IAN BREMMER: I think that winners and losers will be different. The regulatory environment and rollback, I mean oil and gas companies are going to do better in this environment. Crypto is going to do a lot better.

Vaping is going to do really well. Finance is going to do really well. Online betting is going to do really well. Big tech is interesting to watch, but I would be surprised if in two years’ time, Bob, you and I come back and think that the most meaningful thing that has come out of the new Trump administration for the business community are tariffs. I’d be surprised if that’s what we’re talking about in two years.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Ian Bremmer, founder and president of the global political risk firm, The Eurasia Group. Ian is also an author, the founder of GZERO Media, and the host of the TV show GZERO World on PBS. Since the U.S. presidential election, there’s been a lot of noise about what Trump’s second term means for business and how business leaders should prepare their organizations and teams in anticipation. I wanted to talk to Ian to cut through that noise and understand what leaders should really be paying attention to, particularly in light of Trump’s cabinet nominations and tariff threats. Ian doesn’t hold back — offering a no BS perspective on the global response to the election, U.S. trade impacts, the health of capitalism today, and more. Even if you don’t agree with Ian’s personal political leanings, what he’s hearing and sensing from key insiders in Congress and boardrooms globally provides important insights. So let’s dive in. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Ian Bremmer, founder and president of Eurasia Group, host of GZERO World on PBS. Ian, thanks for joining us.

BREMMER: Bob. Good to see you, man.

What is — and isn’t — concerning to business leaders right now

SAFIAN: Yeah, you’ve been a go-to resource for me for years as I try to understand the shifting dynamics in geopolitics and business and culture for the business leaders who are the primary audience of this podcast.

The last few years have been particularly chaotic, requiring constant agility. It’s one of the reasons this show is called Rapid Response. With the election of Donald Trump, we’re facing a new swirl of uncertainty. And so I wanted to ask you, what questions are you hearing that CEOs and business leaders are asking themselves right now and maybe what questions should they be asking?

BREMMER: Yeah. They’re asking mostly about tariffs, they’re asking mostly about immigrants and what that policy will look like because they both have a direct impact on inflation in the United States and the economy more broadly. They’re asking about U.S.-China relations, impact on globalization, and they’re asking a lot about personnel, because of course, there are a lot of sectors that feel like they’re going to do well under Trump.

Trump is very transactional. If you pay him, he usually gives you something directly back, right? So what does that mean? They want to know about what Elon means in the administration. What they’re not asking about is the rule of law in the United States. What they’re not asking about is whether or not a U.S.-led global order is over and what that means and how other countries are going to respond to it. I mean, whether or not the transatlantic alliance will still be a thing at the end of this administration, and how. They’re also not asking, frankly, Bob, they’re not asking how much responsibility they have for why we’re in the situation we’re in right now.

And I’d like to see more of that because, of course, Trump is not the cause of these problems. He’s a symptom of a system that has become kleptocratic and captured by special interests for decades now. And so the fact that all of the CEOs are all trying to figure out, okay, how do we best navigate this for ourselves, and we’re probably going to make an awful lot of money is kind of part of the problem, right? And I got a lot of examples of that, but no one’s asking about that.

What does the United States stand for today?

SAFIAN: You’ve called it a G-zero world for some time now, which is a world where global leadership is kind of breaking down, and there’s no clear center of gravity. And for a while, I thought, or maybe hoped, that business might provide a counterweight a little bit and fill that void. And what I’m hearing from you is like that responsibility doesn’t seem to be weighing, or it doesn’t seem to be driving a lot of the CEOs, at least that you’re hearing from, that it’s much smaller or more parochial priorities.

BREMMER: So, look, I think a lot of people were disappointed that so many Republicans folded after January 6th with Trump. I think a lot of people looking around the world are watching how all of these leaders who privately say that they think Trump is a disaster are all saying, “oh, you’re wonderful, and we’re so happy you won, and congratulations, and we’re going to work with you.”

