JB Pritzker on the Fight Over AI, Housing, and Taxes

Live from Chicago, Ed Elson and Scott Galloway are joined by Governor JB Pritzker to discuss his push to tax social media and prediction markets, how he's thinking about AI and the data center boom, and what he believes the future of housing policy should look like. Subscribe to the Prof G Markets Youtube Channel Check out our latest Prof G Markets newsletter Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram, X and Substack Follow Scott on Instagram Send us your questions or comments by emailing [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Speaker 00

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• 1:53Scott Galloway?

  Today's number, $400,000. That's how much Hugh Hefner paid for the original Playboy mansion in Chicago. Ed, what's more disturbing, or what was more disturbing for me than finding a stack of Playboys in my father's basement?

• 2:11Ed Elson?

  What's that?

• 2:13Scott Galloway?

  Realizing one of them was still breathing.

• 2:17Scott Galloway?

  Hello, Chicago!

• 2:26Scott Galloway?

  All right, that didn't work. You want a dick joke?

• 2:30Scott Galloway?

  Okay, this is an old one, but it's my favorite. Speaking of sons, where he's at that age where it's time for the sex talk. So I went into his room with a banana and a condom.

• 2:40Scott Galloway?

  I can't believe we have the governor here. Anyway.

• 2:44Scott Galloway?

  And he goes, "What's the banana for?" And I'm like, "I can't get hard on an empty stomach."

• 3:03Ed Elson?

  We are here in Illinois, where some of the nation's biggest debates are playing out at the state level. The AI boom, for example, has created a lot of opportunity, but also a lot of resentment, particularly towards data centers, many of which are being built right here in Illinois. At the same time, Illinoisans are concerned about social media and its impacts on mental health, as well as the state's housing shortage, which has led to higher prices, much like what we've seen across the rest of America. Few leaders sit closer to these issues than our next guest, who has spent the past several years guiding the state through them. Since he was first elected in 2018, he passed several historic bills, such as raising the minimum wage. Yup.

• 3:52Ed Elson?

  We are big fans of that, and guaranteeing paid leave for every worker in Illinois. Before, yes.

• 4:02Ed Elson?

  Before politics, he helped create more than 14,000 jobs through his nonprofit work, and today, he is emerging as one of the most prominent voices in the Democratic Party. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your governor, JB Pritzker.

• 4:46Ed Elson?

  Well, it's great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us. We want to get right into it. I would love to start with a question about the Illinois state budget, which was literally just approved last night. Is that right?

• 4:59Speaker 04

  At about 4:30 in the morning.

• 5:00Ed Elson?

  4:30 in the morning. So he's had his rest. He's feeling good. So I just want to start with a couple of things that stood out to us when we were looking at that budget. The first was a social media tax. Illinois is going to tax social media platforms 50 cents per user per month. And the second thing we found interesting was a prediction markets tax. Prediction markets operators will be taxed 50% on their earnings from residents. We can get into the budget itself, but I just wanted to get your views on those two taxes. Why did you pursue them and how will this all play out?

• 5:33Speaker 04

  So to be clear, this is not a tax on people who are using social media. This is literally on the platforms. As many of you know, the social media companies are taking real advantage. Their algorithms are taking advantage of our kids in particular. We've had significant mental health challenges across the country as a result of the work that they do at these social media companies and not to mention the effects on all of us. And so we decided that they should have to pay for some of the effects that they're having on our children. And so we devised this social media platform fee. And again, you talked about how it gets applied, but it's about $200 million. It's not enough, frankly, to cover the mental health needs that we need to pay for in the state.

• 6:17Speaker 04

  But it's a beginning of them paying what I think is their fair share. Remember, they're making a whole big bunch of money on people in the state of Illinois, and yet we get zero benefit and all the negatives. A degradation in our education system, a degradation of mental health. So we want to deal with it. That's one of the ways. We also passed a child social media safety act to make sure that parents have the ability to control the devices of minors, to limit the number of hours they have access to social media if they want to. That's up to parents to make that decision, but we wanted to have the choice anyway.

• 6:57Ed Elson?

  It's great to see that this issue is finally being taken seriously. I think I feel like we've talked a lot about it on the podcast and there seems to be almost no action, at least from federal government, on these issues, particularly around big tech. I mean, does this set the stage for something else to come? Like, what's next in terms of regulating social media and addressing these problems?

