Fareed Zakaria on America’s Retreat from the World

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12

The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy August 2026 Visit apple.com/applewatchseries12.

Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app now with heart rate variability can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12

The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. This on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy August 2026 Visit apple.com/applewatchseries12.

SPEAKER_2 (1:01)

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Scott Galloway (1:27)

Episode 414, 404 is the area code serving Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 2014, Amazon introduced Alexa. I asked Siri why I was so bad with women. And Alexa said, my name is Alexa.

I asked my wife how to turn off Alexa, and she said, just continue to walk around the house naked. That was good, too. What a roll today.

SPEAKER_1 (1:55)

Go, go, go.

Scott Galloway (2:05)

Welcome to the 414th episode of The Prof G Pod. What's happening? In today's episode, we speak with Fareed Zakaria, a journalist, author, and political commentator. Fareed hosts Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN and is a columnist for The Washington Post. We discuss with Fareed the dangers of giving AI too much autonomy with the conflict between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia means for the Middle East, how the upcoming midterm elections could play out, the latest on Ukraine and Russia, and how China could replace the US on an international stage. Whoo, we're cooking with propane and gas today. With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with the inimitable Fareed Zakaria.

Fareed, where does this podcast find you?

Fareed Zakaria (2:51)

New York City, in my office.

Scott Galloway (2:55)

As always, can't even imagine how much I demand yours. Very much appreciate your time.

Let's bust right into it. Last week, OpenAI disclosed six incidents of its models concealing mistakes and seeking unauthorized credentials. And two days later, Meta's new AI agent, Muse, overtook ChatGPT as the free top iOS app in the US. Just curious, kind of my first question is AI question mark. What are your thoughts about the existential threat and how you might think it might shape the midterms, but more specifically, geopolitics?

Fareed Zakaria (3:27)

So, two things to note from those very important news items you pointed out. One, the nature of the break-in is very interesting, because the AI agents chose their own goal. Nobody told them to break into Hugging Face. They were searching for something, and they essentially engaged in something that, at least I would characterize as criminal activity, a cyber break-in, on their own. They tried to hide the work from their human supervisors. They tried to erase records of it, so that there were no logs of it. Some of the agents self-sacrificed, so that the overall mission could be accomplished, the break-in. So this is suggesting you don't need some kind of evil design. If you give the AI a single goal, it will do crazy things.

Unintended consequences here are going to be huge, and we have to think very hard about that. Your second point, which I thought was equally important, the Meta app is now the number one app on the App Store. What does that tell you? It tells you that we are now getting price competition at every level, and the entire race that the hyperscalers, the Googles, the Microsofts have been engaged in, has been on the theory that there are what we would call network economics at play here.