This happens in the CEO community too. And not just with Jeff Bezos, who, I mean, he’s not going to struggle financially. I mean, if Trump goes after him, I mean, he might not make it, right? And I’m being sarcastic, yes, but when I look at the CEOs that after January 6, so many of these corporations and financial institutions, they said we’re just not going to give money.

If you were a Republican that said that you weren’t prepared to certify the election outcomes, we’re just not going to give you any more money. The PACs are just, that’s it. That’s it. And maybe this is only something small that we can do, but the fact is table stakes for democracy should be you accept a free and fair transfer of power, period. And that lasted about six months. And it wasn’t like any of those people came back and they said, “Okay, we’re sorry. We really, we know that that was the wrong thing to do, and we accept it was a free and fair transfer of power.” No, no. It was rather the CEOs that are like, even this little thing, “Why should we bother? It’s actually inconvenient for us. Other companies are going to give money to them. And then if we don’t, we’re just stupid because we’re not going to have that influence.”

And so, I mean, what are the values? And I think the question we have to ask ourselves is what does the United States, I mean, we knew what we used to stand for. We used to stand for the Charter of the United Nations. We created that after World War II. Like, we stood for human rights around the world. We stood for rule of law. We stood for democracy. We stood for collective security and free trade, and market access, and we didn’t always do it consistently. We were hypocritical, we could be exceptionalists, we could be high-handed and pedantic, but still, overall, for the last 50 years, most countries around the world, most people around the world, and most Americans would agree that we generally stood up for and supported that stuff.

SAFIAN: Yeah.

BREMMER: I think that you have literally no idea what the United States stands for today, what the values are. And I think the reason you get so many young people that were willing to go and vote for Trump. And Trump did best among young voters, by the way, right? It’s because they feel like we’re just not the good guys. And we haven’t been for decades. And so they think, yeah, we need to disrupt this. We need to break things. Because of the deep state, and I’m not talking about like a group of secret people that are actually controlling the levers of power, like the Bilderbergers or the Davos type. No, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the moneyed special interests across the United States that have captured the regulatory environment, the political environment for decades now.

It doesn’t matter if you’re Democrats or Republicans in power. That is something that I think most young people think is fundamentally not aligned with what the U.S. says we stand for. And that actually, a world order led by the United States increasingly doesn’t feel like a good place, not like a humane place, like a hospitable place. So a lot more people are willing to vote against whatever the thing is that represents that thing. And by the way, I expect that that anti-incumbent sentiment is likely to hurt Trump next time around. Right?

SAFIAN: That’s a cultural phenomenon that’s going to hurt whoever’s currently in office.

BREMMER: I think that’s right. I think that’s right. It’s happening globally, but it’s stronger in the United States.

Impacts of Trump’s unpredictable appointments

SAFIAN: I had LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman on the show recently, as you know, a strong critic of Trump’s during the campaign. And he was sort of saying he hopes he’s wrong that like his colleagues who are like, “ah, Trump is just saying these things because it’s part of like campaign rhetoric. It’s not real.” It sounds to me like you feel like that’s just BS. Like we know who Trump is, and we know what he’s going to do.

BREMMER: Well, we know who he is. We don’t necessarily know what he’s going to do because he doesn’t know what he’s going to do, right? It depends on the day. And he has recency bias beyond that of any leader I’ve ever seen. I mean, none of the people he’s appointed were in the first term, right? I mean, everyone said, “Oh, he’s learned so much and now they’re going to come in and they’re going to do all these things because he has this experienced team.”

None of the experienced team from the first term are coming back, right? Because he likes all the new shiny people that have just impressed him recently. And so he’s throwing them in, right? It turns out, Bob, you and I are actually capable to be in almost any cabinet post in terms of our experience and our knowledge.

SAFIAN: To me, it’s a little terrifying for myself.

BREMMER: It should be.

And yet you have a significant number of appointees that are definitionally less capable at these jobs than anyone we’ve probably seen in generations from the Democrats or Republicans. That’s meaningful. And they want to disrupt. But, I mean, do they want to build anything? Very, very unclear. How much will they be able to actually disrupt in a U.S. system that is so calcified, and has so many strong moneyed interests in their favor, and with a president that will do favors that will stop disruption for people that have paid him.

