Trump and Canada, How ‘Resist and Unsubscribe’ Affects Scott’s Investments, and the Power of Focus

Welcome to Office Hours with Prop g. This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to office hours of prop t media dot com. Again, that's office hours of prop t media dot com, or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode. Our first question comes from Diane Brooks one on Instagram. They say, why do you think Trump is so focused on belittling Canada? The announcers, I don't know. Because they're close or because it's like that movie in Wall Street where Charlie Sheen asked Michael Douglas, why did you have to break this company? And he goes because it was breakable. So Canada is our largest trading partner. So I could see how he might zero in on our he asked for a list of our biggest trading partners. It's not China. Mexico and Canada are actually tied. What was interesting is a colleague of mine at Stern, a guy named Pankaj Gemawat, did he did he's a expert on trade. And his big insight, which I found fascinating, is that if you look all over the world, trade is a function of proximity. And that is 90% of the nations in the world, their biggest trading partner, they share a border with. And it makes sense logistically. It's just easier. You share cultures oftentimes. There's crossover in terms of language. So and the same is true of us. Our two biggest trading partners are Mexico and Canada. He's also sort of zeroed in, I think, incorrectly on the notion that, past trade deals have disadvantaged The US, and Canada was central to his push to replace NAFTA with the USMCA. He tends to highlight bilateral trade imbalances and sector by sector outcomes, and he frequently points to specific industries, especially things like he likes the kind of tangible stuff, dairy, autos, lumber, steel, and aluminum, where he says Canadian policies or experts hurt US producers. And these industries are typically more important with kind of what he perceives as the real America on people he feels are advantageous to him politically and tend to side with them, whether it's farmers or the manufacturing states in the industrial Midwest. So, also, I wonder if he just sees it as a real estate play that, oh, it's our neighbor. Let's buy their house. The problem is it's around all of this, it's just really fucking stupid. And that is we let's look at oil. We they they transferred us oil and energy and shale in its raw form, and we add value to it, and we get a discount on it because of proximity, and we sell it at a much higher margin. They have manufacturing plants where they produce cars, parts go back and forth. …