speak to me, spoke to the team about some of my
profanity at the beginning of the episode which is fair because it doesn't matter whether he's right or wrong but he doesn't need to be on a program where he feels like he's being strafed by a certain i don't know approach that he's not up for so i totally respect that and it got me thinking about profanity and vulgarity and the role it plays in our programming and i've been
What have I been doing? I've been mostly recovering, recovering? Dealing with the critique of my book, No Tom, Being a Man, available on Amazon. So came out at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. I've never gone above number five, which is mostly a fact.
Mostly a function of the fact that, one, the conversation is getting a lot of attention right now around the role of men, you know, the masculinity crisis, et cetera. And also, I have been just a total media whore. I've been going on TV and different podcasts for the better part of 10 years. You know, I'm generally a likable guy. I try to help other people out.
So when I had this book come out and people heard about it, everybody invited me on everywhere. And my publicists are not worried about me, or the publicists for the book are not worried about me being overexposed. And I've actually canceled a bunch of stuff this week because I feel like it's enough Scott already.
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Chapter 2: What is the current state of the Ukraine peace talks?
I don't know how I got here. I don't know how I got here. Anyways, what's going on in today's episode, you might be asking? Well, I'll tell you. In today's episode, we speak with Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and staff writer at The Atlantic. I love Ann Applebaum.
And I not only love how incredibly smart and measured and thoughtful she is, Jesus Christ, make her secretary of fucking state. Anyway, one of the things I love about social media is it brings attention to people who are just so outstanding that their content resonates for the moment. And this is how I found Ann Applebaum. I think this is going to be her second or third time on the show.
Anyways, I'm just an enormous fan of Anne's. So with that, here's our conversation with Anne Applebaum. Anne, you are one of our favorite guests. I think this might be the third time. Where does this podcast find you?
I'm in the offices of the Atlantic Monthly magazine in Washington, D.C., which is a rare occasion, actually.
The Atlantic Monthly in Washington, D.C. Wow. All right, let's bust right into it. We're recording this in the middle of what the New York Times called a week of hasty diplomacy around the war in Ukraine. Leaked peace plans, private negotiations, and a swirl of business dealings. Putin is set to meet with U.S. Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
And as we speak, no peace agreement has been accepted or signed. And give us the current state of play. What's actually happening on the ground and in these negotiations?
So the negotiations are a somewhat strange product of a series of conversations that Steve Witkoff and maybe others have been having with a guy called Kirill Dmitriev, who's the head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund over the last several weeks and months, actually. And remembering that neither Steve Witkoff nor Kirill Dmitriev has as their main goal
the conclusion of the war and the preservation of the sovereignty of Ukraine and the defense of Europe and a secure future for Europe and for Ukraine, they seem to have as their main goal the creation of a possible new set of American and Russian business deals.
And we know this both because of reporting, really quite amazing reporting in The Wall Street Journal, as well as a few months ago in The Financial Times. We know this because the original version of a peace deal that they presented had a whole long list of
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Chapter 3: How is American business influencing diplomacy with Russia?
One of them is this one that doesn't get attention I just mentioned, which is it's not just that the Trump administration is making money for itself or it's, you know, Trump companies are benefiting from deals with the Saudis or investments in Vietnam. It's also that this administration is... either refusing to enforce laws made in the past or is actively preventing new laws from being made.
So laws designed to prevent the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, for example, or laws designed to regulate the cryptocurrency industry so that ordinary people wouldn't be ripped off. You know, all kinds of regulation that's designed mostly designed to benefit ordinary Americans and make sure that our system isn't corrupt and that people aren't ripped off by U.S.
or foreign companies, a lot of that is just being taken away. You know, they're just not enforcing it. They don't care anymore. And of course, the bad actors know that. And so when they see the legal system being taken apart and they know it's a free-for-all, they can just remove money from people's cryptocurrency wallets, which happens more often than you think.
You know, or, you know, or they can violate the law or they can, you know, they can do as they please because they know that nobody's watching them. And I think that's and that doesn't get a lot of attention because it's not, you know, it's not very exciting news to say that the Trump administration has decided it won't enforce X or Y law. But that's going to create the long term problems.
You know, if we create this atmosphere of lawlessness where, you know, you can buy a pardon from the president if you've broken the law. You can assume that nobody will enforce regulation if you decide to break it. You can rip people off and you won't pay any price. You can do all these things with impunity. I mean, that begins to create a kind of business culture
that is ultimately bad for everyone. I mean, I guess, you know, bad guys will benefit from it, but if you've ever lived or worked in a really corrupt country, and I have, you know, I spent a lot of time in Russia in the 1990s. I spent a lot of time in Ukraine, actually, in the era before it began to reform itself.
And, you know, I remember that it's even for, I mean, maybe particularly for ordinary people, You know, daily life is different in a really, really corrupt country. You know, you don't make business investments in a normal way. You can't make judgments about how to work or where to work unless you know, you know, who's really in charge or who's the person behind each one of these companies.
