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0:01:12 This week on A Touch More,
0:01:16 we’re talking all about the WNBA All-Star roster
0:01:20 with ESPN analyst and former All-Star herself,
0:01:20 Chenea Gumake.
0:01:23 She also tells us what she wants to see
0:01:24 from the CBA negotiations.
0:01:28 Plus, I’m sharing some of the record-breaking updates
0:01:30 from the Euros in Switzerland.
0:01:33 Check out the latest episode of A Touch More
0:01:35 wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
0:01:41 Welcome to Raging Moderates.
0:01:42 I’m Scott Galloway,
0:01:44 and President Trump is clearly in the Epstein files.
0:01:47 Oh, good morning to you too, Scott.
0:01:48 Come on.
0:01:49 Come on.
0:01:50 That’s why we’re here, Jessica.
0:01:51 In today’s episode,
0:01:54 I was in Ibiza last week.
0:01:57 Word has it, I did Molly and had an amazing time,
0:01:59 and I think I’m enjoying this more.
0:02:00 Yeah.
0:02:02 It’s just taking you to another level.
0:02:03 Oh, my God.
0:02:04 This is my hot girl summer.
0:02:07 Today, we’re going to talk about,
0:02:08 today, we’re going to talk about MAGA revolting
0:02:10 over the Epstein files,
0:02:12 an all-time high of Americans now seeing immigration
0:02:14 as a positive for the country.
0:02:17 Well, welcome to pulling your head out of your ass
0:02:20 and a proposal to evaluate lawmakers’
0:02:22 cognitive fitness for office.
0:02:24 That’s ageist, Jess.
0:02:26 That’s ageist.
0:02:28 Anyways, let’s get right into it.
0:02:31 The president is once again at odds with his own base.
0:02:33 This time, it’s over Jeffrey Epstein.
0:02:37 But we should really be focusing on Rosie O’Donnell.
0:02:39 I think that’s not a distraction.
0:02:41 Our favorite Irish lass, Rosie.
0:02:42 Yeah.
0:02:44 No, that is not an attempt to distract and say,
0:02:46 look over here from the fact that he is clearly
0:02:47 in the Epstein files.
0:02:50 After the DOJ released a memo concluding Epstein died
0:02:52 by suicide and had no secret client list,
0:02:55 Trump urged supporters to move on
0:02:58 and defended Attorney General Pam Bondi,
0:02:59 calling her fantastic.
0:03:02 He also claimed critics were just selfish people
0:03:03 trying to hurt him.
0:03:05 But MAGA world isn’t buying it, Jess.
0:03:07 At Turning Point USA Student Summit,
0:03:09 the crowd booed Bondi’s memo,
0:03:11 accusing Trump of breaking his own promise
0:03:13 to release the full files.
0:03:15 And influencers, including Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer,
0:03:17 are openly criticizing the administration.
0:03:19 Loomer is now calling for a special counsel.
0:03:21 Who the fuck cares what Loomer wants?
0:03:21 But anyways.
0:03:22 Trump cares.
0:03:24 There you go.
0:03:27 The leader of the free world happens to care.
0:03:27 He cares.
0:03:29 Inside the administration,
0:03:30 the fallout is even worse.
0:03:34 FBI deputy director and podcaster Dan Bongino
0:03:35 almost resigned.
0:03:35 Almost?
0:03:36 Oh, no, Dan.
0:03:40 We hate to lose someone as competent as you
0:03:41 from our public ranks.
0:03:44 He almost resigned after a tense blow up with Bondi.
0:03:45 He skipped work Friday.
0:03:48 It’s like one of these little tech Google bitches
0:03:50 doing a lunch walkout,
0:03:51 pretending that anyone cares.
0:03:54 Oh, he took the day off.
0:03:55 That’ll show him, Dan.
0:03:58 And he hasn’t spoken to DOJ leadership since.
0:04:00 He hadn’t spoke to him in a whole four days.
0:04:02 Bongino’s future is uncertain.
0:04:04 But for now, he’s still on the job.
0:04:06 Bondi’s still in Trump’s good graces
0:04:10 and even took her to the football game on Sunday,
0:04:11 which, by the way, was outstanding.
0:04:12 Yeah, it was kind of funny
0:04:14 how he wouldn’t get out of the picture, though.
0:04:15 Yeah, and he was booed.
0:04:16 That was my favorite part.
0:04:18 But this episode exposed serious fractures
0:04:21 within the MAGA world and Trump’s grip on it.
0:04:24 Jess, give us your thoughts on this.
0:04:26 I got this wrong.
0:04:27 I didn’t think it was going to be that big a deal.
0:04:28 And it’s just blown up.
0:04:29 Give us your take.
0:04:30 Yeah.
0:04:33 We are conditioned to think nothing matters
0:04:37 because nothing has mattered up until this point, right?
0:04:39 So you think, oh, this is a news story
0:04:41 for maybe a couple of days.
0:04:43 And you worry if you’re recording something
0:04:46 that it’s going to be old by the next day, right?
0:04:47 But this one has had legs.
0:04:52 And a lot of that is because you have the luminaries,
0:04:54 and I’m being generous with that term,
0:04:58 but, you know, the faces of the party upset
0:05:00 and the rank and file upset.
0:05:03 And usually those things don’t coincide, right?
0:05:05 You get a few pissed off people here,
0:05:06 but down here, everyone’s fine.
0:05:08 Or down here, people are upset,
0:05:10 but up here, folks aren’t.
0:05:13 And we have to be real about this.
0:05:15 There are folks who were very outspoken
0:05:17 about the Epstein files and being upset,
0:05:19 like Charlie Kirk, Benny Johnson.
0:05:21 They’ve already fallen back in line.
0:05:23 Trump called Charlie Kirk, apparently.
0:05:26 Then he starts posting, you know,
0:05:27 this isn’t really worth our time.
0:05:30 And Benny Johnson, who had a four-point plan
0:05:33 to how the administration could make things better,
0:05:35 which also included, you know,
0:05:37 something having to do with Bill Clinton,
0:05:41 now is saying that MAGA is taking this seriously,
0:05:44 and apparently Bondi is going to start
0:05:46 dribbling out more information,
0:05:48 or that’s what we heard from Lara Trump.
0:05:51 But I’m kind of in two minds about it.
0:05:52 So the one mind,
0:05:54 which I think is more like your Ibiza-Molly mind,
0:05:57 is I’m excited by this,
0:06:00 because it also shows that for some in this movement,
0:06:02 there is a bridge too far,
0:06:04 or a line that you can’t cross.
0:06:06 And there are a lot of people,
0:06:08 especially the rank and file,
0:06:12 who are upset because this guy was running a pedophile rank,
0:06:13 right?
0:06:15 There were kids that were being abused
0:06:17 who deserved justice,
0:06:20 and that that’s something that should matter,
0:06:22 no matter what.
0:06:25 The other side of that is that it obviously exposes
0:06:29 that Trump, someone who has managed miraculously
0:06:30 to market himself as someone
0:06:33 who isn’t just in it for himself
0:06:35 and isn’t part of the swamp
0:06:37 and the cabal of powerful people
0:06:40 that will protect themselves no matter what,
0:06:42 is exposed now as someone
0:06:44 who’s just your run-of-the-mill,
0:06:47 you know, sharky salesman, right?
0:06:48 That’s how it always was.
0:06:50 And for those of us who aren’t particular fans of his,
0:06:52 that’s how we saw him from the jump,
0:06:54 not even just with the Epstein stuff.
0:06:55 In general,
0:06:57 especially if you’d been around New York,
0:06:59 you knew exactly who Donald Trump was.
0:06:59 You know,
0:07:01 the guy who’s stiffing his contractors,
0:07:05 who’s saying disgusting things about women,
0:07:06 who’s, you know,
0:07:08 cheating on everyone he ever married.
0:07:11 And that never penetrated.
0:07:12 So I kind of just gave up hope,
0:07:13 I guess,
0:07:15 that people would see
0:07:16 that aspect of his character.
0:07:18 And that has been affirmed now
0:07:20 that people are seeing this.
0:07:21 The other side of me,
0:07:23 which is a bit of a Debbie Downer,
0:07:25 and I hate to bring the mood of the pod down
0:07:27 because it has been snappy to begin,
0:07:30 is that I’m also concerned
0:07:32 that we’re going to spend all this time
0:07:33 on the Epstein files,
0:07:34 and it won’t matter,
0:07:37 and we’ll forget to talk about real stuff
0:07:38 that actually affect people’s pocketbooks
0:07:39 and how they’re going to vote.
0:07:41 And, you know,
0:07:43 we’ll show up with campaign posters for 2026
0:07:44 that don’t say,
0:07:45 he took away your Medicaid,
0:07:46 and it’ll say, like,
0:07:48 Pedo Island or something.
0:07:50 It won’t be that extreme,
0:07:51 but, you know,
0:07:53 being relentlessly focused on the things
0:07:54 that win elections
0:07:58 are how you capture people’s attention,
0:07:59 and this is,
0:08:01 it’s an enjoyable sideshow,
0:08:03 I guess is how I would describe it.
0:08:06 So what are your feelings besides elation?
0:08:10 Well, so I teach a session on crisis management,
0:08:13 and there’s sort of just three basics to remember,
0:08:14 and they’re easy to remember,
0:08:15 but they’re hard to do.
0:08:17 And the first is to acknowledge the issue.
0:08:20 The second is to take responsibility,
0:08:21 and the third is to overcorrect.
0:08:26 And I would imagine that the vast majority of people
0:08:27 who went to this island
0:08:31 or accepted private jet travel with Epstein
0:08:33 did not engage in pedophilia.
0:08:35 I mean, there’s a lot of strafe here.
0:08:37 A lot of people have been caught up in this who,
0:08:39 I mean, should wealthy, powerful people
0:08:41 do enough diligence on someone to recognize,
0:08:44 okay, if he’s been convicted of a sex crime
0:08:46 or has questionable activities,
0:08:48 I’m not going to, you know, fraternize with him.
0:08:51 But if the president, in my view,
0:08:52 it’s always the cover-up.
0:08:54 It’s not the scandal, it’s the cover-up.
0:08:56 And if the president had said,
0:08:58 you know, when I was younger, I liked to party.
0:08:59 I met this guy.
0:08:59 He was fun.
0:09:01 He was known for being, having a good time.
0:09:03 He was giving money away.
0:09:03 He seemed legitimate.
0:09:06 And I spent time with him, went to the island,
0:09:09 did not engage in any of these illegal activities.
0:09:12 It was a huge error in judgment, and I apologize.
0:09:14 I think this whole thing would blow over.
0:09:16 And if he said, even if he didn’t mean it,
0:09:20 and I’ve instructed my AG to release the files
0:09:22 or look into it, and then just like he said,
0:09:24 he was going to release his taxes and never did,
0:09:26 I think he’d be fine.
0:09:29 But he could not be acting more guilty.
0:09:31 Oh, wait, wait, wait.
0:09:34 Let’s cancel Rosie’s citizenship.
0:09:35 Look over here.
0:09:37 Nothing to see over here.
0:09:38 He could not.
0:09:41 It’s when my dog gets into the trash
0:09:42 and I walk into the kitchen,
0:09:45 I know my dog has gotten into the trash.
0:09:49 I mean, she could not be more transparent in her guilt.
0:09:52 And it’s as if a communications consultant has said,
0:09:56 okay, do you want to come across as guilty as possible?
0:09:58 Do you want it to seem like, in fact,
0:09:59 you weren’t just down there,
0:10:02 but there’s some really ugly information
0:10:03 about you in these files?
0:10:04 Okay, then act like this.
0:10:06 And this is exactly what he’s acting like.
0:10:10 I feel as if he has such strong political instincts
0:10:11 in terms of his base.
0:10:13 And here he’s just,
0:10:16 he literally looks like guilty.
0:10:19 And now I believe there’s something more here.
0:10:22 I used to think, okay, you know,
0:10:24 all of these guys accepted a party.
0:10:25 They like to have a good time.
0:10:27 They like to be around hot people.
0:10:29 And I would imagine just in terms of probability,
0:10:32 the majority of them did not engage in a crime.
0:10:34 I’m sure some did.
0:10:38 But this feels like this guy is scared to death
0:10:40 of this thing coming out.
0:10:43 And he comes across as really guilty.
0:10:44 Having said that,
0:10:45 and then this is my prediction around this,
0:10:46 and I’m curious to get yours.
0:10:50 Every time I’m hopeful that Senator Susan Collins
0:10:53 actually gives a goddamn about her constituents,
0:10:56 or Senator Murkowski is going to find a backbone
0:10:59 and realize that this is really counter
0:11:00 to the values she espouses, too.
0:11:02 And then they all fall in line.
0:11:06 And I think the same thing’s going to happen here.
0:11:06 And, you know, all of a sudden,
0:11:07 Charlie Kirk’s saying,
0:11:11 you know, after trying to stir this conspiracy outrage
0:11:14 and everything about, you know,
0:11:17 the election being stolen and a pedophile ring
0:11:20 in a basement that is non-existent of a pizza shop
0:11:23 where Secretary Clinton was drinking the blood
0:11:24 of sacrificed children,
0:11:27 it is very rewarding to see the snake
0:11:28 eating its own tail here.
0:11:31 But I think eventually he calls them
0:11:33 and they all snap and fuck in line.
0:11:36 And this just, we just move on.
0:11:37 Your thoughts?
0:11:38 Yeah.
0:11:40 I mean, I largely agree with you.
0:11:43 It doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy something fleeting.
0:11:44 Revel in it.
0:11:46 Like we all love Chinese food, right?
0:11:48 And then we forget that we ate an hour later.
0:11:49 It’s Christmas for Jews.
0:11:50 Chinese food for everyone.
0:11:51 Yep.
0:11:53 So enjoy it.
0:11:57 Like the turning point clips will live forever of,
0:12:01 you know, Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson,
0:12:05 though I’m very confused about the Mossad connect,
0:12:08 you know, that he was a intelligence asset,
0:12:10 also worked for the Israeli government.
0:12:14 But, you know, I’m happy to indulge in some more conspiracy.
0:12:17 But yeah, I generally think that they’re going to fall in line.
0:12:20 And part of that is that there’s no alternative.
0:12:23 And I’m not even talking about, oh, you’re going to wake up and you’re going to vote for
0:12:24 Democrats.
0:12:33 Donald Trump has so completely owned the right wing of the country that you’ve got nowhere
0:12:33 to go.
0:12:40 There have been many moderate Republican soldier that has tried to stand up there and say,
0:12:41 hey, look over here.
0:12:45 There are other people who believe in, quote, conservative values.
0:12:46 And you could give it a shot.
0:12:50 Nikki Haley, Chris Christie in 2016, everybody and their mother tried.
0:12:51 Right.
0:12:52 Ted Cruz even won Iowa.
0:13:02 And he has captivated the attention and the loyalty of this group of Americans in a way that I
0:13:06 certainly haven’t seen politically, at least in my time.
0:13:09 And so they don’t really have an alternative of somewhere else to go.
0:13:15 And MAGA, more so than the Democrats, which we talk about this part all the time, they don’t
0:13:17 run purity tests the same way we do.
0:13:20 They allow for ideological inconsistency.
0:13:25 And yes, I think that there are going to be people that don’t move past this, but it
0:13:32 is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the general MAGA movement because they’ve
0:13:34 got no other optionality.
0:13:41 And we’ll see what he essentially makes Pam Bondi do to try to paper over this because they’re
0:13:44 saying now that there’s going to be more releases coming.
0:13:49 And I, I’m not sure there has to be a sacrificial lamb.
0:13:51 If there will be, I think it’s Pam Bondi.
0:13:57 And if I were to put on my conspiracy theory hat, which is very chic, I would say that my
0:14:06 old colleague, Jeanine Pirro, would be a wonderful replacement for Pam Bondi if she ended up exiting
0:14:08 stage left in all of this.
0:14:10 I’m not sure if you’re being serious or not.
0:14:11 You’re being serious?
0:14:12 No, I am being serious.
0:14:15 You think that Jeanine Pirro would be a good attorney general?
0:14:23 I, I, she wouldn’t be our choice necessarily, but I think that Pam Bondi has seemed miraculously
0:14:29 unserious in this role for someone who had a very important job, obviously in Florida, was
0:14:31 instrumental to Trump in being able to win the state.
0:14:35 And she’s been a bit blah, right?
0:14:36 In this role.
0:14:38 She doesn’t even perform that well in the cabinet meetings.
0:14:43 And, you know, Jeanine Pirro is now the U.S. attorney for D.C.
0:14:45 So she is in the administration already.
0:14:49 And it, it wouldn’t surprise me is what I’m saying.
0:14:51 So yes, I am being serious about that.
0:14:56 You know, you, none of these people would be our picks, but the Wall Street Journal even
0:15:03 wrote a piece about how much the D.C. office is loving having Pirro there and how they have
0:15:05 been surprised by her seriousness.
0:15:08 And she’s reverted back to what she was like as a D.A. in Westchester.
0:15:11 So anyway, I’m just throwing that out there.
0:15:13 Well, at 74, she’d be one of the younger people in government.
0:15:14 There you go.
0:15:15 Yeah.
0:15:16 That’s exactly what people wanted.
0:15:18 Jeanine, you look fantastic.
0:15:22 But do you think someone is going to have to go that there’ll be a Mike Waltz?
0:15:24 Is there’ll be a blood offering?
0:15:26 It’s a really interesting one.
0:15:30 I just don’t, I have a striking inability to predict what’s going on here.
0:15:32 I don’t know.
0:15:33 I guess it depends how long it goes.
0:15:37 What do you think of this effort by a couple Democrats to force a vote?
0:15:38 The Ro Khanna vote?
0:15:39 Yeah.
0:15:40 What do you think of that?
0:15:41 Do you think that’s a good move politically?
0:15:41 Yeah.
0:15:42 I mean, it happened last night.
0:15:44 It got voted down.
0:15:45 That’s right.
0:15:45 Shocker.
0:15:47 Well, they’re in charge.
0:15:50 I mean, this is why you got to win fucking elections, right?
0:15:51 Because then you have the votes to do things like this.
0:15:53 Right on, sister.
0:15:53 Yeah.
0:15:55 It’s a well-timed F-bomb.
0:15:55 That’s right.
0:15:56 That’s what we’re supposed to do.
0:15:57 Like one per day, right?
0:15:58 I think it’s the role for Democrats.
0:15:59 That was mine.
0:16:03 But yes, I think it’s right to be drawing attention to this.
0:16:08 And I also think the attitude the Democrats have had about this consistently, which is,
0:16:09 put it all out there.
0:16:15 There are going to be some folks on our side that are in these five—I don’t even know.
0:16:16 They’re playing semantics with it.
0:16:17 Is it a file?
0:16:17 Is it a list?
0:16:24 And Alan Dershowitz, who defended Epstein and also has been accused of being part of this
0:16:28 cabal, has said in interviews recently, there’s a list.
0:16:29 I know there’s a list.
0:16:33 Galene Maxwell is trying to get her story out there.
0:16:37 You know, she was the front page of Drudge, which you know that things are going really
0:16:39 badly for the president when that’s happening.
0:16:45 And you do have a person who is alive and, for now, and hopefully stays alive, sitting in
0:16:48 a jail cell who probably knows a thing or two about this.
0:16:55 So I think Ro Khanna and folks should be out there really holding their feet to the fire,
0:16:56 not losing the plot.
0:17:01 You know, they’re cutting food assistance and Medicaid and giving tax breaks to the wealthy
0:17:03 and all these things that people actually vote on.
0:17:11 But this is a cultural moment, I guess, not only because the Epstein files and did Jeffrey
0:17:15 Epstein kill himself and all of that has taken on pop culture relevance, but it is saying
0:17:22 something generally about class warfare and it is saying something about where the president
0:17:27 fits in that conversation that we don’t usually have a chance to partake in.
0:17:32 It’s usually just partisans kind of peeing into the wind about it, right?
0:17:34 And it doesn’t matter at all.
0:17:36 And now they’re receiving a little bit of it.
0:17:36 Yeah.
0:17:44 So just going back to Janine Pirro as attorney general, I hadn’t realized that she was actually
0:17:46 nominated for a daytime Emmy award.
0:17:48 So I do think she’s qualified.
0:17:48 Yeah.
0:17:53 And also her criticizing the prosecutors, the January 6th defendants saying they hadn’t done
0:17:53 their job.
0:17:54 She’s clearly.
0:17:59 I just got to ask you, Matt Gates, Pam Bondi.
0:18:05 You’re saying you think he’s going to wake up and say, I’d love we really love Merrick
0:18:05 Garland back.
0:18:09 That just feels like even the president could do a little bit better than that.
0:18:10 But anyways.
0:18:12 Anywho.
0:18:12 Yeah.
0:18:13 Please move on.
0:18:18 So just some quick data here around this that shocked me and you’re a pollster.
0:18:18 You’ll find this interesting.
0:18:24 According to new polling from Morning Consult, Trump’s approval rating has fallen about six
0:18:28 percent since his comments about the Epstein case.
0:18:30 That’s that’s a pretty big move, isn’t it, Jess?
0:18:35 Yeah, it’s things have been at certain moments in complete freefall for him.
0:18:40 And we’re going to talk about immigration where that is very pronounced on the economy as well.
0:18:45 But, yeah, people are not into how this is being handled.
0:18:50 And you’re completely correct that there was a way to manage this properly where you just
0:18:54 said, you know, I want to protect the victims, for instance.