Right? I mean, TikTok, opposed to TikTok, wants to shut him down because he doesn’t want good relations with China, America first, until Jeff Yass gives him a couple million dollars. And now he’s like, “No, I’m not going to shut down TikTok.” So, I mean, one thing you can count on is if you give Trump money, you will get reactions that you want. And a lot of Americans are very willing to give Trump money, especially now that he’s in power. What I would say is, I want what is best for my country and the world. And I happen to think those two things are very aligned.

Trump’s wins and pitfalls in a global context

And when Trump does things that align with that, I will be the loudest and most publicly supportive of him as I was the first time around when he got the USMCA trade deal done, a material improvement over NAFTA, when he did the Abraham Accords, when he did the chorus agreement with South Korea. Hell, I mean, when he was arguing for the Europeans to spend more on defense, when he did the first bilateral trade deal the U.S. ever did with a sub-Saharan African country, with Kenya. So, I mean, it wasn’t like Trump didn’t have any wins.

He had plenty of wins. When you run the most powerful country in the world and you tell other countries, you better do it my way, they’ll agree with you on a whole bunch of stuff. So he will get wins. But he also broke a lot of stuff. He screwed up a lot. And like when he unilaterally pulled out of the JCPOA, the Iranian nuclear deal, didn’t talk with any allies about it. So he undermined the American position. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama couldn’t do it. Trump killed it. Hurt U.S. relations with allies. Paris Climate Accord. World Health Organization in the middle of the pandemic. Like, are you kidding me? Like, that was a really stupid thing. So, I do think we, in this environment, need more people that are willing to, first of all, admit when they were wrong and learn from it.

But also call balls and strikes. And those things are not aligned with what you want. Like, I didn’t want Trump to win, but I thought Trump was gonna win. Like, I mean, I said that publicly, people have been asking me for months. What do you think is going to happen? I think Trump’s going to win. Why do you think that? Because incumbents are getting crushed everywhere. Like if I were an alien looking down on the planet and saw all of these elections in the UK and across Europe and South Korea and Japan and soon Germany and Canada, and in every one of those incumbents are losing. I mean, honestly, Bob, the interesting thing about the U.S. election was that Harris did better than incumbents in all these other elections.

SAFIAN: That it was surprising it was as close as it?

BREMMER: Why did she do so well? And I think the answer is because the U.S. economy was comparatively outperforming and because Trump was quite unpopular with independents. But still, you would bet that Trump was going to win, and that analysis should have nothing to do with your business model.

Is the United States a banana republic?

It should have nothing to do with whether you profit, with whether your political tribe benefits. And a big part of our misinformation environment is that so much of the information we get is from actors that have a strong personal bias in favor of an outcome and present that as if it’s God’s truth. And that destroys democracy. It destroys science. It even destroys a free market economy, which we don’t have in the United States right now. Because in order to have a free market economy, the government has to act as a fair arbiter to facilitate competition. And yet, we’re not facilitating competition. We’re increasingly facilitating monopolies. Like, I mean, I was a little concerned that Elon Musk was on Trump’s first phone call with the CEO of Google.

I wasn’t concerned for Musk. I mean, he paid a hundred million dollars for that privilege, right? I mean, so that was, I think he will do well with that bet for him.

But I think that, for example, if Trump gets on the phone with Modi, or if Biden did, and Adani was on the first phone call. I think that we in the United States would say, this is a banana republic. What the hell is going on in India right now, right? So clearly that does not reflect that the United States cares about rule of law at the top.

And I think long term that probably undermines belief in the dollar. It probably undermines our credibility in setting the rules and standards by which the world operates.

SAFIAN: Ian’s assessment of an eroding free market economy here in the U.S. is sobering — not only where we are today, but how far it could go tomorrow. Whatever your take is on Trump, good or bad, there’s value to checking our assumptions.