It distorts ordinary life and ordinary decision-making. You know, in Russia, universities became very corrupt. The state services became very corrupt. I mean, if you wanted a driver's license or any kind of license, you could pay for it. And people knew that. And then that has a corresponding effect on safety and so on. So you can get into this very ugly downward drift if you don't stop it soon.
And as I said, I mean, the main problem in the United States is just the lack of awareness. I mean, We're so used to our system running on autopilot, you know, assuming that people more or less, most people obey the law and more or less, you know, things work. And once that once the kind of critical mass is reached and that's no longer true, then it's going to be very hard to fix.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of U.S.-Russia negotiations for Ukraine?
You know, it's almost as if in the past, a lot of stuff went kind of through NATO, like through America, right? You know, there was a Polish-America-German link, and now everybody's looking around and saying, wait, you know, is going through America or through NATO, is that safe?
You know, we need to have much stronger country-to-country links that don't depend on, you know, some assumption of permanent American presence in Europe. So, yeah, I think Poland is also a country that is doing well economically. And it looked at over the span of 30 years, has been doing well the whole time. I mean, it's caught up to Western Europe. It's still not as rich as Germany.
But if I recall this, you'd have to... I'd have to check. I think it's richer than Greece per capita, and I think it's richer than Portugal per capita. And so if you're looking at Western European countries, so it's caught up to Western Europe faster than it has ever before at any time in history and continues to develop and grow in a way that…
You would not have guessed or imagined a couple of decades ago. So, yeah, I think Poland up, Germany changing. I mean, the UK is the country that worries me the most just because I think the damage done by Brexit is still working its way through the system. Doesn't mean there aren't brilliant people there and great companies and all that.
But it lost so many markets and so many opportunities through that one stupid decision that I worry it's falling further behind. And I don't want that because I lived in London for a long time. I'm a fan of British culture and many other things. But that's what, anyway, it's interesting.
There's often a lot of, in the UK now, there's almost a kind of, they keep writing articles in the British press about how great Poland is and what if Poland catches up to Britain. I mean, it's almost there's a kind of cultural snobbery there. Like, it can't possibly be the case that Poles are as rich as we are.
But there is something happening whereby they are, they're coming, certainly they're a lot closer in terms of of GDP per capita anyway than they were ever before.
Do you have a sense for, having spent time in Russia and I imagine still having contacts there, how do Russians feel about the state of the war and the relationship with the U.S. and China? What's the vibe, again, I hate to use that word, in Russia right now with respect to the war?
It's really hard to say. So first of all, I had a lot of Russian friends at one point, and they are all gone. They have all left Russia. They're elsewhere in Europe. Some are in the U.S. And so I don't have friends inside Russia anymore, at least none that I would be able to talk to. It's also...
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Chapter 5: How is corruption reshaping American foreign policy?
It's not something that you can measure. And there isn't also a kind of public sphere in which these things are discussed. It's not like there's a place where people talk about the war and debate whether it's good or bad in any real way. So what are people's opinions? It almost doesn't matter because they won't tell you what their opinions are because they keep them to themselves.
I mean, I do have... There's a part of the Russian opposition that measures kind of sentiment on the Internet. They use those kinds of metrics. And they say that exhaustion with the war and disappointment with the war are pretty widespread. And another metric you could look at is the number of...
Russian elite, people in the Russian elite who have fallen out of windows or have succumbed to mysterious accidents in the last couple of years. And almost all of those are probably people who in some way were seen as insufficiently enthusiastic about the war or about Putin. So it's pretty clear there's, you know, if Putin were to say tomorrow,
the war is over and now we can move on, I think people would be happy. They would probably be very happy to end this terrible number of deaths. I mean, imagine the United States. Imagine 20,000 people a month dying or being mortally injured and how that would affect us and how we would be— We wouldn't do it.
I mean, isn't that— Unthinkable. Isn't that, quite frankly, Russia's core confidence is willing to endure more suffering, far more than Europe or the U.S.? There's no way we would do this. No way we would let a million Americans be injured or killed. We would have found a reason to, you know, get a helicopter on the embassy and get the hell out. you know, a year and a half ago.
And I think we consistently underestimate the Russians' willingness to subject their citizenry to pain.
Yeah, I think we do. I don't think the Ukrainians underestimate them. I mean, my last month, a lot of recent conversations I've had in Ukraine have been with people who say, right, we get it. The Russians don't care how many people we kill. I mean, we're going to go on killing them because... That's how we keep our country sovereign.
But they shifted strategy some months ago and they began really focusing on hitting Russian oil export and oil refining facilities. And they do that because they say, OK, they don't care about people, but they care about money and they care about wealth. And so we're going to try to hit them in the places where they're making the most money.
And actually, just in the last couple days, they've started hitting tankers. So far, it's empty tankers, just in case you're worried about oil spills. They hit a couple of tankers that were going into a poor oil tankers. I think they were under a Gambian flag, but we all understand that this is called the Shadow Fleet. We understand that they're Russian or they're going to be carrying Russian oil.
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