0:18:57 And some people would say that’s a load of BS.
0:19:02 But in general, the people who are prone to forgive him would forgive him.
0:19:06 And certainly none of these influencers, I think, would have been mad about it.
0:19:10 So it’s completely relevant that you could go down six points that quickly.
0:19:17 And you know that his team is paying attention to it as well and saying, like, well, what can
0:19:23 we do to leak out enough that nobody is incriminating or we don’t have to hand over the proverbial
0:19:27 list or files or whatever we’re calling it and still be able to manage this base?
0:19:32 Because, you know, he has things that he’s doing that he certainly feels really good
0:19:37 about, right, that he has a couple weeks of good news for his side, you know, getting the
0:19:38 reconciliation bill across.
0:19:42 There’s going to be the rescission bill, the Iranian strikes.
0:19:46 Like, he’d love to be talking about all of those things.
0:19:49 And now this is all that he’s getting.
0:19:53 I mean, trying to change the subject now he’s going after Adam Schiff for a bad mortgage in
0:19:53 Maryland.
0:19:55 I mean, it’s completely laughable.
0:19:59 So just a quick test of your political knowledge here.
0:20:02 There’s only one cabinet member that has a net positive rating.
0:20:04 Any guesses who that is?
0:20:05 Rubio?
0:20:08 No, it’s RFK Jr.
0:20:08 What?
0:20:10 RFK Jr. is the most—he isn’t that wild?
0:20:13 He has a plus 5% net approval rating.
0:20:15 It’s because he’s good looking.
0:20:19 I’m pretty sure that the pollsters asked Rubella and Measles who their favorite cabinet
0:20:20 member is.
0:20:23 OK, with that, let’s take a quick break.
0:20:23 Stay with us.
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0:23:45 Don’t wait.
0:23:59 Welcome back in a quiet but seismic shift.
0:24:04 The U.S. recently deported eight men to South Sudan, most of whom aren’t even from there.
0:24:10 Under a controversial third-country deportation policy, the legal experts say could amount to enforced disappearance.
0:24:11 Their words.
0:24:20 Their families haven’t heard a word since July 4th, and now ICE has issued new guidance to fast-track similar deportations with minimal notice and virtually no chance for migrants to object.
0:24:24 And that’s just one piece of a much bigger picture.
0:24:26 Across the country, immigration crackdowns are intensifying.
0:24:35 The new remote detention camp in Florida, Alligator Alcatraz, is drawing outrage for inhumane conditions and the fact that hundreds held there have no criminal charges.
0:24:41 Meanwhile, the administration is appealing a court order to blocked race-based immigration rates in California.
0:24:46 But a new Gallup poll shows Americans are more supportive of immigration than they’ve been in decades.
0:24:50 Even a majority of Republicans now favor a path to citizenship.
0:24:52 That’s a switch.
0:25:00 But if you’re wondering how far Trump might go to flex his immigration powers, look no further than his latest threat to strip Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship.
0:25:01 Yeah, that makes sense.
0:25:03 He called her a threat to humanity.
0:25:04 Huh.
0:25:09 And said she should stay in Ireland, where she moved after his re-election.
0:25:13 Legal experts quickly pointed out that’s not how citizenship works.
0:25:19 Still, it’s a telling moment, one that shows how far the rhetoric and policy is escalating.
0:25:20 It’s a weapon of mass distraction.
0:25:27 Jess, how does the Supreme Court’s green light on third country deportations open the door for more extreme removals?
0:25:36 And what legal or diplomatic fallout do you think we might see if other nations refuse to cooperate or detainees simply vanish, like in the South Sudan case?
0:25:38 I’m going to say it again.
0:25:42 You got to win elections because then you get to appoint people to the court.
0:25:48 And we are so massively screwed because of this conservative majority.
0:25:55 And my expectation is that Trump will probably get another appointment before he finishes in 2028.
0:25:58 And that really scares me.
0:26:02 You know, there are moments where you say, like, Amy Coney Barrett, I love you, or whatever.
0:26:03 Not this one.
0:26:09 And the most disturbing part of it to me, or the thing that I guess stuck out the most,
0:26:14 is that as part of getting rid of this nationwide injunction that came from the lower court,
0:26:21 is that it does away with having to give meaningful notice before deporting to a third country.
0:26:28 So what they’ve been doing is essentially running out the clock or having no clock,
0:26:34 so that family and attorneys cannot get to a lot of these people who have been either wrongfully detained
0:26:39 or really should just be deported back to their country of origin.
0:26:46 And you hear this constantly, whether we’re talking about CECOT or detention facilities all over the U.S.,
0:26:48 makeshift or permanent.
0:26:50 You know, we’ll talk about Alligator Alcatraz.
0:26:55 But nobody is getting their due process.
0:27:00 Nobody is getting time to talk to an attorney, let alone to their wife or their husband.
0:27:04 And that the Supreme Court could be comfortable with that.
0:27:07 Even when I think about it, it was just a few months ago, right,
0:27:13 where they seemed like some sort of arbiters of humanity about the deportations to CECOT,
0:27:18 where they said they have to make a meaningful effort to produce Kilmar Abrego-Garcia.
0:27:22 Now we have South Sudan with no call to your lawyer is fine.
0:27:23 Yeah.
0:27:27 It strikes me that in a weird way, a lot of these things are interconnected.
0:27:30 And I’ve been thinking about, I hate anonymity.
0:27:35 And I’m interviewing today Greg Lukianoff, who’s a big First Amendment guy.
0:27:36 And I imagine he’ll give me a—
0:27:36 He runs fire, right?
0:27:39 Yeah, he’ll give me a cogent argument for why anonymity is so important.
0:27:45 But my sense is our fidelity or conflating free speech with anonymity has led to an environment
0:27:52 where people will weaponize millions of trolls to create intimidation and shape the discourse
0:27:57 around what’s advantageous for some folks who don’t have America’s best interests at heart.
0:28:02 I don’t think people would ever behave this way if they had to have their identity released online.
0:28:07 And in general, I think that almost anything involving a government investigation,
0:28:13 there might be a quiet period for security reasons, but I think there’s no reason not to release everything.
0:28:19 I just—I can’t understand why any file isn’t ultimately released that the FBI aggregates
0:28:21 unless they see it as a security concern.
0:28:29 And then, more generally, what do stormtroopers ice the KKK and weirdos not letting Jews access
0:28:31 certain parts of UCLA have in common?
0:28:33 And the answer is masks.
0:28:40 And when I think about what’s been a hugely accretive or beneficial move for our men and women in blue
0:28:43 and our trust in police forces around the nation, it’s been body cams.
0:28:48 And the fact that they have their badge number and their name right on their—visible on their chest,
0:28:53 and they’re not allowed to wear masks because they have to take accountability for their actions.
0:28:57 And it’s been, I think, one of the greatest innovations in law enforcement
0:29:02 that if you’re going to apply force or you’re here to protect and to serve,
0:29:05 that you need to show all of your actions in 4D color.
0:29:11 And what do you know, ICE enforcement agents are wearing masks, which tells you, in my opinion,
0:29:15 everything about how they’re acquitting themselves or what they’re doing.
0:29:18 They wouldn’t dare want anyone to actually know who they actually are.
0:29:23 So this, to me, comes back to a basic trend in our society that’s a wrong trend,
0:29:28 and that is an acceptance and even reverence for anonymity as opposed to forcing people
0:29:30 to take accountability for their actions.
0:29:34 And people come back and say, well, what about the civil rights lawyer in the Gulf that needs
0:29:35 to protect our identity?
0:29:39 We could absolutely have anonymous accounts online and ensure that people are using them
0:29:42 for reasons where they would need anonymity.
0:29:48 But when you go onto your feed—and, Jess, I imagine you get a lot of this because I found
0:29:53 a disturbing trend online where women are subject to more hate-filled emails and rhetoric and threats
0:29:59 of violence by virtue of the fact that they’re women—I don’t think it’s healthy, this protection.
0:30:06 I think every social media platform should force identity and age gate and accepting a federal agency
0:30:12 that now has greater funding than the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not doing covert or national
0:30:18 security work, but treating people—you just wouldn’t see them putting their knees on the heads
0:30:22 of people or separating women from their 13-year-old screaming daughters if they actually had to show
0:30:23 their fucking faces.
0:30:28 So whether it’s the Epstein files and a belief that, oh, some things should stay out of public
0:30:35 view or masks covering the real identity and thereby reducing the accountability of this
0:30:40 enforcement agency, which we are paying for, I think all of it comes back to the same place,
0:30:43 and that is we have gone way too far with a reverence and an acceptance for anonymity and
0:30:45 not connecting identity to people’s actions.
0:30:46 Your thoughts?
0:30:49 I think it’s an incredibly important point.
0:30:55 And if you wanted to get into the nuance of what has to be for national security, what actually
0:31:00 needs to be put out in the world, I think that you can have those conversations on a case-by-case basis.
0:31:07 But in general, you know that society would run a hell of a lot different if people had to show
0:31:12 themselves, if they had to own what they’re saying in-person and online behaviors.
0:31:20 And you’re completely correct that it is a complete cesspool of what goes online, especially when it comes
0:31:21 to misogyny and harassment.
0:31:22 I’m going through this right now.
0:31:30 There’s a large conservative account that posted a picture of me with my ex-boyfriend and a picture of me with my husband.
0:31:36 And the post says that I cheated on my first husband.
0:31:37 I don’t have a first husband.
0:31:38 I only have one husband.
0:31:41 And, you know, it gets worse.
0:31:44 We’re talking whore, the C word, all of it.
0:31:53 And this is because I responded to the news that Ken Paxton, AG in Texas, his wife has filed for divorce after 38 years together.
0:31:57 It has been rumored for a long time that he cheats on her.
0:32:00 And she’s just had enough at this point.
0:32:09 Anyway, so I wrote The Party of Family Values strikes again because we’re constantly lectured by conservatives about how Democrats are folks that are part of a pedophile ring.
0:32:18 And it has unleashed a torrent online that I haven’t seen worse than actually when the president of the United States of America comes after you.
0:32:22 A lot from women, a lot from good Christians, right?
0:32:25 You know, I’m the best Christian there ever was.
0:32:38 And you’re an enormous whore and can’t get it taken down because of what goes on on social media now and the changes that have happened under Elon Musk.
0:32:42 And so I’m kind of just sitting here having to take it.
0:32:48 The algorithms love this type of outrage, this type of incendiary, ridiculous content.
0:32:55 And first off, I’m sorry you’re going through this, but to anyone that doesn’t have their head up their ass, realize this is all total bullshit.
0:33:08 But what this continues is a long tradition of misogyny that has gone just apeshit online where people don’t have to take accountability for their hateful, weird rhetoric, which sometimes can be very – it’s not only damaging emotionally and mentally.
0:33:11 It can put people in physical danger because people start believing this shit.
0:33:14 And then a crazy person picks up on it.
0:33:29 But it continues a long tradition that has gotten much worse online, which a bunch of dudes refuse to address because it’s difficult to imagine what it’s like to be a victim of this when you’ve never been a victim of this.
0:33:41 And the misogyny here is just so stark because, according to online trolls and especially the right, infidelity is a feature, not a bug for men.
0:33:43 And it’s a crime against humanity for women.
0:33:49 So why not just accuse women of something, whereas it would be a compliment?
0:33:52 I mean, that’s a real man on the Republican side.
0:33:53 He should even be president.
0:34:02 Well, the people who are making these comments about you, one, I don’t know if it’s a media organization, but effectively this goes back to big tech.
0:34:12 The platform platforming this clearly false content, most likely, and it sounds like it’s Twitter, the algorithms see it like how much activity it’s getting.
0:34:17 And so they elevate it and they give it more organic reach than it deserves on its own.
0:34:18 There’s no veracity here.
0:34:24 People wouldn’t be spreading this type of information as far and wide organically.
0:34:32 But because it invokes a lot of reactions and back and forth, and I’m sure people are weighing in and defending you, the algorithms love it.
0:34:40 So they spread it further than it would go on its own, thereby disparaging your reputation and also creating emotional harm.
0:34:49 When you algorithmically elevate content, you are now an editor and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be subject to the same liability and slander laws as traditional media.
0:35:08 Fox News, including your endorsement for attorney general, she was named in a case for spreading misinformation about Smartmatic, purposely and knowingly spreading misinformation around a company, knowing that it was false information that caused material and economic harm.
0:35:14 This is happening to you right now, but because it’s happening to you, Twitter knows this is bullshit.
0:35:18 And it’s very easy to see that this is causing real harm and disruption in your life.
0:35:30 But because they’re, quote unquote, a nascent technology company, which is what it was called in 1997 when this ridiculous 230 law was passed, they are not subject to the same liability as Fox News when they spread misinformation.
0:35:44 So this all comes back to big tech figuring out a way to weaponize Republicans and Democrats to avoid any real responsibility or liability for things that traditional media has been responsible and liable for.
0:35:52 It not only tears at the fabric of our society, it not only tears at the fabric of our society and coarsens our dialogue, but creates a post-truth society where nobody knows what to believe anymore.
0:35:59 Because the reality is, if somebody sees a story over and over, it becomes, in their mind, naturally, less of a lie.
0:36:03 It’s like, oh, I’m seeing this everywhere and there must be some truth to it.
0:36:13 No, it just means the algorithms have decided, regardless of how disparaging or slanderous it is, if it creates more engagement, we’re going to spread it far and wide.
0:36:26 So I kind of lay this at the feet, not only of the people who created this false narrative, but the fact that, one, the social media platform doesn’t force identity when people weigh in and say vile things about you.
0:36:27 We should know who they are.
0:36:29 They should have to stand behind it.
0:36:37 And also, this organization or the people posting this content, or the platform specifically, should be subject to the same laws as traditional media.
0:36:43 Anyways, I’m sorry you’re going through that, and I hope you recognize that in the moment, everything seems worse than it actually is.
0:36:48 This isn’t that meaningful, and everyone will forget about it and move on.
0:36:49 Yeah, I hope so.
0:36:55 Yeah, and I’m, you know, it’s been a few days, and you learn to move on quickly, which is probably another statement on how society works.
0:37:09 But I just wanted to add to your analysis to say that a critical component of why things are so bad is that we are so intellectually lazy now that no one wants to even Google something.
0:37:22 You know, this happens constantly, and I understand that it is baked into the job for me to bring information that is different from the mainstream conservative point of view that my colleagues are espousing.
0:37:38 But because you don’t want to spend any time taking a look at what Quinnipiac is saying or taking a look at what Marist is saying or even the Fox News poll, you just immediately dismiss anything that makes your antenna go a little haywire.
0:37:47 You know, to loop it back to the immigration issue, Trump has blown his best issue in historic terms.
0:37:57 I mean, he’s negative 27 on immigration now with Gallup, negative 16 with Quinnipiac, negative 9, Marist, Fox News, minus 7.
0:37:59 Totally lost support of the Hispanic votes.
0:38:04 Remember, that was one of their favorite things to talk about, how the hombres actually wanted this.
0:38:10 Well, it turns out the hombres are not actually interested in the way immigration law is being enforced at this particular moment.
0:38:15 And it probably has to do with the fact that 70 percent of people who are being detained haven’t been convicted of anything.
0:38:18 So they say, oh, well, people are pending charges.
0:38:22 You can say whatever you want about someone like this is the United States of America.
0:38:27 You have to be convicted of something, not just that they’re floating the idea that you did a very bad thing.
0:38:34 But you talk to the strongest section of his base about this, of Trump’s base.
0:38:38 Those poll, they’re all fake news polls, right, if they even exist.
0:38:45 And they haven’t spent any time actually going around and looking at a source that doesn’t confirm their immediate bias.
0:38:56 And so the masking thing with ICE agents, I don’t know if you’ve seen these stories, but there are people impersonating ICE agents, just like putting on masks and robbing, throwing people in trucks.
0:39:06 I mean, and some folks don’t even know if it isn’t actually an ICE agent that is doing something like this because the reality on the ground is that there are folks that are doing this.
0:39:09 And Brian and I were talking about this over the weekend.
0:39:18 We hadn’t been seeing that many stories from New York City about these immigration raids, like hearing a lot about what’s going on in Chicago and in Boston.
0:39:30 And I heard from a friend that apparently in big immigrant neighborhoods out in Queens in particular, that there are ICE agents everywhere there now.
0:39:37 So the city is not being spared because Eric Adams is a friend of the Trump administration in any way.
0:39:43 And I assume that the stories are going to start rolling in of these terrible things happening, you know, all over the subways.
0:39:52 And it’s just I’m not saying that immigration law doesn’t need to be enforced, but I don’t want our country looking like this.
0:39:54 Yeah, but it’s it’s so gross.
0:40:05 It’s performance and pageantry and fear and not really addressing the issue because going to the very core of the issue, while most people acknowledge immigration has been the secret sauce for American prosperity or one of them.
0:40:11 What they don’t want to have an honest conversation about is that the most profitable part of immigration has been illegal immigration.
0:40:14 And we can just wake up with tens of millions of illegal immigrants.
0:40:23 It’s a flexible workforce that comes in, pays Social Security taxes, commits crimes at a lower rate and then melts back to their own country when the work dries up.
0:40:27 It’s been this unbelievable, profitable, flexible workforce.
0:40:32 And where I see the far right go is they say, look, and it’s a solid argument.
0:40:33 Theoretically, they broke the law.
0:40:34 They broke the law.
0:40:35 They knew they were breaking the law.
0:40:37 They should be subject to enforcement.
0:40:45 But they never want to talk about, well, based on that law, shouldn’t we be prosecuting all the employers who knew they were employing undocumented workers?
0:40:47 And by the way, that is a crime.
0:40:49 But we don’t talk about that.
0:40:56 We don’t talk about the cut and dry, the employers, whether it’s fast food restaurants or families employing undocumented workers.
0:41:03 We seem to forgive those less brown, older, less vulnerable people, right?
0:41:06 So we’re just not focused on the right thing.
0:41:15 If you want to talk about an alien invasion, if you want to talk about millions of people storming the shores and offer their services for free, you want to talk about disruption.
0:41:26 What if seven or eight or 10 million immigrants stormed the shores, just overwhelmed the United States and were willing to work for free 24 by seven?
0:41:27 And what would that do to certain industries?
0:41:29 Well, it’s here, folks.
0:41:30 It’s called AI.
0:41:45 And instead of focusing on AI and taking some of that $12 billion and upskilling people and training to be critical thinkers and understand AI and how to leverage it and job training to get people out of things like trucking, which clearly AI is going to just decimate.
0:42:11 We want to scare the shit out of people and increase inflation by getting rid of three percent of America’s working population, which is ISIS goal, which will be somewhere between five and 15 percent of the agricultural and construction communities between tariffs on drywall gypsum, Canadian lumber and then emptying out construction sites of which 15 percent of the workforce is undocumented workers.
0:42:15 And by the way, when you lose 15 percent of your workforce, the industry kind of collapses for a while.
0:42:22 You’re going to see massive inflation and you’re going to see huge economic strain.
0:42:43 But instead, you know, instead of focusing on our economy, instead of focusing on how we would use that money to upskill people and protect jobs, I just think the president, I think they love this macho mass big guys ripping families apart that they’re I think so many Americans are so angry and upset that they actually enjoy some of this footage.
0:42:45 It’s like, oh, we’ll show those, you know, those criminals.
0:42:53 But, you know, the nice the nice white family that owns the car wash has been hiring undocumented workers and wink, wink.
0:42:56 Everybody’s put up with this for a long time.
0:42:58 Leave those good Americans alone.
0:42:59 I wonder what’s going to happen.
0:43:04 I think at some point there’s going to be a confrontation that’s going to turn violent in the United States.
0:43:07 I think I think people are so correctly horrified.
0:43:12 There was a really interesting video taken in a hospital where doctors just surrounded ice and said, what are you doing?
0:43:13 Get out of here.
0:43:18 And what is going on here is so craven and so aggressive and so upsetting.
0:43:23 I mean, at least the brown shirts in Nazi Germany showed their faces.
0:43:27 You know, these guys showing up with masks and the militarization.
0:43:31 I mean, it’s happened incrementally, so we’re not a shock.
0:43:45 But if someone had played just a few years ago what was going to happen here at car washes in Calabasas or to, you know, Uber drivers or or people showing up for their citizen hearings or church.
0:43:49 I think we would have just said, well, of course, that would never happen in America.
0:43:51 Well, well, it is.
0:43:57 Anyways, with that, we’ll take another quick break and we’ll be back in just a moment.
0:44:03 OK, welcome back.
0:44:06 Before we go, Washington Representative Marie Glessencamp-Perez.
0:44:13 She’s doing a few lawmakers have dared to do publicly question whether some of her older colleagues are still mentally fit to serve.
0:44:21 The 36-year-old Democrat is pushing a proposal that would allow the House Ethics Office to assess whether a member’s cognitive decline is impairing their ability to do the job.
0:44:24 An idea that was quickly swatted down by her colleagues in committee.
0:44:26 Are they really fucking old people?
0:44:27 Seriously, it’s become.
0:44:28 Actually, no.
0:44:28 Really?
0:44:31 They’re not really fucking old people that swatted it down.
0:44:34 It’s people who want to hang out for the next 50 years in Congress.
0:44:40 Or who are scared of the really fucking old people who wield a tremendous amount of power as well.
0:44:47 Fair Point, her call for cognitive oversight lands in a moment when concerns about mental acuity in government aren’t just theoretical, they’re fueling investigations.
