The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:05:10 · George Hahn
Difficult to decipher as the line between gangsters and state officials was drawn in pencil. Owners who guessed wrong lost their companies and sometimes their lives. Russians called these shakedowns, a bastardization of the Wall Street corporate raider concept minus the tender offer. Has measurable costs. In a 2016 paper, researchers at the World Bank and Moscow's Higher School of Economics surveyed nearly 2,000 Russian manufacturers and found that firms in regions with heavy rating were a third less likely to make capital investments than those in regions with low levels of rating. Under Putin, Ridershva became state policy with the 2003 dismantling of Yukos, then the largest oil company in Russia. From that point forward, one Russia analyst wrote in 2025, the message was unmistakable. Property rights existed at the pleasure of the Kremlin. The first thing we do is let's kill all the lawyers, is uttered by the villainous right hand man to Jack Cade, who's leading a rebellion against the king in Shakespeare's Henry the sixth part two. The line has multiple readings, see Shakespeare, but as Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in a 1985 opinion, Shakespeare insightfully realized that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government. Trump grasps this intuitively. No Shakespeare required. In his second term, Trump has fired or pushed out half the lawyers working at the Justice Department. At the SEC, the agency tasked with enforcing laws that are foundational to the world's deepest capital markets, one in six employees has been nudged to the exit. More important for wrongdoers with the right connections, the SEC has brought only five enforcement actions all year, down from eighty two years ago. Meanwhile, Trump bought shares in Oracle while brokering a Raderschfa style deal for the company to acquire TikTok. He purchased NVIDIA shares, then cleared the way for it to sell chips to China despite national security concerns. And while dangling his regulatory blessing for a sale of Warner Bros. Discovery to either Netflix or Paramount, Trump bought shares in all three companies. At the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, an obscure federal regulator that has jurisdiction over crypto, Trump has reduced staffing by 22%, causing enforcement actions to fall to 80% of the annual average over the past decade.
00:08:29 · George Hahn
Good timing as Trump went on to earn $1,400,000,000 from his meme coin and crypto empire last year despite previously calling crypto a scam. Last week, a lawsuit against World Liberty Financial accused Trump of defrauding shareholders and violating constitutional restrictions on accepting foreign money. Finally, Trump has gutted the IRS, reducing the total headcount by 25% while slashing the unit that audits high net worth individuals by nearly 40%. Spoiler alert, audit rates have hit a historic low. Not that Trump is personally worried. He secured immunity from audits. If you're a white collar criminal, this is your golden age. Comedian Eddie Izzard once joked that humans are incapable of comprehending crimes at scale. If somebody kills someone, you go to prison, he said. Someone who's killed 100,000 people were almost going, well done. You killed 100,000? You must get up very early in the morning. Trump is an early riser. Journalist Isaac Saul, founder of the nonpartisan news site Tangle, attempted to document the scale of Trump's corruption. In a post from May and a follow-up this month, he identified nearly 100 instances of alleged corruption, self dealing, and conflicts of interest. Examples include bribes for regulatory favors, pay to play pardons, crypto schemes, trading on inside information in the equities and prediction markets, an insider trading subscription service run through truth social, foreign governments pouring money into Trump family ventures ahead of favorable US policy decisions, and the president's children taking stakes in companies awarded federal contracts. Exact numbers are buried in lagging disclosures and opaque books, but a New York Times investigation estimates the president made $2,200,000,000 his first year back in office. A decade ago, Trump campaigned on a promise to drain the swamp. The charge resonated because corruption, self dealing, and conflicts of interest are bipartisan, fueling the sentiment that the greatest gains accrue to the most powerful. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that analyzed lawmakers' stock trades found that congressional leaders outperformed rank and file lawmakers in investment gains by as much as 47 percentage points.
00:11:35 · George Hahn
Former house speaker Nancy Pelosi, who's long been criticized for opposing a ban on congressional stock trading, registered a 166 x increase in her stock portfolio from 1987 to 2024. But compared to Trump, Pelosi's an amateur. Since 2014, she's made 213 stock trades. In a single day, shortly before pausing his liberation day tariffs, he made 327 trades. Trump isn't draining the swamp. He's swamping our ability to keep up with his crimes. Power corrupts, but Robert Caro, who spent five decades studying power as he chronicled Lyndon Johnson's rise and fall, came to believe something else too. Power always reveals. Give someone enough of it, and you find out what they wanted all along and what they're willing to do to get more of it. Of all Trump's corruption, two acts reveal the most about his motives. In presiding over the forced sale of TikTok's US business at an estimated 94% discount, Trump, along with the buyers, betrayed the free market. On the front end, he abused his power, forcing a sale on his terms. On the back end, he divided up the spoils with his political allies. Similar to the lesson Russian investors learned when Putin dismantled Yukos, American investors now know the president, not the markets, dictates valuations, deal terms, and who can buy what. Trump's betrayal of Ukraine and, by extension, the West cuts even deeper. Less than a month after signing the bipartisan Lindsey Graham sanctioning Russia and Iran act, Trump waived sanctions on Russia, cutting a deal to buy diesel. Later, he effectively ratified Elon Musk's decision to restrict Ukrainian access to Starlink and Starshield. Put simply, we're financing Russia's war and sabotaging Ukraine's defenses. But wait, there's more. By helping Russia, which gives Iran intelligence, technology, and diplomatic backing, we're indirectly helping our enemies in Tehran. As Tom Nichols, retired professor at the US Naval War College explained, Trump either believes he has Putin on a shorter leash regarding Iran or he just doesn't care that US tax dollars are funding the Iranian weapons killing American troops. There's a word for that. Traitor. What does Trump gain in exchange for selling out America and our allies? Answer, we don't know, but every autocrat sees the signal. American foreign policy is for sale.
00:14:47 · George Hahn, Scott Galloway, S1, S4
Winning back congress won't fix this mess overnight, but subpoenas and investigations can unearth corruption and ultimately arm a reconstituted DOJ with the evidence it will need to achieve a reckoning. When I sold l two, the process was boring. There were rules we all played by and an absence of fear that bad political actors would insert themselves into the process. That's what a country looks like when the rules apply to everyone. On November 3, let's make America boring again. [00:15:30] S2: Life is so rich. [00:15:37] S1: When you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but buyers won't sign without proof that your product is secure, especially if it has AI. Vanta gets you compliant fast with SOC two, ISO 27,001, and more, and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring. Hyperbound, a YC backed startup, used Vanta to unlock the Fortune 100 in under a year. Snowfire got audit ready in a month and closed a multimillion dollar deal. Trust matters. Get started at vanta.com. [00:16:05] S4: From the studio that brought you WandaVision. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore. It's like I'm losing my The vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't for real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible? Don't miss the two episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like mortal jeopardy. Now streaming only on Disney plus.