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Well, we've got to, I think, keep our eyes and ears open. I mean, as you know, the world has changed. Technology is moving faster and faster. AI is upon us, and I think it's sort of slapping people in the face pretty fast. You know, we're going to see, there's no doubt, an effect on the economy as a result of AI. We want to be able to deal with that. We, in fact, passed an AI safety bill to make sure that we're monitoring the AI company's ability to stop the AI when it is literally a danger to the public. And so, having to report to the state about that, having systems for turning it off in certain circumstances within a very short period of time, that's an example of us dealing

• 8:04Speaker 04

  with it. And then you talked about Kalshi and polymarket. You know, that's a situation I think many of you have seen, that there are a lot of very manipulated transactions that are happening on these betting markets. And there are two things going on that I find kind of reprehensible. One of them is the manipulated transactions. So, someone who's betting on an issue that they know what the outcome will be, or have a significant impact on what the outcome will be, that's insider trading. I mean, and the federal government has decided through the CFTC, they're going to do nothing about this. So, we've got to do it at the state level. So,

• 8:44Speaker 04

  that's one thing. I think the other is that they're taking bets on outcomes of games, which is fine, except that we have a sportsbook law in the state of Illinois, where you've got to get a license to do that in the state. But under the CFTC, you don't need a license of your Kalshi or polymarket. So, what do they do? They're literally taking transactions away from what otherwise would be a regulated market and putting it into an unregulated market. So those are both areas where we've got to keep our eyes open and make sure that we're dealing with it. But standing up for the people of Illinois, making sure that we're doing what clearly Donald Trump and the Republican Congress are unwilling to do, that's something that

• 9:29Speaker 04

  I've been focused on for several years and I'm going to keep focused on it.

• 9:33Scott Galloway?

  So you're essentially, in many ways, the CEO of a company that has a product. And states offer a certain value, services, and a cost, the taxes. Illinois is one of five states that's had net negative outflow of its population.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  Not anymore. Not anymore. Literally, last three years, we've had increased population. Last three years.

• 10:07Scott Galloway?

  Last, last three years?

• 10:09Speaker 04

  Last three years. And I'll add one other thing, which is, you know, people have said this about Illinois, but you know, we did the, look, every year, as you know, they do a survey, the American Community Survey, to determine roughly what the populations are of different states. But it's a survey, right? The census happens once every 10 years where they actually count each person. Someone comes to your door, there's an ability to count each person. They counted everybody in Illinois. After 10 years of saying we lost population and said, oh, it turns out Illinois didn't lose population. And indeed, after they counted it, they went and recalculated as they do to make sure that did they get it right in all the states. And Illinois was one of the states where they realized they didn't get it right and

• 10:49Speaker 04

  they added 250,000 to our number, which means we now have over 13 million people in the state of Illinois. So the American Community Survey, there's clearly something wrong with it because every year from 2010 to 2020, they showed downward population. And then when they did a census, it turns out, no, we didn't have downward population. And then once again, 21, 22, they showed downward population. And yet, now in the American Community Survey, in the last three years, they're showing us increasing population. So, look, I'm not sure what to believe, but I know that if you count every single person, we're gaining population.

• 11:23Scott Galloway?

  So. Back to the notion of offering a product at a good price, right? What are the two or three things in the front of your mind? You're running for reelection. What? How do you make the product of Illinois a great value? What are the two or three things you want to see improve? I mean, the reality is this is a high tax state, which means it needs to be worth it. So what do you have planned? Or what would you like to see happen to ensure this product, as you said, continues to get more customers coming into the state?

• 11:56Speaker 04

  Well, let me start with I, when I got elected in 29, when I took office in 2019, I mean, the state really had gone through a terrible period of time in which we went without a budget for two years in a row. The only state ever to have that happen, by the way, and $17 billion in unpaid bills. We'd had 21 straight credit downgrades in the state. So just the management of the state was poor.

• 12:19Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  And I heard it, by the way. I went to New York and I met with the bond rating agencies as well as bond investors who really are judging the economy and the future of the state. And, you know, they were skeptical, right? Because they'd seen Illinois poorly governed for a lot of years.

• 12:35Scott Galloway?

  Yeah.

• 12:35Speaker 04

  I, you know, I had a plan and I implemented that plan. And we've had 10 credit upgrades. We've had eight straight balanced budgets, just past the eighth one. Well, early this morning.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  And so that's part of it, right? Better management of the state. The second thing is we got to grow the economy of the state. The history in Illinois is that we grow at a less than half of the rate of growth of the entire United States. So we're just, you know, not growing at the rate that we. Now, remember, some of our largest industries in Illinois are agriculture, which doesn't grow at a very high rate, manufacturing, which doesn't grow at a very high rate. Those are two huge pieces of our economy in the state. So when I came in, I had to look at, well, how do we increase the growth rate for the state? You've got to have industries that are growing at a much higher rate than agriculture and manufacturing. So that's what I've made investments in over the last seven years, seven and a half years. For example, we now have a quantum park.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  We are probably the number one state in the United States for quantum technology. And that industry is growing at 20 to 25% per year. Life Sciences is growing at about 10% per year. We invested in bio manufacturing. That is a new industry that's growing again at 10% a year. And so when you go down the list of the things, clean energy, by the way, also growing at about 8 to 9% a year. So, all of these things are things that are, you know, we've got to turn the crank faster in the state. So, if I'm making a case about the state on finances, I would say we're in much better shape than we were seven and a half years ago. And our economy is doing better than it was.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  We're about 1.2 and 1/2, 1.3 trillion dollars GDP. That makes us, just FYI for the people of Illinois, some pride here that we would be in the G20 if we were an independent country. Wow. And I'll just add that that's a consideration. Just kidding, just kidding. But these days, you know. I could just follow up. I do want to say, sir, I want to add, you talked about what's the pitch? The last part, and this is not unimportant, particularly for young people, and that's if you want to grow your state and grow your economy, you want to focus on this, but it's true for everybody.