0:44:57 Republicans are now probing whether Biden was mentally fit enough to authorize end-of-term and clemency decisions, claiming staff may have used an auto pen without his direct input.
0:45:02 Biden says he made every decision himself and slammed Trump and his allies as liars.
0:45:06 But still, the broader question remains, when is it too old to govern?
0:45:09 Curious on your thoughts on this.
0:45:11 How realistic is Perez’s proposal?
0:45:16 And could it actually break an unspoken code of silence around age and capacity in Congress?
0:45:19 Or will it just be another flashpoint that fades without reform?
0:45:19 What do you think, Jess?
0:45:23 It’s definitely not going to pass.
0:45:24 Right.
0:45:33 But I do think that it’s important for people to show who they are and their morality and their beliefs.
0:45:34 And that’s what she’s doing.
0:45:36 She’s just making a public declaration.
0:45:47 And this is coming from her constituents, who were all deeply concerned about President Biden and his mental fitness, as millions of Americans were, yourself included.
0:45:56 And she’s putting her stake in the ground, where she just says, this is something that we need to be talking about more and to be thinking about.
0:46:04 And maybe it’s not the end of the world if there’s some mechanism to step in when there is a problem.
0:46:12 And the argument against it is, well, we, you know, we have elections and they have to stand again and get voted back in.
0:46:17 But in a lot of these districts, they’re rubber stamps for whoever is in the majority.
0:46:19 You’re talking about D plus 30 districts.
0:46:23 And if someone isn’t getting primaried, then that carries on.
0:46:30 There’s a lawmaker, I think she’s 86 years old, who’s been flirting with maybe I’m going to run, maybe I’m not going to run.
0:46:35 Her staff has to kind of clean up after she makes a comment about it.
0:46:36 And now she’s decided that she’s going to run again.
0:46:40 Maxine Waters, she’s 86 years old.
0:46:41 I get it.
0:46:45 These are only two-year terms, so it should be out by 89 or whatever.
0:46:49 But, like, some things just don’t feel appropriate.
0:46:54 And I also think that there is an unfair sliding scale for folks.
0:47:02 Like, I interviewed Greg Kassar for our podcast, and he wants a new generation of leaders.
0:47:03 He’s part of that.
0:47:05 He’s on the progressive left of the party.
0:47:07 He’s been on tour with Bernie and AOC.
0:47:12 So I say, you know, well, Bernie’s 82 years old, and he’s going to run again for his Senate seat.
0:47:16 Well, there’s a carve-out for Bernie because Bernie has a ton of energy.
0:47:17 And, yes, I get it.
0:47:23 Bernie Sanders, you have a lot more faith in his ability to survive a term than you did necessarily about Joe Biden.
0:47:28 But you either have a standard or you don’t have a standard.
0:47:38 And that’s where this representative, Glucin-Kamp-Perez, is kind of putting her stake in the ground and just saying, we need to have standards that everyone abides by.
0:47:51 And then you can plan for what life after Congress looks like for you if it’s just retirement or maybe you want to go into the private sector or you want to go back to teaching if you’re a teacher or maybe, you know, want to travel the world, whatever it is.
0:48:02 But a lot of people have been talking a big game about passing the torch and a new generation of leaders or what it takes to do this job, which is an incredibly special, elite job.
0:48:04 There are only 435 people with this job on the Senate side.
0:48:09 Only 100 people in a country of 330 million who get this job.
0:48:11 Take it more seriously.
0:48:13 I love this.
0:48:24 And I think it’s just insane that we’ve decided that a 34-year-old doesn’t have the cognitive ability or life experience to run for president, but someone, 81, can do it.
0:48:30 16 years, term limits, or 18 years and 75, you’re out.
0:48:31 It’s just insane to me.
0:48:38 We have, we age gate all sorts of tests, whether it’s pilots, whether it’s CEOs of public companies.
0:48:44 And we’ve decided that, arguably, to your point, the most important decision, we’re not going to have age limits on.
0:48:46 And it really hurt Democrats.
0:48:49 I think five representatives died.
0:48:50 I think it’s three.
0:48:50 Was it three?
0:48:52 I thought it was five of them passed away.
0:48:53 Like, since the term.
0:48:54 Yeah, three.
0:48:55 It’s a lot of people.
0:48:57 I mean, I joked, I’m going to go see the F1 movie.
0:49:03 And I’m like, I think it’s hilarious that Brad Pitt is an F1 driver who clearly, I can, spoiler alert, I’m pretty sure he probably wins the race.
0:49:07 But in 10 years, his kids are probably going to take his driver’s license away.
0:49:13 It not only creates a situation where you have people who are cognitively impaired and make poor decisions, including to run again.
0:49:15 Bernie should not be allowed to run again.
0:49:17 That’s insane because biology is undefeated.
0:49:24 And by the time he’s 86 or 87, he’s probably going to slow down and not be able to represent his constituency very well.
0:49:27 And there will always be examples of the 100-year-old who runs a marathon.
0:49:39 But in general, we’ve decided that 17-year-olds don’t have the cognitive capacity to decide to join the army for good reason or that they, you know, kids should not be able to access pornography, at least theoretically.
0:49:42 We age-gate all sorts of stuff on the bottom end.
0:49:47 And the cognitive decline is just as severe on the back end.
0:49:49 Of course we should age-gate this.
0:49:51 And the dialogue, I believe, has actually progressed.
0:49:58 When I first said that Biden was too old to run on Bill Maher two and a half years ago, it was called an ageist and how dare you.
0:50:16 And, okay, in addition to the cognitive decline, which puts serious strain on the public, having to put up with individuals who no longer have good judgment or even just the capacity to do their jobs, it creates an environment where we’re not thinking long-term.
0:50:19 Two-thirds of Congress will be dead within 25 years.
0:50:24 Are they really that concerned at the end of the day about deficits and climate change?
0:50:35 And they get all indignant and clutch their pearls that they got as a wedding gift in the 30s and say, okay, you’re being ageist.
0:50:38 We care about climate change and our grandchildren?
0:50:39 No, you don’t.
0:50:44 Listen to young people talk about the deficit and the climate change.
0:50:46 They’re going to be around to have to pay this shit back.
0:50:58 They’re going to be around when everyone has to move out of or there’s forced mass migration and an unbelievable tax on everybody when we have to pay for disaster relief on super fires that are happening every other week.
0:51:02 So we absolutely need a representative democracy.
0:51:09 And the average age of our elected representatives across the world, this is a global phenomenon, has risen from 55 to 62.
0:51:16 And the U.S. has the oldest, I believe, of any G7, except we haven’t taken a note from other countries.
0:51:19 Most countries, there’s age gates.
0:51:22 You know, firefighters in the U.S. have to retire at 57.
0:51:29 You have to retire from the armed forces at 64 because you might make bad decisions to kill other people when you’re 84.
0:51:36 But we’ve decided, no, you can make decisions about who gets food stamps or what nations we do or do not declare war against.
0:51:41 Finland requires medical testing for driver’s license applicants after the age of 45.
0:51:47 England has an age limit of 75 for sitting on a jury.
0:51:57 They realize at 76, you may not have the cognitive ability or the physical stamina to pay attention to ensure that an individual is acquitted fairly through the court process.
0:52:01 Eighty-six members of the House and 33 members of the Senate are now over the age of 70.
0:52:04 In the House, the average age is 57.
0:52:07 In the Senate, it’s 65.
0:52:10 And this is the third oldest Congress in 1789.
0:52:11 Enough already.
0:52:12 Enough already.
0:52:13 We need age limits.
0:52:18 If we have them on the bottom end, there is no reason we shouldn’t have them on the top end.
0:52:23 It’s also a worse problem on the Democratic side than it is on the Republican side.
0:52:23 Fair.
0:52:27 Trump aside, who’s obviously an incredibly old president.
0:52:34 But the rank and file, and this is they doing as well with the Supreme Court nominations, too.
0:52:39 You know, I could see a world in which we were in power and we’re like, I’m really into this 65-year-old.
0:52:40 I think it would be great on the bench.
0:52:42 I’m like, take the teenager.
0:52:44 Put the teenager on the court.
0:52:45 Put in Representative Tallarico.
0:52:47 That’s a great plug.
0:52:47 Yeah.
0:52:49 We’ll have him on the podcast on Friday.
0:52:49 There you go.
0:52:51 This is how you’ve got to be thinking about it.
0:52:57 I do want to say something positive about the current state of Democratic politics.
0:52:58 Go on.
0:53:03 Because we don’t do this nearly enough, and these are fundamentally our people.
0:53:14 There’s new polling out from Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s pollster, showing that Republicans are trailing on the generic ballot in 28 House battleground seats.
0:53:19 There are huge amounts of pickup opportunities, especially with the big, beautiful bill.
0:53:21 Don’t blow it by only talking about Epstein.
0:53:33 And one thing that I saw that I thought you would really like is there’s this up-and-coming ad-making firm that’s Cool Campaigns, Van Ness Creative.
0:53:41 And they have basically issued a warning saying that if you’re not going to get online, then you just need to retire.
0:53:52 That no one should be making you ads or supporting campaigns of people who cannot communicate the way that the world is getting information and ingesting it.
0:54:00 And, you know, there’s an effort that you can make if, you know, you’re older and all you can do is hold a camera up to your face while you’re sitting in a car or whatever.
0:54:13 That’s still making some sort of effort, but there are actually pretty high numbers of folks in elected office who don’t even want to partake in the main vehicle for political communication at this point.
0:54:19 And that those people need to retire along with the 85-year-olds.
0:54:19 I agree.
0:54:25 Across both chambers, there are 20 members who are 80 years or older who likely think CHAT-GPT is a venereal disease.
0:54:31 I mean, the Congress is beginning to look like the waiting room at a cardiologist in Boca Raton.
0:54:33 It just, for God’s sakes, enough already.
0:54:34 All right.
0:54:37 Jess, that’s all for this episode.
0:54:39 Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates.
0:54:42 Our producers are David Toledo and Eric Jenikas.
0:54:44 Our technical director is Drew Burrows.
0:54:47 Going forward, you’ll find Raging Moderates every Wednesday and Friday.
0:54:53 Subscribe to Raging Moderates on its own feed to hear exclusive interviews with sharp political minds.
0:54:58 This week, Jess and I are talking with, and we’re excited about this, with Texas State Representative James Tallarico.
0:55:03 Make sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss an episode.
0:55:05 Jess, have a great rest of the week.
0:55:05 You too.

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0:00:52 That’s this week on Explain It To Me.
0:00:56 New episodes every Sunday, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:01:04 Megan Rapinoe here.
0:01:14 This week on A Touch More, we’re talking all about the WNBA All-Star roster with ESPN analyst and former All-Star herself, Chanae Agumike.
0:01:18 She also tells us what she wants to see from the CBA negotiations.
0:01:23 Plus, I’m sharing some of the record-breaking updates from the Euros in Switzerland.
0:01:28 Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
0:01:33 Welcome to Office Hours of Prop G.
0:01:37 This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind.
0:01:42 Just a reminder, you can now catch Office Hours every Monday and Friday.
0:01:43 That’s two episodes a week.
0:01:48 If you’d like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehoursofpropgmedia.com.
0:01:51 Again, that’s officehoursofpropgmedia.com.
0:01:57 Or, post your question on the Scott Gallery subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode.
0:01:58 First question.
0:02:03 Our first question comes from Snarky Spice on Reddit.
0:02:04 They ask,
0:02:07 Hey Scott, my dad and I have always been really close.
0:02:11 You recently discovered YouTube for the first time, and it’s actually the one who turned me on to your podcast.
0:02:13 We even met you at TED.
0:02:14 Oh, that’s nice.
0:02:20 Over time, though, he’s stopped listening to your pod or any others and has been hooked on the All In podcast.
0:02:29 My dad is a lifelong liberal, a philanthropist, and a very caring person, but since listening to that podcast, he’s been shocked by some of the things he’s started saying, Russian talking points and whatnot.
0:02:33 It feels like his worldview is changing, and it has been painful to watch.
0:02:41 As a daughter, how can I respectfully talk to him about the dangers of that kind of media influence without sounding condescending or pushing him further away?
0:02:44 And as a father of sons, how do you go about talking to them about media literacy?
0:02:46 Thanks for all you do, Amy.
0:02:49 I can’t speak specifically to the All In pod.
0:02:50 I’ve never listened to it.
0:02:53 I know they have a following.
0:02:59 I know that all of them are very successful, and then the podcast moderator, who’s, I forget his name, is less successful.
0:03:04 And they’ve gone, my understanding is from everything here is they’ve gone totally red pill.
0:03:09 But that’s their right, and that’s kind of your dad’s right.
0:03:15 I would say that trying to browbeat your dad, my son popped up the other day.
0:03:17 I mean, you are where you spend your time, unfortunately.
0:03:23 And my son, I remember on my way to get sushi, my 13-year-old or then 13-year-old son said,
0:03:25 Dad, when did they take their land away?
0:03:28 And he was obviously referring to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
0:03:30 And Emil, I wanted to go, well, that’s not actually accurate.
0:03:38 But the fastest way, I think, to get your family members to sort of seize up or cement their views or their weird views is to come at them.
0:03:43 And what I would suggest is what I’ve said to my son as I just started asking more about it.
0:03:48 And then my older son, a few years ago, was talking about Andrew Tate.
0:03:52 And he didn’t say he specifically liked him, but he was sort of defending him.
0:03:56 And I said, what is it about Andrew Tate that appeals to people your age?
0:03:59 And what do you like or not like about him?
0:04:02 And, you know, what attributes do you think are positive or negative?
0:04:05 I’d just ask a series of questions and try and get them to their own conclusions.
0:04:11 With respect to your dad, I think just having civil conversations around their views or what have you,
0:04:16 that hurts, losing people to the All Red Pill podcast.
0:04:18 Yeah, I don’t think there’s a whole hell of a lot you can do.
0:04:20 And I think it might be a learning experience for you.
0:04:26 Ask him to listen to a pod you like, you listen to a pod he likes, and then discuss.
0:04:34 And, but yeah, I have heard that those guys are basically Sergei Lavrov and kind of parroting Russian talking points.
0:04:38 But look, that’s your dad’s right, that’s their right.
0:04:42 And I would suggest you just try and engage him with other content.
0:04:50 But I can tell you what doesn’t work as, you know, a dad is coming at someone angry or in an obstinate.
0:05:03 I think from the left, we’re especially bad at that lecturing people and asking them to sign up for an orthodoxy and focusing on social virtue instead of what actually impacts the material and psychological well-being of actual Americans.
0:05:06 I think, I think the Democrats are just awful at that.
0:05:11 So I would just engage him in conversation, try and separate the person from the politics a little bit.
0:05:15 I don’t, I just don’t even talk to my father-in-law about politics.
0:05:17 I don’t need to hear why he thinks Trump is great.
0:05:20 I just, I don’t want to dislike the man and I would end up disliking him.
0:05:27 And where I live, where I have a home in Florida, I would say a good 40, maybe 50% of my friends are Trump supporters.
0:05:34 And, and I have one friend that I’ve grew up with my whole, I mean, I’m really close friend who’s like gone total fucking red pill.
0:05:44 He puts out these videos every day, like calling Governor Newsom, Governor Newsom and talking about, you know, that Biden should have been arrested.
0:05:47 And I’m like, Jesus Christ, this guy has literally lost his shit.
0:05:50 But I just ignore it all because I value the friendship.
0:05:55 And if you don’t separate the person from the politics, you’re going to lose 50% of your relationships.
0:06:07 And one of the terrible things about how polarized we’ve become and quite frankly, just how, what a fucking narcissist Trump is and how he needs to be in the news every day, even if it’s deploying the National Guard for no reason, in my view.
0:06:10 That’s just, just not helping.
0:06:18 And, but what I would say is try not to give into it and inject politics into your relationships because you kind of immediately sequester yourself.
0:06:19 From 50% of the population.
0:06:24 Anyways, long-winded way of saying try and separate the person from the politics.
0:06:27 Engage your dad in discussions around this stuff.
0:06:31 But I wouldn’t, I’d be very careful not to lecture at him.
0:06:34 And at the end of the day, he’s a grown man who gets to make his own decisions around this stuff.
0:06:35 Thanks for the question.
0:06:39 Our second question comes from KCBH711.
0:06:41 They say,
0:06:45 Hey Prop G, you said college is overpriced and outdated.
0:06:48 How does AI fit into the future of higher education?
0:06:52 Do you think it is the final nail in the coffin or a way to reinvent it?
0:06:54 Yeah, it’s overpriced.
0:06:58 But the problem is it’s, it’s still the ticket for a lot of people.
0:07:06 I continue to hear adults at parties whisper, oh, they don’t need, you know, our kids aren’t going to need college anymore.
0:07:10 Meanwhile, they’re paying college consultants $30,000 to try and get their kids into Brown.
0:07:12 These people are so full of shit.
0:07:13 Oh, it doesn’t matter.
0:07:14 You don’t need college.
0:07:17 It’s because they’re worried little Bobby is not going to get into a good school.
0:07:21 So the lie we tell ourselves is that people don’t need college anymore.
0:07:26 Yeah, a lot of people, two thirds of young kids aren’t not going to get a traditional liberal arts education.
0:07:31 But it still is a great, I don’t know, great on ramp into a better life.
0:07:32 There’s just no getting around it.
0:07:38 I think you’re going to make on average double, a college grad is going to make double what someone with a high school degree only is going to make.
0:07:43 And someone from elite college, it’s even, I think it’s even more dramatic.
0:07:51 So there’s bullshit around people don’t need college anymore is a lie we tell ourselves when our kids don’t end up with the opportunity or the desire to go to college.
0:07:53 And I want to be clear, it’s not for everybody.
0:07:55 There’s a lot of great jobs in the real economy.
0:08:05 I donate a lot of money to vocational programming for young adults because the real economy has a lot of interesting jobs out there in the trades that you started 60, 70, 80, 100.
0:08:17 You’re making 100 grand a year by the time you’re 25 installing energy efficient HVAC or repairing EVs or, God, I can’t imagine how much money they’re going to pay you if you get the skills to be on specialty construction for a nuclear power plant.
0:08:35 Anyway, there’s a lot of opportunities, non-college opportunities, but I think that the best thing, one of the best things we could do in terms of reform for college is one, revoke the tax status or tax-free status of universities that have over a billion dollars in endowment if they don’t expand their freshman class faster than population growth.
0:08:43 This artificial scarcity bullshit mindset is really creating a lot of manufactured stress among America’s middle class.
0:08:47 I got into UCLA when they had a 76% admissions rate.
0:08:50 I was one of the 24% that was rejected initially, and then I appealed and I got in.
0:08:53 And this year, the acceptance rate is 9%.
0:09:01 So if you don’t expand your freshman class faster than population growth, you’re no longer a public servant, you’re a Chanel bag, you lose your tax-free status.
0:09:10 Schools should be on the hook for 10%, 20%, 50% of bad debt such that they stopped doling out a shit ton of cheap credit to kids who they know are not going to be able to pay it back.
0:09:20 So your question about AI, I think AI will help people learn faster and will up the bar, but I don’t think it’s going to replace creativity, strategy.
0:09:23 You know, I think it might hurt salaries.
0:09:35 So investment banking and consulting are going to dramatically reduce their hiring because the initial entry-level people are basically doing the work that AI can do or AI can do the work that they can do right now.
0:09:51 But the top bankers, the top consultants are able to sit down with people and kind of emphasize the right points and sort of understand, can kind of see the matrix, if you will, of a company and have the credibility to say to the CEO, no, this is a stupid idea, you should be doing this.
0:10:02 So I think it’s going to enhance education, make it more efficient, but I don’t see it replacing education because at the end of the day, what we do at NYU or other schools, we don’t educate, we certify.
0:10:15 And that is the real value add and the reason people pay us, pay our students $212,000 and the reason why kids pay us $300,000 in tuition over four years is that what we’re doing is we’re certifying.
0:10:18 The admissions process is so arduous.
0:10:19 We do credit checks.
0:10:22 And above, I said it’s so fucking exclusionary and rejectionist.
0:10:24 We do interviews.
0:10:29 It’s basically the higher ed is the outsourced HR department for the corporate world.
0:10:32 And that is we make sure the kids aren’t mentally ill.
0:10:34 We make sure the kids can play with others.
0:10:35 The kids have to do group projects.
0:10:41 The kids at NYU have to go to Barcelona for the semester and show that they can survive without their parents.
0:10:44 You know, that they can do basic math.
0:10:46 That they can show up for class wearing shoes.
0:10:51 You know, just all this shit that basically says, all right, this is an adult that will succeed in the corporate world.
0:10:58 And so the corporate world is willing to pay a 40, 50, 60% premium because of the incredible screening we’ve done.
0:11:03 And some higher ed’s primary value add has already happened by orientation.
0:11:05 Whew!
0:11:06 That was a mouthful.
0:11:08 Thanks for the question.
0:11:10 We’ll be right back after a quick break.
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0:14:46 Welcome back.
0:14:48 Our final question also comes from Reddit.
0:14:50 Mango279.
0:14:52 Mango279.
0:14:53 Jesus Christ.
0:14:57 Prof G, how are you feeling about your son leaving for college soon?
0:14:59 It’s tough.
0:15:00 It’s very strange.
0:15:07 It’s, on the one hand, my purpose for the first four years of my life was trying to get rich.
0:15:11 And so I could take care of myself, my mother, and be a baller.
0:15:12 That was my purpose.
