The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:00:00 · Scott Galloway, Heather Cox Richardson
[00:00:00] S0: Support for the show comes from Odoo. Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in, an all in one business management software that brings every part of your business together from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations. No bouncing between tabs. And best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com/propg. That's odoo.com/propg. Support for the show comes from USA Facts. Income inequality, entitlements, housing costs. Wanna really see what the government is up to, what it costs, who's benefiting? Check out a debate on the American dream between yours truly and conservative Ben Shapiro. It's not your typical sound bites from boring politicians reading talking points. The debate is framed by an informative set of government facts from USA Facts, and then Ben and I get into it. There are sharp differences, some common ground, and data and facts that leave you knowing more. Check out the full debate now on The USA Facts YouTube channel. [00:01:25] S1: Deadlines. Go to monday.com, the AI Workspace platform.
00:01:25 · Heather Cox Richardson, Scott Galloway, S2
[00:01:25] S1: Deadlines. Go to monday.com, the AI Workspace platform. [00:01:32] S0: Episode 419. Four one nine is area code covering Northwestern Ohio. In 2019, a photo of an egg became Instagram's most liked post at the time. True story last year, I went dressed as a chicken for Halloween, and I met someone dressed as an egg, and one thing led to another, and let's just say we answered the age old question, the chicken. [00:01:56] S2: Go. Go. Go. [00:02:05] S0: Welcome to the 419 episode of The Prof G Pod. What's happening? In today's episode, we speak with Heather Cox Richardson, historian at Boston College, author and the voice of the newsletter, Letters from an American. We discussed with Heather where the midterm stand with less than a week to go, corruption in the economy, and the lessons of history, Elon Musk's influence on American politics, and what's at stake for democracy after election day. With that, I absolutely adore professor Richardson. She's probably one of our three favorite guests here on Prof G. So with that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Heather Cox Richardson. Professor, it's always good to see you. [00:02:51] S1: Back at you, professor Galloway. How are you? How's this how's this season treating
00:02:51 · Heather Cox Richardson, Scott Galloway
[00:02:51] S1: Back at you, professor Galloway. How are you? How's this how's this season treating [00:02:56] S0: you? Well, it's great. I I was down for parents weekend at UVA, which feels very American, college football and Jeffersonian, so it's been wonderful. And I see you've been up to a lot of trouble. I keep seeing clips of you hugging female candidates and other historians. It seems like you're out and about. I'm not used to seeing you outside of outside of Maine. Seems like you've been traveling. [00:03:17] S1: I have been traveling. Now I I did travel a lot in 2324 because I had a new book out, and then I went to ground to write another new book, which will be out next September. And so you haven't seen me out and around much, but you will again soon because I do a lot of on the road stuff too, especially now that I'm not teaching at the university. [00:03:35] S0: Okay. Let's bust right into it. You were our first ever Prof G Conversations livestream guest back in June. We were discussing America Two Fifty. Now we're eight days from the midterms with nearly 30,000,000 Americans having already voted. As a historian, is there any point in history that reminds you of this moment where we are now, and what does that say about what might happen over the next several days?
00:04:01 · Heather Cox Richardson, Scott Galloway
[00:04:01] S1: It's funny you say that because I've been telling people it's such a weird time to be a historian because you are watching the news being made around us, the history being made around us, and it's almost like your brain is on a split screen because you can also overlay the past onto where we are now. And, yes, this moment, politically, looks very much to me like the eighteen fifties, the eighteen nineties, and the late nineteen twenties, early nineteen thirties. But it's the 1850 comparison that is the one that is really engaging me intellectually more than the others right now. Because what happened in the eighteen fifties is you had the breakdown of the two major political parties, the Whigs and the Democrats. And from that, you got the rise of a number of new parties and gradually the separation of the political system into an oligarchic party. The Democrats became the oligarchic party. And what was left became the political party, which were the Republicans. And watching what we are doing now looks so much like that. And I'm happy to unpack that if you would like, but it's just a it's just a really funny thing to be watching it happen, to be in it rather than just reading about it in the books from the eighteen fifties. [00:05:15] S0: That's really interesting because we're so focused on whether whether the Democrats take the Senate right now that we might miss a more structural shift. Is there... Are we potentially in a historic moment where the parties could actually be reconstructed as something different?
00:05:15 · Scott Galloway, Heather Cox Richardson
[00:05:15] S0: That's really interesting because we're so focused on whether whether the Democrats take the Senate right now that we might miss a more structural shift. Is there... Are we potentially in a historic moment where the parties could actually be reconstructed as something different? [00:05:31] S1: Oh, I think we are. I I I would lay money on that. And what I find really interesting about it, and and it might be worth us talking about what the eighteen fifties looked like and how those parties broke apart and But what I find really interesting about this moment is that when I have studied political ideology in the past, which is really what interests me, the difference between people's ideas and reality. That has always been my go to intellectually. I have always thought the political ideology essentially came from sort of the the patterns in American political history. That is you'd sorta heard people talking about stuff. You kinda thought about it this way, and it changed a little bit because of that. But I feel like we we are actually seeing right now is political ideology being built from the ground up, somewhat... I won't say haph azardly, but extraordinarily organically. And that's not something that I ever thought was happening in, say, the eighteen fifties or the eighteen nineties. So it's really making me sit back and say, wait a minute. Was Abraham Lincoln really figuring this out intellectually, or was he listening to his neighbor and going, hey, that's not such a bad idea?
00:06:41 · Scott Galloway
[00:06:41] S0: I was speaking to a friend of mine, Anthony Scaramucci, and I said, you should run for president. You'd be a really interesting voice in the race. And I think the more voices, the better. That the primary... The election process is great at making everyone stronger the more voices that are in it, and producing not only the right person, but the right person for the moment. He said, I couldn't get through the Democratic primary. I'm like, no, no, no, no. Your campaign should be to try and reconstitute the GOP, which no longer exists. I'm curious if you think, like, if if if does MAGA survive? Does the GOP reconstruct? While the Democrats are very, know, out of favor right now, I don't see and I'll maybe I'm wrong I don't see this structural change of the Democratic Party where I think there might be opportunity for reformulation or an emergence of a different wing would be around the around the the fissure or the tension I see is between MAGA and what used to be the GOP. Have I have I misdiagnosed that?