The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:57:01 · Heather Cox Richardson
[00:57:01] S1: Well, on both of them, first of all, I think that that is... The latter is a reflection of the fact the American people have woken up and remembered that it is in fact their country and that they have agency to change the future. And that kind of organizing, you can't buy with money. And you've seen that in... And you saw that in Brazil, right, over the, over the the weekend. So there's that. I will say about about older people in office that we are in, I think, a unique moment right now because of the extraordinary improvements in health care over the last, you know, twenty, thirty years so that people are able to still, you know, be in public in a way that they weren't in our parents' generation, for example. And if you couple that with the reliability of air travel so that people don't have to have the grueling... You know, think about the Supreme Court in the early years. You literally had to ride a horse around the circuit, you know, and you weren't gonna have somebody who was 90 out there riding the circuit. It was a young person's game. And those two changes, we haven't yet reflected in our political system, but there's no reason to think we won't. Because, yeah, I I actually heard a focus group talking about this... The senate race here in Maine, and senator Susan Collins, the Republican who's running for a seat against Democrat Troy Jackson, is 72 years old, but she has some sort of a condition that makes her seem a great deal older than that. And one of the people who was a Collins voter in a focus group said she would not be a Collins voter this time around because... And I... This is not a direct quote, but she essentially said, I don't wanna pay for her nursing home in the senate the same way we paid for Mitch McConnell's. And I was like, woah. And then I thought, honestly, that's not really unfair.
00:58:48 · Scott Galloway
[00:58:48] S0: Average age of Americans is 38. Average age of our elected officials is 62. I see McConnell, Ginsburg, Feinstein, it's just it's become ghoulish. It's become very strange. And I also just I wonder if they when you're that age, if you price in the risk of your policies on youth, and if you're able to grasp an increasingly technological society, and also a component of democracy I believe is churn and shedding new skin. And to your point, what you said was really powerful about one of the benefits of a democracy versus an autocracy. It gives them kind of peace with honor and an exit. I think I think Mitch McConnell's family should be ashamed of themselves for putting them through that. It just strikes me that at some point someone, our kids, should come to us, professor, and say, you know, mom, dad, it's time to come home. And I think term limits and age gating, if you will, actually give more dignity... You know, provide the same type of dignity and graceful exit you're talking about that democracy provides. So we'll go... Sorry. Go ahead, Heather.
01:00:00 · Heather Cox Richardson
[01:00:00] S1: Well, there's also, I think, the... A corollary to the fact that we're in this moment where you do have this twenty to thirty year period that our parents didn't have is that we don't really talk as a society enough about what that should look like. And somebody said to me a number of books ago, this is the most famous you're ever gonna be, ironically. Right? What are you gonna do with the rest of your life? Like, what is your next move? And I remember being really taken aback, but spending time and thinking, yeah. What do I want to do going forward? And what I wanted was to support other people. And just having that question asked when I was in my fifties feels like that's something we should put more of an emphasis on so that people don't get to be 80 and still clinging to what... Not just, by the way, in politics, but also in business or in any profession. It is time to not just to pass the torch, but to to invest in younger generations.
01:00:55 · Scott Galloway
[01:00:55] S0: I see it in academia. I see it in politics. I see it in business. The thing that I really think plagues society is people who won't leave. And I, you know, people who won't... I was just thinking about Christiane Amanpour, who after forty five years or forty three years is leaving CNN. Clarissa Ward is gonna take her place and outstanding. I'm like, there's a dignity to saying, okay. It's time for me to make room for younger people. Last question about technology. I believe the rise of social going on mobile has created an atmosphere for almost everything really awful in the world. I think social media on mobile has created atmospherics for it. A decline in the trust of our institutions, an increase in not shared truths, but shared lies. I'm curious for your thoughts about historically, whether it's the printing press or newspapers or radio or TV. This moment with this technology, well, one, do you buy that thesis that social media has been a real social ill for democracy and, two, any historical references that help us understand where it heads or what we can do about it.
01:02:05 · Heather Cox Richardson
[01:02:05] S1: So it's interesting you would say that, and this is probably a glass half full or half empty response in that if you look at the disinformation that has traveled over social media, a 100%, it's been vile. But you can also turn around and look at the fact that we've been able to create extraordinarily strong democratic movements thanks to social media. And you look at some place like the American South during Reconstruction when you had the arrival of the KKK, there was nothing a black family could do. They couldn't call their neighbors to them. They couldn't say, hey. I'm worried these guys are in the neighborhood. They were on their own. And you compare that to what happened in Minneapolis with the ICE agents there. You could reach out to people and say, I need help here right now. And, of course, that made it possible to push back on them. What I would... And and then you also have the fact that the social media has made it impossible now for politicians to say one thing to one audience and something else to another audience, which looks very much like the telegraph. Once you had the telegraph giving information about what a politician said in Southern Illinois, for example, versus Northern Illinois. There was a big split across the center of the state. That's what gave rise to people like Abraham Lincoln who said, hey. I'm talking the same way on both sides of this line. Stephen Douglas is not. So it definitely changes a lot of things up. But I think what I would say about that is, like everything else, we need to have guardrails around how we use any new technology. And I'm a huge defender of the First Amendment, so I'm not at all about people in the government trying to corral what people can say on social media, but I do think that the algorithms that give privilege to bots and trolls and disinformation should and could be regulated. And then we would take that tool and turn it into something that is predominantly good rather than predominantly bad. I feel your pain on that one, though, because the stuff that's out there is horrible, vile, and, of course, was instrumental in giving us Donald Trump. The same token, we could also use it the other way.
01:04:14 · Scott Galloway, Heather Cox Richardson
[01:04:14] S0: About halfway through my question, I realized that social media and new technologies and substack have given us Heather Cox Richardson. I just don't know if you would have the same impact and the same real time ability to communicate and have the... Like Doris Kearns Goodwin, fantastic historian. There's been amazing history, the guy who wrote the Churchill books. They wrote books and taught classes. So they had a big impact on hundreds of people daily, but their impact on millions of people was very intermittent. And [01:04:45] S1: Well, we also got to work around the gatekeepers. That that is that is is... So the voices that are out there now, I think one of the things pushing this moment, the voices that are out there are voices that did not get traction until they could work around the gatekeepers. [01:04:59] S0: Or they got fired by the gatekeepers. That's right. Said, I'm gonna keep going. [01:05:02] S1: Oh, and and look at the difference that's made in so many different people who are somewhat unleashed. I mean, I think the best example of that is Paul Krugman who... You know, he was fine at the times, but, boy, now that he's writing on his own every day, I never miss a column because it just... It's got a an authentic edge where you feel like [01:05:20] S0: you're Honey badger don't give a shit. [01:05:22] S1: Mhmm. That's right. Well