Beyond this week’s talks between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump, there’s an epic tale that has been unfolding for decades. It’s a battle to be the world’s number one power and a much bigger story than the latest meeting of these two men.

Kishore Mahbubani is a former Singaporean diplomat who served as president of the United Nations Security Council. For two decades, he has argued that the West fundamentally misunderstands the rise of China and its challenge to American supremacy.

Mahbubani. who eventually turned to academia, now specializes in governance and public policy. In this conversation with Mishal Husain, he traces the story behind the Xi-Trump talks, the handshakes and the social media posts–and what may lie ahead.

Mahbubani also reveals how his own successes were made possible by Singapore’s remarkable growth.

Read this interview with Mishal’s notes on Bloomberg Weekend: www.bloomberg.com/Mishal

03:34 - “The most important contest of our time”
5:50 - “It's not about personalities”
6:26 - “China can no longer be stopped”
07:28 - US versus China: It’s a “zero-sum” game
08:40 - Bill Clinton’s first meeting with Jiang Zemin
12:35 - Cold War Comparisons
18:30 - Growing up in Singapore in the 1950s
19:53 - "My mother never cracked”
26:25 - “China has become a tiger”
30:24 - US war is a “gift” to China

Contact The Mishal Husain Show mishalshow@bloomberg.net

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For a brief moment in 2017, Anthony Scaramucci became a unit of time. His 11-day stint as White House communications director was so short-lived that it entered the political lexicon.

Almost a decade on, he has proven more durable than the joke. The Trump loyalist-turned-critic, Wall Street financier and podcast host remains a well-known figure in American political culture.

Scaramucci is still holding forth on the US president he once backed, as well as bets that have shaped his own career, including on crypto and Sam Bankman-Fried.

In this conversation with Mishal Husain, Scaramucci talks about his early life, his mistakes and his view of the political landscape ahead of the midterm elections.

Read this interview with Mishal’s notes on Bloomberg Weekend: www.bloomberg.com/latest/weekend-interview

03:00 - The midterms are “a longtime off”
06:58 - “I’m a loyalist”
08:35 - Who’s Trump’s successor?
08:55 - A president needs “name recognition”
11:41 - Meeting Trump for the first time
13:14 - Trump’s “phenomenal political instincts”
14:45 - Joining the Trump campaign
16:11 - “Donald Trump was talking to my Dad”
20:56 - Getting fired by Trump
24:16 - It was “humiliating”
25:56 - Meeting Sam Bankman-Fried
27:53 - “I made false assumptions”
31:18 - Bitcoin “I want to judge it over a five or 10 year period”
33:05 - Growing up on Long Island
35:17 - “The Mooch”
37:17 - The future of the Democrats
44:51 - History is a guide

Contact The Mishal Husain Show mishalshow@bloomberg.net

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For more than 30 years, the Indian-born writer Amitav Ghosh has built a global following with novels that draw on deep historical research.

But his latest offering, Ghost-Eye, is more esoteric. The plot moves back and forth between India and the US, using past lives to explore the ties between the personal and the political.

The plot centers on a psychiatrist treating a 3-year-old who shocks her family by insisting she remembers a past life in a fishing community.

In this conversation with Mishal Husain, Ghosh explains why he’s finding it harder to write nowadays, how the memories of his childhood came flooding back during the Covid pandemic, why he sees capitalism as an obstacle to protecting the environment and thinks India has lost its way diplomatically.

Read this interview with Mishal’s notes on Bloomberg Weekend: www.bloomberg.com/latest/weekend-interview

03:37 - “She had a near-death experience”
05:37 - Reincarnated past lives
08:05 - “The world has lost all its wonder”
08:28 - Growing up in Kolkata
10:56 - Kolkata and New York are the “opposite ends of the telescope”
11:44 - “I really learned to think against the grain”
12:13 - Creating a “bubble of tranquility” to write
12:32 - Writing from “within the crisis”
14:45 - India has lost its way diplomatically
16:25 - Watching Zohran Mamdani grow up
19:12 - India and China
23:11 - Writing a story to be read in 100 years
27:31 - Writing books by hand

Contact The Mishal Husain Show mishalshow@bloomberg.net

Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.