Mixed Signals: Davos, the inauguration, and media’s place in the new global order, with Ian Bremmer

Ben Smith:
I’m Ben Smith.

Max Tani:
I’m Max Tani. This is Mixed Signals from-

Ben Smith:
Semafor Media.

Max Tani:
Actually, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

Ben Smith:
Did you get your own name wrong?

Max Tani:
No, no, I didn’t. I’m sorry. I felt so tempted. I still hear Nayeema in the thing. I’m tempted to say Nayeema’s name. Anyway, let’s just do it again.

Ben Smith:
I’m Ben Smith.

Max Tani:
I’m Max Tani.

Ben Smith:
You sure?

Max Tani:
Yes, I am sure. That’s me. I’m not Nayeema.

Ben Smith:
Okay. This is Mixed Signals from Semafor Media.

Max Tani:
This week, ahead of the presidential inauguration and the World Economic Forum in Davos, we wanted to talk about the role of the media in an increasingly unpredictable global political landscape. To do that, we’re sitting down with Ian Bremmer. Ian is the president of the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy business, and he is a ubiquitous figure both in the political and financial media, as well as in the contacts lists of many major world leaders.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. I’ve known Ian a long time, and he’s an amazing self-made figure who, in some sense, has become, I don’t know, the Secretary of State for corporate America.

Max Tani:
Well, we’ll ask him how he got there, what world leaders are feeling about what’s going on right now, and media’s role in either creating order or disorder. All of that right after the break.
Ben, how are you? You’re sitting across the office from me in a different room, but how’s everything going over there?

Ben Smith:
It’s good. I’m actually jealous of you because I am preparing to go to Davos, which is always interesting, but it sure feels like Washington is going to be more interesting next week.

Max Tani:
See, that’s really bizarre because usually it’s the other way around. Usually, it’s that people in my position are like, “I want to go to Davos. I get to go skiing,” or whatever. I remember when I was a staffer at Business Insider-

Ben Smith:
Reporting. I think the word is reporting.

Max Tani:
I know what goes on there. I know what goes on there. When I was a staffer at Business Insider, I remember our editor-in-chief at the time did a slideshow about skiing at Davos with one of our other top editors. I was skeptical of how much work was actually being done.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. It’s a hazard there because you wind up on the slopes either with somebody whose way better than you, or worryingly worse than you. It’s something I’ve done with respectively two of our colleagues who will remain unnamed. Barely avoiding injury in both cases.

Max Tani:
Well, we’ll talk off the show about whether or not you’re a good skier, because I am curious about that. But this is a media show, not a skiing show, so we should get into it.
We’ve got a big calendar, a very busy calendar of major media events over the next few days. We’ve got the second inauguration of Donald Trump, which I will be at, so please give me tips, scoops, anything related to the inauguration. Say hello, I’ll be covering the media circus. You’re headed to Davos, obviously to do some skiing and a lot of schmoozing with the financial and political elite.
But presumably, between the parties and the networking, there’s actually some real news happening at these events, right?

Ben Smith:
Yeah. Davos is this incredibly target-rich reporting environment. Just a huge gathering of CEOs, presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers, finance ministers who are stuck in this tiny little town with you. Last time I was there, the PR guy Richard Edelman was trying to avoid my calls on a story that I was writing about him. Twice in a row, he just, as he’s trying to avoid my calls, he just runs into me, which is a great small town reporting experience.
But more broadly, it’s a place where people are trying to figure out what will be the elite’s consensus of the next year. Famously, often totally wrong. But it’s a place, in some sense, where consensus gets made and decisions get made in that context. Right now, they will of course all just be watching you in Washington, trying to figure out what the hell is going on there.

Max Tani:
Sure, absolutely. Well, we know a few people who won’t be at Davos, or they’ll be there a little bit later, like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, who are going to be at the inauguration.
It’s funny that you mention that’s where consensus is made, because of course, generally one of the rules or jokes that we have is that anytime that a consensus is made at Davos, generally the opposite thing happens. Although of course, last year, the Davos consensus was that Trump was going to win and it was headed in this direction, and things ended up, while it wasn’t a predictable 2024, we ended up in the same place that many of the elites thought we would. Should we be listening to elites more?