0:15:13 I’m not proud of that, but that’s the honest truth.
0:15:18 My purpose the last 10 years, 15 years, is I want to raise good men.
0:15:28 And no matter where I am in the world, at the same time I call my kids, I spend a ton of garbage time or just like nonchalant time with my kids.
0:15:34 My kids are at the point where they’re kind of like, I don’t want to say they’re sick of hanging out with me, but I’m kind of always pretty available to them.
0:15:37 And I think they’ll remember that when they’re older.
0:15:39 I think they’ll remember what an effort I made.
0:15:42 And I try also really hard to model good behavior.
0:15:43 And sometimes I fail.
0:15:44 I get angry a lot.
0:15:49 Or, you know, I have to remember I’m their dad, not their friend.
0:15:53 I had this image that we would be great buddies and they’d be really into World War II history and CrossFit.
0:15:57 And what you find out is if you want to be a good dad, one, you’re not their friend, you’re their dad.
0:15:59 And you’ve got to do the hard work early on.
0:16:01 You’ve got to have the hard conversations.
0:16:02 You’ve got to say, this is unacceptable.
0:16:05 No, you’re not going out with your friends tonight because you were disrespectful to your mother.
0:16:07 You know, you’ve got to do the hard work early.
0:16:11 And some, you have to be an asshole such that they don’t grow up to be huge assholes.
0:16:13 So that is my purpose, is trying to be a good dad.
0:16:36 But I still feel this kind of, this weirdness, sadness, and not failure, but I always had this image that I would do all these amazing things with my kid that would be so instructional, so many life lessons.
0:16:38 And I feel like I kind of never got there.
0:16:56 Like, I wanted to, I wanted to build something with my kids, you know, renovate a car, or I wanted to have kind of these weekly things with my kids where we went over our family history, or I wanted to have a kindness practice, or, you know, and I feel like the most I’ve done is I managed to get through all eight seasons of Game of Thrones with them.
0:17:05 You know, it’s just, I felt like, I know I’m a good dad, but I felt like I really wanted to be a great dad, and I just never quite got there.
0:17:06 And now it’s too late.
0:17:16 Now my boys are just into their own things and their own friends, and I’ve missed my window of opportunity to kind of be the great dad that I was wanting to be.
0:17:28 So I feel a little bit of like, shame’s not the wrong word, but disappointment, that I spent so much time virtue signaling and talking about being a dad, and I feel like, I know I’m a good dad, but I feel like I missed the opportunity to be a great dad, and now it’s too late.
0:17:29 So I have that kind of pit of sadness.
0:17:36 And I don’t know how much of that is on a self-reflection, or just the fact that I’m prone to depression, and see everything as a glass half empty.
0:17:55 I’m excited about the idea of trying to get my kids to launch, to have my oldest leave the house healthy, happy, you know, I’ve got him working out, I know he likes himself, I know he feels loved, but I want to get my kids to launch.
0:17:56 That’s my purpose.
0:18:09 I want my kids to go into the world, secure, happy, like themselves, find interesting things, add value, love their country, find a mate, and I think we’re tracking to get them to launch.
0:18:10 So that feels good.
0:18:15 The really hard part is, I got talked into boarding school from my oldest.
0:18:18 I think it’s been really good for him.
0:18:20 It’s kind of been a fucking disaster for me.
0:18:24 I really hate not having my sons in the same house with me.
0:18:26 I have my youngest, but I don’t have my oldest.
0:18:34 And even if I didn’t see him that day, just knowing he was upstairs, just hearing him around, hearing him on the phone, gave me a lot of comfort.
0:18:41 And I feel as if I’m always a little bit lost when I’m home and both my sons aren’t home.
0:18:41 He comes home.
0:18:43 It was told to me that he would be home all weekend.
0:18:44 He’s not.
0:18:45 He’s home Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon.
0:18:47 It was the right thing to do.
0:18:50 He’s a bit of a, not a loner, but he’s very confident.
0:18:53 And he loves boarding school.
0:18:54 He’s doing really well.
0:18:54 He’s thriving.
0:18:56 I can see him kind of evolving into a man.
0:18:59 So it was the right decision for him, but it’s, I don’t know.
0:19:00 And so it was the right, I should stop there.
0:19:01 It was the right decision.
0:19:08 But the idea, one of the reasons we’re moving back to the U.S., one, I’m so fucking freaked out about this slow burn into fascism.
0:19:14 I want to be back on the ground, but two, it looks as if my oldest is going to go to college in the U.S.
0:19:17 And I don’t want to be more than a kind of a two-hour plane ride.
0:19:23 I mean, talking about the dog wagging the tail here, I’m literally reconfiguring my life.
0:19:30 Not reconfiguring my life, but wherever I end up living, it’ll be somewhere that’s close enough such that my son can come home the weekend should he desire to.
0:19:34 But, yeah, I’m sad about it.
0:19:35 Is sad the wrong word?
0:19:37 A mix of pride, a mix of melancholy.
0:19:40 I mean, I can’t tell you.
0:19:42 It was literally just yesterday.
0:19:48 My son would come in and, like, crawl into bed with me and then pop up and say, Dad, let’s make a plan.
0:19:59 And then all of a sudden, he was this, like, tall, gangly 17-year-old, you know, who is nice to me but is, you know, definitely not that impressed with me and definitely doesn’t want to make a plan for the day with me.
0:20:01 I don’t know where or when.
0:20:03 It just goes, you know, they say this, it goes so fast.
0:20:06 It goes so crazy fast.
0:20:15 So, yeah, I’m a little bit, I feel good about his leaving the nest and he’s doing well, but there’s just no getting around it.
0:20:18 I’m really sad that this is it.
0:20:23 And I know that 90% of the time I’ve spent with my kids or my oldest has already happened.
0:20:27 So, yeah, I’m sad that my son is leaving for college.
0:20:31 That’s all for this episode.
0:20:36 If you’d like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to OfficeHours at PropGmedia.com.
0:20:38 That’s OfficeHours at PropGmedia.com.
0:20:46 Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit and we just might feature it in an upcoming episode.
0:20:53 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez.
0:20:55 Drew Burrows is our technical director.
0:20:58 Thank you for listening to the PropG pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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0:01:18 Megan Rapinoe.
0:01:18 Megan Rapinoe here.
0:01:28 This week on A Touch More, we’re talking all about the WNBA All-Star roster with ESPN analyst and former All-Star herself, Chanae Agumike.
0:01:32 She also tells us what she wants to see from the CBA negotiations.
0:01:37 Plus, I’m sharing some of the record-breaking updates from the Euros in Switzerland.
0:01:42 Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
0:01:49 I’m Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice.
0:01:58 What would a modern-day Gestapo with Wi-Fi and drones targeting people based on their identity, not their behavior, look like?
0:02:00 We know what it looks like.
0:02:01 It’s called ICE.
0:02:05 ICE Age, as read by George Han.
0:02:15 President Trump is no longer fighting inflation, China, or AI.
0:02:25 Instead, he’s declared war on a manufactured threat, the enemy within, immigrants, journalists, and professors.
0:02:31 Our biggest threat, apparently, isn’t Russian aggression or economic inequality.
0:02:34 It’s your Uber driver or anthropology professor.
0:02:41 This is not only cruel and depraved, but stupid.
0:02:50 As the chill being cast across the agriculture, services, and construction sectors will likely be more inflationary than the tariffs.
0:02:52 More stupidity.
0:02:58 Trump’s goal is to deport 4 million undocumented people over four years.
0:03:01 That’s about 3% of the U.S. workforce.
0:03:05 10 to 15% in several sectors dependent on immigrant labor.
0:03:11 The big, beautiful bill signed into law on July 4th isn’t about border security.
0:03:16 It’s a blueprint for mass detention and deportation.
0:03:20 A $75 billion hammer in search of a scapegoat.
0:03:32 Under the law, ICE gets funding that rivals the military budgets of Italy or Israel to build sites like the facility in the Everglades, nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz.
0:03:33 The goal?
0:03:35 Fear.
0:03:38 This isn’t law enforcement.
0:03:44 It’s authoritarian cosplay designed to scare the electorate and silence dissent.
0:03:53 Trump’s war doesn’t punish behavior, but identity, as immigrants from certain countries and ethnicities are targeted.
0:04:02 Federal agents in full tactical gear swept through a park in Latino-heavy L.A. this week just to make a point.
0:04:03 The mayor said,
0:04:04 The mayor said,
0:04:07 It’s the way a city looks before a coup.
0:04:09 Question.
0:04:14 What do stormtroopers, the KKK, and ICE have in common?
0:04:17 A mask.
0:04:21 ICE has become Trump’s personal Praetorian guard.
0:04:30 Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Vice President Harris’ running mate, was excoriated for comparing ICE to the Gestapo.
0:04:33 But spare us the bullshit indignation.
0:04:43 Masked agents in fatigues, raiding churches and schools, separating families is not modern America, but 1930s Europe.
0:04:45 Or is it?
0:04:55 In the 2026 fiscal year, ICE will receive over $11 billion, a 10% increase from current funding.
0:04:58 The new law will more than double that.
0:05:06 It authorizes the hiring of 10,000 agents, bringing ICE’s force to nearly 30,000.
0:05:17 In 1944, Nazi Germany had 32,000 Gestapo officers and $2 billion, inflation-adjusted, in funding.
0:05:20 They were fighting a world war.
0:05:24 Trump is fighting home health aides and Uber drivers.
0:05:30 ICE claims it’s targeting the worst of the worst.
0:05:39 But fewer than one-third of the record 59,000 immigrant detainees have been convicted of any crime.
0:05:40 The rest?
0:05:44 A. Immigrants who didn’t look like the typical Iowa voter.
0:05:49 Trump’s reach even extends to his political rivals.
0:05:58 He publicly questioned the citizenship of NYC mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani and his former first friend, Elon.
0:06:02 Mamdani has been a U.S. citizen since 2018.
0:06:03 Doesn’t matter.
0:06:07 Criminal now also means not for Trump.
0:06:18 The argument that immigrants are stealing jobs is a lie told by people who’ve never built a business or managed a P&L.
0:06:21 Immigrants create jobs.
0:06:25 They work jobs native-born Americans won’t touch.
0:06:29 They pay into Social Security but rarely collect.
0:06:33 Deporting them is an economic own goal.
0:06:40 The Cato Institute estimates the cost of mass deportations could eventually exceed $1 trillion.
0:06:51 The Peterson Institute projects a 1.2% drop in GDP if 1.3 million people are deported.
0:06:57 Growing to 7% if deportations hit $8 million.
0:07:02 That’s not policy but, see above, stupidity.
0:07:05 Hurting others while hurting yourself.
0:07:15 Instead of militarizing immigration enforcement, we should be investing against the real challenge.
0:07:16 AI.
0:07:25 The World Economic Forum says 9 million jobs globally may be displaced in the next five years.
0:07:32 Anthropics CEO warns AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.
0:07:39 Imagine the population of Greece storming the shores of America and taking jobs,
0:07:41 even jobs Americans actually want,
0:07:44 as they’re willing to work 24-7 for free.
0:07:47 You’ve already met them.
0:07:50 Their names are GPT, Claude, and Gemini.
0:07:53 Want to protect American workers?
0:07:55 Train.
0:07:56 Don’t terrorize.
0:08:02 Trump’s war on domestic enemies doesn’t stop with ICE.
0:08:05 He’s coming for the press and the Academy.
0:08:11 Disney, Meta, and Paramount have all settled nuisance lawsuits with Trump
0:08:13 for a combined total of about $60 million.
0:08:17 All the funds go to his presidential library,
0:08:20 where truth will go to be laundered, not learned.
0:08:24 Newsrooms are folding or playing defense.
0:08:27 Breaking with a long-standing tradition,
0:08:31 the White House is hand-picking press pool participants.
0:08:37 Harvard, once America’s aircraft carrier strike force of soft power,
0:08:39 is now a mega-speed bag.
0:08:42 Autocrats always come for universities,
0:08:45 which train people to ask questions.
0:08:50 The White House is threatening to defund billions in research,
0:08:53 choke off international student visas,
0:08:55 and criminalize campus dissent.
0:09:02 Nearly 300 top researchers have applied for scientific asylum.
0:09:04 In France!
0:09:07 In the 30s and 40s,
0:09:11 some of the world’s premier academics fled Europe for America.
0:09:13 They brought quantum theory,
0:09:14 chemotherapy,
0:09:15 modern computing,
0:09:17 and other breakthroughs with them.
0:09:19 Oh, including the bomb.
0:09:24 The rivers of elite human capital are now flowing in reverse,
0:09:26 and we’re sending the scholars back.
0:09:30 How can we be this fucking stupid?
0:09:35 This isn’t a slippery slope,
0:09:37 but a vertical drop.
0:09:40 Trump has Congress kneeling,
0:09:41 courts folding,
0:09:43 and corporations cashing in.
0:09:46 What’s left is us.
0:09:49 This was never just about immigrants,
0:09:50 professors,
0:09:51 or journalists.
0:09:54 It’s about unchecked power
0:09:55 that,
0:09:56 unchallenged,
0:09:58 is metastasizing.
0:10:02 Democracy doesn’t defend itself.
0:10:05 We won’t fight this with hashtags,
0:10:07 but with votes,
0:10:08 lawsuits,
0:10:10 and courage.
0:10:14 This is the moment we decide,
0:10:17 are we citizens of a republic,
0:10:21 or spectators to its collapse?
0:10:27 Life is so rich.

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0:00:28 and the things, and the things, and the non-stop things.
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0:00:48 Welcome to Office Hours with Prabhji.
0:00:51 This is the part of the show where we answer questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship,
0:00:53 and whatever else is on your mind.
0:00:56 Just a reminder, you can now catch Office Hours every Monday and Friday.
0:00:58 That’s right, two episodes a week.
0:01:02 If you’d like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to
0:01:03 officehoursofproftgymedia.com.
0:01:06 Again, that’s officehoursofproftgymedia.com.
0:01:12 Or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode.
0:01:13 First question.
0:01:19 Our first question comes from The Relevant Elephants on Reddit.
0:01:21 God, the best names in the world.
0:01:21 They ask,
0:01:26 Hey, Prop G, you said mandatory service could help the nation’s loneliness epidemic.
0:01:31 I volunteer at animal rescues in LA, and I’m literally the only man there.
0:01:34 I’ve asked on Reddit how to get more men involved, and the top answers were,
0:01:37 that’s a woman’s job, or I don’t have time.
0:01:39 I don’t buy that, and I don’t think you do either.
0:01:41 So how do we reach these men?
0:01:44 How do we convince them that volunteering is masculine and actually good for their social
0:01:45 lives, too?
0:01:47 First off, thanks for doing that.
0:01:52 I feel a little bit self-conscious, like lecturing about volunteering, because I give a lot of
0:01:54 money away, but I don’t give much of my time away.
0:01:58 I like to think that I’m generous with everything but my time, so occasionally I’ll do some volunteer
0:02:04 work or spend time with young men, but I don’t show up to food kitchens and shit like that,
0:02:05 and I should.
0:02:07 I just, I don’t know, lazy, selfish.
0:02:09 So I don’t want to lecture people about it.
0:02:16 What I would say is that I had Dan Harris on the pod, and he writes about anxiety and purpose.
0:02:17 Very thoughtful guy.
0:02:24 He has a really wonderful podcast called 10% Happier, and he, a couple things that he said
0:02:26 really stuck with me is that, one, action absorbs anxiety.
0:02:31 If you are, I have someone in my life right now that has, like, crazy tooth pain and is worried
0:02:36 at something with her head, had a head injury, and I’m like, okay, let’s get you in to see
0:02:42 a neurologist, like, tonight or tomorrow morning, and a dentist, like, and immediately she felt
0:02:44 better because action absorbs anxiety.
0:02:47 If you’re worried about something, just immediately move to action to try to address it.
0:02:48 And you’re going to feel better.
0:02:55 Also, the other thing you said that a great way to sort of practice to sort of help you
0:02:57 get out of a funk or depression is to help others.
0:03:00 And that is, it gives you a sense of purpose.
0:03:05 You get out, you meet other people, makes you feel important, makes you feel masculine.
0:03:11 I think that if you’re feeling down, getting out of your own head and start focusing on service,
0:03:16 helping others, I think is a great way to kind of address maybe if you’re feeling a little
0:03:17 bit down or a little bit depressed.
0:03:20 So I think volunteer work is an outstanding idea.
0:03:25 In terms of how to get more people to volunteer at dog shelters, you know, I don’t know, go
0:03:27 on your social media feed and show all the cool dogs.
0:03:29 And it’s funny you say that.
0:03:34 I spoke at a conference in Palm Beach about three months ago.
0:03:37 And we were talking, I was talking about mating and the dynamics of mating.
0:03:41 And he came up to me and he was this shorter guy, like not unattractive, but not attractive.
0:03:44 Like not the kind of guy I would think would do well on dating apps.
0:03:49 And he said that he met his wife at a dog shelter and that his wife, he claims is much higher
0:03:50 character and much hotter than him.
0:03:56 But she was really drawn to him because of his kindness and his service, which I thought
0:03:57 was actually pretty interesting.
0:04:00 I do think, I’m trying to think how you appeal to dudes here.
0:04:02 I do think it’s probably a really good way to meet friends.
0:04:06 And also it’s just a great rap at a bar.
0:04:10 You know, well, when I was volunteering down at the, when Bosco, the rescue dog who I was
0:04:15 saving from the kill shelter down at the animal shelter I volunteer at.
0:04:17 Anyways, I think it’s probably a great way to meet friends.
0:04:24 And I would say social media and these accounts, these rescue shelters having accounts and
0:04:28 opportunities or calls to attention around opportunities to volunteer.
0:04:35 And again, just more broadly, I think that a fantastic way to address mild depression or
0:04:39 if you’re feeling down is to get out of your own head and start serving in the agency
0:04:39 of others.
0:04:41 Thanks for your good work.
0:04:45 Our second question comes from RedLegs05 on Reddit.
0:04:50 They ask, Prop G, you joke about being a narcissist.
0:04:53 I think most of us raised on social media are, but we rarely talk about it.
0:04:56 Maybe because if we’re not successful, it just feels shameful.
0:05:00 So how do you think narcissism fuels achievement or results from it?
0:05:03 And would you ever delete your social accounts other than Twitter?
0:05:04 You call them toxic.
0:05:08 What’s stopping you from actually logging off and signaling some virtue while you’re at it?
0:05:09 That’s an interesting question.
0:05:14 So a narcissist, I think, is someone who thinks, you know, looks out the window and sees himself
0:05:20 to an extent where they lack empathy and they can even become somewhat sociopathic because
0:05:22 everything is just about them.
0:05:29 they don’t really make much of an effort or think, look through the lens of other people’s emotions or success.
0:05:36 And I think I suffer from some of it, but I think even if someone states they’re a narcissist, it probably means they aren’t.
0:05:54 And one thing that has having kids, working with people, having had some adversity in my life, having friends from different economic backgrounds, going to a public school where there are people from all different ethnicities and economic backgrounds.
0:05:57 So I think you’re more inclined to become less of a narcissist, is that true?
0:05:59 What’s the opposite of narcissism, empathy?
0:06:00 I don’t know.
0:06:13 But I think that some of the self-absorption, I feel, or vanity are also embers such that I want to be more successful.
0:06:21 The affirmation or the approval of others in being impressive in other people’s eyes is definitely a motivating force for me.
0:06:25 And I think it’s interesting to look at what motivates you around things.
0:06:33 And my primary objective or purpose the first 40 years of my life was economic security, which is Latin for get more money.
0:06:35 And why is that?
0:06:43 One, in a capitalist society, all the signals are trying to encourage you to make more money and be more productive such that you’ll go out and buy more Chipotle
0:06:45 and go to Disney World and fuel the economy.
0:06:50 So every signal is, all right, how do you aggregate more money, more power?
0:06:53 Well, if you aggregate more money and power, your kids are going to have more opportunity.
0:06:56 You’re going to be, men are going to laugh at your jokes.
0:06:58 Women are going to want to have sex with you.
0:07:01 I mean, all of these things are pretty strong motivators in a capitalist society.
0:07:04 And so I very much bought into that.
0:07:09 And also in a capitalist society, you get to take care of your own when you have money.
0:07:12 And my biggest source of stress growing up and even into my 30s and 40s with kids,
0:07:18 was feeling like I was economically vulnerable, whether it was investing in companies that were going poorly
0:07:26 and worrying that I was failing my children or really my first sort of fear and anxiety around money when I was a kid
0:07:29 because me and my mom didn’t have enough, but the real fear set in when my mom got very sick.
0:07:37 And I felt those natural masculine protective instincts to try and take care of my mom.
0:07:44 And it was very hard and humiliating because I wasn’t able to do it at the level that I expected for myself.
0:07:48 And so I figured out pretty fucking early, okay, money matters a lot.
0:07:52 And I became very focused and that was my purpose.
0:08:01 But as I got older, wanting to be loved, wanting to impress people, wanting to have relevance, all of that.
0:08:01 I mean, that’s a form.
0:08:02 Is that a form?
0:08:04 I think that’s more vanity than narcissism.
0:08:06 But those things are very motivating.
0:08:14 And I have thought somewhat to your second part of your question, I thought at some point, I’m just going to go dark off of social media.
0:08:15 This is just so fucking stupid.
0:08:17 And I’m addicted.
0:08:19 I don’t have an addictive personality.
0:08:20 I drink a lot of alcohol.
0:08:22 I don’t do a lot of drugs.
