The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:07:28 · Laura Jáner
[00:07:28] S2: I'd love to come back to the parallels because as you said, there are definitely many, especially with the recent Biden and and Trump election. But just to get back to the win... Lula's win. So he went from trailing to winning in, like, a pretty shocking three weeks. As we said, he gained roughly 10,000,000 votes between the rounds compared to, like, 3,600,000 for Flavio, mostly through, like, higher turnout and picking up voters from eliminated candidates. And as the sitting president, Lula also made some big policy moves in that window. Congress passed a constitutional amendment ending Brazil's six day workweek, guaranteeing workers two days off with no pay cuts. And for context, the five day workweek is pretty standard in most developed economies. And Lula also raised Bolsa Família, which is Brazil's main welfare program he himself started a couple decades ago, with bigger payments starting six days before the vote. And he also cut federal taxes on gasoline and launched a new debt relief program. But I'd love to ask you, what do you think really made the difference in those three weeks just so we can add some color to this sort of surprising turnaround? And one last follow-up is the the US midterms are as this is released this week. So is there anything in how Lula turned this around that the... That American campaigns on either side should also kind of pay attention to? What do you think of the the three weeks between the first and second round?
00:08:50 · Brian Winter
[00:08:50] S3: Well, Laura, as you mentioned, there were a variety of things that happened, including this big bill that he ran up of more than $40,000,000,000 worth of tax breaks and extra spending on welfare programs and so on. And that's part of the reason why financial markets were upset that Lula won. They had been counting on a Flavio Bolsonaro victory. But they, along with the rest of us, were wrong. And I have to say that these have been humbling days for me because I certainly... You know, we all sensed that the momentum was shifting in Lula's direction, but none of us expected it would swing quite this much. And I do wonder if there are lessons for Democrats in The United States or perhaps anyone anybody anywhere looking to run a campaign in 2026, where you know the technological landscape has changed so much. And I would start with this basic fact. Lula at the age of 80 acquired his first smartphone in the final two weeks of the campaign. And you know part of your audience may think, woah, why didn't he have one before? And that's a good question. You know he was an old school politician, really a man of the twentieth century. That was when he had his political rise, was during the 1970s and the 1980s. But this is also a story of a modern digital operation that came out of nowhere in the space of three weeks between the first round of voting, which Lula lost by two points, and the second round which of course he ultimately won. And the stories that are coming out suggest that Lula was prevailed upon to allow a small group of young aids to go crazy, you know, online and specifically on WhatsApp Yeah. Which is such a huge platform in Brazil along with others like Instagram and TikTok. I think it's important to pause here and note that there are various studies that show that Brazil is one of the countries in the world with the highest rate of engagement with social media. According to one study on average more than six hours a day, and that includes WhatsApp as well as other platforms. And so this was perhaps a country that was especially ripe for this kind of campaign. So what happened? There was this young... This one young congressman named André Janones.
00:11:36 · Laura Jáner, Brian Winter
[00:11:36] S2: Yep. [00:11:37] S3: Very close to Lula, but who had been kept somewhat at arm's length during the first round. And they liberated him, so to speak, to build out a digital army in the hopes of staging a comeback. That's exactly what he did. He took a group that he had of some 50,000 people and just started... He renamed it Lula's Army, and he just started building it out with constant content that, you know, it was an interesting dynamic because the foot soldiers in the army, so to speak, were allowed to post. It was it was all him and a couple of other people. And they were given orders to post things online and so on. By the end of the campaign, this group had 10,000,000 people. Wow. And if you had to point to one thing that turned Lula's campaign around, it was that. And, of course, look, I mean, the campaign would have never worked had there not been actual content and ideas to use those channels for. But I can confirm for you, I've had conversations with people all over Latin America, including politicians, over the last couple days since this election result. And this is what they're all asking about, seeking to replicate for themselves. Because prior to that, it had really only been the right in Brazil that seemed to know how to use social media. This is something that, you know, progressive groups all over the world have struggled to match the engagement that the right has been able to muster. So perhaps this really will turn into a case study that others around the world will will look at.
00:13:19 · Laura Jáner
[00:13:19] S2: But to that point, I'd love to ask you, how much do you think this win we can credit to Lula himself versus... Like, how much do you think he was simply riding like an anti Bolsonaro wave? And for some context, there's, like, high rejection to the Bolsonaro name in Brazil because of their association with an attempted coup in 2022 for which Jair Bolsonaro is currently serving twenty seven years. Again, Jair Bolsonaro is Flavio Bolsonaro's father. Since the Bolsonaro name is pretty tainted at this point and and that even the choice to put Flavio Bolsonaro forward as the candidate that would, you know, represent sort of the right in Brazil is people see it as a mistake because there's a lot of voters in Brazil who see the presidential vote as a lesser of two equals. Like, who's least bad? Is it Lula or is it Bolsonaro? And using Bolsonaro against Lula might lead a lot a lot more people who aren't necessarily pro Lula to vote for Lula because they're so scared of the Bolsonaro name as, you know, they have this sort of threat to democracy thing attached to to the... Their reputation because of Jair's involvement with the coup. The Lula name is being floated as, you know, such an epic story in Brazilian politics, which is definitely true. But he is... He's actually turning 81 today. It's his birthday today. You know, what elected him this time around? Do you think it was really... Do you think you can credit his sort of cult of personality, or was it really just more of like a we're scared of Bolsonaro?
00:14:48 · Brian Winter, Laura Jáner
[00:14:48] S3: I'm not sure Lula himself knows the answer to that question as we sit here today. This is what everyone's trying to figure out. I mean, there there are philosophical questions in... That you've raised about why people vote the way they do. Do they go into the ballot box thinking, oh gosh, I'm so happy to cast a vote for this candidate, or do they fear or hate [00:15:15] S2: Yeah. [00:15:15] S3: The person who they feel like they're casting a vote against? Many political scientists who have tried to understand this question in Brazil think it's the latter. That especially in a second round runoff like the Brazilian system has, that it's usually about opposition to, yes, people who want to avoid somebody coming back in to power. But look, I think that some of this is inevitably wrapped up with Lula's story as well. And this is where, you know, the Brazilian case probably is not replicable elsewhere because there's nobody else in Latin American politics quite like Lula. If he completes this fourth term to which he's been elected, and I think it's fair to raise that given that he would be 85 by the time it's over. He will have been the main figure of Brazilian politics for an entire half century. [00:16:12] S2: Yeah.
00:16:12 · Laura Jáner, Brian Winter
[00:16:12] S2: Yeah. [00:16:12] S3: For fifty years, dating from the nineteen seventy nine strike in which he was a labor union leader under dictatorship who very bravely took a stand in favor of better working conditions for metal workers and others in Brazil at a time when when strikes were illegal. Yeah. And since that moment, you know, he ran for president for the first time in 1989, and he actually lost three elections before he won one. He finally won in 2002. This long career was one of Lula's weaknesses during the campaign [00:16:52] S2: Yeah.