Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway Raging Moderates: The Death of the American Dream (feat. Rahm Emanuel) About this episode Scott and Jessica sit down with Rahm Emanuel—former Chicago mayor, Obama Chief of Staff, and U. S. Ambassador to Japan—for an unfiltered conversation about the Democratic Party at a crossroads. They cover everything from Biden’s health and GOP tax cuts to rising antisemitism, the education crisis, and the growing struggles facing young men. Plus, Rahm weighs in on 2028—and whether he’s seriously considering a run.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.
0:27 Speaker 01 Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying, excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing increasingly is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It To Me, how to mind your manners. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:56 Scott Galloway? Hey folks, we took a break for Memorial Day, but before the long weekend, we sat down with Rahm Emanuel for a conversation recorded last Thursday. We got into the issues surrounding Biden, the Republican transfer of wealth to the rich, and what Democrats need to focus on. Here's the episode. Enjoy.
1:13 Scott Galloway? Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Scott Galloway.
1:15 Jessica Tarlov? And I'm Jessica Tarlov.
1:17 Scott Galloway? Jess, joining us today is someone who's worn a lot of hats in American politics, two-time mayor of Chicago, former White House chief of staff, and most recently, U.S. ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel. Rahm, welcome to the show.
1:29 Speaker 04 Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Jess.
1:31 Scott Galloway? We're going to jump right into this. The headlines this week have been dominated by the news that President Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. That comes on the heels of a week already full of questions about his health and a buzzy new book. Quick question. Did Biden's narcissism and entering into consensual hallucination with a lot that the Democratic Party, that he was the best candidate for a president, is that a big part of the reason that we re-elected an insurrectionist?
2:00 Speaker 04 Look, I mean, I have a couple answers on this. You know, look, White Houses are insular.
2:06 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
2:07 Speaker 04 And the Oval Office is seductive. And while you talked about his medical condition and all this, I, my take on this is, uh, this is Shakespearean. And the reason I say that is, I've worked with, uh, former President Biden in three different functions. One, I was assigned by President Clinton when I was senior advisor to work with him on passing the Violence Against Women Act. And the assault weapon ban, when he's a senator and I was a, as I said, senior advisor for the president. Then our offices, when I'm chief of staff for President Obama, are adjacent to each other. And then, as ambassador that he appointed me, and I'm 8,000 miles away, we worked through this historic agreement between Japan, Korea,
2:48 Speaker 04 and the United States. So I've seen him at different stages, from different locations, and I've seen him change. And I, what saddens me, and I'm just saying this as a, both a friend, genuine friend to him. He, he's a good man, who did good work, who wanted one thing in life, which was to be known as somebody that was significant. And the tragedy here will be that his last act is going to become a defining act. And it is going to actually undo the one thing he wanted out of his life, which is, it's going to, I won't say obliterate, that's a little dramatic, but it's definitely going to color in a very significant way, the one thing he wanted.
3:27 Speaker 04 And had he stayed true to his commitment in 2020 and said, I'm going to be a transitional. I do believe this was, you know, this gets back to a question, could you have won, could the Democrat have won this race? I've always thought a Democrat could have beaten Donald Trump.
3:42 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
3:42 Speaker 04 He didn't get 50-plus percent. And I feel empathy for him, because he wanted one thing in life, beyond doing good work, you know, some sense to be seen as a significant player, et cetera. And the vanity, the power of the office, the lack of people around him that would tell him truth. And I add one thing, I mean, President Obama and President Clinton, they, your job at certain times of the presidency is to tell the president not what they want to know, but what they need to hear.
4:13 Scott Galloway? Right.
4:13 Speaker 04 And that didn't happen. He or they or both got walled off from that. And White Houses get very, very insular. And that office is incredibly seductive. So I feel him not holding to his pledge
4:30 Scott Galloway? Mm-hmm.
4:30 Speaker 04 had consequences, one to him and two to all of us. And we're dealing with it today.
4:36 Scott Galloway? We'll just follow up and then, just moving to solutions. We've decided that a 34-year-old does not have the cognitive ability or the judgment to run for the highest office. Do you think we need age limits on the higher end? Why wouldn't we have age limits, say of 75, to run for office?
4:50 Speaker 04 Well, it's not only cognitive. You ever see a before and after picture of a president in the White House?
4:55 Scott Galloway? Sure.
4:55 Speaker 04 The day they walk in and the day they walk out?
4:57 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
4:57 Speaker 04 Every year is a dog year, okay? You walk into that office and it is a physical, mental, emotional, psychological beating by the hour.
5:09 Scott Galloway? Mm-hmm.
5:09 Speaker 04 There should be a cap. You saw it with Ronald Reagan's, I mean, deterioration in his final years.
5:15 Scott Galloway? So you're on board with an age limit at the high end? That someone who's, say, above a certain age should not be able to run?