• 15:03Speaker 04

  We protect people's individual rights. No matter who you are, no matter who you love. Even under attack from ICE and CBP and Donald Trump, right? We protect our neighbors, and you saw that. We were under attack before Minnesota, before Minneapolis was. We were like the testbed for Donald Trump. They came here, and frankly, everybody here knows, people came out with their whistles, people came out with their phones and videoed everything and posted it. People protested peacefully and pushed back. And look what happened. They left. And unfortunately, they tried again in Minneapolis with many more troops, essentially. And Minneapolis pushed back too.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  So I'm proud of the people of this country, and we're starting to see a real movement of pushback, and I think we're winning. We'll be right back.

• 16:03Speaker 05

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• 17:56Ed Elson?

  We're back with Prof G Markets.

• 17:58Scott Galloway?

  To be blunt, I would argue that given your universities, the wealth here, that the city punches out or below its weight class in terms of technology companies, in terms of actual unicorns, and given the importance of technology in some of the faster growing economies, and you're a venture capitalist, what, if anything, or if any programs do you think would inspire, my sense is, Governor, and again, you may correct me, that a lot of kids interested in tech who come out of your fine universities head east or west, that a lot of them don't stay. What, if anything, do you have planned to sort of, and you just talked about quantum, but to make, quote unquote, have Chicago occupy the place it commands

• 18:43Scott Galloway?

  in terms of technology?

• 18:44Speaker 04

  Sure. So, you're right. So, when I, many years ago, this is the business I was in, right, investing in technology companies. I was an entrepreneur myself, and I believe in the power of entrepreneurship. And so, we had a real problem in Chicago in particular, but throughout the state. And the problem was that, you know, we have some of the greatest universities in the world. University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Northwestern University, there is a long list of great universities here. Those are just the headlines. And we have great technology that's coming out of laboratories in those universities, right? We are research institution heavy in the state. But what was happening was people

• 19:26Speaker 04

  were getting up and leaving. They would, the famous thing that I really paid attention to was, in the early 90s, as you probably know, Marc Andreessen and others really invented, not Al Gore, but they invented really the internet, or at least made it useful, right? The first graphic browser came out of the University of Illinois. But, you know, YouTube is from here. PayPal, actually, originally came out of Illinois. So, you could go down the list of these companies and say, what happened to them? Well, they all got up and left. So, when I think about that, I think it's the job of our government, in part, to create an environment in which those entrepreneurs want to stay in the state of Illinois. But if you're not paying attention to it, people will get up and leave. And that's

• 20:08Speaker 04

  why when I came into office and really weren't, nobody was talking about quantum when I came into office, right? That's why we made an initial major investment, $200 million, more than any other state, in not the Quantum Park, but in making sure that we were building up the research capabilities in the state of Illinois. You don't often hear that a state does that. But I wanted us to attract the best scientists, the best technologists. And so we did that in 2019. And oh, by the way, the federal government saw it and they gave us four of the 10 centers for quantum technology that they awarded, these major federal grants, because we were willing to put our money up, they put their money up. And so we really

• 20:47Speaker 04

  won that battle. That was 2019. Fast forward in, in the last couple of years, it was important for us because we were winning on that research front, to turn it into practical application, commercialization. So what did we do? We created the Quantum Park, working with the University of Chicago, University of Illinois runs that Quantum Park. It's on the south side of Chicago, on a piece of land that has been empty for 30 years. It used to be a US steel site. It's a beautiful site on the lakefront, but it had been abandoned. It, you know, had some toxicity to the soil. It needed remediation. But it's an amazing place and the neighborhood had really been left out and left behind. So we've now turned

• 21:27Speaker 04

  that into a major Quantum Park. We've attracted IBM, SciQuantum, Inflection, Dirac. I mean, we can go through a list, some of these you haven't heard of because they're burgeoning new quantum companies. But the point is that it's, we now have more than a billion dollars invested in that park. I'm not talking about us. I'm talking about private dollars coming in. We have DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been responsible for so many of the technology advances that we've all seen, including internet, including GPS, etc. They are, have created a benchmarking facility at that Quantum Park. So this is

• 22:08Speaker 04

  all about making Illinois the next Silicon Valley for quantum. Because that, if you really want to improve the economy of the state, you make investments like that that have a long-term benefit. We will see, in my view, Literally tens of billions of dollars and ultimately, you know, the economy for quantum is going to be a trillion dollars. We should get a massive portion of that because we were early, because we made the investments and we've attracted the right people.