Ben Smith:
The elites are back, I guess. Is that what’s going on? I don’t know.

Max Tani:
Who knows?
Well, a person who knows a little bit more than us about whether elites are back is Ian Bremmer, who is our guest on the show today. Ben, can you tell us a little bit about Ian and his background?

Ben Smith:
Yeah. Ian, who people will have seen on podcasts. He hosts a television show, has his own podcast, sends out a bunch of newsletters. Founded a group called Eurasia Group in 1998 that’s become a really important advisory firm, consultancy particularly to American companies. His core philosophy, which I think is bearing out, is that we’re headed into this G-Zero world, which he describes as “a global power vacuum in which no country is willing and able to set the international agenda.”

Max Tani:
Well, let’s give Ian a call and talk about all that.

Ben Smith:
Hello, Ian. Thank you for joining us.

Ian Bremmer:
Hey, guys. Good to be with you.

Ben Smith:
I guess I want to just begin by talking about your own role. This is a media show. When I think about your role as somebody who thinks a lot about strategy, talks to everybody, gives behind-the-scenes advice, that people in the tradition you come out of, in some are often very, very behind-the-scenes figures. Henry Kissinger was maybe who would write something foreign affairs once in a while in his later years. But you are all over the media. You’re producing newsletters, and puppet shows, and a television show which is also a podcast, writing this weekly email that lots of people read.
I’m curious how you think about that. In this media, it feels like you’ve made a decision that part of the kind of role you have has to be very, very public, very in the media, almost running a media business.

Ian Bremmer:
I guess I would say it’s not that I made a decision, it’s that I never changed my decision as I became better known, had more influence, had more resources. Built a staff, built a company. I’m a political scientist. I’ve an analyst. I’ve never been in a government. I’ve never had a policy role, with the exception of advisory in formal stuff. My view has always been the reason I didn’t want to be in government is because I didn’t want to have to somehow coat what I was saying publicly. I wanted to be able to say what I believed. I think there’s value to have people say what they believe, especially people that are informed to say what they believe. People that actually have experience, and expertise, and network in an area.
When I’m giving a speech that is going to be projected to a million people, or in the case of my Ted Talk, 12 million people, I can be as honest as I would be sitting in a private room with a head of state or with you off the record. I think that that’s incredibly important because it allows me to be sane and feel like that I have some sort of impact.

Max Tani:
Ian, you’ve talked a lot about G-Zero, which is this idea that the major Cold War powers, principally the United States, have receded over the last decade or so, and that the power and leadership vacuum that’s now in its place is this concept called G-Zero.
We’re really interested in the media repercussions of that. As you look at the situation currently around the globe, I’m very curious, do you think that the media is responsible for more order or more disorder? What’s the media’s role inside the new order?

Ian Bremmer:
That’s a very interesting question, and I love the space that you guys operate in, but I need to take a step back for one second because it’ll inform my answer.
Which is the way that I define G-Zero when I first coined the term, I think 12 years ago, maybe 13, was not that the United States was receding. It was rather that the Americans were increasingly renouncing the order that the Americans had created. Because if we look at where we are today, and G-Zero is here today, it’s been coming for a while but it’s here now, it’s not that the United States is suddenly much less powerful than it was five years ago. In fact, the opposite in many ways is true. America actually relationally has much more power than its allies did five years ago. When I think about America, it’s the consolidation of governance in the US under Trump is much stronger than in allies. America’s adversaries are on their assess right now, too. Iran’s lost their empire, the axis of resistance fell apart. Russia’s in deep structural decline. China’s in the worst economic conditions since the ’90s, maybe the ‘70s. While the US is actually coming back from the pandemic in the best position of any advanced national democracy.
The reason I’m saying all of that, aside from the fact just I want everyone listening to this to understand what the G-Zero is since we’re talking about it-

Ben Smith:
By the way, if you were listening on 2X, you’d better go back and slow that down, because I feel like you were on 2X there, Ian. That was pretty good.

