The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:26:37 · Laura Jáner, Brian Winter
[00:26:37] S2: were. Mhmm. [00:26:38] S3: And so, you know, maybe that's maybe that's another broader lesson as well.
00:26:43 · Laura Jáner
[00:26:43] S2: Totally. I'd love to come back to The US parallels. And I'll start with one that I'll pose, which is the vibe session, a term that's kinda used in in The US. And I think it applies to Brazil because on paper, Lula's economy seemed to be doing well. You know, unemployment was was low and wages were growing, but Brazilians don't feel it. In a September poll, 49% of Brazilians said the economy had gotten worse over the past year and only 19% said it had gotten better and Americans truly will recognize this from the Biden years. And... But, I mean, on the unemployment point, a lot of the explanation is what kind of jobs those are. Nearly four in 10 Brazilian workers are in the informal economy, and almost 2,000,000 now drive or deliver full time for apps like Uber and other delivery apps, mostly because they couldn't find another job. And the Financial Times had a recent article about this where they described it as the Uberization of Brazil. So, I mean, the low unemployment number, least, we can't take at face value. And another part is the debt. A record of nearly 84,000,000 Brazilians are behind other payments in some of the... At some of the highest interest rates in the world. I would love to know how, like, you square sort of these... The the headline numbers that, you know, growth was fine and, you know, the situation wasn't as dire with what voters seem to be telling posters. And how much do you think this economy sort of factored into the election at least compared with maybe corruption like we were talking about? Do you think this is a fair comparison at least with the with The US?
00:28:14 · Brian Winter, Laura Jáner
[00:28:14] S3: Oh, I do. I mean, look. I think there are two main issues at work here. The first one is that people struggle. Yeah. And jobs are not as high quality as they used to be. Traditionally, certainly when Lula was coming up in politics, the pathway to the middle class in Brazil lied with a formal sector job, usually in a factory, usually in industry. In fact Lula's party, the workers party, is built around that idea. [00:28:51] S2: Yeah. [00:28:51] S3: The trade unions that were so strong in the nineteen seventies and eighties. But as elsewhere, including The United States, industry in Brazil has eroded. Values have changed somewhat, and it's happened in a relatively short period of time. When I was a reporter living in Sao Paulo during the first half of the twenty ten's, that was still an era where people were so proud to have a Cartera Sinada. [00:29:23] S2: Yeah.
00:29:23 · Brian Winter
[00:29:23] S3: Which means in English that's like a assigned notebook. And it's the little notebook where if you have a formal sector job, your employer provides a written record that you have that job and then and then signs it. And for a generation of Brazilians this was their maximum aspiration. Not only did it mean a certain economic prosperity or at least safety, but it was also a source of prestige and pride in a lot of segments of the working class to have that kind of job. Well, today, not only have a lot of those jobs disappeared because of competition mainly from China, but also Brazilians in polls say that they would rather work for themselves. And that is a big change in the span of about ten years. So while it's true that yes, some people are making ends meet through Uber and through other gig work, Some of that is by necessity. Yeah. But a lot of it is by choice. And the Bolsonaro family appeared to have benefited from that switch until, you know, in the end it was not enough for them to get elected. The other point I would make just regarding the parallels is, you know, the economic forces at work in Brazil are very similar to what we saw in the twenty twenty four election here in The United States, where at first President Biden and later Vice President Harris seemed kind of disoriented by the amount of dissatisfaction out there in the world because the headline numbers of the economy were good. As you noted, Brazilian unemployment is at an all time low. Inflation is also under control at about 4%. But there are a variety of other things happening within the economy, including very very high interest rates that mean that affordability is really a concern. And it's been funny to see Brazilian newspapers over the course of this year use the English word affordability when they're talking about this subject, and yet more proof of how some of these ideas and agendas get passed back and forth between our countries.
00:31:47 · Laura Jáner
[00:31:47] S2: Definitely. For a lot of Brazilians, this felt like another, like I said before, an election between the lesser of two evils. Right? People didn't seem excited, like you said, about either candidate. In a way, it's felt like that for for several cycles now, especially as Lula has been candidate for many elections in the past decades. But there is a sense of, like, disillusionment at least with with Brazilian politics and kind of especially with both the right and the left's failure to produce sort of like more moderate candidates. And Brazil still struggles as kind of a stagnated country and and with full growth, etcetera. But would you say you are bullish on Brazil?
00:32:27 · Brian Winter
[00:32:27] S3: Look. I am a mix on this question. I think on the one hand, Brazil has all kinds of... Not just potential. I I actually... I've developed in twenty five years of following Brazil, I've developed an allergy to the word potential. Because I feel like it's used to describe like a a kind of ideal, like a fantasy land that everybody kind of knows is just a way to sound optimistic, but not really be optimistic. I prefer the word opportunity, and Brazil has concrete opportunities in front of it. It is an exceptional producer of food for the world, number one in so many areas, whether it's beef, soy, iron ore. It's the biggest producer of oil in Latin America now as well. It's not Venezuela or or Mexico. It's... Or even Guyana. It's it's Brazil. And it has the advantage in today's convulsed world of being distant from the world's conflict zones, both geographically Yeah. And geopolitically. Brazil tries to have good relations with everybody in part because it can because of its geographic location, but also in part because they think it helps sales. Like, you can sell to everybody. So why not have that good relationship? And it's funny because I say that sometimes to Brazilian audiences, and I see people kind of look at me skeptically. Like, oh, this is, you know, here's a gringo who's trying to to, you know, to sound nice and sound complimentary. But I'll tell you, I speak to audiences all over the world about Brazil and about Latin America, And the further afield you travel, the more you're likely to see people nodding because people in places like Dubai or Tokyo or Europe or even The United States understand how important these advantages are. So why do I have a mixed outlook? Because I think that the next period of time could be difficult for Brazil, the next year or so especially. These challenges that Lula faces with getting not only the government's debts, but household debts under control. There's polling suggesting that Brazilian households on average are spending 30% of their income servicing their debts, in part because they've run up credit cards, but also in part because they've engaged in these betting apps which have been so prominent over the last couple years. He's gonna have... Lula's also gonna have to deal with a congress that is much much much much more conservative than he is.