• 22:33Ed Elson?

  One, one, one, uh, yeah.

• 22:39Ed Elson?

  So you mentioned quantum, biotech, life sciences, all these fascinating technologies. You didn't mention AI and AI is, that is, you know, the multi-trillion dollar prize. But as we are increasingly seeing, it is becoming increasingly unpopular in America. And here in Illinois, this is one of the, has one of the highest numbers of data centers in the state. And increasingly, what we're seeing is a lot of people have decided, we actually don't like data centers. We actually don't like AI. They are protesting against it. As governor, how do you think about AI? How do you adopt the technology such that you can generate prosperity and productivity while at the same time recognize that a lot

• 23:24Ed Elson?

  of people are not fans of this technology? They don't even want it here.

• 23:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, let me back up and just say, you know, there's a little bit of a difference between data centers that we were attracting several years ago and now the AI data centers. These are like massive facilities, right?

• 23:39Ed Elson?

  Right.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  Um, and, uh, I'm proud of the fact that, that, you know, Illinois, because of our geography, because of the fact that we, I don't know if anybody knows here, that we have, uh, 80% of the United States freshwater is on the shores of or underneath or surrounding in our rivers, uh, Illinois. I mean, 80% of the United States freshwater, right? Including, of course, the Great Lakes. And it's 20% of the world's freshwater. Nobody ever took full advantage of the fact that, that, you know, that's, that's a commodity that we all should be valuing and protecting for the state of Illinois. So let's start with just a recognition of that and a recognition that we also have been a net energy exporter

• 24:22Speaker 04

  in the state. About 53% of all the electricity that gets created in the state of Illinois is nuclear, with the largest nuclear state in the country. Now, there were Years ago, when people were like, oh, my God, that's a terrible thing. I think mostly today, people would say, we need more electricity, how are we going to get it fast enough? And of course, we've expanded all the renewable energy sources that we can as fast as we can. But nuclear is the best way to get baseload energy that we need. So to your.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  So to your point, though, data centers are sucking a lot of the electricity and water. And it's not just Illinois data centers. There are data centers all over the country. They're doing this, and particularly the AI, big AI data centers. That are going up and, you know, you saw like in Pennsylvania, they're restarting Three Mile Island just for a data center. And I think that my guess is that's going to be a reasonably unpopular thing to have done.

• 25:22Speaker 04

  What I've done here, and I proposed it back in February, is that we, you know, we had, just like we do in a lot of industries. We had tax credits available for people to build data centers. I do want to point out that data centers are really great job creators for the, in the construction side of things. But once they're built, they really don't employ a lot of people. What they do do is pay property taxes in the local area, which brings down property taxes for others. I'm going through all this because what we now need to do is take a pause. And that's what I proposed back in, in February, when I gave my State of the State speech. We should pause our data center tax credits. We had to take an assessment of where we are. And very importantly, we should force data centers to bring their own electricity

• 26:07Speaker 04

  and make sure that they're paying their fair share if they're coming to the state of Illinois.

• 26:13Ed Elson?

  We, we agree on that. I just want to ask you about housing. So you recently had a, proposed a bill, bill called the Build Plan. And the idea was to bring down housing prices by essentially getting, giving the state the power to override these local zoning policies, if I'm getting that, getting that right. And the bill didn't pass. And I look at that, to me, that's a great plan to reduce the cost. of housing in America. We've talked about this a lot. Econ 101, you need to increase the supply if you want to get prices down. It sounds like you tried to do that and it didn't work and it didn't it didn't pan out. What are your takeaways from build not going

• 26:58Ed Elson?

  through? And what does the future of housing policy in America look like in a way that is actually effective and actually brings prices down?

• 27:06Speaker 04

  I'm glad you asked because you know, when I ran for office, my my slogan for my campaign was think big. Now, some of that was because. But but it was also because we needed big change in the state and I talked about some of the challenges we had. And I have not stopped thinking big or acting in a way that that will change the the direction of the state in a positive way. One of the things, of course, that that we need in the state of Illinois, it's the biggest expense that everybody in this room and everybody in the state has, which is housing. If you want to address affordability, and that's sort of the buzzword of the day. But really, if you want to bring costs down for people, you've got to make it more affordable for

• 27:47Speaker 04

  people to buy a home or rent a home, rent an apartment, etc. So here's the other thing. We've balanced the budget every year. It's not an easy thing, especially in this moment when Donald Trump has taken away $8 billion from the state of Illinois, $8 billion. We our total budget is $55 billion. When you take $8 billion away, it's impossible to replace. So so let's be clear. If we want to address this, we can't do it by just writing checks so that we can just, you know, create a bunch of housing and and give it away. Yes, we need affordable housing for low income people who otherwise can't afford housing. We absolutely been investing in that. We're not going to stop doing that. But what we need now also