Ian Bremmer:
Well, because I was being political science wonky, and I know that’s not the thing you guys want to talk about.
Now when I slow it down to normal speed, the reason I wanted to make sure we got that right is because you asked me what role I think media is having. It’s not that the role of US-owned media types has receded. Elon has not receded. My God, not at all. But what the United States reflects and is exporting is not rule of law. It’s not multilateralism, and alignment with the same values and standards of our allies. No. It’s the promotion of the alternatives for Deutschland in Germany and the destruction of the EU. It’s the demand that the royalty in the UK steps in and forces the British Prime Minister to stand down. It is the law of the jungle where the Americans get to make demands by dint of being more powerful. That’s a very, very unusual place for American media to be. It is not aligned with the historical US worldview.

Ben Smith:
Do you think that the heads of state, foreign ministers, some of whom we’ll see in Davos next week, do you feel like they’re figuring out this media environment, or are they totally lost in it? Do you have a sense? Do you have examples of who you see has really figured it out, who hasn’t?

Ian Bremmer:
Well, it depends on which media environment. I think that you have people that are aspirants to various components of MAGA. Like in particular, the Argentine President Milei, who is not just a compelling figure for headlines, but has also had a really successful first year, so he has a good story to tell, too. He’s very, very good at social media. He really figured it out. Former President Yoon in South Korea is really, really bad at media. He has not ... If you wanted to do a spectrum of where leaders fall, let’s bracket the spectrum with Milei, and let’s say Bukele from El Salvador, and Modi from India on one side. Let’s put Yoon on the other. Then you’ve got people in between.
The Europeans are largely on the uncomfortable side because they have a very different ... First of all, many of them have different rules about free speech. They’re deeply uncomfortable about this algorithmic promotion of anything, including disinformation and people that aren’t real. They see it as a threat to their democracy, which I am frankly somewhat empathetic to.

Ben Smith:
Do you think though that contemporary politicians have to essentially be influencers at some level, have that level of comfort on the vertical screen?

Ian Bremmer:
No.

Ben Smith:
Are there other paths to power, or is that now really the path to power?

Ian Bremmer:
I don’t think it’s the only path to power. I wouldn’t say that. For example, you look at Germany, and Friedrich Merz is likely to become the next chancellor, which is the most powerful position in an individual country in Europe. It’s the biggest economy, it matters a lot in the EU. I would say he’s not particularly savvy as a media figure at all. Now Germany is maybe one electoral cycle behind the European countries in terms of populism and antiestablishment sentiment, and Germany, it’s a coalition multi-party system. After the elections, you’re actually cobbling together a government, which is very different than this winner take all system. Some of it depends on that.
I would argue that in Japan, the third-largest economy in the world, the LDP, more or less, it’s not a single party democracy but it’s close. The LDP basically decides among the various factions inside the LDP, the Liberal Democratic Party, who’s going to win. Sometimes they’re quite charismatic, like Shinzo Abe was, and like Koizumi Junichiro is. And sometimes they’re not, like the present prime minister. That’s okay.

Ben Smith:
Uncharismatic people can still dream of backroom deals to power, basically.

Ian Bremmer:
Well, look, you’re asking me from the perspective of the American political landscape, which is in the extreme in terms of just how much being a media figure has mattered.

Ben Smith:
Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:
It’s a two-year, multi-billion dollar farce of an election. It’s not the way one should hold an election.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. Steve Bannon has said that he feels like Trump’s real genius was that Trump was the first to realize that all politics is media, which I always thought was very interesting. It feels true in this environment right now.

Ian Bremmer:
It’s as very US perspective, yeah.

Ben Smith:
Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:
Bannon’s a very US guy. He hasn’t been as successful when he’s tried to export that.

Ben Smith:
Yeah.

Max Tani:
Is there any correlation though, between the “health,” and I put that in quotes, of some of the countries that you mentioned, and whether or not the system of selecting their rulers can be swayed by importance on vertical video? Would say that is a country like Japan in a better place, do they have healthier elections because voters can’t be persuaded by being good a vertical video or interviews, or things like that? I’m curious.