After the break, Ian digs into which businesses are poised to benefit most from a Trump administration, plus what he’s hearing from Chinese leaders, and more. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, the Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer shared his outlook on how business has reacted to Trump, both before the election and after. Now, we talk about why tariffs may not be the most impactful part of Trump’s business agenda, the state of the Chinese economy, the future of sustainability, and more. Let’s jump back in.

The real impact of tariffs on multinational businesses

SAFIAN: I want to ask you like significant tariffs sort of could portend a real shift in global trade patterns, right? It’s a pretty strong risk in a lot of ways for multinational businesses. Does that mean they need sort of new contingencies about how they operate in different places? Are we going to see dramatic shifts in business models from it? Do we not know yet? Or do you have to be preparing for that?

BREMMER: I am less worried about this than most of my clients are. And I would say, and again, we’re talking about the biggest multinationals out there. Remember, first of all, Trump put tariffs on China in his first term, a total of like 25 percent in a couple of tranches. Biden had every opportunity to remove them, especially in a higher inflation environment in the U.S., chose not to, right? So, I mean, it is the revealed preference of the American political establishment that these tariffs are actually fruitful, even though the markets react negatively to them. Secondly, the people that are being appointed by Trump, Lutnick for Commerce, not Treasury, Lighthizer hasn’t gotten his post yet, but if he does it’s going to be a trade post, and it’s not clear how he feels about that.

And on the Treasury side, it will be a Wall Street person. Of all the appointments that Trump is making, these seem to be the most kind of normal, could imagine them in pretty much any Republican administration, and want the U.S. economy to do well, want the markets to do well, want business and industry to do well.

And so even if Trump is going to say, I’ve got these big tariffs that I’m going to use against you as a stick in what will clearly be meant to be a negotiating position, how strong that stick will be, how willing Trump will be to accept deals when everyone’s willing to give him something. I mean, my conversations with the Chinese have already been, “Here are some things we think we could give the Trump administration. Like, we’re willing to buy more Boeings, like we’re willing to put BYD, the electric vehicle, we’re willing to open factories on the ground in the United States. And that could lead to jobs in places that you guys would appreciate. We can buy more treasuries.”

So, I mean, like there’s obviously, if Trump wants deals, there will be deals to be done. Now, are they going to move far enough, fast enough to avoid any increase, meaningful increase in tariffs? I don’t know the answer to that. But I would be surprised if in two years’ time, Bob, you and I come back and think that the most meaningful thing that has come out of the new Trump administration for the business community are tariffs. I’d be surprised if that’s what we’re talking about in two years.

The winners and losers from Trump’s second term

SAFIAN: So, do you have a sense of what will be the most meaningful thing? Like, is it that sustainability is about a specific industry? Like the winners and losers are going to be different.

BREMMER: Well, I think that winners and losers will be different. The regulatory environment and rollback, I mean oil and gas companies are going to do better in this environment. Crypto is going to do a lot better. Crypto gave more money than I think every other sector combined bundled to the Trump administration.

And that was a really good bet. Again, I don’t think that’s the way that our political system should work, but it does. And so I think these are going to be the most crypto-friendly rules that anyone is going to write in the history of the planet. And so that feels like a sector that’s going to do incredibly well.

Vaping is going to do really well. Finance is going to do really well. Online betting is going to do really well. Other sectors won’t do so well. So, I mean, big tech, interesting to watch, right? With the new FCC.

SAFIAN: If you have a sense about sort of AI guardrails, tech policy, is there any clarity about where?

BREMMER: The executive order is going to get ripped up, which I thought was a fairly useful piece of regulation, even though it was still very early days. I mean, I think more of the question is going to be will you see, I mean, the Lina Khan effort to strip Chrome from Google is a pretty big deal whether or not it would stand up after years of fighting, who knows, but it obviously is a distraction and will hurt them.