• 28:31Speaker 04

  is housing for working class people, for working families, for middle class people who can't buy a home. I mean, now, what's the average age to buy a first time home? 40 years old. It used to be 30. It's now 40 years old. People want to start a family, can't afford to buy a house and, you know, Get their family somewhere where there's a good school and so on. So, how do you do that? If you don't have a lot of money to build housing, or just subsidize people buying housing, how do you go about that? Well, one way to do that is, remove some of the barriers to make it less expensive to build homes, and make sure that you're providing just some basic down payment assistance for people in a world where interest rates are very

• 29:13Speaker 04

  high compared to where they were before. Anyway, they're 6.5% roughly for a mortgage right now. And, the average home in Illinois costs about $400,000 across, sorry, in the city of Chicago, about $400,000. Across the state, it's about $320,000 to buy a home. People can't buy a home anymore. And so, we want to make it a little easier, and the only way to do that is, let's remove the barriers. So, what's an example of how you remove barriers? Well, one way to do that is, make sure that, in a neighborhood where, you know, over the years, redlining, for example, has put a bunch of regulations in place, that really haven't been removed, and they haven't been called out for the fact that they were about

• 29:55Speaker 04

  redlining, have kept people from building like a two-flat, a duplex where otherwise there was only a single-family home allowed. What about if you own a home and you have a garage? And, you'd like to put your parents in the, they're getting older, and they'd like them to be on your property, but they'd like their own home, and you want to convert your garage into a home? It's near impossible in most places in the state of Illinois, just to do that. And it may take you a couple of years to get permitted, to do anything like that, if it is allowed. So, what we're trying to do is, just make it a little bit easier. We're not talking about building, you know, 50 condos next to a, you know, single-family home block. That's not what we're, and yet, that is the misinformation

• 30:39Speaker 04

  that people who are opposed to this, have been putting out. So, look, it may take us, it clearly is going to take more than the session that we were just in, to convince people this is the right way to go. But, we are making progress in this regard, and the right thing to do is, add a few homes everywhere in the state. We need about 240,000 more homes, in the state by 2020. We are probably have a shortage of about 130,000 right now. So you can't do that quickly unless you do something significant, thinking big. And that's what the build plan is. We got about two pieces of it passed. Uh, there are about four that didn't get passed, uh, in this session. But I've worked on things for a couple of years to get them done.

• 31:21Speaker 04

  We just banned, uh, cell phones during the school day in classes.

• 31:30Speaker 04

  And that took us a couple of years. So sometimes you gotta work on something more than just a few months.

• 31:36Scott Galloway?

  To what extent do you think states and cities should continue to subsidize billionaire families that own sports franchises?

• 31:47Speaker 04

  I'm sorry.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  I didn't hear anything before sports franchises. What, what did you ask?

• 31:55Scott Galloway?

  I'll, I'll phrase the question a different way. Bears, question mark.

• 32:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, who here is a Chicago Bears fan?

• 32:07Speaker 04

  So me too, and, and, uh, when the Bears showed up about-

• 32:10Scott Galloway?

  Who's a fan of balancing the budget?

• 32:14Scott Galloway?

  Sorry, couldn't resist.

• 32:15Speaker 04

  It's only your audience, by the way, where people are really thinking about that. I really appreciate it, although in the-

• 32:20Scott Galloway?

  That's right.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  In the state of Illinois balancing budgets, it's actually a big deal, isn't it? Um, so, uh, look, I, I mean, I love the Chicago Bears and they showed up in Springfield about a couple of years ago. Um, and, and spent, I think, a couple of years trying to lobby the legislature and were unsuccessful. Um, and the reason is, you know, things have changed, you know, since many years ago, when there was a, uh, you know, stadium finance authority created, that created Soldier Field and created what I would call Comiskey. I know it's rate now or something like that guaranteed rate field. Um, Comiskey, um, uh, for the White Sox. Uh, you know, years ago, it was very popular.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  For politicians to build and pay for stadiums for sports teams. It's not very popular right now, especially in a moment when people aren't able to get fed because SNAP's being taken away, Medicaid and their healthcare's being taken away. And we have a lot of other priorities. I'm not suggesting that we don't love the Chicago Bears or that we don't want to help a business in the state, and that is a private business owned by a private family. We do, we want more business, more jobs. We want to help people come to or expand in the state. But honestly, in the priority of things in Springfield and things that matter in the state, it wasn't the number one priority. So nevertheless, I thought it was important for us to put forward something that would help the Bears stay in the state.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  I think they want to stay in the state, but I also think that, you know, that it's a it's a team that has struggled, I think, to make investments. And so they're looking for others to help them make investments like this. What I'm unwilling to do is spend taxpayer money to build a stadium for a private business.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  But but in but incentives, incentives like, for example, we do this for lots of companies. You need infrastructure, you need roads, you know, you need sewers, you need when you're going to build a new factory or build a new headquarters. Those are all things that government is supposed to do. And so those are things that we talked to the Bears about doing and giving them the ability to build a privately owned stadium. That was something that we put a plan together for. But, you know, look, it's not my job to go lobby for the Bears. They've got to go get the support for the for their staying in the state and for all the things that they want. And I think they were not all that successful at getting that done. I say all that with the desire that, you know, the Senate passed a bill that would

