The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
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.
00:32:52 · Heather Cox Richardson, Scott Galloway
[00:32:52] S1: Well, I would say it also protects them in that that one of the geniuses of democracy and the easy transfer of power is that you can leave office. You know, we think about it protecting the people who are in danger of being, suppressed or injured by a leader. But it also protects a leader and enables them to say, I'm sorry I didn't get elected. I'm gonna go home and, know, play with my grandchildren. [00:33:19] S0: Putin's exit is a window right now.
00:33:21 · Heather Cox Richardson
[00:33:21] S1: That's that's right. And and so one of the things that that strikes me... There's two things that strike me in this moment. One is that you were talking about Democrats and their base at this point. They keep talking about farmers and workers a 100%. They're both hurting. But also key to that is entrepreneurs, is small business people who look at a system that they can't break into and are more than happy in moments of political change to join with the farmers and workers and say, listen. We don't like those billionaires either because we're never gonna be able to break into a market that is monopolized by them. And that's a winning coalition. That's what we've seen again, eighteen fifties, eighteen nineties, and nineteen thirties. But then go looking at the nineteen thirties, I think key to that moment was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic president elected in '32, was very clear that he was not destroying the capitalist system in The United States. He was protecting it. And the... Because he because he said, listen. Look around the world. You've got the rise of fascism, and you got the rise of communism. The only way to maintain this system is to file off the sharp edges of modern day industrial capitalism and turn it into a regulated system whereby individuals really can work hard and rise. And, of course, under him, we get the great compression where there's much less of a distance between the people at the bottom and the people at the top in terms of their income and wealth both than there is, than there has been since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1981 or since it... There was before FDR was elected in '33. So that idea that what Democrats... And and by the way, I... I'm thinking about, again, is that broad coalition that I think is going to change under that label. Parties always change. What they are... Should be arguing and could be arguing is that what they're really trying to do is is go back, if you will, to the future, to a regulated system that protects the American dream. I'm hearing that word a lot again, which I hadn't for a long time, that protects the American dream by making sure people have access to education and to health care and to loans to start a small business and so on because that's the language that FDR managed to use to create this broad coalition.
00:35:48 · Heather Cox Richardson, Scott Galloway
Although, of course, the very wealthy never liked him. One of my favorite cartoons ever is that one from the New Yorker of all the the rich people in their incredibly fine furs and all that stopping. You know, this one stopping by somebody's ballroom and saying, do come along with us. We're going down to the Trans Luxe to hiss Roosevelt. [00:36:10] S0: When I think of the buckets of capitalism or three key agents, I think of the owners, the earners, and the consumers, right? The gal who owns the factory, gal working in it, and the gal buying their products. I see over the last forty years, the rivers of leverage, prosperity, and income have all flowed from consumers and earners up into the owners. And it feels to me like we are ripe. And also I think the boring stuff is what moves the needle here. And the boring stuff that or the boring thing that I think the moons are lining up around is another great era of trust busting. I feel the concentration that's been allowed to happen at a corporate level is just every day extracting more and more rents from earners, lowest percentage of GDP represented by salaries in history, greatest percentage of corporate profits as a percentage of GDP, both happening at the same time. Based on like Teddy Roosevelt like trust busting or breaking up the railroads or a... Even going to the eighties and AT and T, do you think the moons are lining up around a potential another great next era of trust busting?