0:08:25 I do some THC, but I don’t think I’m addicted to any of it.
0:08:29 I’m one of the 95% of people who manage their substance and their professional and personal lives fairly well.
0:08:34 Where I do have an addiction is I’m addicted to the affirmation of others.
0:08:38 I care too much about people who I will never meet or their opinion of me.
0:08:42 And sometimes it gets in the way of what really matters.
0:08:47 And that is the affirmation, love, empathy, and care of people who are close to me.
0:08:48 You know, I work.
0:08:54 I will trade off personal time for work because I want to impress people and I want to make more money.
0:08:56 And then I do slow down and think, what the fuck am I doing?
0:08:59 Here’s a nice thing about money.
0:09:00 God, I’m going off script here.
0:09:01 There’s three buckets.
0:09:03 There’s things you want to do.
0:09:10 I want to hang out with my kids and go to, you know, the, you know, the Arsenal game or Chelsea game or Spurs.
0:09:11 We’re a house divided.
0:09:13 How the fuck did we end up with three teams?
0:09:16 Anyways, there’s things you have to do, right?
0:09:17 Jim Bancop is going to be a can.
0:09:21 He’ll want to, he’s, he’s the CEO of Vox who distributes our podcast.
0:09:22 He wants to get together.
0:09:23 I have to do that.
0:09:24 And I say have to do that.
0:09:25 I also want to.
0:09:25 I like Jim.
0:09:26 He’s actually a reasonably nice guy.
0:09:28 And there’s things you should do.
0:09:34 I’ve been invited to all this shit at can that will be a bunch of people and it’d be good networking and good for my business.
0:09:38 And I’m like, the great thing about having money is you can eliminate the should bucket.
0:09:39 I no longer do shit.
0:09:41 I should no longer do shit.
0:09:41 I should.
0:09:42 Oh my God.
0:09:42 Isn’t that nice?
0:09:56 I do think though, that at some point I would like to go dark and just hang out with friends and maybe get involved in, I don’t know, trying to add more value on the nonprofit side.
0:10:00 Maybe write more, hang out somewhere beautiful and just wait for the ask answer.
0:10:08 This whole social media thing, it definitely, after I do a lot of it and it’s so important, you’ve got to be on social if you want to market your product, have relevance.
0:10:09 I get it.
0:10:15 But at some point I’m going to, you know, every time I spend more than a few hours on social media, I feel like I need to shower.
0:10:17 It’s like eating a big bag of Skittles.
0:10:18 You’re like, oh God, is that a good idea?
0:10:24 So, yeah, at some point I will, but right now I’m still desperate for your affirmation.
0:10:26 Thanks for the question.
0:10:28 We’ll be right back after a quick break.
0:10:37 Support for the show comes from Upway.
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0:11:38 Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.
0:11:41 One of the hardest parts about moving to a new city is finding your people.
0:11:45 You can look far and wide, but it’s hard to find the people who just get you.
0:11:47 And the same goes for you to be marketers.
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0:12:42 Can’t stop, won’t stop, get guap, 10 white toes and then Tori flip-flops.
0:12:51 This week on Net Worth and Chill, I’m joined by Saweetie, the Grammy-nominated recording artist and entrepreneur who’s turned her hustle into an empire worth millions.
0:12:57 From attending USC to pursuing music to securing major deals with McDonald’s and Matt Cosmetics,
0:13:03 Saweetie breaks down how she transformed her icy girl persona into cold, hard cash.
0:13:07 A money goal is to have passive income in the millions.
0:13:12 Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff.
0:13:18 Welcome back to our final question from Tana on Reddit.
0:13:24 Hey, Scott, I was laid off from my job three months ago and I’m having a lot of trouble finding a new job.
0:13:25 I work in tech as a product manager.
0:13:30 It seems like a lot of white-collar workers are also having trouble in the current job market, especially in tech.
0:13:34 What would you suggest are the best ways to go about regaining employment these days?
0:13:35 Thanks in advance.
0:13:37 I don’t think there’s a silver bullet here.
0:13:45 The one thing I would correlate with a job search that sometimes people don’t necessarily correlate with is,
0:13:49 one, it’s okay to be vulnerable.
0:13:59 I think especially men put up this front of, oh, yeah, I decided I didn’t like them and I left and I’m fielding other offers when the reality is I got laid off and I really need help.
0:14:01 Do you have any idea of anyone who’s looking for a job?
0:14:07 And I mean, you don’t want to come across as desperate, but it’s okay to be, yeah, got laid off, looking for a job.
0:14:09 Let me know if you know of any opportunities.
0:14:09 Here’s my CV.
0:14:11 This is the kind of role I’m looking for.
0:14:24 And I think it’s okay to call people you’re close with and say, if you have any ideas or to call and say, what I tell people are looking for a job I’m close with, I’m probably, there’s probably opportunities in my universe that I’m not thinking of.
0:14:32 If you want to meet someone at X company or you think, I had a friend of mine who is the chief revenue officer of a well-known tech company, but it’s not working out.
0:14:32 He doesn’t like it.
0:14:35 Call me and say, do you know anyone at Reddit?
0:14:36 There’s a job there.
0:14:39 And he forwarded me the job description and it ends up, I do know someone at Reddit.
0:14:43 So, one, don’t be afraid to ask for help.
0:14:46 Two, every day, just a list of shit you’re going to do.
0:14:50 Send out this many emails, go on LinkedIn, contact this many people.
0:14:56 Success in anything is a small series of disciplined efforts every day, right?
0:15:05 Working out every day, cutting back your food intake a little bit every day, sending nice messages to people every day, showing you care, saving a little bit of money every day.
0:15:10 That is what success is, small acts of discipline every day.
0:15:14 So, every day, before you go to bed or in the morning, write up a list, do certain shit.
0:15:24 Now, here’s the thing I find that’s most interesting about the job search dynamic is that I love that study that came out of Google that when they post a job opening, they get immediately at 100 applications.
0:15:26 They shut it down 20 minutes later or take it down.
0:15:28 They invite in the 20 most qualified people.
0:15:40 And then 70% of the time, the person they ultimately end up making the offer to is someone who had an internal advocate, someone who already worked at Google, who said, I know Lisa and she’s fantastic.
0:15:49 And just trust me on this, because here’s the thing, most hiring managers have figured out, interviews are fucking useless, literally fucking useless, or at least they are for me.
0:15:51 I mean, occasionally someone comes in and you’re like, no way.
0:15:54 And occasionally someone comes in and blows your socks off and think we should try and find a way to hire this person.
0:16:00 But anyways, I find the 80% in the middle just doesn’t work.
0:16:04 I’ve been fooled a lot in interviews, both of the upside and the downside.
0:16:06 So it’s about reference hiring.
0:16:14 If someone calls me, Ed Elson, who’s the co-host of Prop G Markets, my friend Joanna Coles, called me and said, you must hire this young man.
0:16:15 And I’m like, to do what?
0:16:17 And she’s like, it doesn’t matter.
0:16:24 And she’s like, literally, I called him and said, I don’t know who you are, but I’ve been told to hire you by someone I trust.
0:16:25 So I hired him and she was right.
0:16:26 He’s great.
0:16:32 So the key when you’re hunting for a job in general is to be as social as possible.
0:16:33 Go out.
0:16:40 Go out, meet as many people as possible, have fun, contact people, make as many contacts as possible and let people know that you’re looking.
0:16:46 And it’s in some, the most popular kids in high school aren’t the best looking, the smartest or the best athletes.
0:16:49 They’re the ones that like the most other people.
0:16:53 So to a certain extent, networking and looking for a job is a popularity contest.
0:16:58 And how do you become most popular and put yourself in a room of opportunities, even when you’re not physically in it?
0:17:00 You like as many other people as possible.
0:17:02 You’re as social as possible.
0:17:05 So one, a series of small disciplined acts every day.
0:17:12 Two, don’t be afraid and let your ego get in the way of calling out or calling people and reaching out and asking you for help.
0:17:16 And three, be as social as possible and let people know that you’re looking for a job.
0:17:18 Anyways, best of luck to you.
0:17:18 Thanks for the question.
0:17:22 That’s all for this episode.
0:17:27 If you’d like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehours at propgmedia.com.
0:17:29 That’s officehours at propgmedia.com.
0:17:37 Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit and we just might feature it in an upcoming episode.
0:17:44 This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez.
0:17:46 Drew Burrows is our technical director.
0:17:49 Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:17:56 We’ll see you next time.
0:17:57 We’ll see you next time.

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0:02:01 Episode 356.
0:02:03 356 is the country code for Malta.
0:02:08 In 1956, Elvis Presley released his first hit single, Heartbreak Hotel.
0:02:08 Choose to it.
0:02:12 Someone asked me to do an impression of Elvis, and I said, sure.
0:02:14 And I pretended to be dead on the crapper.
0:02:16 Go!
0:02:17 Go!
0:02:17 Go!
0:02:18 Go!
0:02:28 Welcome to the 356th episode of the Prop G-Pod.
0:02:28 What’s happening?
0:02:30 I am still in Ibiza.
0:02:33 I just think Ibiza is fascinating.
0:02:40 One, they’ve managed to maintain this point of differentiation in this sort of singular ownership of island life and DJ culture.
0:02:43 And the result is incredible margins.
0:02:52 Specifically, I am staying at the Sixth Senses, which is this new raft of six-star priced hotels with four-star service.
0:02:54 It’s just, it’s nice.
0:02:55 It’s lovely.
0:02:58 But it’s not worth the money we’re paying, quite frankly.
0:03:06 And part of that is, A, Ibiza draws a tremendous crowd with lots of money and has this sort of singular feel.
0:03:06 What do you want to do?
0:03:07 What is all strategy?
0:03:09 What can we do that is really hard?
0:03:15 Becoming known for a great island that has the world’s best DJs in residence, that is really hard to do.
0:03:19 And then figuring out a way to price discriminate such that you get enough people to create a vibe,
0:03:28 but also monetize the people here who are in their 50s who still want to see Calvin Harris and figure out a way to charge them a crazy amount of money.
0:03:29 That’s just not easy.
0:03:35 Speaking of the super wealthy getting even wealthier, the tax bill passed last week, which I find incredibly disturbing.
0:03:41 One, because I can’t understand how America has not basically decided it’s the Hunger Games.
0:03:43 And that is, they weren’t fooled.
0:03:46 I think people want to think, oh, they don’t realize what’s in the bill.
0:03:49 Unfortunately, I think Americans do realize what’s in the bill.
0:03:58 And I think the lower 90 realize that they’re now nutrition for the top 10 percent, but believe that someday they’ll be in the top 10 and also conflate masculinity with cruelty.
0:04:12 When they see ICE agents holding people down and putting a knee on their head as a, you know, a 16-year-old screams to let his mother go, they find that those are hard decisions and that’s masculinity and that’s leadership.
0:04:15 And they’re so angry, they want to see that type of persecution.
0:04:17 You want to protect jobs, people?
0:04:23 Get your head out of your ass and start figuring out vocational training and some sort of, I don’t know, upskilling around AI.
0:04:25 You know who’s taking our jobs?
0:04:29 It’s not some lady wiping your grandma’s ass or collecting or picking your crops.
0:04:38 What does it mean when you have ICE agents who find that the most fruitful ways to find these quote-unquote undocumented workers is at schools, churches, and Home Depot?
0:04:40 Are those really the people we want to be deporting?
0:04:46 Anyways, by the way, this is totally reimagined Gestapo, full stop.
0:04:46 Yeah.
0:04:55 Oh, by the way, in case you’re asking, in case you just got your conservative ire up or my, are about to accuse me of TDS and say, oh, what, you’re comparing him to Hitler?
0:04:58 Yeah, I am, 100 percent, 100 percent.
0:05:01 But it’s clear, this isn’t just an accident.
0:05:03 The American people have not been fooled here.
0:05:04 They’ve decided this is what they want.
0:05:06 They want a certain level of harshness.
0:05:08 They want a certain level of cruelty.
0:05:12 They’ve conflated that with leadership and masculinity.
0:05:14 I think that is what is most frightening and most disappointing here.
0:05:27 But by the way, I’ve loaded my taxes into Chad GPT, and I’m going to get this, save about between $400,000 and $1.4 million a year over the next five years, based on what I’m hoping I make and the impact of this tax bill.
0:05:33 This is nothing but a transfer of wealth, again, from the poor to the rich.
0:05:44 And the poor will see most of that transfer in the form of incredible erosion in health care and the social safety net, and the wealthy will just get continued goodies in terms of tax cuts.
0:05:56 And then we’ll throw in some authoritarianism wrapped in bureaucratic language such that the senior administrative officials, administration officials can’t be subpoenaed or aren’t subject to certain checks or safeguards.
0:05:59 This is absolutely a move towards authoritarianism.
0:06:03 And what’s the most disturbing thing about it is it doesn’t feel like the American public has been fooled.
0:06:07 It appears that that is, in fact, what they want.
0:06:13 I look at when I’m on a vacation like this, I have time to slow down.
0:06:19 And I think like most people, when you’re on vacation with your family, you do kind of count your blessings and have some time to reflect.
0:06:23 And I immediately reverse engineer my prosperity.
0:06:26 This is what happens when you’re under the age of 40, or this is what happened to me.
0:06:28 And maybe I was just less thoughtful than most people.
0:06:34 But under the age of 40, when I reverse engineered my success to pillars, I credited my grit and my character.
0:06:35 Like, check my shit out.
0:06:37 I’m just so fucking impressive.
0:06:42 And this is, and all the panels I was on, well, this is how I, I, I did this X, Y, and Z.
0:06:48 And then as you get older, you realize, and I think this is part of maturing, that a lot of your success is not your fault.
0:06:51 And that has become so strikingly clear to me as I’ve gotten older.
0:06:59 And then when I reverse engineer my prosperity and blessings to pillars upon which those, that prosperity and those blessings were built on,
0:07:03 I go all the way back to the fourth grade when I got assisted lunch.
0:07:05 That is my family.
0:07:07 My mom made $800 a month as a secretary.
0:07:09 And so we qualified for assisted lunch.
0:07:17 And the wonderful thing about this program, the wonderful, the really generous thing that reflected so well on America about this program,
0:07:19 I didn’t know about it.
0:07:20 I didn’t know about it till later in life.
0:07:21 Why?
0:07:28 Because the good taxpayers of California and our wonderful federal government said it’s important that nine-year-olds don’t feel stigmatized.
0:07:30 So my mom would send in paperwork.
0:07:34 I would get the same lunch and breakfast coupons that every other kid had.
0:07:35 So there was no stigma attached.
0:07:42 I think that says something so nice about American values, or at least what used to be American values.
0:07:44 And then I got to high school.
0:07:50 When I was 17, and I’ve spoken very openly about this, my mom told me she was going to have to spend the night in the hospital
0:07:55 because she was getting something called a DNC, which I later found out meant she was getting an abortion.
0:08:05 And had we lived in America, in deep, dark, red country, we just weren’t very sophisticated or knowledgeable.
0:08:09 We probably would have had an unwanted pregnancy.
0:08:11 And at the age of 17, I had a job installing shelving.
0:08:12 I was making good money.
0:08:16 I probably, I most definitely would not have gone to UCLA.
0:08:27 And that would have not created this upward spiral of prosperity that I’ve enjoyed because of the generosity of California taxpayers and the great University of California system.
0:08:31 When I got to UCLA, the only way I got through was with Pell Grants.
0:08:33 I just couldn’t afford to be there.
0:08:38 Oh, and by the way, the fact that it had a 74% admissions rate, but Pell Grants got me through college.
0:08:43 And I qualified for those because, see, above, I came from an upper, lower, middle-class household.
0:08:48 A third of Pell Grant recipients will either have their grants reduced or eliminated.
0:08:55 When I graduated from college, I got to start companies and raise tens and then hundreds of millions of dollars.
0:08:58 All of my companies were built on the Internet.
0:08:59 Oh, by the way, who funded the Internet?
0:09:00 The federal government.
0:09:04 Why? Because we have the capital to make these big forward-leaning investments in technology.
0:09:17 We’re about to have a trillion dollars in debt service payments, which will crowd out all types of forward-leaning technology investments because we are massively funding with future prosperity these tax cuts.
0:09:23 So are we going to have the money to invent or invest in these deep, deep technologies that the private sector won’t invest in?
0:09:25 Oh, I was able to raise capital.
0:09:25 Why?
0:09:30 Because there was $5 million for every startup in the United States versus $1 million in Europe.
0:09:30 Why?
0:09:31 Because of rule of law.
0:09:33 Who built my companies?
0:09:34 Well, one, I’d like to think I had a role on it.
0:09:39 But Jawad Mohamed, my first programmer, Red Envelope, an immigrant from Pakistan.
0:09:46 Claude De Jokist, probably our most talented consultant, ran our CPG group, was an immigrant from Canada, who, by the way, was almost kicked out of America.
0:09:55 But because I have money, I was able to lawyer up and make sure she could stay and build a great American company that seven years later, we sold for $160 million.
0:09:58 Made a bunch of Americans and made a bunch of Americans and some immigrants rich.
0:10:04 Christine Dang at Red Envelope, our chief merchant, an immigrant from Vietnam.
0:10:12 The talent pool to build these great companies was because we, in fact, we, in fact, loved immigrants.
0:10:14 So let’s go even further back.
0:10:16 America welcomed my mother and father.
0:10:26 Had they run the risk of having their phone absconded or being shipped to some sort of detention center in a swamp land or being tracked down at work or something like that?
0:10:30 Or even if they got here legally, they think, do I really need to be here fucking?
0:10:35 Oh, another great immigrant, Maria Petrova, who, in her fifth language, edits my books and newsletters.
0:10:37 Jesus Christ.
0:10:39 Yeah, we don’t want that kind of talent coming here anymore.
0:10:51 So even if they’re not worried about having being run down and basically physically abused by ice, mass ice agents, do they really want to come here?
0:10:55 Universities. I got to go create an amazing platform at universities.
0:10:59 Why? Because corporations love working with academics.
0:11:08 There was incredible deep research funded by the government that gave us the resources to pursue the truth, which the private sector absolutely loves and benefits from.
0:11:10 Now, that’s under attack.
0:11:11 Back to mom and dad.
0:11:12 I don’t think they’d be here.
0:11:16 I don’t think I would have been able to make the best decision I’ve ever made.
0:11:20 The best decision I’ve ever made would not have been afforded to me, specifically to be born in America,
0:11:25 because I don’t think my parents would have come and put up a door to risk this bullshit right now.
0:11:28 Let’s go even further back, even further back.
0:11:35 My mother was a four year old sleeping in the tube in London as Hitler bombed the shit out of London in the Blitzkrieg.
0:11:51 history is because we decided that fascism was unacceptable.
0:11:53 History is rhyming.
0:11:56 It sounds like a bad cover band right now.
0:11:57 Would I be here?
0:12:03 Would my mom have survived if America hadn’t immediately decided that fascism was unacceptable?
0:12:27 So everything that I think I am blessed with or many things that have created just what is an exceptional life around around economic opportunity, loving the middle class, giving people merit and opportunity, a certain rule of fair play, a love of immigrants and a love of the unremarkable.
0:12:36 And appreciation that with a little bit of money, you can invest in young people and they will be able to pay that money back.
0:12:46 And that will be a good return on investment, making sure kids have nutrition, making sure people have access to some sort of dignity, making sure that women have some sort of bodily autonomy.
0:12:52 All the things my success is built on, all of those foundations are under attack right now.
0:13:02 And if you look through your history and your blessings, and most of us are a lot more blessed than we want to believe because social media has made us angry at everybody and angry at ourselves.
0:13:05 But the majority of you listening to this podcast have exceptional prosperity.
0:13:17 And if you reverse engineer it to many of the core things that weren’t your fault, that really led to your success, many of them, many of them, if not most of them, in my case, are under attack.
0:13:30 This is a direct insult to all of the people who made huge sacrifices to ensure that we lived in a free, democratic society that loved unremarkable people.
0:13:33 Okay, moving on.
0:13:43 In today’s episode, we speak with Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College historian and author who connects American history to today’s politics in her bestselling books and popular newsletter, Letters from an American.
0:13:50 We discussed with Professor Richardson the evolution of the Republican Party, Trump’s mega bill, and what still gives her hope for America.
0:13:54 So with that, here’s our conversation with Heather Cox Richardson.
0:14:12 Professor Richardson, where does this podcast find you?
0:14:19 I am in mid-coast Maine, much hotter than I have been in the last nine months up here.
0:14:20 Nice.
0:14:23 Well, let’s bust right into it here.
0:14:33 How has patriotism been redefined in recent years, and what would it look like to reclaim it in service of democracy rather than authoritarianism?
0:14:36 Well, the second half of that is easy, but let’s start with the first half of it.
0:14:56 One of the things that the Republicans did pretty effectively, really starting in the 1950s with the scare about communism, but certainly after the 1960s and the 1970s, was to identify membership in the Republican Party as being the heart of patriotism.
0:15:01 I mean, you really see this taking off under Nixon and Spiro Agnew when they deliberately polarized the country.
0:15:06 They called it positive polarization, meaning that it was positive for them because people would vote Republican.
0:15:15 And you see it really taking off under Ronald Reagan and his construction of the other people like welfare queens.
0:15:27 And once you got into talk radio in the mid-80s and then into the Fox News channel, the deliberate division of the country into two groups, one, you know, assumed to be pro-America and the other assumed to be anti-American.
