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Brian Winter

Things Brian Says on Podcasts

Where to Find Them

Brian Winter writes Latin America in Focus . They have also been a guest on The Lawfare Podcast (5 times) , The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition (5 times) , Prof G Media (2 times) , The Grant Williams Podcast , The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway , Conversations with Tyler and The Foreign Affairs Interview .

Recently: “Brazil’s Election Comeback and What America Can Learn” on Prof G Media (November 2026); “Brazil’s Election Comeback and What America Can Learn” on The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway (November 2026); “What America Can Learn From Brazil’s Election” on Prof G Media (November 2026); “The Hundred Year Pivot Ep. 11 – Brian Winter” on The Grant Williams Podcast (January 2026); “Lawfare Archive: Brian Winter on the Imminent Election Crisis in Brazil” on The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition (September 2025); “Lawfare Archive: Brian Winter on the Imminent Election Crisis in Brazil” on The Lawfare Podcast (September 2025).

What They Said

“I've developed in 25 years of following Brazil an allergy to the word potential, because I feel like it's a fantasy land that everybody knows is just a way to sound optimistic but not really be optimistic. I prefer the word opportunity.” — Brian Winter, The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway

Asked whether he is bullish on Brazil, Winter lists its real advantages but warns about household and government debt, before giving this verdict on how people talk about the country.

The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · 2026-11-04 Permalink → Listen →
The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway Around 29:08 into the episode
Brian Winter

…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.

Laura Janér

…at least 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 with low growth, et cetera. But would you say you are bullish on Brazil?

Brian Winter

Look, I am a mix on this question. I think on the one hand, Brazil has all kinds of not just potential. I actually, I've developed in 25 years of following Brazil, I've developed an allergy to the word potential because I feel like it's used to describe like 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 Mexico, or even Guyana. It's Brazil. And it has the advantage in today's convulsed world of being distant from the world's conflict zones, both geographically 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…

Laura Janér

Yeah, I love that answer, and it's how I'd answer it too. So you spent a decade reporting from Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and you've written about what you call Latin America's revolution of the rights. Since Trump returned to office, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuador, and Honduras have…

Brian Winter

Some of it because of the unique dynamics of this campaign that we've described, the problematic nature of the Bolsonaro family, whose leadership of the Brazilian conservative movement is now very much in doubt, especially after Flavio Bolsonaro fled the country. I think he, in doing so, he has…

Laura Janér

Yeah. I don't know if you heard of that book, Uberzin Lu Xpello, Brazil in the Mirror, where there's big research done that found that actually the average Brazilian citizen is kind of conservative and right-wing, right? I think that was the takeaway from the book, which I was very surprised about…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“Lula, at the age of 80, acquired his first smartphone in the final two weeks of the campaign… A young congressman, very close to Lula but kept at arm's length during the first round, was liberated to build out a digital army. He took a group of some 50,000 people and renamed it Lula's Army. By the end of the campaign, this group had 10 million people. If you had to point to one thing that turned Lula's campaign around, it was that.” — Brian Winter, The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway

Asked what turned Lula from trailing after Brazil's first round to winning the runoff, Winter credits a WhatsApp-driven operation run by a small group of young aides, which politicians across Latin America now want to copy.

The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · 2026-11-04 Permalink → Listen →
The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway Around 14:06 into the episode
Brian Winter

…of Brazil. But there have been so many parallels really since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and then the election of Jair Bolsonaro two years later. So I think there's a lot that our countries have in common as well. So when it comes to why we should care, I would start with those things.

Laura Janér

…of surprising turnaround. And one last follow-up. The U.S. midterms are, as this is released this week. So is there anything in how Lula turned this around that America Can on either side should also kind of pay attention to? What do you think of the three weeks between the first and second round?

Brian Winter

…days for me because I certainly, you know, we all sensed that the momentum was shifting in Lula's direction, but none of us expected it would swing quite this much. And I do wonder if there are lessons for Democrats in the United States or perhaps anybody anywhere looking to run a campaign in 2026 where the technological landscape has changed so much. And I would start with this basic fact. Lula, at the age of 80, acquired his first smartphone in the final two weeks of the campaign. And, you know, part of your audience may think, whoa, why didn't he have one before? And that's a good question. You know, he was an old school politician, really a man of the 20th century. That was when he had his political rise, was during the 1970s and the 1980s. But this is also a story of a modern digital operation that came out of nowhere in the space of three weeks between the first…

Laura Janér

But to that point, I'd love to ask you: how much do you think this win we can credit to Lula himself versus how much do you think he was simply writing like an anti-Bolsonaro wave? And for some context, there's like high rejection to the Bolsonaro name in Brazil because of their association with an…

Brian Winter

I'm not sure Lula himself knows the answer to that question as we sit here today. This is what everyone's trying to figure out. I mean, look, there are philosophical questions. That you've raised about why people vote the way they do. Do they go into the ballot box thinking, oh gosh, I'm so happy…

Laura Janér

Yeah, I'm sure. I mean, I was born in 2001, so I have never known Brazil without Pete, which is Lula's party. Most of it was Lula himself, except for the four years of Polsonado we had in 2018 to 22.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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