The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
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
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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.
00:30:41 · Heather Cox Richardson, Scott Galloway
[00:30:41] S1: Well, let's move backward on that one, and I would love to see what you think about this in the sense that it it astonishes me that the people who are openly saying to the American people that there's nothing wrong, the economy's great, and whose wealth is now measured in the hundreds of millions. I mean, numbers that are just unfathomable, billions, billions of dollars, or even a trillionaire. It it astonishes me that they don't seem to understand that that sort of inequality usually ends up involving a piano wire. [00:31:18] S0: Yeah. Or a guillotine. [00:31:19] S1: And I don't... I just don't understand. Yeah. I don't... I I... Do you have any sense of, like, what they're thinking?
00:31:27 · Scott Galloway
[00:31:27] S0: They don't listen to Heather Cox Richardson. They have a total lack of understanding of history. It doesn't... Or they're comfortable that they're... I mean, this is a crude example. A friend of mine who is a tech billionaire has a plane and a go bag in a bunker in New Zealand. And I just said to him, if if quote unquote things really get real here and you have to get on a Gulfstream to head to your bunker in New Zealand, I'm like, you don't think your pilots are gonna kill you and take your shit? I mean, there is no escaping if things really get this bad. And so I don't... I... In some, I don't think they have a historical reference. And also, and I wanna come come back to your comments, and then I'll... But I'll pose another question. I now believe that one of the keys to, you know, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts. When we have one person worth a trillion dollars who's acting like a nation state turning off and on and throttling back battlefield technology, it is the best argument I have heard for exceptionally progressive tax rates were say above say above a $100,000,000, more money than you could ever spend, more money than you could ever want to be happy, and Daniel Kahneman shows above a number much lower than that, you get no incremental happiness. So you're not really losing anything from these individuals, That exceptionally progressive taxation actually protects us from this type of aggregation of power. A lot there. Your thoughts.