The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:02:49 · Heather Cox Richardson
[00:02:49] S5: It seems to me this is the kind of moment where exactly as you say, there is plenty of room for a new Republican Party, which really is kind of an old Republican Party, and we can talk more about that. But I'm actually really interested on who's left. If MAGA has jumped off a cliff, who's left? And what you're seeing in this election is a number of Republicans who went along with Trump until very recently suddenly jumping ship. And you're seeing that, of course, over the Amy Acton ad, for example. But you're also seeing it in South Carolina where a Republican governor... Former governor just came out and endorsed the, the Darlene Graham's opponent because he said we just can't go this way. You're starting to see that split. Again, very much like the eighteen fifties, which we can talk about. But what you have left standing then on the people who haven't jumped off the cliff is a a a... An entire constituency, a huge constituency that doesn't necessarily know what it stands for yet. And we have as well the injection of a whole bunch of new issues, like data centers, like climate change, like AI, like all these things that people actually don't have a position on necessarily, and they are willing to make common cause in ways that they haven't before. Again, very much like the eighteen fifties. So I'm interested in what's happening with who's left on the table because it looks again to me like, I'm so sorry to say it again, the eighteen fifties where you had a whole bunch of people jumping into the same swimming pool together and saying, listen. We don't agree on immigration. We don't agree on finances. We don't agree on internal improvements. But by God, we can agree that we don't want the elite enslavers to take over our country and turn the rest of into sir... The rest of us into serfs. And when that happened, you got the Republican Party rising, and then, of course, you also got the, the Democratic Party reforming in the the North and coming up with a new approach to a bunch of older problems. And then, of course, we went forward with that system for a long time. And I think we did the same thing in the eighteen nineties and again in the nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties.
00:04:59 · George Hahn
[00:04:59] S3: These midterms are now the most expensive political advertising cycle on record. Ad spending has topped $11,200,000,000, according to The New York Times, more than the entire twenty twenty four presidential election. On Monday, Scott and Jessica Tarlov taped raging moderates live from the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Scott was watching the money.
00:05:26 · Scott Galloway
[00:05:26] S6: If you look at what's happening in Texas, first off, we're spending more money. We're spending, I think, 11,000,000,000 versus 10,000,000,000 in this midterm. This is a midterm after a presidential election and spending has gone up. This is the full local television station employment act, The amount of money that's being poured into this election. And I this is have, I think this is gonna be the biggest knock on effect coming out of this election. And what do I mean by that? They're gonna spend $850,000,000 on a Texas Senate race. I believe they're spending almost a billion dollars to tell people in Waco what they already know. I think this is gonna be the election where the ROI on money drops off the face of a cliff. Where you just for the first time, and we all talk about, and I agree Citizens United is terrible, we need to do away with it. But if you can't buy a senator in deep red Texas for $850,000,000 And I think this is a wonderful thing. I think the ROI on money is about to hit an absolute record low in this race. And the broader picture is, I think we've spent the last forty years trying to determine, talking a lot about how to build wealth. I think we're gonna spend the next ten years or the next few election cycles talking about what are the responsibilities of wealth. And when you have one person, I think it's he said 300,000,000 so far at the midterms, these numbers are hard to wrap your head around. So let me help wrap our heads around that. Say you're worth a million dollars, and you're worried about potentially having your business go away, getting hauled in front of Congress. I mean, you have a real vested interest in keeping one party in power. If you had a million dollars, what would you think of putting, and you had a real interest in getting Republicans elected, would you put $300 into a campaign? That is the equivalent of what it means for Elon Musk to put $300,000,000 into politics when he's worth a trillion dollars. And whereas before, why I've become much more progressive on tax structure, I generally think that the biggest threat, we talk about Citizens United, the biggest threat to democracy is that power corrupts, and absolute power absolutely corrupts.
00:07:48 · Scott Galloway, S1, George Hahn
And in a capitalist society with no campaign spending limits, a trillionaire can basically decide I'm going to spend $300 to swing an election, and that we need progressive tax rates to quite frankly protect us from the tyranny of power. Because when someone can take a small amount of money and pour hundreds of millions of dollars into an election, [00:08:12] S1: and you realize just how this means nothing to him. It literally means nothing [00:08:17] S6: to him. That's a millionaire going out for a nice dinner, is what $300,000,000 from Elon Musk spends. So one, I think the biggest outcome or the most navel gazing as a society we're going to do is, one, the election experts are going to go, wow, the ROI on money has just fallen off a cliff here, which I think is a wonderful thing. But also, what does it mean when you have individuals who for the price of a nice dinner of a millionaire can pour a 0.25 or a $500,000,000 into a campaign? [00:08:51] S3: Back in his conversation with historian Heather Cox Richardson, Scott asked about the eighteen fifties and whether there's a modern equivalent to the question that defined that era.
00:08:51 · George Hahn, Scott Galloway
[00:08:51] S3: Back in his conversation with historian Heather Cox Richardson, Scott asked about the eighteen fifties and whether there's a modern equivalent to the question that defined that era. [00:09:03] S4: The eighteen fifties sort of ended in a war that settled one question. And today it feels as if we don't have one defining issue. We have immigration, trade, AI, bodily autonomy. But I'll put forward a thesis to you. I do think there is one central question that is being asked and potentially answered across the West. And I think that France is sort of the canary in the coal mine. And that is in France, a third of the spending on education is going to teachers who are no longer teaching. Retirees are of greater incomes on average than working Frenchmen and Frenchwomen. And it feels as if young people have been served a bill for a party or a dinner they never got to attend. And it is bubbling up everywhere in terms of a lack of trust in institution, a propensity to riot over whether the match is Me Too or Black Lives Matter or George Floyd, which were all righteous movements, the kerosene we're knee deep in is the fact that the entrants feel like the incumbents continue to vote themselves more money. I see that as the central issue. If there was one issue to be answered or fought over in the... Similar to what the one question that was answered in the eighteen fifties, that it would be entrants versus incumbents, young versus old. React to that thesis.
00:10:32 · Heather Cox Richardson
[00:10:32] S5: I'm gonna react by starting with the eighteen fifties. The question that was answered was not human enslavement. The question that was answered was whether or not the government should protect property that privileged a very few people or whether it protected the good of the community, whether it protected everybody else. And that's where we get and why it becomes such a big deal that the Gettysburg Address in November 1863 talks about a new birth of freedom and the protection of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Because remember, before that, the elite enslavers who controlled the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Senate were very clear that no matter what people wanted... There's a very famous speech. This no matter... It doesn't matter if 99% of American voters want something, they can't have it because the constitution very explicitly prevents the government from doing anything but protecting property. So what Lincoln is really doing is he's bringing white voters, the white male voters in those days, of course, on board, not by saying we're going to get rid of human enslavement on any moral issues, but rather we're going to get rid of the power of that small group of elite southern enslavers to control the American political system and make you end up working for them. And then if you if you redefine that, then I think you look at this moment and you see a very similar question. And I won't speak to France because I am not a specialist in France, and it has its own history, of course, including a very public displays of disaffection with the the government. But I think you are seeing in any number of issues in The United States today, And I think the fight against data centers is the symbol of that, this idea that we do not want a government that reacts only to a very few people in power, because what we're seeing is more pushing back against billionaires than pushing back against retirees, for example, who in fact... Many of whom, in fact, aren't really hurting with the potential cuts to Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and so on. So I think I... If you switch that lens a little bit, it's just always the the same story. A few people want everything, and the rest of us would like a government that actually serves our needs as well.