0:15:31 And, you know, that picked up a lot of themes like the fight against the Vietnam War and so on.
0:15:37 But that idea that patriotism belongs to a certain party has turned out to be, you know, really quite poisonous.
0:15:48 And you see now the elevation of partisanship over country in, you know, even in things as recently as the budget reconciliation bill.
0:15:53 So there is a perversion of patriotism that we see going on around us.
0:16:02 But reclaiming a broader patriotism that shows an allegiance to the country rather than to a political party, you know, we’ve done that repeatedly in the past.
0:16:09 And the answer to that is simply to return to the foundational principles of the American democracy, the idea that we should be treated equally before the law.
0:16:13 We have a right to a say in our government and we have a right to equal access to resources.
0:16:20 Those aren’t difficult concepts and they’re the ones that have managed to create broad based political movements throughout our history.
0:16:25 What do you think Americans get wrong about how authoritarian regimes come into power?
0:16:33 And does this what other moment in history would you most equate this one to in terms of a rise of authoritarianism?
0:16:46 You know, I think a lot of Americans in the past, and I don’t think this is necessarily true any longer, but a lot of Americans in the past thought of authoritarians as people who arrived with the fanfare of the military behind them.
0:16:48 And the truth is that the military comes later.
0:16:59 The rise of an authoritarian comes from within established systems, often democratic systems, where people vote into power somebody, never who has a majority.
0:17:00 Hitler was democratically elected, no?
0:17:07 Well, yes, but, well, those authoritarians never have a majority of the population.
0:17:13 They are able to use the systems in order to turn a very small minority into a governing body.
0:17:17 So, anyway, I think we’re seeing the same thing around us now.
0:17:22 And what looks like this in the past to me is one of two things.
0:17:31 Either the 1850s and the ability of a few elite slave owners to monopolize the political system to take over the government in their own interest.
0:17:36 Or the 1890s when we saw something very similar among the giant industrialists.
0:17:40 And that, in a way, makes it easier to see ways to get out of it.
0:17:45 I often draw parallels between America now and 1930s Germany.
0:17:47 Do you think that’s a fitting comparison?
0:17:49 Both the examples you gave were from American history.
0:17:52 Well, remember, I’m an Americanist.
0:17:56 So, you know, I can speak with authority on America.
0:17:59 Any other country that I talk about is ill-informed.
0:18:05 You know, what historians do is we understand our body of work.
0:18:07 And what I do is America.
0:18:10 And my background is only partly in history.
0:18:12 You know, my master’s is in literature.
0:18:14 My degree is in American civilization.
0:18:19 So I’ve been trained in a very different way than a historian who could do comparative history, for example.
0:18:26 So, yeah, I can read the same books that Germanists read, but I don’t have the theoretical background to speak authoritatively about them.
0:18:42 What I can do is look at people like Hannah Arendt and Eric Hoffer and George Orwell and all those people who looked at the moment after the rise of Mussolini and Hitler and made broad generalizations about the kinds of populations that are susceptible to a rising authoritarian.
0:18:49 And, you know, that’s really your field, that idea of how do you market and to what population do you market?
0:18:55 The idea of giving up your rights and your privileges in order to support one guy.
0:19:01 So funny, because just as you said that, I was immediately very self-conscious about Dunning-Kruger.
0:19:03 And that is because I’ve had some success in some areas.
0:19:06 I feel it gives me license to speak about things I don’t know that much about.
0:19:13 And I very much appreciate how measured you are in acknowledging that you’re not an expert in certain fields and somewhat remiss to speak about it.
0:19:16 And that is so that is so rare in today’s age.
0:19:18 So I do appreciate that.
0:19:25 And I think it represents one of the wonderful things about academia, that that is a standard in academia, that you are supposed to stay in your own lane.
0:19:34 So, look, I’d be curious from an American viewpoint or based on your background and domain expertise.
0:19:36 So I’ll flip the question back to you.
0:19:40 Who do you think has done the best job of marketing political parties?
0:19:42 Or let me frame it this way.
0:19:43 I think the Democratic Party right now.
0:19:50 My understanding is if the election were held today, that Trump would still win handily over Vice President Harris.
0:19:54 And that the Democratic Party is less popular right now than Trump or the Republican Party.
0:20:11 And I would I would argue that a lot of that is marketing, that the Democratic Party is seen primarily as weak as a party of identity politics and a party that doesn’t really understand how to improve the material and psychological well-being of ordinary Americans.
0:20:20 But I’d love to get your view of what parties and why have been successful at marketing their own brand of politics.
0:20:27 You know, let’s start with what you just said about the Democrats, because I don’t disagree with you about the way that Democrats are perceived.
0:20:32 But that’s in part because defining the Democrats has been the business of the Republican Party.
0:20:43 And that’s, you know, through a media system that elevates the Republican voices through a construction of a certain kind of politics on the Republican side.
0:20:48 They have managed to define their opponents in ways that are completely inaccurate.
0:20:52 And the Democrats, I think, have not been able to push back against that successfully.
0:21:03 Now, you just you started by asking who has successfully marketed the kind of political positions that are the political parties that in our history.
0:21:15 And one of those groups is today’s modern Republican Party, who since at least the 1980s has billed itself as a party that’s going to dramatically increase economic growth and enable all boats to rise.
0:21:24 Remember Reagan talking about the fact that this by cutting taxes and cutting regulations, there would be such investment in the economy that would enable everybody to do better.
0:21:34 And we would be able to have increasing services, not less services, but increasing services because of the increase in tax revenue that quite literally never paid off.
0:21:42 And you’re still seeing it again with the budget reconciliation bill of just a week ago where, you know, you had Trump out there saying this is going to cause such extraordinary growth.
0:21:43 It doesn’t.
0:21:45 That simply does not work.
0:21:58 But I think they were able to sell it in part by tapping into an extraordinarily powerful mythology and a mythology that is not only part of American history, but part of sort of human literature.
0:22:09 And that was the idea of the idea of the idea that Ronald Reagan pushed so effectively in 1980 when he was in his campaign in 1980.
0:22:12 But certainly people had been doing from you before Reagan.
0:22:16 You could go back to Barry Goldwater and back to William F. Buckley Jr.
0:22:25 and back even, you know, into the years before the New Deal into fundamentalist Christianity, for example, and into all these different roots in the United States.
0:22:36 That idea of the individual fighting back against the empire is a powerful enough myth that if you think about it, in 1977, it was the heart of Star Wars.
0:22:45 That idea of the cowboy and the independent individual and so on, that’s something that a lot of Americans believed that they embodied.
0:22:49 And I think one of the things that I was just, I just had to walk over here.
0:22:54 Like I say, I really am a mid-coast Maine and I don’t have cell coverage or cable at my house.
0:22:56 So I have to, somebody lends me this place to work from.
0:23:07 And I was walking over here and I was thinking, you know, we’re seeing this now play out where a lot of people who believe that they didn’t need the government, they didn’t need taxes, they could do it all on their own,
0:23:15 are watching all the pieces of the government on which they depended being slashed and suddenly reaching a reckoning.
0:23:25 And one of the things that, to me, is intellectually interesting is what happens when people recognize that, in fact, they do need a community.
0:23:27 They do need each other.
0:23:35 Well, in the past, what we’ve gotten is the kind of cultural moment where you celebrate buddy movies or community movies.
0:23:50 You know, during World War II, Hollywood made zero Westerns and they made all those sort of World War II buddy movies or platoon movies and other things that celebrated towns and loyalties to each other.
0:23:52 Maybe we get a moment like that.
0:23:55 Maybe we get a lot of people who withdraw from politics.
0:24:00 Maybe we get an extraordinarily angry reactionary politics that supports authoritarianism.
0:24:11 But that branding of the Republican Party as the cowboy party, as the individual party, as the party of guys who could make it on their own, was extraordinarily effective.
0:24:17 And between 1981 and 2021, it moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent.
0:24:23 So I think you have to look at that as a pretty, pretty amazing branding moment.
0:24:25 What would you do for the Democrats now?
0:24:28 Let me just say I love this conversation.
0:24:32 So when people ask, what is the strategy of America?
0:24:38 I would say if you had to distill it down to one very basic thing, since the 1980s, the strategy has been to cut taxes.
0:24:45 That it’s intoxicating to believe that the private sector, which is incredible in the United States, best private sector arguably in the world,
0:24:51 that it’s when it’s unbridled and just let to run flat out, that it’ll create so much prosperity,
0:24:55 so much so much growth that that will ultimately, quote unquote, trickle down.
0:25:06 I think that it’s just impossible if you have any reverence for data, for numbers and the pursuit of truth to not acknowledge at this point that that strategy has not worked.
0:25:17 I would argue what you’re calling the cowboy mentality is that we have embraced or conflated masculinity and strength with cruelty and coarseness.
0:25:34 That there is a certain level of censors being tickled by people who are so angry, felt like they’ve been so lied to, and that anger gets speedballed by algorithms that have a profit incentive in convincing us that your neighbor isn’t a Russian soldier pouring across the Ukrainian border,
0:25:46 or that your enemy isn’t an Islamic Republic that is threatening, you know, has a gender apartheid, or that your enemy isn’t, you know, climate change.
0:25:51 Your enemy is the guy or gal next door that doesn’t share your beliefs and that you have every right to be angry at them.
0:26:06 And that when these individuals see masked ICE agents putting their knees on the head of immigrants, that unfortunately, and I think this is terrible, there are a lot of Americans that conflate that with leadership and strength.
0:26:19 And that I’d love to lay this all at the feet of Republicans who are engaging in the slow burn towards fascism and are combined cruelty and stupidity, which adds up to depravity.
0:26:24 But I’m worried, and I want to get your thought here, and then I’ll answer the question about what I think the Democrats need to do.
0:26:42 I worry that this represents a deeper sickness in American society, that Americans are so anxious, depressed, and angry that they are acting out and they sort of appreciate or conflate this cruelty with strength and with leadership.
0:26:47 And it represents a deeper sickness in our society that is going to be tougher to fix.
0:26:48 Your thoughts?
0:26:49 Well, I agree with that.
0:26:51 And the piece that you didn’t mention is misogyny.
0:26:58 I mean, a large part of this, that what you’re talking about, is dominance, is demonstrating dominance.
0:27:03 And one of the ways it’s been easiest to demonstrate dominance in the U.S. since the 1980s is to dominate women.
0:27:16 And that, I think, is way under-talked about because the conflation of women’s rights and the modern American government is, I think, terribly underexplored.
0:27:28 Now, that being said, one of the things that I need to lay on the table, where I think you and I have a real confluence, is that I am an idealist in that, you know, as I said, what historians study is how and why societies change.
0:27:30 And different people have different ideas about it.
0:27:34 It could be the economy or mass movements or great men or religion.
0:27:37 I believe ideas change society.
0:27:40 So, and everything is subordinate to that.
0:27:41 Now, that’s just my position.
0:27:47 You know, I’m not willing to go to the death for that, you know, against somebody who believes something else.
0:27:54 But if that’s the case, then what you are identifying, and I’m not going to disagree with you about that, is not a constant.
0:28:06 It is something that has been created by a certain kind of language, which is how we communicate ideas, and by a certain kind of political system that encourages that sort of anger and hatred.
0:28:18 Because I’m going to throw back at you here that if you actually look at polls on substance, not on things that are political, but if you look at how Americans feel about abortion rights, for example.
0:28:19 They agree with us.
0:28:20 They agree with Democrats.
0:28:22 By a lot.
0:28:26 But the point is not that they agree with Democrats, but they agree with each other.
0:28:48 And that disconnect between the American people and what they believe and what they want and what they are being fed by their, I would say, national rather than state leaders primarily, that seems to me to be the place that is the fulcrum for where we are and where those of us who want to change that really should be focusing.
0:28:51 And that comes down to, I hate to say it, marketing.
0:28:53 We’ll be right back after a quick break.
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0:32:26 Two weeks ago, I was asked to address what was called the Young Democratic Caucus, which is representatives in Congress under the age of 50.
0:32:31 And I think it’s hilarious and telling that they would identify any group as young if you’re under the age of 50.
0:32:33 And this was the entire topic.
0:32:39 And I feel as if I’m kind of like, I don’t know, Luke Skywalker and you’re Yoda.
0:32:43 So I want you to correct me and edit me where you think I get this wrong.
0:32:46 But they said, how do we rebrand the Democratic Party?
0:32:53 And I said, I think the three pillars are one, restoring our alliances, alliances with our great trading partners and other democracies.
0:32:57 And the notion that somehow we’ve been taken advantage of is insane.
0:33:05 They sell us Mercedes at five points of gross margin and they get eight times EBITDA on it or they get 40 cents in value.
0:33:08 We sell them in video chips at 50 points of gross margin, of which get a 30 PE.
0:33:24 So we get $15 global trade and these unbelievable alliances pushing back on fascism in the middle of the 20th century, creating unbelievable prosperity, pushing back on Russia, pushing back on China, pushing back promoting civil rights, women’s rights.
0:33:33 This has just been amazing. These alliances have been a reflection of what it means to be human, our advantage as a species, what it means to be mammal.
0:33:41 And we need to restore alliances, most specifically in America, restore alliances between Republicans and Democrats, restore alliances between men and women.
0:33:45 The genders have done an amazing job of convincing themselves that it’s the other gender’s fault.
0:34:00 Young men believe that their dissent is a function of women’s assent, couldn’t be more wrong, and that we need to restore the greatest alliance in history and that men and women need to stop believing that it’s the other gender’s fault.
0:34:05 Young men believe, or a lot of women, unfortunately, I think, believe that men don’t have problems.
0:34:06 Young men don’t have problems.
0:34:07 They are the problem.
0:34:08 I don’t think that’s productive either.
0:34:11 The greatest alliance in history is the history between men and women.
0:34:16 Men should celebrate, promote, and protect their daughters, their wives, other women.
0:34:24 And women need to realize that their incredible progress, they will not continue to flourish if men, our young men, are floundering.
0:34:29 So my first kind of touchstone or pillar is alliances and the importance of alliances and coming together.
0:34:30 The second is inequality.
0:34:33 You lose nothing above $10 million.
0:34:40 There is no reason we shouldn’t have a 60%, 70% alternative minimum tax above $10 million.
0:34:46 Daniel Kahneman and every psychologist has shown that above a certain amount of money, it brings you no incremental happiness.
0:34:49 Restore corporate tax rates to a reasonable rate.
0:34:53 Corporations are paying the lowest tax rates since 1929.
0:34:55 Collect the taxes owed, the tax gap.
0:34:57 It’s not about tax rates.
0:34:58 It’s about the tax code.
0:35:00 Reduce the deficit.
0:35:04 Lower interest rates, which will bring down our costs on our interest rate.
0:35:06 Restore fiscal responsibility.
0:35:12 And then finally, something, and I may not have the right word here, but rather than calling it health, fitness.
0:35:15 70% of America is overweight or obese.
0:35:19 Places a huge burden on us economically in terms of a health care system.
0:35:21 Better lunch, better nutrition.
0:35:25 Put in place incentives that do away with food deserts.
0:35:28 Encourage the industrial food system to produce healthy food.
0:35:37 And some alliances, addressing income inequality and becoming the fittest, strongest nation in the world, both mentally and physically.
0:35:39 Those are kind of the three sort of policy pillars.
0:35:49 But I am very open to coaching here because I was flying on instruments trying to tell these 50 or 60 representatives which messaging I think they need to embrace.
0:35:50 Your thoughts?
0:35:55 So let me dig in a little bit to what you have suggested.
0:36:02 When you are talking about fitness, one of the problems there, of course, is our transportation systems.
0:36:07 And indeed, what you’re talking about with food deserts and the way food is distributed.
0:36:17 You know, one of the things about our food systems in the U.S. since World War II has been to provide as many calories as it is possible to provide as quickly as they can be provided.
0:36:22 Because that was the crisis that they were designed to address after the Depression.
0:36:28 So we do have these perverse incentives set up in the way that we manage, for example, surpluses.
0:36:34 But if you look at fitness, you’re not, I think, talking just about muscles.
0:36:41 You’re talking about once again, and I’m pushing on this because this is kind of my American Studies background.
0:36:47 I think you are talking about once again celebrating working hard at something.
0:36:52 That is, rather than simply having it, you work for it.
0:36:57 So, you know, being in good shape and caring about nutrition and cooking and so on, that takes work.
0:36:57 That takes effort.
0:37:00 And that’s about more than physical fitness.
0:37:11 And you mentioned, in one word, mental fitness, but I would suggest it also celebrates the idea that it’s a positive good to invest work in something.
0:37:26 And one of the things that really jumps out at me in this administration is the degree to which they sort of seem to say, well, we’re elevating those people who would otherwise be elevated if we hadn’t had to deal with civil rights initiatives, what they’re calling DEI initiatives.
0:37:31 And what that has done is we now have in place a bunch of people who have no freaking clue what they’re doing.
0:37:38 You know, the idea that they should just have these positions rather than working their way really hard to get up to them.
0:37:41 You look at somebody like Mark Milley versus Pete Hegseth.
0:37:47 And Milley, you know, is very, very, you know, very well educated, works very hard at what he does, worked his way up.
0:38:04 And then you have Hegseth, who came from the Fox News Channel, that idea of culturally, once again, celebrating hard work, education, the idea of taking control of your life, not by attacking your neighbor, but by investing in yourself.
0:38:11 That’s really very classic America that, if you think about it, was uppermost until at least the 1970s.
0:38:16 I started with something much more corny, and that was, I started with the word love.
0:38:28 And that is, anything that gets in between two people being able to get married such that they can look after each other and have a rational passion for each other’s well-being such that they don’t end up on social services.
0:38:39 Anything that inhibits a family’s ability to take care of their children and creates so much economic stress that they’re more likely than not to end up in a single-parent home.
0:38:43 And I think you can reverse engineer a lot of single-parent homes to economic stress.
0:38:54 Anything that gets in the way of people being in an ICU or an emergency room because, or being insured because they’re of sexual orientation.
0:39:07 Anything that gets in the way of a parent’s ability to stay married, to have some dignity around their children, to not have medical debt such that they have to make a choice between food for their children and diabetes.
0:39:09 But anything that gets in the way of this term love.
0:39:19 And that kind of got laughed out of the room because they thought, you’re falling into the trap of the feminization of the democratic brand, which they believe has not been helpful.
0:39:26 Any thoughts around this notion of love or empathy being a touchstone for a political movement?
0:39:33 Yes, but I have to point out to you that what you have just done is you have modernized the concept of conservatism.
0:39:50 What you are suggesting there echoes almost precisely what Edmund Burke was talking about during the French Revolution when he said that governments should not be concerned about ideologies because pretty soon leaders are busy trying to fit people into their ideologies rather than the other way around.
0:40:00 What he said was that government should focus on stability because when you have a stable government and a stable society, there is less impetus to overturn it.
0:40:08 And this is one of the reasons in his era, of course, he was interested in supporting aristocracy and the church and the family and so on.
0:40:18 But that what you just outlined is a conservative small C and not Republican and certainly not MAGA Republican, but a conservative Rockefeller Republican.
0:40:19 That’s right.
0:40:25 Eisenhower Republican, which which just again what you just outlined in this modern world sounds radical.
0:40:27 Sounds like a radical left position.
0:40:42 And this always whenever and ever anybody tells me I’m a leftist, I just laugh because quite literally the policies that you are outlining in which now would be called wildly progressive were in fact Eisenhower values.
0:40:49 And he was a Republican and not a conservative Republican, but certainly a center right, not not center to center left.
0:41:09 So my thoughts are that, first of all, that this is a conversation that really, really needs to be in the public sphere again, because it’s just common sense, you know, and it’s something that, again, the nation was united around until there was a deliberate decision to just to divide the party, to divide people along party lines.
0:41:15 And I don’t disagree with you on on any of the idea that, you know, single family homes are often economic.
0:41:23 I mean, the other thing that I find really interesting is during the Biden administration, there was a great deal of talk about how crime rates were plummeting.
0:41:35 And I thought what was interesting about that is that even the members of the administration pointed to the increased police officers that they had in which they had invested in order to make those crime rates come down.
0:41:45 But nobody that I read anyway, and I’m not a criminologist, but I did read around in this because I was very interested in it, looked at the fact that we had record low unemployment.
0:41:54 People had jobs and those jobs in the bottom 20, 20, you know, 20 percent were paying a much greater rate than they had before Biden was in office.
0:42:02 So you’re looking at that and you’re thinking, you know, if you got money, you commit fewer crimes, which is sort of logical.
0:42:11 So, yeah, I mean, I’m not going to disagree with with that at all in that concept, in your concept of fitness, in the concept of inequality.
0:42:12 Yeah.
0:42:14 You know, this is a no brainer.
0:42:16 You know, people say if I could be emperor, what would I do?
0:42:37 And the answer is I would start with getting rid of the Bush tax cuts and the and the Trump tax cuts and work on on recreating the great compression that that economists talk about where there is less of a gap both in income and in wealth between the the bottom of American society and the top of American society.
0:42:51 Not just for economic reasons, but because I think that does a whole heck of a lot more societally when there is a less of a gap between people, less of an educational gap, less of a wealth gap, less of a cultural gap and so on.
0:42:56 And I agree with you also in terms of restoring alliances for sure.
0:43:03 And it always jumps out at me, of course, that the United States was a driving factor in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
0:43:09 And here we are sending now people to, you know, a gulag in the Everglades.
0:43:17 But what I would say is that these are really difficult concepts to put into a package that can win an election.