Ian Bremmer:
I think we have an independent variable question here, which is what’s causing what. Is it that the American political system is unhealthy and therefore it makes vertical media more important? Or is it algorithms actually have played more of a role, and that has in turn made the American political system more unhealthy? I think that the latter might well be true. There’s certainly an interrelationship between them. There’s also a big difference between an unhealthy system politically that happens to be very healthy in lots of other ways. The US system is obviously performing incredibly well in lots of ways that don’t have to do with civic infrastructure and institutions. That’s probably an unsatisfying answer.

Max Tani:
Slightly switching gears though, I want to ask a little bit about the media consumption by the big players themselves. It’s interesting you bring up South Korea. We had a story recently on Semafor about how the South Korean President’s claims of a rigged election and left-wing collusion with North Korea really mirrored those made by popular South Korean YouTubers who are increasingly popular there.
Are there specific changes that you’ve seen in how world leaders themselves consume media?

Ben Smith:
Yeah. Are they themselves getting pilled by watching YouTube, in some sense? I think that was the implication of that Korea story.

Ian Bremmer:
Yeah. I agree that that was the implication of that story. I think that the South Korean President is unusual because he’s an outsider, he’s a bit of an outcast. He’s not very socially or interpersonally engaging. He’s not a retail politician.
You may know this story, Ben and Max. That when he ran, the reason he won in part is because he created an AI version of Yoon. Did you know that?

Max Tani:
I did not know that, no.

Ian Bremmer:
You didn’t know that?

Ben Smith:
That’s incredible.

Ian Bremmer:
He did. It was more attractive, it was more charismatic, it gave more engaging answers, and the voters liked it. He’s unusual. He’s a little bit more like DeSantis.
I think most of the world leaders that I engage with on a regular basis I would say are people that actually have very little time for realtime red-pilling or blue-pilling media consumption.

Ben Smith:
[inaudible 00:17:53].

Ian Bremmer:
There’s no way the Japanese leaders that I know have time for that. There’s no way the European leaders I know have time for that, the Canadian leaders I know have time. I’m talking about across the political spectrum, they just don’t.

Ben Smith:
They’re just not at home watching YouTube in bed.

Ian Bremmer:
They just don’t. They are such hard jobs. Almost all of their time is filled. They have briefs, confidential briefs that are difficult and challenging they have to read. They have to maintain an enormous number of facts in their system. They might watch a half-an-hour of TV. They might engage a little bit in social media in their off time. Generally speaking, I would say they’re like CEOs that we know that don’t even have email.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, yeah. Well, we’re going to take a quick break and we’ll be right back with Ian Bremmer.
This week on our branded segment from Think With Google, I spoke with Google’s VP of Marketing Josh Spanier about what he’s calling AI’s shift from hype to how.
The AI story is moving so fast, new tools, new projects. Anything new you’re excited about?

Josh Spanier:
I’m so excited. I’m really, really excited about how we firmly move from the AI hype era into the AI how era. We’re actually building things with AI cross our industry, across Google that is enabling incredible impact.
Something that I really enjoyed recently was my Spotify Wrapped end-of-year analysis. Spotify in partnership with Google used a Google tool called NotebookLM to create a podcast which read to me a five to six minute podcast of my listening habits, what songs I’d most been into over the year. My whole family got their version of their NotebookLM Spotify Wrapped podcast and we listened to all of them. It was just a really fun, magical moment and they were by AI.

Ben Smith:
I feel like I have to ask you what was in your Wrapped list now. I’m thinking a lot of ’90s Brit pop?

Josh Spanier:
There was some ’90s Brit pop, but I’m honestly more into house and dance music. I’m from the rave generation, so that sort of stuff.
From a business perspective, just inside Google marketing, we’ve been experimenting using AI to really help us speed up our understanding of audiences. We’re sitting on hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents, on focus group videos, on other inputs around Gen Z or Millennials. What we can do is take all that content and create an AI persona, a proxy for one of the audiences we care about. These proxies, we can speak to. We literally can start the AI persona and chat with them about a campaign we’re doing. Because Gemini, Google’s large language model, is multi-modal, we can upload an ad we’ve made, have the AI persona watch the ad, and then tell us whether they think this ad is actually compelling for that audience persona, for that profile.