• 35:01Speaker 04

  allow them to stay in the state. The House did not pass it because I think frankly, you know, midnight was a deadline. Some of you may know the way the legislature works, but you have to get super majorities after midnight on May 31st. So we call that May 32nd. They passed midnight, they weren't able to get it in the House, and they didn't have a super majority of votes to get it done. We'll see what happens. There may be time to get that done this summer. But the key thing for me is protect the taxpayers and make sure that we're helping a business grow in the state. Stay with us.

• 35:42Speaker 07

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• 39:04Ed Elson?

  We're back with Prof G Markets.

• 39:06Scott Galloway?

  Should you decide to run for federal office, I think something that might be a liability is that when someone asks you a question, you're thoughtful and you add color. Sorry about that. And context. So I'm going to help you out here. And we're going to try and do social media TikTockable answers. Okay. So I want to do two lightning rounds. And one will be a policy lightning round, and one will be more of a personal lightning round. Make sense, Ed?

• 39:32Ed Elson?

  That makes sense.

• 39:33Scott Galloway?

  Okay, so I'm going to talk about a policy, and I just want to get a quick response. Wow.

• 39:42Ed Elson?

  This is what it's like. Imagine working for him.

• 39:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I really don't, yeah.

• 39:45Ed Elson?

  It's pretty tough.

• 39:50Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, things are rough for you. He's like, he's like 14 years old.

• 39:55Scott Galloway?

  Anyways, federally mandated $25 an hour minimum wage.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  I raised the minimum wage in the state of Illinois to $15 from $8.25. I do think it's got to be a level playing field across the country. So if we're going to raise the minimum wage, which we should do, federal minimum wage, $7.25. I know you want a shorter answer. Federal minimum wage, $7.25. You can't survive on that. So $25 seems like fair and reasonable if it's across the board.

• 40:25Scott Galloway?

  Uh, lower Medicaid eligibility. Or Medicare, excuse me, I forget which one. Two years, basically a single payer. Socialized national healthcare.

• 40:34Speaker 04

  We, well, you put a lot of words in there. I mean, we need. About socialized.

• 40:39Scott Galloway?

  Socialized medicine.

• 40:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay, okay, all right. That, you're putting a perspective on it. What I would say is everybody should have a doctor. We should have universal healthcare in this country. And, and that. There are several ways to do that. Single payer Medicare for all.

• 40:59Speaker 04

  Or a system that has private and public, like a public option, for example. But it's got to be a federal public option. We looked at it for the state to create a public option and couldn't figure out how to make it work fiscally for the state to do it. No state's been able to do that, but it could work nationally.

• 41:21Scott Galloway?

  Mandatory national service.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  I really do, yeah. I.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  You know, I really do believe that, that everybody should do some service. And I think going forward, when you think about the effects that AI is going to have on the economy, that people are going to have to learn what we've traditionally called vocational training. And we should just. Provide that training for everybody and the opportunity to go in the military if that's a choice that people want to make, but but some choices that people could make at age 18 when they're graduating, uh, cause I, I think in the end, you know, AI is not going to replace things. I do not believe AI is going to replace a plumber, uh, and, and they're not going to replace, you know, people who construct buildings. So I do think

• 42:08Speaker 04

  that having some kind of opportunity for people that, you know, it's just like you're required to go to school. This should be in that vein.

• 42:16Scott Galloway?

  Uh, last one on the policy side, alternative minimum tax on anyone making say over $10 million of 50%.

• 42:22Ed Elson?

  Could, can I just, can I just amend that slightly to something that's gotten very popular recently, which is the wealth tax, just because this is, seems to be the direction in a lot of ways that the Democratic Party is heading. California, they proposed the wealth tax. We've just seen a federal proposal. I mean, alternative minimum tax is also interesting, but given wealth tax is so popular, what do you make of that?

• 42:44Speaker 04

  You may not know that I introduced the graduated income. We have a flat tax in the state of Illinois. I introduced a graduated income tax that would lower taxes on 97% of people in Illinois and raise taxes on the top 3% in Illinois. Um, we could not get that done back in 2019. I really believe that we've got to have a fairer tax system where the wealthy pay a much higher rate than people who are just working class. In fact, most people shouldn't have to pay a lot of tax, uh, and indeed there shouldn't be the same tax rate that, uh, is applied to someone like you, Scott, uh, as compared, as compared to a, a nurse or someone who's working at McDonald's.