0:43:20 I think people feel on vibes that these are right.
0:43:30 But what I think about packaging, not the Democrats necessarily, because we’re in this really interesting moment where the political parties are breaking down.
0:43:36 Certainly the names may remain, but what they look what the internals look like are going to be very different.
0:43:48 And that’s what I’m interested in is watching these conversations take place all over the country among people who are not necessarily in elected office or aiming for elected office where they are redefining what they would like America to be.
0:44:06 One of the things that jumps out to me when you define America is less the idea of alliances or less the idea of love and more the idea that what America has stood for historically is the idea that if you are willing to work hard, you can create a better life for yourself and your children.
0:44:11 And everything flows from that.
0:44:27 Now, the way that you talk about that, though, and again, that we have done historically, notably in the 1950s, 1940s, 1930s, the late 1890s, early 2000 and aughts, and in the 1870s and before that is by saying we’re in this together.
0:44:31 We are a community that we are a community that works together and that we are not divided.
0:44:49 And again, you used to see that in the 1940s, 1950s, and so on in movies, for example, in Superman, in Frank Sinatra’s The House Where I Lived, the film about how he was dead set against religious discrimination in the United States.
0:44:59 That is something that strikes me as being marketable, not least because you can plug into it our greatest moments in our history.
0:45:16 So just along the lines of Magic Wand and being an emperor, some of the lowest levels of young adult and teen depression are in Israel, despite all the existential threats surrounding them, and amongst young Mormons.
0:45:24 And the thing I find that’s true among both those groups, and again, I might be backfilling a narrative here, is I think restoring mandatory national service.
0:45:32 You talked about how people kind of saw themselves as Americans first before Republicans or Democrats, or maybe I’m putting words in your mouth, in the 60s or 70s.
0:45:34 But I think a lot of that was because they’d served in the same uniform.
0:45:44 What do you think of the idea of mandatory national service where Americans from different ethnic, demographic, and income and sexual orientation backgrounds could see each other?
0:45:46 And I’m not just talking about the military.
0:45:52 I’m talking about senior care, smoke jumpers, you know, forest reclamation, whatever it might be.
0:46:01 But you’re going to spend 12 to 24 months working alongside a group of random Americans realizing that you need to work in the agency of something bigger than yourself, and that thing is the United States.
0:46:03 12%.
0:46:10 But I’m going to add a reason for that, and that is, of course, having come through a university system.
0:46:17 In modern America, a lot of young people are not really ready to make adult decisions when they leave home.
0:46:29 They need to spend time literally just learning how to live with other people or learning how to be on their own and managing, you know, their schedules and, crucially, figuring out what they want to do.
0:46:31 Especially boys.
0:46:32 I’m going to be a sexist.
0:46:33 Especially boys.
0:46:34 Do you have kids, Professor?
0:46:35 Three of them.
0:46:41 Yeah, biologically, 18-year-old boys are 18 months behind their prefrontal cortex development.
0:46:50 When my 14- and 17-year-olds have friends over, the boys are dopes, and some of the girls look like they could be the junior senator from Pennsylvania.
0:46:52 I think this would be especially important for young men.
0:47:03 It’s easy to be sexist when you’re favoring the female gender, but I really do think there is a marked difference between the maturity levels of boys coming out of high school and girls coming out of high school.
0:47:15 Well, and just the opportunity to work in different ways with different people would open up, I think, a lot of people to professions that they might not otherwise have considered.
0:47:29 And that, you know, I always think back on a student I had who was in college, I’m trying to be vague here, because of his extraordinary sport ability, which was great, I’m sure.
0:47:38 But he discovered his senior year that he was actually really, really good at history, is how he came across my screen.
0:47:42 And he was just really starting to get it.
0:47:55 And I said to him, you know, we talked about this, and he really had gone to school to play sports, and he was planning to go back to work in construction where he had come from.
0:48:07 And yet, had he had a couple of years, he might have discovered that he was as good as he was at history before he was graduating.
0:48:19 And it always has kind of stuck with me that he’s somebody who could have really benefited from a, not a gap year, because it’s going to take people six months just to get their feet under them, as it does in college.
0:48:23 But a gap two years seems to me to be simply a no-brainer.
0:48:25 Lots of other countries do it.
0:48:26 My nephews who live in Europe did it.
0:48:34 And I would love to see that, both for the reasons you suggest, but also because developmentally, it just seems like it makes such good sense.
0:48:40 You were generous asking my thoughts on how to rebrand or brand the Democratic Party.
0:48:41 I’ll flip the question back to you.
0:48:43 What do you think would be the right messaging or platform for Democrats?
0:48:49 So this is a little hard for me, because as I say, I don’t really think in this moment as Republicans versus Democrats.
0:48:52 I actually think in this moment of the MAGA Republicans.
0:48:53 I need your help more, Professor.
0:48:56 We’re up against the rope.
0:48:58 And quite frankly, we’re getting the shit kicked out of us.
0:49:09 So to the best of your ability, if you were channeling Democrats, what would you suggest is the real opportunity or white space for Democrats right now?
0:49:14 OK, so where I was going with that is that I will tell you the branding that I would do.
0:49:18 And it seems to me something the Democrats could jump on, should jump on.
0:49:30 But it’s not saying, here’s a party I want to market, because I think in this moment it’s going to be important to recognize that the anti-MAGA party is not just Democrats, including in the way people think about certain issues.
0:49:41 Some people still vote Republican because it is ingrained in them to have an R after their name, but they are, in fact, quite open to the idea of the kinds of things you and I are talking about.
0:49:43 So here’s what I would say.
0:49:56 And my model is Abraham Lincoln, who was living through a very similar moment when two older parties were falling apart and you had the rise of a reactionary right elite that was trying to get rid of American democracy
0:50:00 and create a system in which the government answered only to them.
0:50:05 And this is, of course, the elite enslavers who wanted to spread human enslavement across the American West.
0:50:12 They’re establishing slave states that could work with the southern slave states to get rid of free states all over the country.
0:50:14 So what happened in that moment?
0:50:20 And you have to remember here always that the people who could vote in the United States in that period were all white men,
0:50:26 almost all of whom were virulently racist and didn’t really care at all about black rights.
0:50:36 The way Lincoln managed to create a coalition that could restore American democracy was continually to go back to the Declaration of Independence
0:50:42 and to say repeatedly, either we are all created equal or we are not.
0:50:45 And if we are not, we need to tear up the Declaration of Independence.
0:50:51 And when he did that, even in the southern parts of Illinois, for example, during the Lincoln-Douglas debates,
0:50:57 even Democrats who were virulently racist would say, no, no, no, that’s what we stand for.
0:51:10 And I think one of the things that is important to do in this moment is continually to highlight the principles on which people who live in the United States have stood on democracy and expanded democracy.
0:51:18 And what is so exciting about that for someone like me is that while I just invoked Lincoln because he was very, very self-conscious about what he was doing,
0:51:24 and often if I can’t figure out how to address something, I will think, what would Lincoln have done in terms of principles?
0:51:34 But if you think about someone like Fannie Lou Hamer or Dolores Huerta or Dr. Hector Garcia or Dr. King or, you know,
0:51:44 any of these people who were parts of marginalized populations used those concepts to expand rights in the United States
0:51:50 and bring more people under the umbrella of the idea that they could have control over their destinies.
0:51:56 And I think that’s a touchstone that resonates with all American populations
0:52:05 and one that we have not taken sufficient advantage of in the years that we have really stopped teaching the real meat of American history.
0:52:16 And I would argue that the popularity of the stuff I write is in part indicative of an extraordinary hunger for people to feel that they are part of that larger story
0:52:19 of human self-determination and of the United States of America.
0:52:25 I see more and more people now starting to do it, starting to talk about it, more politicians doing it.
0:52:36 But I think that is crucial to building a mass movement that can overaw the kind of rising fascism that you’re seeing among MAGA Republicans.
0:52:40 We’ll be right back.
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0:54:10 We’re back with more from Heather Cox Richardson.
0:54:14 So, let’s bring it to present day.
0:54:20 You’ve called Trump’s MAGA bill the capstone of MAGA’s six-month transformation of the U.S. government.
0:54:24 Do you think we’re witnessing the cementing of illiberalism?
0:54:29 And you’ve also said this is sort of the signature Republican legislation of this millennium thus far.
0:54:31 Your thoughts?
0:54:34 Well, I will answer that.
0:54:36 But let me ask you, what do you think of that budget reconciliation bill?
0:54:42 I think it’s the largest transfer of wealth in history from the future to the past,
0:54:46 from the poor to the rich, from the young to the old.
0:54:49 I think it’s, not to be too dramatic here,
0:54:51 but when I look at my success, Professor,
0:54:56 it’s built on these pillars of access to family planning for my mother,
0:55:00 assisted lunch programs when I was in elementary school,
0:55:06 access to deep pools of capital to start companies based on rule of law,
0:55:10 access to wonderful, talented immigrants who built my companies.
0:55:20 You know, the fact that my mother was able to survive in Britain,
0:55:22 sleeping as a four-year-old Jew in a bomb shelter,
0:55:29 that America decided to convert its car factories to tank factories to push back on fascism.
0:55:33 I mean, I’m so personally, quite frankly,
0:55:36 and you can probably hear the emotion in my voice,
0:55:44 just so rattled by this because I feel it is setting on fire all the pillars of my prosperity and success.
0:55:53 Well, and that, I think, is what I was getting at with the idea that this was the capstone of the past six years.
0:55:58 It’s also the capstone, in many ways, of the Republican project since Reagan,
0:56:00 which is to blow up the social safety net.
0:56:03 But it’s not, I call it a capstone in part because, of course,
0:56:07 that’s what the Department of Government Efficiency was also designed to do.
0:56:10 And that the idea of the rescissions,
0:56:12 the clawing back of the money that has already been appropriated,
0:56:14 the impoundments, and so on,
0:56:18 the idea is to shred the modern American state.
0:56:24 But what interests, I mean, what interests me is the wrong way to put it,
0:56:28 but what is replacing it, as I say,
0:56:34 is the idea that somehow we’re going to go back to a better past,
0:56:36 which, by the way, is a very fascist concept.
0:56:41 But there doesn’t seem to be any real idea of what that looks like.
0:56:44 So, for example, these Trump tariffs,
0:56:49 the idea that this is suddenly going to make everybody rich is just a complete fantasy.
0:56:52 It is a complete fantasy, or the fact that Brooke Rollins,
0:56:57 the head of the Agriculture Department today,
0:57:01 said that when we get rid of the undocumented immigrants
0:57:04 who are actually working in the agricultural field,
0:57:08 that we can simply replace them with the people who are on Medicaid.
0:57:13 You know, that’s just such a far-fetched image
0:57:15 of what the future could look like in a country
0:57:19 that has, since the very development of Western agriculture
0:57:22 in the 1880s and 1890s,
0:57:24 depended on migrant labor.
0:57:27 I mean, there’s just, there’s nothing on the other side
0:57:32 that suggests the survival of American democracy.
0:57:34 And so I think what you’re looking at
0:57:36 is the rise, as I say, of authoritarianism,
0:57:38 one guy to run everything.
0:57:41 But as we’re looking at that,
0:57:42 and as I alluded to earlier,
0:57:47 will 334 million Americans say,
0:57:48 oh, I was conned, it’s okay.
0:57:50 Or will they say,
0:57:52 this is not the country I wanted.
0:57:54 And this is one of the reasons
0:57:56 that conservatism developed,
0:57:58 actually, to go back to that theme,
0:58:00 because what they are creating
0:58:02 is extraordinary instability,
0:58:04 just extraordinary instability.
0:58:06 And of course, with that bill,
0:58:08 we now have a massively expanded ICE
0:58:10 and border patrol system
0:58:12 that is, in fact,
0:58:13 a standing army in the U.S.,
0:58:15 a militarized state in the U.S.
0:58:19 But is that going to be enough
0:58:22 to maintain a dictator
0:58:25 or a quasi-dictator
0:58:28 from the MAGA wing in power going forward?
0:58:30 I think I have too much faith
0:58:31 in the American people
0:58:32 to believe that’s going to be the case.
0:58:33 What do you think?
0:58:36 Well, I’m a bit of a catastrophist
0:58:38 and a glass half-empty kind of guy,
0:58:39 as you’ve probably figured out.
0:58:41 So I immediately draw conclusions
0:58:44 or parallels with the Gestapo
0:58:46 that was 32,000 people.
0:58:47 I think ICE is 22.
0:58:48 They spent $2 billion.
0:58:50 We’re spending $12 billion.
0:58:51 It was meant to be
0:58:52 an administrative body
0:58:53 focusing on documentation
0:58:55 and border forms.
0:58:56 And instead, it’s turned into what I,
0:58:58 as far as I can tell,
0:59:00 is a series of pageantry and fear
0:59:04 meant to exhibit strength
0:59:05 and also scare people.
0:59:08 And my father always used to say to me
0:59:09 when I would compare Trump to Hitler,
0:59:10 you’ve got to keep in mind, Scott,
0:59:12 Trump had his own private army.
0:59:13 And as far as I can tell,
0:59:14 ICE is a private army
0:59:15 for the current administration.
0:59:18 So I find it frightening.
0:59:20 And when I think of just
0:59:22 taking out the moral argument
0:59:23 and the historical parallels,
0:59:27 you know, the notion somehow
0:59:28 that we need to get rid
0:59:29 of these immigrants
0:59:31 such that more Americans
0:59:32 have better jobs
0:59:32 and higher paid,
0:59:35 it’s just so stupid.
0:59:38 If you want to talk about,
0:59:40 imagine that millions of immigrants
0:59:41 pouring over the border right now,
0:59:42 it’s called AI.
0:59:45 AI has a much bigger threat
0:59:47 to people’s livelihoods
0:59:48 than the person taking care
0:59:49 of your aging mother
0:59:50 or serving,
0:59:51 you know,
0:59:52 or working at the Chick-fil-A.
0:59:54 And the notion somehow
0:59:55 that American wages
0:59:56 are going to go up,
0:59:56 all that’s going to happen
0:59:57 is our expenses are going to go up.
0:59:59 And what I find most telling
0:59:59 about these raids
1:00:01 is they’re raiding Home Depot
1:00:01 churches and schools.
1:00:03 And maybe that’s an indication
1:00:03 that these are the kind of people
1:00:04 we want here.
1:00:06 And then just being
1:00:07 very unemotional about it.
1:00:09 Immigration,
1:00:09 people are often
1:00:10 very comfortable saying
1:00:11 immigration is the lifeblood
1:00:12 of our success.
1:00:13 What I don’t think
1:00:14 they’re in touch with
1:00:15 is that the most profitable
1:00:16 part of immigration
1:00:17 has been undocumented
1:00:17 immigration
1:00:19 because they’re
1:00:20 a flexible workforce
1:00:21 that pays taxes
1:00:21 and then doesn’t stick around
1:00:22 for social services
1:00:24 and melts back
1:00:25 sometimes to their
1:00:26 original host country
1:00:27 when the crops are picked
1:00:29 or that work dries up.
1:00:30 And the reason why
1:00:32 we have put up with this
1:00:33 or tolerated it
1:00:34 is because we recognize
1:00:34 it’s an incredible
1:00:35 economic advantage
1:00:37 to have this flexible workforce.
1:00:38 So, you know,
1:00:38 again,
1:00:39 I go back to Germany,
1:00:40 the demonization
1:00:41 of immigrants.
1:00:42 I just,
1:00:43 it economically
1:00:44 makes no sense.
1:00:45 It’s morally reprehensible.
1:00:47 And I am uncomfortable
1:00:48 with a private army
1:00:50 an army that will have
1:00:51 a greater funding budget
1:00:53 than at the FBI
1:00:54 who is responsible
1:00:55 for white collar crimes
1:00:55 and terrorism.
1:00:56 We’ve decided
1:00:58 to allocate more resources
1:00:58 to a private army
1:00:59 of people
1:01:00 who have to wear masks.
1:01:01 You know,
1:01:03 they’re not only wearing,
1:01:04 they’re not only wearing
1:01:06 a certain color shirt
1:01:07 or insignias
1:01:08 as armbands,
1:01:09 they’re wearing masks
1:01:10 because of what they’re doing
1:01:11 is so,
1:01:12 in my view,
1:01:12 un-American.
1:01:14 So I find ICE
1:01:14 another,
1:01:15 you know,
1:01:18 incredibly disturbing.
1:01:19 Your thoughts?
1:01:19 I agree.
1:01:21 I totally agree with that.
1:01:21 Well,
1:01:23 my point was just
1:01:24 I’m not entirely sure
1:01:25 that in a country
1:01:26 of this size
1:01:28 they are going to be able
1:01:29 to get the kind of control
1:01:30 that somebody could
1:01:31 in a smaller country
1:01:32 like Germany was
1:01:33 in 1933.
1:01:34 So,
1:01:35 you know,
1:01:36 I think you’re right
1:01:37 that this is pageantry,
1:01:39 that a lot of it so far
1:01:40 is pageantry designed,
1:01:41 first of all,
1:01:42 to terrorize immigrants,
1:01:45 but also to terrorize
1:01:46 other Americans
1:01:48 into not speaking up.
1:01:49 And that’s the piece
1:01:50 that I am not convinced
1:01:51 is necessarily going to work.
1:01:52 And by the way,
1:01:53 I didn’t mean in any way
1:01:56 to downplay the terror
1:01:57 and the damage
1:01:58 and the torture even
1:01:59 that immigrants
1:02:00 and migrants
1:02:02 are going through
1:02:03 in this.
1:02:03 I’m trying to look
1:02:05 at the larger picture here
1:02:06 and what the Trump administration
1:02:07 is trying to do.
1:02:07 So I don’t disagree
1:02:08 with you at all
1:02:09 on that,
1:02:10 but I’m just saying
1:02:12 I’m not entirely sure
1:02:12 it’s going to work.
1:02:15 This is an extraordinarily
1:02:18 unstable administration.
1:02:19 Trump himself
1:02:20 is not in good shape.
1:02:21 J.D. Vance,
1:02:22 the heir apparent,
1:02:26 commands no real voting base.
1:02:28 Increasingly,
1:02:29 the wheels are coming
1:02:30 off the bus
1:02:31 as FEMA can’t respond
1:02:32 to things,
1:02:33 as the tariffs
1:02:34 are starting to kick in,
1:02:36 as prices are going up.
1:02:37 You know,
1:02:38 it is,
1:02:39 you know,
1:02:40 I guess what I keep saying
1:02:41 is I think we’re going
1:02:42 into a period
1:02:44 of extraordinary instability
1:02:46 and I am not convinced
1:02:48 that the outcome of that
1:02:48 is going to be
1:02:49 a dictatorship.
1:02:52 It could just as easily be
1:02:53 that the outcome of it
1:02:54 is a renewed
1:02:55 American democracy,
1:02:56 but it’s going to be
1:02:56 messy,
1:02:57 messy,
1:02:58 messy either way.
1:03:00 I love your vision.
1:03:02 I always jokingly say
1:03:02 in my companies,
1:03:03 there’s been all these people
1:03:04 that are kind of invisible
1:03:05 until they fuck up,
1:03:06 and that is the person
1:03:07 running the accounting,
1:03:08 the person running the events,
1:03:10 that they’re not appreciated
1:03:11 until something goes wrong.
1:03:12 And I feel that a lot
1:03:13 of Americans are coming
1:03:14 to grips with the fact
1:03:15 that there’s a lot
1:03:15 of people,
1:03:16 hydrologists,
1:03:16 meteorologists,
1:03:17 the TSA,
1:03:19 working who are invisible
1:03:20 until there’s a disaster.
1:03:22 And that some of this
1:03:22 long-term thinking
1:03:23 and investment
1:03:24 and boring jobs
1:03:25 are actually really important.
1:03:27 And that they’re going
1:03:28 to learn very painfully
1:03:29 that these things matter
1:03:31 and that immigrants
1:03:32 play a key role
1:03:34 and that an autocracy,
1:03:34 a strongman,
1:03:36 I love your vision.
1:03:38 I’m worried that this
1:03:39 is the first step
1:03:41 towards a darker period
1:03:43 where we have a lot
1:03:44 of young men
1:03:44 who are struggling,
1:03:45 don’t have a lot
1:03:46 of economic
1:03:47 or romantic prospects,
1:03:51 are looking for scapegoats
1:03:55 to justify their problems.
1:03:57 And that we’re one economic shock
1:04:00 away from an authoritarian government
1:04:01 that gets even uglier.
1:04:02 And we already have,
1:04:03 you know,
1:04:04 you call it a gulag,
1:04:06 I call them concentration camps.
1:04:07 Concentration camps,
1:04:08 one of the definitions
1:04:09 is a camp outside
1:04:11 of the host territory
1:04:12 such that the individuals
1:04:13 shipped to these places
1:04:14 don’t have the rights
1:04:15 they would in their own
1:04:17 domestic environment.
1:04:18 We’re already there.
1:04:19 We have demonization
1:04:19 of immigrants.
1:04:21 We have militarization
1:04:22 of civil agencies.
1:04:24 We have a disrespect
1:04:25 for some of the institutions.
1:04:27 They always attack
1:04:28 the academics.
1:04:28 Why?
1:04:30 Because you and I,
1:04:31 you’re what I’d call
1:04:32 a hardcore,
1:04:32 real,
1:04:33 legitimate academic.
1:04:35 I’m short of showing up
1:04:36 and doing a rich little version
1:04:37 of academics
1:04:38 and that is I teach.