Ben Smith:
Does it give good notes?

Josh Spanier:
It’s actually giving us remarkably good notes. Now it’s not the perfect answer and you still have to do fundamental research. But it’s actually allowing us to go, “Oh, this is a good creative direction or a not-so-good creative direction,” and actually helping us speed up some of the decisions we’re making about the territories to explore for our creative.

Ben Smith:
Where can marketers go to get better at using these tools?

Josh Spanier:
You can head on over to thinkwithgoogle.com to learn a lot more about these tools and others to help you up your AI game.

Ben Smith:
Thanks, Josh.

Josh Spanier:
Thanks, Ben.

Ben Smith:
You’ve had a run-in with Elon Musk back in 2022. You wrote that he told you he’d spoken to Putin recently about the war in Ukraine. He then volubly denied it. I’m curious what you made of the episode, what you made of his denial?

Ian Bremmer:
I guess I was a little surprised that he publicly said what he said. Though, more recent reporting in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, they’ve done their own investigations. I haven’t spoken to any of them about it. Actually confirmed pretty much everything in my piece.

Ben Smith:
What did you make of that experience I guess? He is, as we’ve said, the most important media figure in the world.

Ian Bremmer:
Well, he wasn’t then.

Ben Smith:
He is now.

Ian Bremmer:
He is now. Look, I would rather him not have been personally upset with me. I don’t like being the story. That wasn’t pleasant. But I didn’t write any differently about that as I would have with anything else that I cover. Whatever.
I think that if you just keep your head down and do honest work, and also admit when you’re wrong. Sometimes I’ll make a bad call. We talked about Milei beforehand. I thought that Milei was not going to succeed. As I said at the beginning of our call, he’s had a fantastic year. I proactively came out and said, “You know what, I thought he was going to screw up. He’s actually done a fantastic job. Let me explain why I thought what I did and how I got it wrong.” He was so impressed with that, he reached out, wanted to do an interview, and we ended up doing a 45-minute interview. I think the only other American media establishment he had worked with, if you can call it that, was Tucker Carlson before me. I’d like to argue that mine was a little more fact-based.

Ben Smith:
Just to go back really quickly to get a sense of how information is flowing these days. What is that? Does he What’s App you? Do you get a written letter from the Presidential Spokesman’s Office? How does that stuff travel?

Ian Bremmer:
He re-posted something that I put out or something someone put out with my video explaining how I got Milei wrong. Then one of his advisors said, “He would love to be on the show.” It was like he saw it, that was something he consumed. Remember, I think he’s actually very, very good personally in an unusual way at new media, and promoted it. There you go.

Max Tani:
It’s really interesting. It’s your job to have relationships with figures in the government and leadership in a lot of different countries. I don’t know how you continue to maintain these relationships. I have a hard time maintaining 50 as a reporter and I think I’m doing okay for myself. You also talk to a lot of business leaders, including the leaders of some of the biggest tech and media players, some of whom are Eurasia Group clients.
You guys just released your annual risk report. I want to ask specifically about that. What are some of the risks to those of us in our audience, people who are listening in media, technology, and marketing, what are some of the global risks that apply to us specifically? Yeah, let’s keep it at that.

Ian Bremmer:
To you?

Max Tani:
Yeah. Let’s make it about us.

Ben Smith:
Make it about our audience, yeah.

Max Tani:
The podcast’s community and our listeners.