• 43:24Scott Galloway?

  Uh, so I'm sorry, did you have something?

• 43:27Ed Elson?

  Yeah. I mean, the wealth tax in particular, because this seems to be one of the issues that is going to divide people. Um, some would say that the wealth tax is going too far. Maybe it would disincentivize, uh, investment. Maybe it's too anti-business, like where do you land on this ultimately?

• 43:44Speaker 04

  Like I said, I think the wealthy, and we've talked about a millionaire's tax here in the state of Illinois, uh, as an alternative to a graduated income tax. By the way, do you know who introduced the graduated income tax in the United States? Abraham Lincoln, um, and-

• 43:57Scott Galloway?

  But how does that work if it's not federally mandated? Because you just, everyone moves to Florida. It doesn't have to be a federal. How do you do that? I mean, aren't you just gonna lose more and more? I mean, it's easy to have class warfare and demonize billionaires, but if you lose them, you lose a lot of tax revenue, no?

• 44:12Speaker 04

  I get it, but, you know, I, we also have much better education system than Florida does. We have a much better healthcare system than Florida does.

• 44:20Scott Galloway?

  Billionaires can get great education in Florida, Governor.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  I, I, I, I get that the billionaires can, it's true. They can go anywhere. They can go to Monaco if they want to, but, but I'm suggesting to you that, that I, I want to live in a state where we protect people's rights, where we're making sure that people have healthcare, we're making sure that people get a decent income, uh, and that includes the right to organize and collectively bargain, um, and, because if you want to deal with affordability, by the way, put more money in people's pockets. That's the best way to do it. Um, but I, I also think that, you know, we're a state, look, I think there's a lot of pride, uh, in the people of Chicago and the people of the state of Illinois about our state. Yes, it's colder here than it is in Florida. There is not much I can do about that, although slowly, I was, I was getting slowly but surely,

• 45:04Speaker 04

  oh, by the way, Florida's gonna need fresh water, just like everywhere else.

• 45:09Scott Galloway?

  Yep.

• 45:10Speaker 04

  So actually, you've seen, if you look at the projections going forward, people moving across the country, the projections are that people will move more and more toward the Midwest, uh, and not away from it because of the water problem.

• 45:23Scott Galloway?

  So even very generous of your time, we're gonna wrap up with the personal lightning round. Um, okay. Uh, guilty pleasure.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  Oh, well, you can see I've had a lot of guilty pleasures. Um, most of them have been food oriented, but I guess cheesecake. Eli's cheesecake, I might add.

• 45:42Scott Galloway?

  Living person that has the most, uh, impact on you?

• 45:48Speaker 04

  My wife, who's been amazing.

• 45:50Scott Galloway?

  Person who's, who's no longer with us that's had the most impact on you?

• 45:53Speaker 04

  I mean, I know, you're asking all the, you know, the, you're getting answers from me that you probably are uninterested in, but my mother, who was an activist for LGBTQ rights and for abortion rights in the sixties and seventies, when it was hard.

• 46:11Scott Galloway?

  Last piece of media you've read or watched that's really moved you or impacted you?

• 46:15Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  You know, now I'm consuming so much every day that I'm not sure that's really moved me.

• 46:25Speaker 04

  There's a story that I just read recently about a transgender woman who went missing. And in the course of that story, it not only covered, you know, her family's journey trying to locate her or determine if she had been abducted and killed, which often has happened, unfortunately. But also, it talked about the challenges that transgender people have with, you know, the mental health challenges that are brought on by societies, the mores that people put and, you know, the way people treat transgender people. So I don't, that moved me because I really believe that we ought to be protecting every single person's individual rights and respecting everybody.

• 47:10Speaker 04

  And I think that unfortunately is not the tone or tenor of the leadership of this country right now. And the result of that is that we're moving backward, not forward, in protecting people.

• 47:20Scott Galloway?

  Best advice you've ever received?

• 47:22Speaker 04

  My mother, once again, when she sent me off for my very first job, official legal job, where I had a paycheck and paid into the union also.

• 47:35Speaker 04

  But I went off to work, I was 14 years old. And my first job, my family, my father started a hotel business and my family was in the hotel business and I got...

• 47:47Scott Galloway?

  Really?

• 47:48Speaker 04

  They may not know, you know.

• 47:50Scott Galloway?

  Really?

• 47:52Speaker 04

  And it was, actually, the job, by the way, was picking up the laundry at a motel. This is like the dirty sheets, right? Picking up the dirty sheets and then loading them into the washing machine and then picking them out of the washing machine and throwing them into the dryer. So, you know, not a terrific job, but a great first job. My mother said to me as I was leaving the very first day, she said, "Now, remember, you have to work twice as hard as the guy next to you because you did not earn this job."