Will you see more of that kind of thing when you have an FCC appointee that likes Musk but isn’t necessarily a fan of the Monopoly tech platforms? That’s a very interesting question. Trump during the first term did not really have a technology policy. Didn’t focus on it. This time around, he’s going to have a bunch of people that want the Americans to win visa vis the Chinese.

China’s shifting global position amid economic downturn

SAFIAN: Cause that’s the story you hear from Silicon Valley executives from the big tech companies, right? “Hey, give us space because we got plenty of competition from the Chinese and we want to win that battle.”

BREMMER: Yeah, I was just in a meeting in Congress, where one of the tech CEOs basically said he was asked by a senator, “So what do you think we should do on regulation? How are we?” And he said, “No, no, no.” He said, “We’re good right now. Don’t need anything else right now. Maybe in a few years. But, we really want to make sure that we got to beat the Chinese. And so that means anything that you might do that could slow us down from beating the Chinese.” It’s a great argument, I mean, because it’s like, it’s conveniently win-win. Again, I’m much more interested analytically. And when people make arguments that aren’t aligned with all of their money and all of their personal political attachment, like then I’m like, Oh, that might be interesting.

So like when I tell you, even though I’m voting for Harris, that I think that Trump is going to win, that’s probably analytically interesting to you, right? When a tech CEO tells me that you can’t regulate us or we’re going to lose to the Chinese, you haven’t actually learned anything. And why? You know, CNBC and Bloomberg and all these guys continue to allow smoke to be blown up their collective asses by people that have no interest in telling them the analytic truth is a problem.

It’s a problem. So, look, again, I, I have an interest in talking about where I think U.S.-China’s going. And the reality is the Chinese have the worst economy now that they’ve had in decades. So they are more interested in cutting deals across the board. That’s why they just met with Modi and pulled their troops back from the contested border.

It’s why they met with the Shiba and they allowed, re-allowed the export of seafood despite their concerns about the Fukushima contamination, which seemed to have been made up by the Chinese. And it’s why behind the scenes, they’re trying to figure out who do we talk to in the Trump team that we might be able to offer a deal with.

By the way, they can’t do that with the Secretary of State because he’s the first incoming Secretary of State ever to be officially sanctioned by the Chinese. It’s a problem. And China’s going to have to, it’s like the U.S. had that problem with Modi when he became prime minister, by the way. And this is, in my view, China should have resolved this the next day.

Like one of the advantages of China is they have a system where if the leader says it like with zero COVID and they change it, it can happen in a day. So who the hell has not advised him on, you want a better relation with the U.S., this is going to be Secretary of State, why have you maintained this sanction?

Like, it’s crazy. It’s crazy town. And that implies to me that Xi is not getting good information right now.

SAFIAN: I mean, it’s ironic that sort of in some ways China’s become like the champion of globalization, right?

BREMMER: You care about protecting intellectual property or using Belt and Road to get the political outcomes you want, or really screwing countries that still recognize Taiwan. So, I mean, I’m not sure I would call them the champion of globalization, but clearly, they are the largest creditor to the global South. And so therefore they have a lot more to lose when countries blow up than the

SAFIAN: They have to be more committed to it.

BREMMER: Yeah. So, I mean, I look at when Tony Blinken wrote this foreign affairs piece saying that there’s this axis of evil just two months ago, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China, I’m like, and China? Like, I mean, China is an adversary of the United States. But China is committed to the stability of the global system because they have no choice. Russia, North Korea, and Iran are chaos actors.

SAFIAN: Right. They’ve got nothing to lose in some ways, right?

BREMMER: So I don’t even believe, to be fair, I don’t even believe that Tony believed what was in that piece. And it was shocking to me that he decided this was going to be the big thing that he wrote on his way out, right? I just, I really didn’t, I didn’t get it. I haven’t had a chance to talk with him about it since he wrote it, so I’ll talk to you instead.

How does sustainability efforts change?

SAFIAN: I want to ask you about sustainability for businesses. Like it’s been a priority for them in some ways because it leads to cost savings. If it’s consumer expectations, it’s been encouraged by governments. How much does that change with Trump? How much are businesses like, yeah, that’s not going to be a priority for me anymore.