Ian Bremmer:
Obviously when you see the way that Mark Zuckerberg has just done a 180 on what used to be moderation and is now censorship, and his head of public policy and his board member, and many other things. That’s a risk. What is the risk?
The risk is that you now have, in the President of the United States, someone who is actively seeking to unwind the old American order, which I’ve never seen a leading country do before. And instead, insert a unilateralism that is based on doing deals bilaterally, hub-and-spoke, with him and his administration, and his closest advisors which obviously, first and foremost, appears to be Elon. If you’re Mark ...
By the way, Mark did, I thought, a pretty good job of navigating behind-the-scenes the first Trump Administration, with very strong relations with the president, with Jarrod, with others. He was respected in the inner circle last time around. It’s not like he was always a Dem and couldn’t figure this out. You would expect he’d be someone who would figure out how to navigate this early on. But still, nowhere near as dramatic a change as what we’re seeing now.
If he’s doing that, well, how are others going to respond to that? What is Bezos going to do to respond to that? Is that going to mean more censorship inside The Washington Post? Is that going to mean a clearing of house politically?

Ben Smith:
You don’t think it’s paranoid or cynical to imagine that big American corporate media figures are going to shift their direction of coverage, take it easier on Trump because they’re afraid of him?

Ian Bremmer:
I think that there is a much bigger concern about Trump on this front than there was in his first term, than there was with Biden, than there was with Bush, than there was with Obama. I think there are a few reasons for that. One is because Trump is very interested in the media as a foil and as an enemy. He refers to them as the enemy of the people. Number two is because Elon is his guy. He gave him $250 million, and Elon wants to destroy establishment media. Number three depends on the confirmation of Kash Patel to a degree. But you have Trump this time around who had a number of efforts against him that he believes were serious and politicized.
Now by the way, some of his greatest enemies are Republicans that served in his first administration. He’s learned that lesson and he’s not going to point to anyone like that this time around. But some of them are people that he believes used their access, whether it’s part of the so-called deep state in the bureaucracy, or whether it’s political leaders, or whether it’s media leaders that were attached to them, he considers them enemies. The possibility that those people will be investigated is not zero. And absolutely, you would rather be in a position to proactively address that then to find out late that you didn’t take out any insurance. I think a lot of people are going to change their behavior on the basis of that.

Max Tani:
Maybe setting aside Elon and Trump, as we wrap this up, I’m very curious because you have a much broader vantage point than some of us in the US media. Who do you think are the most powerful media figures and institutions in the world? Like I said, let’s leave aside Trump and Elon, they’re their own things. We would naturally probably drift that way if we didn’t leave them off the list. Is it YouTube? Is it Chinese state media? Who or what institution is it do you think?

Ian Bremmer:
I’d go with TikTok number one, and we’ll see who owns it. I have no confidence at all that it’s going to be Elon. Let’s watch that play out. It’s going to be YouTube. It’s going to be Facebook. Then it’s going to be the next gen AI players in very short order. Let’s face it, a lot of stuff is happening in group chat that isn’t happening in social media right now. In that regard, it’s becoming more diffused and fragmented. Then over time, in short order, it’s going to be driven on interactions with your personal AI. I don’t think that’s 10 years away, I think that’s two or three years away. Then it will be the companies that own that AI, that collect that data, that algorithmically nudge you to behave in certain ways, to consume certain things which is a radically different perspective on the media than we have right now.

Ben Smith:
Have you noticed over the last week, I don’t know if you saw the story, but that Red Note, that Chinese app, is the number own downloaded app in the US App Store?

Ian Bremmer:
Yeah.

Ben Smith:
We’ve created these funny interactions between Chinese users, American users. There’s this whole TikTok trend of Chinese users saying, “I’m your personal spy saying farewell to you.” It’s a moment I would not have predicted and a strange one.

Ian Bremmer:
Americans raising the Uyghurs in Tiananmen, and getting very solid pushback that’s informed by Chinese with radically different worldviews. It’s very interesting.

Ben Smith:
What do you make of this moment? Which obviously isn’t going to last.