• 48:25Speaker 04

  He did. And I will never forget that. I mean, as long as I live and I have tried always to work as hard, harder, twice as hard as the people that I'm working next to because I'm frankly, I landed in the lucky tub.

• 48:39Scott Galloway?

  And. Advice you would give to young men who are struggling?

• 48:51Speaker 04

  One thing is that your relationships really matter. That, you know, having personal human connection to people really matters. And I know that in this world, more and more, that's falling apart. People do not have personal connection. So, one is to maintain your connection. I think it's harder and harder, especially in a world where, and this is just a fact of life and a positive one, where women are more financially independent than they have been ever before, and that should continue. But that doesn't mean that, you know, men can't be, can't, you know, be protectors and providers and partners, you know, with women who are financially independent.

• 49:35Speaker 04

  And I think it's just that we are living with some old mores that have been foisted upon a new world still, right? And especially when you've got somebody who wants to, you know, who says he wants to make America great again, as if it's like we gotta go back to the 1950s for America to be great. And so that's, you know, my advice is that and, and I guess, you know, recognizing that you can't, you know, you really need your world aperture and view to be wider and not narrower. Stop, you know, spending all of your time on social media and spend a lot of your time putting it aside and actually interacting with people.

• 50:15Scott Galloway?

  And we'll wrap up.

• 50:23Scott Galloway?

  We'll wrap up here. Where you felt your lowest moment, where you were most sort of, I don't know, grieving or unhappy in your life? And when you look back on your life, what you think you'll point to as being the point in your life where you're the happiest and most fulfilled?

• 50:39Speaker 04

  Well, I'll give the latter one. I mean, maybe it's too classic, but, but I mean, literally, the birth of my first child was probably the happiest moment I can imagine. I mean, I, it's hard not to say that my wedding was important and, and, but I'm not sure my wife will listen to the podcast, so. But it is true, the birth of my first child. And then I think, I mean, there's no doubt. I, I lost my father when I was seven and my mother when I was 17. And between those two, time, in that time period, my mother was an alcoholic. And there is, I'm not sure when I was seven, if I fully understood the loss that I was

• 51:24Speaker 04

  experiencing. I mean, I understood it in the 10 years after, but it included also the loss of my mother because essentially, my brother and sister and I were taking care of my mother for some of that time. She was an amazing person, and when she was sober, she was the smartest person you'd ever meet. And as I said, she was an activist in years when that was really hard to do. So I just, I'd mention this, the lowest moment is one of those two moments when I, my father passed away when I was seven, my mother passed away when I was 17. That, that moment when my mother passed away, probably because I was more cognizant of maybe that I was more alone in the world, or that I didn't have family mentors, let's

• 52:06Speaker 04

  say, anymore, except my brother and sister, who, you know, were, were close as a result.

• 52:13Scott Galloway?

  I don't want to end there. If you had a magic wand. If you had a magic wand and you would want one policy or one thing to change about America, what would that thing be?

• 52:22Speaker 04

  It has to be that that no one in this country should go without having the opportunity to have a great job and a good paying job. I mean, that to me, the dignity of work is so vitally important. That's not to suggest that people who are very vulnerable and don't have a job, you know, and can't get a job because of their vulnerabilities, developmental disabilities, or other things shouldn't, you know, be people that we are caring for and making sure we're lifting up. But I'm telling you, like, the idea that we're going to go into a world now where possibly we're not going to have enough jobs because of AI, I think we have to start thinking seriously right now, because there is no time to waste about what does the world look like in the future, because people need jobs.

• 53:04Speaker 04

  It can't be that we're just handing out profits to people as a result of what AI is happening. You know, maybe that's like one way to deal with it. Or I think a lot of the oligarchs that Donald Trump has, you know, spends his time with, think that we shouldn't actually give any money to anyone and that they should be the only ones who make it. But but I'm see, even if you say, let's distribute, you know, what the trillions that they're going to make from this, that's not the answer. It is the dignity of work that I think really matters to people. And yes, people need to never go without enough to be able to provide the basic necessities and a little bit more, because no one can afford anymore. And a working person can't afford to go to Disney World.

• 53:46Speaker 04

  A working person can't afford to take their family on vacation anymore. That is not a world that like, working to survive, that's not enough. And so we've got to have a world where we recognize the holistic benefit that it is to be human and what it is that we need to do to lift people up.

• 54:04Scott Galloway?

  Lift people up. Please join me in thanking the governor of the great state of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker.

• 54:10Ed Elson?

  This episode was produced by Procter Media. Like and subscribe. Thank you so much. Have a good night.

• 54:58Speaker 10

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• 55:35Speaker 06

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• 56:15Speaker 11

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