The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
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.
00:27:16 · Scott Galloway
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00:29:33 · Scott Galloway
So you had mentioned the nineteen twenties. And on Saturday, you published a history of the decade before the nineteen twenties crash when an economy that benefited too few people collapsed. Meanwhile, the report on people profiting from this administration keeps piling up. Trump's own financial disclosure shows at least 2,200,000,000 in revenue in 2025, up from $622,000,000 the year before he took office. Forbes estimates he's $2,700,000,000 richer than what he won in 2024. And I'd also like to point out that he's making more trades in a single day than Speaker Pelosi, who gets pilloried for this, made has made in the last ten years. He's made more trades than all of the rest of Congress combined. And then my other favorite stat is that the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, when it's at zero, everybody gets the same thing. When it's at one, one person has everything. The French began separating people from their heads when it was at point eight three. It's at point eight five in The US right now. Talk about the twenties and the moment we're in and what it says about, you know, the twenty thirties in The United States.