5:21 Speaker 04 Yes, that's the short answer. I will say one thing, there's an anecdote out of the Oval. You know, obviously, I'm President Obama's chief of staff for the first two years. And one day, you know, we were going from healthcare to a 10 minutes financial reform. Then we were going into the oil well that had exploded and it was just, you know, that was only by 10:30. And I told him, I said, "Look, man, when we get out of here, I want to get a t-shirt shack on a beach. And I want to sell one color, white." So if somebody said blue, I'd go, "White." And one size, medium, just so I don't have to think, I don't have to make a call. And we used to have this, like, we'd be in a meeting and it was like mind-boggling.
6:05 Speaker 04 I'd look at him, I'd go, "White." He'd look at me and go, "Medium." Because we were going to open up a t-shirt shack on a Hawaiian beach and all we were going to do all day is lean forward. And just watch the ways so you didn't have to think anymore. And the immense pressure, as my grandfather would say, it takes the nashuma out of you.
6:24 Jessica Tarlov? Yeah, I like knowing that white and medium are your safe words. So now I know that before we get to the reconciliation package, I just wanted to add on to what you were saying, Scott, about President Biden and, you know, the extension of what original sin is uncovered, and there are already four books, right, that are coming out about the quote unquote cover up in the White House is that we have this enormous trust deficit with the American people. And they're skeptical of politicians in general, but it has never been so bleak for Democrats in comparison to the Republican Party. And I'm curious, as someone with great political instincts and having been successful in many
7:08 Jessica Tarlov? arenas of politics, how you think Democrats can deal with that? Because it feels very much to me and Scott that we are going about business as usual in extraordinary times and that we need an extraordinary solution to the challenges that we're facing.
7:25 Speaker 04 You know, just I, this wasn't a surprise to the American people.
7:29 Jessica Tarlov? They told us over and over, he's too old.
7:31 Speaker 04 Yes, I mean, if you go back and do kind of an autopsy of the presidency, there's the confluence in that first August with both what happens in Afghanistan and the recurrence of COVID. And also, which I think sometimes gets lost in the analysis, he doesn't try to deal with Afghanistan by doing a Kennedy post Bay of Pigs and say, I own this, this is on me, I made the decision. And his response sets off triggers because he was supposed to be hired to manage better than the chaos of Trump 1.0. And that starts to build the resistance to him. He never then gets back to positive real estate from a polling standpoint in trust.
8:14 Speaker 04 And as inflation picks up and gets deeper, and he tries to tell the American people the economy is better than you appreciate, the age issue comes over as a person who's out of touch. And it grows to like a 70 mile an hour headwind straight at him. And the American people could not see past that block. And it grew in intensity every day that went by. So it was the most discussed subject. If it was a secret, the American people were in on it.
8:45 Jessica Tarlov? Right.
8:46 Speaker 04 It wasn't a secret. They were in on it and they issued a judgment. Now, there is a trust factor. I think there's a trust factor for politicians. The truth is a trust factor. The farther you get away from people's home, the less trust there is. Local politics versus national one. There's not, you know, people go, oh, our democracy is at threat. Not the local level.
9:05 Jessica Tarlov? Right.
9:05 Speaker 04 National level. I think the bigger challenge for Democrats is, and I don't think we own universally the deficit on trust. I think our challenge, Democrats are seen as weak and woke. Republicans are seen as going to be in this reconciliation bill, as people that stab you in the back and betray you. That's the two vulnerabilities of both parties. And if we do certain things that I've been advocating, and I can talk about it on this show, I think we can make up for and address the weak and woke in a very kind of focused way. I think people have clearly, because of weak and woke, disappointed in us. And that has made them appropriately angry at us.
9:46 Jessica Tarlov? What do, what do we do about that? You know, we've heard it in every kind of denomination. You know, they're crazy, but we're preachy. They look down on us. Why are you on the wrong side of a 70 30 issue? Fix us, Rom.
10:00 Speaker 04 Well, here, look, I'm sensitive to a child that's trying to figure out what pronoun they want to use, but nobody wants to be sensitive to the fact that the rest of the classroom can't tell you what a pronoun is. And to me, this is insane. I've said this before and I'll say it again. We shut the front door of a school for two years during COVID and then we blew open the bathroom door right afterwards. And not only were we off on a tangent of a set of issues, we made them primary to us. Yes, by our DNA as Democrats, we are an accepting party. We became a party that advocated. And that's a mistake. Go back to President Clinton. That's a formative experience for me.
10:43 Speaker 04 In 1992, 40% of his advertising is on ending welfare as you know it. He comes on the heels of Jimmy Carter's loss, Walter Mondale's loss, Michael DeCocas' loss. He ran openly as a new Democrat. And that new Democrat wasn't just the economy, stupid. It was 100,000 community police officers not defunding the police. It was ending welfare as we know it, not continuing kind of a failed system, even when it was self-evident that it was broken. The economics and the cultural aspect were grounded in mainstream. President Obama himself talked openly about it's easier to father a child, it's different to be a dad, and he got criticized for it. And he stood up for that.
11:27 Speaker 04 Grounding yourself in the mainstream culturally is really, really important for the whole agenda, not just tactically. Democrats, and this is a thing that I would say about politics, sound is not always fury. And you have to, if you're good in politics, know the difference between sound and fury. Just because a Washington group tells you to use the word Latinx doesn't mean...