BREMMER: Oh no, it’s still a priority. ESG is not a priority in the same way that DEI is not a priority. By the way, it never was. DEI was box-checking for corporations. Now it is not even that. But ESG was something that a lot of companies aligned towards. And now they realize that overtly embracing that will cause you more political problems.

Then it solves for you, but corporations still understand that the future of global energy is in transition. We are, and we’ll continue to be the largest fossil fuel producer in the world. But I mean, Texas is also leading the United States in green energy, and they’re investing huge amounts.

And especially with the AI boom in the United States, that’s going to require a much more robust and post-carbon energy grid. We’re not there yet. And we need fusion. And we’re 10 years away from fusion, right? So until then, it’s gonna be massive amounts of wind and solar and nuclear investments. That’s what you’re gonna see.

SAFIAN: And the idea that climate change is or isn’t real, which obviously we know that it’s real, but you know, there are political interests sometimes in saying that it’s not, that is not businesses moving against their interests by saying, yeah, climate change is something we have to, we have to address.

BREMMER: I was surprised Trump could find someone that seems to be a climate denier to appoint for Secretary of Energy. Now, Doug Burgum, who is very capable, and is going to be the energy czar, and run interior, which he is actually well, very, very well placed to do. I hope he’s not a climate denier. So hopefully the wacko climate denialism from the secretary of energy designate is not going to matter much.

We have 194 countries that all recognize that climate is real. What they don’t recognize is what they want to do about it. And coming out of the COP summit in Baku, there’s very little agreement on what kind of funds should be invested to help those that are going to be hit the hardest by climate change, who have not benefited from carbon emissions, what we’re going to do for those countries.

And the answer appears to be nothing in particular. So, I mean, the big problem is that globalization had been really benefiting larger and larger numbers of people. That can happen again with AI if there’s access to everyone, but climate cuts in exactly the opposite direction. Climate is really a destroyer of populations, much more so than the wars in Gaza or Sudan or Haiti’s collapse, or Ukraine. And yet the attention that we paid to it, I mean, 95 percent of the people ask, are asking me about geopolitics. They’re talking about the conflicts and they’re not talking about the impact on the billions for

SAFIAN: So many more people are at risk.

BREMMER: Yeah. Yeah. And because we’re just not going to pay for it. We’re just not going to pay for it.

We will have massive hurricanes, and a whole bunch of Americans won’t be able to get insurance anymore. And I already hear friends from New York that got their places down in Florida and they’re like, “Oh my God, my tax and insurance is higher for my house than it was back in New York. I didn’t expect that.” I’m like, “Oh, wow, at least you’ve got all the culture of Florida that you can enjoy.”

But still, you still have billions of people that may not matter to the average American, but they’re people. And going back to our earlier point, historically, I believe that Americans cared about people. And I don’t think of myself as an American primarily, I think of myself as a human being primarily, right?

And I have a hard time sort of just discounting the value of anyone that doesn’t happen to hold my passport. And that, for me, is a challenge, you know? I mean, I think we should be proud of having created the United Nations. Like, that was something that represented the Americans when we’re at our best.

And now the fact that we don’t support it because they embarrass us, they shame us into recognizing that we’re not actually living up to our own values. So as a consequence, we want to shut it out. La la la, not talking to me. That’s something I think is a problem, and I’m someone who still believes it’s patriotic to criticize my country when we do something wrong.

I still believe that. It may not be true in another few years, but for now it is.

The state of capitalism in the United States

SAFIAN: If I’m hearing you right too, about business, like when I talked to Reid Hoffman, he used the phrase crony capitalism a few times, and it sounds like you feel like crony capitalism is not new with Trump, although maybe accelerated.

BREMMER: I think it’s accelerated, but let’s remember that a lot more billionaires gave money to Harris.

SAFIAN: Yeah.

BREMMER: I mean, I don’t see crony capitalism as something where you paint the brush against Trump. I don’t. That’s why I said, what CEOs have not asked me about is what capitalists would, ostensible capitalists in America, need to — we supposedly have the strongest capitalist society in the world, and yet we fundamentally are not capitalists in two critical ways.