Ian Bremmer:
It’s not going to last, that’s the problem. I don’t make anything of it because it’s a random blip. What we need are Americans and Chinese engaging in things that show their collective humanity.
Look, my first trip outside the United States was to the Former Soviet Union back in 1986. I was 16-years-old. I met kids that were young Komsomolets. They were Communists. They were pioneers. They all knew their ideology just as Americans recite the Pledge of Allegiance. But you peel back one layer, and these kids are the same kids as we are. They got the same interests, they got the same types of friends, same type of interaction, same type of insecurity, same type of hopes and aspirations.
They wanted to all know about Sharper Image, because I brought a catalog with me and I showed them some of the things that we had. I remember there was a cordless phone that it had a flotation device and it was waterproof so you could use it in your swimming pool. There were three different levels of technology that blew their fricking minds. “What do you mean a swimming pool? You mean you’d use it in the gymnasium?” We’re like, “No, your personal swimming pool that middle class Americans.” They can’t believe it. “What do you mean it doesn’t have a cord?” No, the phone doesn’t have a cord, you can use it, you can walk around. “That’s crazy!” We had fun with that.
But the reality was that was the biggest difference between us because I knew what Sharper Image was even as a kid in the projects and they had no idea. But as kids, we’re the same. It’s great if we can have a Nigerian and a South Korean playing Fortnite on Twitch, that’s really cool. What we don’t have increasingly are people connecting around the world with these common interests, particularly the West and China. In my view, that’s a deeply dehumanizing trend. That’s a horrible thing.

Max Tani:
It is true that pre-internet, Sharper Image was one of the coolest places in the world that you could go as a kid, and maybe even not as a kid.

Ian Bremmer:
Right? To the mall, to wherever it was.

Max Tani:
Absolutely.

Ben Smith:
I also remember it vividly. Would read a long or watch a doc on Sharper Image, somebody should-

Ian Bremmer:
What was the coolest thing you remember, coolest product you remember from Sharper Image?

Ben Smith:
I want to say a foot massager of some sort. I don’t know why that’s what comes to mind, but that is my association.

Ian Bremmer:
The other thing I loved was the lamp you could touch and it would actually go get brighter and then shut off. All you had to do was touch it.

Ben Smith:
Amazing.

Ian Bremmer:
It was crazy!

Max Tani:
Last question for you, Ian. Which is every year, you put together a big list of risks, it gets a lot of media coverage. We’ve talked about it already. As you were putting it together for this year, did you notice any bright spots? They’re not going on the risk report obviously, but do you see any bright spots in terms of global trends?

Ian Bremmer:
Well, first of all, you may have not gotten to the end of the report, but we have red herrings at the end of the report that are always things that people think are risky that actually aren’t.
We wrote that Trump fails. A lot of people think Trump is going to fail. A lot of Democrats hope Trump is going to fail. We don’t. We actually think given his power position, a lot of things he wants to do, he will be able to do. He’ll have a better shot of addressing illegal immigration than any president for a generation. That’s a big deal. Now some things will be constructive, some destructive, but the president’s not going to fail in his first year. I think that’s important.
But the most positive stuff is not what’s in the report, because the most positive trends globally are not geopolitical trends because we’re in a geopolitical bust cycle. Of course, that part’s going to be negative. But we’re in a technology boom cycle. Even more than a boom cycle. You can’t even call it a cycle because we’ve never had the kind of new technological innovation at scale, at speed that we have right now. We’re going to change everything. So much so that I am less worried about climate because I think that we either completely solve a lot of these problems or we blow ourselves up, but that comes faster than the dystopian stuff that could come from a 2.8-degree Centigrade increase with the ice caps melting, and all of the rest.
Really, the extraordinary time that we are going through with the impact of tech, yes, on media, but more importantly on society, more importance on the world around us. We don’t have 50 years for that. We’ve got 10 or 20. We’re all going to live through and experience that. That’s pretty extraordinary. It’s a little scary, but it’s pretty extraordinary.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, it is a wild time.

Ian Bremmer:
Yeah.

Ben Smith:
Well, thank you for joining us, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:
This was a lot of fun. Thanks, man.

Max Tani:
Thank you so much, Ian.
What did you think about his diagnosis of media in terms of bringing disorder or order to the new G-Zero world?