1:04:39 But you,
1:04:40 quite frankly,
1:04:41 you just have much deeper
1:04:42 domain expertise than me.
1:04:44 And I find that
1:04:46 common across all
1:04:47 moves towards fascism
1:04:48 is to attack universities.
1:04:49 Why?
1:04:50 Because at the end of the day,
1:04:51 you especially,
1:04:52 but also I’ll include myself
1:04:53 in this crowd,
1:04:54 we teach young people
1:04:55 to ask why.
1:04:57 And they don’t want
1:04:58 young people
1:04:59 and intelligent people
1:05:00 asking why.
1:05:01 They want them
1:05:02 feeling things.
1:05:03 And so I worry
1:05:04 that there’s a fork
1:05:05 in the road here,
1:05:07 but one potential
1:05:08 left turn here
1:05:09 could be much darker.
1:05:10 And I look back
1:05:11 at Germany again
1:05:11 in the 30s,
1:05:12 an incredibly
1:05:14 progressive society,
1:05:15 pro-gay,
1:05:16 civil rights,
1:05:17 appreciation for immigrants,
1:05:19 appreciation for academics,
1:05:20 and then
1:05:22 a descent into darkness.
1:05:23 And I worry
1:05:24 that that same
1:05:26 opportunity for darkness
1:05:28 is available to us.
1:05:29 And then
1:05:30 everyone talks about
1:05:30 institutions,
1:05:31 the courts,
1:05:32 the universities.
1:05:33 And what I like
1:05:34 about what you’re saying
1:05:35 is it’s beyond
1:05:36 institutions,
1:05:37 it’s people.
1:05:38 It’s the judges
1:05:39 got to stand up.
1:05:41 Academics got to be fearless,
1:05:42 such as you have been
1:05:44 and smart and thoughtful.
1:05:45 People, employers
1:05:47 have to stand up
1:05:48 for their employees.
1:05:49 You know,
1:05:51 I’m very disappointed
1:05:52 that the technology community,
1:05:52 some of the people
1:05:53 I hang out with
1:05:54 who are incredibly blessed
1:05:55 not speaking up
1:05:56 about their blessings,
1:05:58 that we keep talking
1:05:58 about institutions
1:05:59 under attack.
1:06:01 I think that’s true.
1:06:02 What I find so disappointing
1:06:03 about this, Professor,
1:06:05 is that not more people
1:06:06 are speaking up
1:06:07 when you have
1:06:07 billionaire owners
1:06:08 of media companies
1:06:10 paying off
1:06:11 the administration
1:06:11 under the threat
1:06:12 of a legal case
1:06:13 that they would win.
1:06:14 When you have
1:06:16 legal firms
1:06:17 saying we will provide
1:06:18 basically bending a knee
1:06:19 and ignoring
1:06:20 all the principles
1:06:21 of our basic
1:06:22 judicial system,
1:06:23 I worry that not
1:06:25 enough individuals
1:06:26 are standing up.
1:06:26 Because at the end of the day,
1:06:27 these institutions
1:06:29 are made up of people.
1:06:31 So I’m more worried
1:06:32 about a darker
1:06:33 fork in the road here.
1:06:34 Well, I’m worried
1:06:35 about that darker
1:06:35 fork in the road,
1:06:37 but I also recognize
1:06:38 that there is no way
1:06:39 forward
1:06:40 except doing it.
1:06:41 There’s no way through
1:06:43 but going forward.
1:06:44 And so one of the things
1:06:45 I’m trying to do
1:06:47 is find a way
1:06:47 to get people
1:06:49 on the brighter path
1:06:50 rather than the darker path
1:06:50 because, you know,
1:06:51 the thing is,
1:06:52 as a historian,
1:06:53 we know how this plays out.
1:06:54 We know exactly
1:06:55 how this plays out.
1:06:58 And one of the things
1:07:00 that just gobsmacks me
1:07:01 is that knowing
1:07:02 what we know
1:07:05 and how these situations
1:07:05 play out,
1:07:07 that people
1:07:08 in the administration
1:07:10 would be trying it
1:07:10 yet again
1:07:11 and people would be
1:07:12 getting behind them
1:07:13 because, again,
1:07:14 I can write that script.
1:07:16 I really can write
1:07:16 that script.
1:07:17 But I can also write
1:07:18 the other script
1:07:20 in which people reject
1:07:21 that version
1:07:22 of our future
1:07:23 and pick a different one.
1:07:25 And that’s the one
1:07:26 that I’m working for.
1:07:27 I do have a question
1:07:28 for you.
1:07:29 You mentioned something
1:07:30 a second ago
1:07:31 that sparked an idea
1:07:32 for me
1:07:32 that I would love
1:07:33 to hear you
1:07:34 expand on
1:07:35 a little bit more.
1:07:37 I have been sitting here
1:07:38 looking at
1:07:41 the reduced numbers
1:07:42 of undocumented
1:07:43 and documented
1:07:44 migrants in the United States
1:07:45 and saying to myself,
1:07:47 where are they going
1:07:48 to find ways
1:07:49 to replace them?
1:07:49 And I’m looking
1:07:50 at child labor,
1:07:50 for example,
1:07:51 or now this idea
1:07:52 that people on Medicaid
1:07:53 are going to work
1:07:53 in the fields
1:07:54 or whatever.
1:07:55 Do you think
1:07:57 that what they are doing,
1:07:59 what the administration,
1:08:00 to be clear,
1:08:00 is doing,
1:08:02 is recognizing
1:08:03 that AI
1:08:04 is going to wipe out
1:08:05 a ton of jobs
1:08:06 and setting up
1:08:07 the idea
1:08:08 that those jobs
1:08:09 are not the fault
1:08:10 of those people
1:08:10 pushing AI,
1:08:12 which is a problematic
1:08:13 and maybe someday
1:08:14 we can talk about
1:08:15 what AI entails
1:08:16 for the United States,
1:08:17 but that rather
1:08:18 than saying
1:08:20 this billionaire
1:08:21 puts you out of business,
1:08:22 they’re trying
1:08:22 to convince
1:08:23 a lot of people
1:08:24 who will be unemployed
1:08:26 that their problem
1:08:27 is the gardener
1:08:28 or is the woman
1:08:29 doing health care.
1:08:29 Is that,
1:08:30 do you think,
1:08:31 a deliberate sleight of hand?
1:08:33 For me,
1:08:33 the logic
1:08:34 just isn’t sequential
1:08:35 or doesn’t add up
1:08:36 because the people
1:08:37 they’re going after
1:08:37 are exactly
1:08:38 the kinds of jobs
1:08:39 that AI,
1:08:40 some of the few sectors
1:08:42 that AI can’t replace.
1:08:44 AI still hasn’t figured
1:08:44 out a way
1:08:47 to wake your grandmother up
1:08:48 and bring her her medication.
1:08:50 AI still can’t
1:08:51 give you physical therapy.
1:08:53 AI still can’t,
1:08:53 you still need
1:08:55 people on construction sites.
1:08:56 You still need people
1:08:58 harvesting crops.
1:08:59 I just don’t,
1:09:00 you know,
1:09:01 I mean,
1:09:01 AI could potentially
1:09:03 replace a lot of Uber drivers
1:09:04 and a lot of truck drivers,
1:09:05 but what I see
1:09:07 is that
1:09:08 who AI is replacing
1:09:10 is my kids.
1:09:11 When I say my kids,
1:09:12 my second year MBA graduates,
1:09:13 I was,
1:09:14 my first job out of college
1:09:15 was at Morgan Stanley
1:09:16 as an analyst.
1:09:17 They hired 80 analysts.
1:09:18 I’m convinced
1:09:19 all the work I did
1:09:20 in two years
1:09:20 in fixed income
1:09:21 as an analyst
1:09:23 at Morgan Stanley
1:09:24 could be done
1:09:25 in about six weeks
1:09:25 now with AI.
1:09:27 So the notion somehow
1:09:28 that this,
1:09:30 if they really wanted,
1:09:31 I see the presidency
1:09:33 as just a capital allocated
1:09:34 and that his job is to,
1:09:35 or her job is to,
1:09:36 allocate capital
1:09:37 to a greater return
1:09:37 than another leader
1:09:38 who has capital
1:09:39 at their disposal
1:09:40 and taking $12 billion
1:09:42 to round up immigrants
1:09:43 who are taxpayers
1:09:43 and,
1:09:44 you know,
1:09:45 during the day
1:09:46 at work
1:09:46 and on weekends
1:09:47 and evenings
1:09:48 at school
1:09:49 and at church,
1:09:50 that makes no sense to me.
1:09:51 If you really were concerned
1:09:52 about employment,
1:09:53 you’d be deploying
1:09:55 vocational programs
1:09:55 and more critical
1:09:56 thinking skills
1:09:56 such that people
1:09:57 could embrace
1:09:58 these new technologies
1:09:59 and also embrace
1:10:00 more self-sufficiency
1:10:01 and energy
1:10:02 and shovel-ready jobs.
1:10:02 I mean,
1:10:03 we need more
1:10:04 healthcare workers,
1:10:04 more people
1:10:05 who understand
1:10:06 how to install
1:10:07 energy-efficient
1:10:08 HVAC computers,
1:10:10 build nuclear power plants.
1:10:10 I mean,
1:10:11 that to me
1:10:12 is where you would help
1:10:15 with the employment picture.
1:10:15 But,
1:10:17 look,
1:10:18 you’ve been so generous
1:10:19 with your time.
1:10:19 I just want to,
1:10:21 I want to have,
1:10:23 I want you to just touch
1:10:24 on one thing
1:10:25 that’s very close
1:10:25 to my heart
1:10:26 and that is,
1:10:27 I work,
1:10:28 I think a lot
1:10:29 about technology
1:10:29 and something
1:10:30 that’s just
1:10:30 so extraordinarily
1:10:31 disappointing to me
1:10:33 is that these
1:10:34 are the most blessed
1:10:34 people in the world
1:10:35 as far as I can tell.
1:10:36 If you look at
1:10:37 the majority of them,
1:10:37 you know,
1:10:38 there’s some,
1:10:39 there’s absolutely
1:10:40 some great stories
1:10:40 of immigrants
1:10:41 and people
1:10:41 playing themselves
1:10:42 by their bootstraps.
1:10:44 20% of the NASDAQ
1:10:45 is not only immigrants
1:10:46 by market cap,
1:10:47 it’s Indian immigrants.
1:10:49 And there’s
1:10:50 some wonderful stories.
1:10:51 But a lot of these kids
1:10:53 came from privileged backgrounds.
1:10:54 Whether it was Bill Gates
1:10:54 or Mark Zuckerberg,
1:10:55 they dropped out of Harvard
1:10:56 because they could.
1:10:58 And they got into Harvard
1:10:59 because they could.
1:11:00 And yet it feels like
1:11:02 the most blessed among us,
1:11:03 specifically these tech billionaires,
1:11:04 are the first ones,
1:11:04 quite frankly,
1:11:05 to shitpost America
1:11:06 and talk about
1:11:06 some weird
1:11:08 techno-libertarian vision
1:11:09 that makes absolutely
1:11:10 no sense to me.
1:11:11 And a lot of people
1:11:12 draw conclusions
1:11:13 with the Gilded Age.
1:11:14 And I know you’ve looked
1:11:15 at the Gilded Age.
1:11:15 And I would just love
1:11:17 to get your thoughts
1:11:18 on the parallels
1:11:20 between the Gilded Age
1:11:21 and kind of this
1:11:23 technotopia
1:11:24 or whatever you’d want
1:11:25 to call it
1:11:26 and what we can learn
1:11:26 from it
1:11:27 and where you think
1:11:28 it goes from here.
1:11:30 I’m actually really glad
1:11:31 you asked that
1:11:32 because I think a lot
1:11:33 about that,
1:11:35 including in the ideology
1:11:37 of the modern-day tech people
1:11:39 because of the parallels
1:11:41 it has with the 1880s
1:11:42 and 1890s especially
1:11:44 because things were changing
1:11:46 by the actual turn
1:11:47 of the century.
1:11:49 What I think happens
1:11:51 is that people
1:11:53 begin to
1:11:55 internalize
1:11:56 their belief
1:11:57 that they are better
1:11:58 than other people,
1:11:59 that they have done
1:12:00 something extraordinarily clever.
1:12:02 And often,
1:12:03 I just want to add this here,
1:12:04 I will follow that thought,
1:12:06 but often there is
1:12:07 a generational change
1:12:08 inherent there.
1:12:09 That is,
1:12:10 the first generation
1:12:11 will say it
1:12:12 but not really mean it.
1:12:13 They’re saying it
1:12:14 either to pump themselves up
1:12:15 or for political advantage.
1:12:17 but their sons,
1:12:18 because it’s almost always sons,
1:12:20 actually believe it.
1:12:21 So in the 1890s,
1:12:21 for example,
1:12:22 you see coming out
1:12:23 of the Civil War
1:12:24 a whole bunch of people
1:12:25 in the American South
1:12:26 talking about how
1:12:27 black Americans
1:12:28 are inherently not
1:12:30 as able
1:12:31 as white Americans,
1:12:32 as Euro-Americans,
1:12:32 and therefore,
1:12:33 they should not have a say
1:12:34 in American society.
1:12:36 They used it really
1:12:37 as a political argument
1:12:38 for that first generation.
1:12:40 The second generation
1:12:42 believes that they are better,
1:12:43 that white men
1:12:44 are better than black men
1:12:45 and certainly than
1:12:45 other black people
1:12:46 and they are willing
1:12:47 to enforce that
1:12:48 through lynching.
1:12:50 So that generational shift
1:12:51 really matters.
1:12:53 But that being said,
1:12:54 I do think there is
1:12:55 this idea
1:12:57 that as people succeed
1:12:58 and as they spend time
1:12:59 with other people
1:12:59 who succeed,
1:13:01 they start to believe
1:13:02 that they are,
1:13:02 in fact,
1:13:03 better than other people
1:13:04 and they,
1:13:05 especially men,
1:13:07 tend to erase
1:13:08 the reality
1:13:08 of how they got
1:13:09 to be where they are
1:13:10 and they set out
1:13:12 to create a system
1:13:13 that they think
1:13:14 advantages them
1:13:15 in such a way
1:13:16 that they will do good
1:13:18 for the most people.
1:13:19 So instead of picking up
1:13:20 right there
1:13:21 Peter Thiel
1:13:22 or Elon Musk,
1:13:23 where I’ll get in a second,
1:13:24 Andrew Carnegie
1:13:26 is a really useful person
1:13:26 to look at
1:13:27 because he becomes,
1:13:28 he’s an immigrant
1:13:29 who becomes a steel baron
1:13:32 and he arrives
1:13:33 in the United States
1:13:33 at a time
1:13:35 when he is able
1:13:35 to rise
1:13:37 because of the economy,
1:13:38 because of the Civil War
1:13:39 and the nationalization
1:13:40 of that period
1:13:41 because of his connections
1:13:42 and so on
1:13:44 and by the 1890s
1:13:46 he is no longer
1:13:47 talking about,
1:13:47 you know,
1:13:49 the fortune of America
1:13:49 that enabled him
1:13:51 to become who he was.
1:13:52 He is talking about
1:13:53 how it was his own
1:13:54 hard work
1:13:55 that enabled him
1:13:56 to become who he was
1:13:57 and that because
1:13:58 he was so much better
1:14:00 than the people around him
1:14:01 he should be able
1:14:02 to concentrate wealth
1:14:03 in his own hands
1:14:04 and that that’s the way
1:14:05 the society really should work
1:14:06 is that wealth
1:14:07 should concentrate
1:14:08 among those
1:14:09 most able
1:14:10 to amass it
1:14:11 because what they would do
1:14:12 was they would use it
1:14:13 as the stewards
1:14:13 of society
1:14:15 by building libraries
1:14:16 or opera houses
1:14:18 or public facilities
1:14:20 that could not be achieved
1:14:21 unless they did
1:14:22 concentrate that wealth
1:14:23 because if you left it
1:14:23 in the hands
1:14:24 of the workers
1:14:25 they would waste it
1:14:26 on food
1:14:27 or clothing
1:14:27 or housing
1:14:28 or leisure time.
1:14:29 Well,
1:14:30 if you move that
1:14:31 mindset
1:14:32 into the present
1:14:33 you can see
1:14:34 somebody like
1:14:35 Elon Musk
1:14:35 who believes
1:14:36 that he will save
1:14:37 humanity
1:14:37 or at least
1:14:39 alleges he believes
1:14:40 that he will save humanity
1:14:42 by settling Mars
1:14:45 you see that same idea
1:14:47 that he has ideas
1:14:50 that are only being corrupted
1:14:51 by the idea
1:14:52 of civil rights
1:14:52 regulations
1:14:54 the idea that
1:14:54 in fact
1:14:56 women and people of color
1:14:58 should have equal rights
1:14:59 to employment
1:15:01 and equal protections
1:15:02 in American society
1:15:03 that hampers him
1:15:05 and that mindset
1:15:06 that some people
1:15:07 are better than others
1:15:08 and have the right
1:15:09 to rule
1:15:09 for the good
1:15:10 of humanity
1:15:12 is a thread
1:15:13 that runs through
1:15:14 American history
1:15:15 not just from the Gilded Age
1:15:16 but the elite
1:15:17 and southern enslavers
1:15:18 said the same thing
1:15:19 in the 1850s
1:15:19 the exact same thing
1:15:20 in the 1850s
1:15:21 that they were the ones
1:15:22 who had truly figured out
1:15:23 society
1:15:25 so to me
1:15:26 it’s just a continuity
1:15:27 and that
1:15:28 in many ways
1:15:29 helps me think
1:15:30 about ways
1:15:31 to combat it
1:15:32 because I don’t believe that
1:15:33 I actually do believe
1:15:34 that people are equal
1:15:35 and that they do have a right
1:15:36 to a say in their government
1:15:37 and they do have a right
1:15:37 to be treated equally
1:15:38 before the law
1:15:39 and they should have
1:15:40 equal access to resources
1:15:42 including things like
1:15:43 health care and education
1:15:45 so when I think about
1:15:47 reinforcing that set
1:15:49 of ideological principles
1:15:50 which are the same ones
1:15:51 that somebody like
1:15:52 Theodore Roosevelt
1:15:53 or Dwight Eisenhower
1:15:54 or FDR
1:15:55 or Lincoln embraced
1:15:57 in a way
1:15:58 there’s a road map there
1:16:00 to see how we have
1:16:01 succeeded in the past
1:16:03 and I do want to point out
1:16:04 that in all of those moments
1:16:05 that I just mentioned
1:16:05 the 1850s
1:16:06 the 1890s
1:16:07 the 1920s
1:16:08 the present
1:16:11 it didn’t look
1:16:12 at the time
1:16:13 as if
1:16:14 the idea of equality
1:16:15 was going to win
1:16:16 you think of somebody
1:16:17 like John Dos Passos
1:16:18 and his poem
1:16:19 about how they have
1:16:20 clubbed us off the streets
1:16:23 people thought
1:16:23 that the rich
1:16:24 elites
1:16:25 who wanted to control
1:16:26 everything
1:16:27 were going to win
1:16:27 it was never
1:16:28 an easy fight
1:16:30 and this fight
1:16:30 is not going to be
1:16:31 easy either
1:16:32 but I am not
1:16:34 ready to give up
1:16:35 on America
1:16:37 we have done it
1:16:37 in the past
1:16:39 and in a way
1:16:40 we have the tools
1:16:40 to know how to do it
1:16:41 again
1:16:43 not ready to give up
1:16:44 on America
1:16:45 Heather Cox Richardson
1:16:46 is a professor of history
1:16:47 at Boston College
1:16:48 and an expert
1:16:49 on American political
1:16:50 and economic history
1:16:51 she is the author
1:16:52 of seven award winning books
1:16:53 including her latest
1:16:55 Democracy Awakening
1:16:57 Notes on the State of America
1:16:59 her widely read newsletter
1:17:00 Letters from an American
1:17:02 synthesizes history
1:17:03 and modern political issues
1:17:05 I’m going to ask a favor
1:17:08 most conversations I have
1:17:09 I think I have a certain
1:17:11 I’m not proud of this
1:17:11 level of arrogance
1:17:12 I think
1:17:13 okay that’s interesting
1:17:14 but I have a better take on this
1:17:16 I found myself insecure
1:17:17 in this conversation
1:17:19 because you are so forceful
1:17:20 and dignified
1:17:21 and have such deep
1:17:21 domain expertise
1:17:23 and this is my ask
1:17:25 I want to bring more
1:17:26 light to your work
1:17:27 I think
1:17:29 it just shocks me
1:17:30 that you are
1:17:31 as much
1:17:33 praise
1:17:34 and influence
1:17:35 as you have
1:17:35 that
1:17:37 I think your work
1:17:38 deserves a lot more
1:17:39 attention
1:17:40 and with your
1:17:41 approval
1:17:42 and your help
1:17:43 I would like to bring
1:17:44 more attention to it
1:17:45 I can’t tell you
1:17:46 how much I enjoyed
1:17:47 this conversation
1:17:48 I think you are doing
1:17:48 great work
1:17:49 and are
1:17:50 the right voice
1:17:51 at the right moment
1:17:55 this episode
1:17:56 was produced by
1:17:57 Jennifer Sanchez
1:17:57 Drew Burrows
1:17:58 is our technical director
1:17:59 thank you for listening
1:18:00 to the Prof G Pod
1:18:01 from the Vox Media Podcast Network