First is where we use our political power to undermine competitors unfairly, right? Real capitalists would want unfettered competition with a balanced level playing field. Moneyed capitalists and Americans actually, their revealed preferences is the opposite of that. So that’s number one.

And number two is that real capitalists are capitalists when they have losses and gains, not just when they have gains. And our capitalists love to be capitalists when it comes to profit, but God forbid they’re responsible for any losses. Then that is on the taxpayer, preferably the kids of the taxpayers, right?

So, I mean, you’re an oil company and you’re doing all sorts of horrible things to the environment. Capitalists would say that’s a cost. That should be the L in your P and L and you need to pay for that. That’s what capitalism is. You destroy democracy, not intentionally, but it’s part of your business model. With social media or you cause like lots of children to engage in self-harm because of what you’re doing on social media. Like that’s a cost. You got to pay for that. “No, not me.” Why not? “Cause I’m a socialist.” I guess. I guess. Like I see a lot of these CEOs as some of the biggest socialists in the world when they’re experiencing losses.

And I’m not proud of that. I’m a capitalist. I mean, I started my own company from scratch. Nobody gave me a goddamn thing. I didn’t get any subsidies from the U.S. government, right? I started it. I built it for 28 years. And when we have losses, nobody’s bailing me the fuck out. You know? I mean, that’s a hit to me.

So screw these people. That’s my view.

SAFIAN: For me, one of the things that’s interesting is the amount of money that you have to invest as a business to impact government policy and get those kinds of benefits is so relatively small in your business. I mean, I understand a hundred million dollars for Elon Musk, maybe a lot of money for you and me, but not Musk. And what happened to the market cap of Tesla afterwards? Like he’s, he’s made his money.

BREMMER: It’s a great bet. It’s just that it’s not a capitalist bet. It’s an inhumane bet because it’s not actually about survival of the fittest. It’s about survival of the people that are close enough that they can capture the political process. That’s not free and fair market capitalism. It’s not.

So, and, by the way, I do think that you can, capitalism is alive and strong in the United States. It really is small and medium businesses. We have the best environment in the world for start-up entrepreneurs. And I don’t just mean in the tech space, I mean, everywhere.

I mean, your local bodega, I mean, like your online little start-up. I mean, someone that’s selling a product, he’s got an idea. She’s got a service, whatever it is. There are so many of those people and they’re brilliant. And they build.

SAFIAN: The Shark Tank economy.

BREMMER: Absolutely the shark economy and Shark Tank itself, all of that stuff. Right? I mean, we do that. And if I had been born in another country, I wouldn’t have had this opportunity. I would have been like a nice, smart political scientist someplace making some consulting money, whatever and here I get to build a global business. Why? Because I live in the United States. That’s incredible. So it’s not like, I don’t think everything about the U.S. is broken. Not at all. But I do think that at the high levels, the big industry, we have become kleptocratic. And, and that’s, I think that’s a hard, and it’s not a Republican thing at all. It’s, it, this is structural. It is structural.

SAFIAN: This is great. Thanks. Thanks so much for coming on and being as straightforward as you always are. Really

BREMMER: Thanks, Bob. Good to talk to you.

SAFIAN: Given who Trump is and his history, it’s hard to really know what he will or won’t do once in the White House. Still, I heard a bunch of things from Ian that can be helpful in preparing a business for the road ahead: about Trump’s transactional predilections, about tariffs as a tool for deal-making, about a hands-off regulatory environment. I’m also compelled by Ian’s commentary about values, because I do believe business has a role to play in safeguarding America’s reputation and moral leadership. If values are eroding, what can we each do to keep our own house in order, to lead a team that we can be proud of — one that goes beyond borders and sees people not by what it says on their passport but as Ian says as human beings. Yes, self-sufficiency is the American way. But so is caring for our neighbors. Even if we’re only doing it to protect ourselves. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.