Ben Smith:
I think the thing he said at the end is really just the truest thing of all, just that really the underlying thing here is we’re just living amid this unbelievably sweeping technological change. Media is a feature of that. What Elon Musk is doing, and the rise of social media, and AI confused social media is all a feature of that. These world leaders and governments are struggling so much to navigate it. I do think that is the big story of this moment, this amazing surge of technology, including the stuff we’re using right now. That, combined with just an absolute lack of faith in government.
I don’t know, did that leave you feeling better or worse about the state of the world?

Max Tani:
I don’t really know. I was interested in the question that he couldn’t answer as well, which is are the places that are not dominated by this style of media, we’re talking about Japan maybe principally, are those places better off? He couldn’t really say. Better off of course is subjective, which he emphasized repeatedly. I’m interested in that. I’m interested to compare to systems, the places where old media still seems to have some sort of sway, or elections and leadership isn’t determined by whether or not you’re compelling on YouTube. Are those places better? Are they healthier than our system economically, politically, in terms of civic life, in terms of whether people like each other? I don’t know. It’s interesting. It remains unanswered.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. I did find it kind of reassuring that he thinks that public life will continue to be so dominated by people who are basically out in the world getting information from advisors, from human beings, rather than this what sounds like extremely strange case of this introverted South Korean president who’s black-billing himself on YouTube and sending his avatar out to talk to people, because that is a really dystopian vision of leadership.

Max Tani:
It is true. But at the same time, I do think that, and maybe we’re part of the problem here, the media narrative since Trump won has been, “All of that stuff is irrelevant and you’ve got to pay attention.” Or, “It’s less relevant than it’s ever been and you’ve got to pay attention to what’s going over here. This is where the people are in this other space.” Clearly, that’s something that certain places are taking to heart. Meta literally took that to heart by making Joe Rogan the focal point of its media strategy.
I don’t know. While everybody may still be reading the same FT articles, and Wall Street Journal articles, and watching CNBC, and Bloomberg, and whatever their partners are overseas, I don’t know. It is clear that the world is changing and that these leaders are paying attention to whatever new media landscape we have.

Ben Smith:
I think it’s great that they’re going on three-hour podcasts. I think it’s the notion that they would be-

Max Tani:
When they’re listening.

Ben Smith:
... watching a three-hour podcast or listening to them that stresses me out a little bit.

Max Tani:
What about this show? Where do we fit in that?

Ben Smith:
I think this is so dense on accurate and actionable information for leaders that they should obviously listen to this one.

Max Tani:
It’s the exception that proves the rule.

Ben Smith:
Exactly.

Max Tani:
And it’s shorter. It’s not three hours. It’s not three hours.
Well, that’s going to be it for us this week. Ben, enjoy Davos. I’ll have an interesting time at the inauguration. On a more somber note, we do want to say I know that we have a lot of people who listen to this show who are based in the Los Angeles area. Obviously, we’re thinking about everybody this week whose been impacted by the fires. Southern California is my home, it’s where my family’s based. Of course, we’re thinking of all of you and hoping everybody is staying safe, and hoping for the most minimal impact to our listeners and those of us who we love. We just wanted to say something, because obviously-

Ben Smith:
Yeah, amen.

Max Tani:
Yeah. It’s very, very difficult.
Anyway, thanks as always for listening to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. Our show is produced by Sheena Ozaki, with special thanks to Max Toomey, Brita Galanis, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Garrett Wiley, and Jewel Zern. Our engineer is Rick Kwan. And our theme music, of course, is by Billy Libby. Our public editor is the AI version of Max, who is more likable and people find to be more interesting and appealing, and to maybe support for public office, or at least to listen to this show. Maybe we’ll try that out for an episode, have an AI version of me.

Ben Smith:
Please, no. But if you like the real Mixed Signals, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Please feel free to review us, especially if you like it. And if you miss Nayeema, remember to follow her new show, Smart Girl, Dumb Questions, which we’ll link to in the show notes.

Max Tani:
And if you want more, if you’ve listened this far, presumably you do, you can always sign up for Semafor’s Media Newsletter, which is out every Sunday night. Thank you so much for listening.