The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:17:24 · Scott Galloway
[00:17:24] S0: Centering analogy because the way you're framing it is that the 1% who were the... Also happened to be the slave owners who had the majority of private property. I mean, the analogy is striking when you put it that way, because essentially what we're talking about is income inequality, right? Where a small number of people engage in regulatory capture and just start to run away with it. I saw this crazy stat that since 2022, people aged 75 and above have increased their net worth to 37%, and people under the age of 25 have seen their net worth plummet by 23%. What typically happens though? Like, how does that... I see I see, to your point, data centers for me, I I don't... I I think some of the notion around the water and the noise, I know there are issues, but it's an age old problem. Nobody wants a chicken processing plant or a factory or nuclear power plant down the river. That is... That always happens. But this seems especially angry because I think these data centers are a vessel for anger around income inequality. And people now look at the quote unquote, they no longer refer to them as the billionaire class, but as the Epstein class. How does that usually play out though in terms of not only elections swinging one way or the other, how does it play out in terms of new laws, new approach to government? I would argue the last forty years has been all about how to create wealth, and the next decade is gonna be about the responsibilities of wealth. But I don't know exactly how that bubbles up and manifests in terms of laws or political movements. Any thoughts?
00:18:55 · Heather Cox Richardson
[00:18:55] S1: I have a lot of thoughts on this, and they may or may not be right. But isn't that the central question? How do you transfer frustration on the part of voters or nonvoters, people who are not people with power or money? How does that translate into actual political change? And this spends... I spent a great deal of time on this question when I was writing my book on the Republican Party because my whole... All of my books had been about... And all my work had been about sort of the political zeitgeist, how ideas get written into laws. And my argument at the time until I was writing that book was that, essentially, you had the construction of ideas that show up in newspapers. You see them in political speeches and so on. And in order to stay in office, lawmakers put those things into law. And then I'm writing a Republican book, and a lot comes down to this stupid dinner party in which, basically, one guy is trying to flex his muscles, and he... You know, it... There's only about six people involved. And this was actually a real intellectual crisis for me because if, in fact, a dinner party made the difference between the way Reconstruction played out, what did that say about all my ideas about zeitgeist and people whose ideas being important and all that? And and I spent... I actually stopped writing for a number of months and really dug into the political theory of what happens in translation of ideas to policy and vice versa. And what I came to believe through the help of actually a scholar, a friend of mine who's a scholar of Brazil and does a lot of work in political work... Political theory there, is that what happens is if if people are generally happy, they're not necessarily paying a lot of attention to politics. There are couple people who are saying, hey. These are... Things aren't so great, and everybody thinks of them as sort of whack a doodle. Right? They're not paying attention to them. But the more the people in power are not responding to the people on the ground, the more those people who are unhappy start to speak up and start to find each other. And that's fine. They can find each other, and they can grumble, but still they're not running politics. Right?
00:21:09 · Heather Cox Richardson
But what seems to turn the trick is that as you get new people moving into politics and wanting to break the stranglehold of the political system that is controlled by a very few people, they start to become the vehicles for that argument that people on the ground are making, and they start to feed it as well. And I can tell you how how how we get to there. But that idea that the more people who speak up, the more they will affect, not necessarily the people in office. Nobody is going to be changing Ron Johnson's opinion at this point. Right? But they affect the positions of the people who are trying to get into office who then get voted in by those people. That's how you change the political system. And that feels very much like what we're seeing now. You see the rise of a candidate like, like, Nixon in Florida, for example, or the rise of Brian Poindexter in Iowa. These these people who could not have broken into the system 10 ago, but who now are looking... Are running really, really strong. And so that idea that you change society by speaking up, by demanding things of your leaders, but also of the rising leaders, and you elect them. That's how we got the eighteen nineties and the nineteen oughts and the progressive era was simply a peaceful transition of power into the hands of numerically younger, but also politicians with new ideas who couldn't get a foothold ten years before they were finally pushed into power around 1900.
00:22:38 · Scott Galloway
[00:22:38] S0: So everyone's focused on the next eight days. I've I've been thinking a lot about day nine, and that is let's let's assume for fun, take the house, Democrats take the senate. I'm worried that the Democrats are mistaking a fling for real love. That the way I would describe the Democrats right now in the populace is they hate us less. But to believe that all of a sudden we have a mandate going into '28, I feel like day one, we've got two years to show we're the party of ideas versus just indignance and shame and hand wringing. I don't think that carries us into '28. If you were advising the Democratic Party and assume that they get control of Congress, when has party movements sustained and been successful, and what are the attributes, features, and behaviors of parties who are able to capitalize on midterm elections establish a relationship with centrist as opposed to just a fling? Because right now, it feels like the Democratic Party does not have a lot of love. Everyone's calling this a blue wave. I would call it a red riptide. And that is, okay. It's not us folks. It's them. And I mean that in both a good and a bad way. Your thoughts.
00:23:52 · Heather Cox Richardson
[00:23:52] S1: I I agree with you. But that being said, again, pretty common in the periods of great change where the initial vote is against the other party. And then the the trick is for the party in power to hit the ground running, and I think the Democrats have been pretty clear about the fact they wanna start right off with extending the child tax credit, which is enormously popular. Extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies, again, enormously popular. One of the things about this moment is there's so much low hanging fruit that they can, at least in the house, bring to a vote and pass, and then if they have the senate put pressure on Republicans to vote in favor of. And then if Trump or Vance then vetoes it, then that's hanging around the necks again of the Republicans. So I don't think that we're in a... In an unusual place there. I think it's one that the Democrats have to capitalize on. But I would also say one of the things that always surprises me is what happened after Watergate. We tend to forget that period, which I think is really interesting because, of course, we get the Watergate babies in '74, and people... They're elected in '74. They take office in seventy five, nineteen in both of those cases. And in 7576, they pass a slew of legislation to reign in the power of the president. Much of what Trump is overturning now comes from that 7470... Late seventy four, seventy five, seventy six period. And then you really get... You get, Carter elected in '76, and then you actually get dramatic legislation in 7778 that is social welfare legislation, progressive legislation, and people tend to forget that because then we get the oil crisis and then we get the hostage crisis, and they tend to just think, oh, nothing got done in the seventies. But if you actually look at the laws that get passed in '77, '78, it's enough of a progressive menu that it has made me wonder, contrary to as much of what I've written in the past, if what is really driving the Reagan revolution and Ronald Reagan at the end of the seventies is that period of four years of legislation even more than his opposition to civil rights from the, you know, the nineteen fifties.
00:26:07 · Scott Galloway, S3
[00:26:07] S0: We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Superhuman. There's a [00:26:19] S3: lot of potential for AI assistants to make your job easier, but not if every ass starts with you debriefing the entirety of the project from scratch. Ideally, you'd be following along from the start and ready to jump in as soon as you need help. Superhuman says they've got the solution. Superhuman Go comes from the makers of Grammarly. It can embed in the tools you and your team already use, but was ready to help without having to switch apps or break your flow. It can help you make sense of Advanced Message thread, help you get ready for a meeting, or catch a typo before you hit send. And when you get stuck, Go can help you brainstorm, outline, or review relevant context so you don't lose your place. It's basically an AI assistant that's always on, always ready to help. Bottom line, Superhuman is built for people who take their work seriously and expect their tools to do the same. You can try Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com.