11:56 Speaker 04 People use it. And we have to be not cavalier attacking people, but we have to ground ourselves in the very conversation that families have about social media, about homeless encampments near their house, things that happen on their block, and not look, we're running off in some tangent because some Washington group with a 202 area code on their phone yelling at you. And my other point to illustrate this, in the last State of the Union by President Biden, he said illegal immigrant. The next morning, the Washington interest groups attack him and say, you have to use undocumented. And rather than say, hey, look, they crossed the border illegally. They're immigrants. I'm using illegal immigrants.
12:41 Speaker 04 You want to use undocumented, you use it. I'm going to use what I'm going to use. That would have been a sign of strength. Grounding yourself in the mainstream and the strength to say when somebody who's in the family is offside. That is essential, more so for Democrats. And we got caught in a cul-de-sac, driving around in a circle in the last three years.
13:04 Scott Galloway? So, Ron, how's Republicans just passed a massive tax and spending cuts package? A lot of think tanks have said this is going to be the greatest transfer of wealth from poor to rich in history. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, on this bill and these tax cuts.
13:22 Speaker 04 This is not an advocate for my web traffic on my piece, but I just had a piece go up on the Washington Post on this piece. But I think this is a huge opportunity for Democrats. You don't have either the microphone of the Oval Office or the gavel of the congressional. Both sides of Pennsylvania are owned by the Republicans. There is an architecture built in to that midterm.
13:49 Speaker 04 An energized opposition, two to one independents break from the incumbent party, and a depressed incumbent party. That is already, you can see in the early polling, setting up for 2026. You can see Democrats are energized in these special elections. Independents have broke from the Republican Party. Republican Party is just not turning out the way they did when Donald Trump was on the ballot. It's early, but the outlines of that architecture exist today, Scott. On this bill, make simplicity a virtue. There is a division between the MAGA, realizing all of a sudden Medicaid affects the rural hospitals and their constituents, and the fiscal, if there are such things, in the Republican
14:34 Speaker 04 Party, conservatives, who like the pain of cutting Medicaid. Enjoy it, actually. To me, you should make the battle cry, raise taxes on the wealthy, so that we can give health care to the many. Very simple. The Democrats should be offering one simple bill. Raise taxes on people making above two and a half million. Eliminate carried interest. Put the corporate tax rate back up to 27%. Restore all the health care cuts. Don't try to solve all the problems. This is setting up 2026. The one thing we can win is 2026. That's what this is about. The independent voters, which are going to be key in swing states and swing districts, want reform, but most importantly, they want a check on an untethered, unchecked Donald Trump.
15:19 Speaker 04 And you got to associate the Republicans as a rubber stamp Congress. This is not about oligarchy. This is not about fascism. This is not about do nothing Democrats and weakness. Midterms are a referendum on the party in power. Make it a referendum on the party in power. This is a rubber stamp Republican Congress that has decided to reinforce what I refer to as the three Cs: corruption, chaos, and cruelty. And repeat it. Washington Interest Group sees corruption as the Qatar jet. The Bitcoin. The public sees corruption as a well-heeled, well-connected, getting a tax cut, and we're getting our healthcare cut. That's how they see, perceive corruption. And we should go right at it,
16:04 Speaker 04 drive like a Mack truck right to that point and don't go off wandering onto other ancillary issues. The wealthy are walking off with all the money, and you're paying for it with your healthcare. It also has the beauty of one thing. It's true.
16:20 Jessica Tarlov? I like that. It's easy and digestible, and we suffer from being too loquacious as a party.
16:27 Speaker 04 No, we're always meeting with our PhD committee to explain our theory of the case. Yeah.
16:32 Jessica Tarlov? Embarrassed to be a PhD holder myself, but we'll pretend that I'm not for the rest of this podcast.
16:39 Scott Galloway? OK, let's take a quick break. Stay with us.
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20:17 Jessica Tarlov? You mentioned education, the classroom, and that's why you ran to be the mayor of Chicago. And I've been disturbed by how Democrats have lost their edge in handling all of the most important issues to Americans. I think we're only still up on climate change and abortion, and only just barely now at this point. And one of the biggest losses, I think, is that parents in this country don't trust us to handle their children's education. And I'm curious as to what you think are some good policies that we could stand behind that would reaffirm people's trust in us on that particular issue?
20:58 Jessica Tarlov? And also, what we can do about the awesome, and not in the necessarily positive way, but just in the huge way, the power of the teachers' unions? When, you know, an average person knows who Randy Weingarten is, that's a problem for the party, especially considering what went on during COVID.
21:19 Speaker 04 So you're right, Jess. Last 30 years, Democrats had anywhere, starting from Jimmy Carter's creating the Department of Education, and Reagan trying to, or advocating to shut it down. We had anywhere, call it from 20 to 30-point advantage on education. President Obama did race to the top. President Clinton did teachers of excellence. But we basically kept coming at this, focused on the classroom. Accelerate. There's no doubt during COVID, we shut schools down much longer than they need to be, much longer than, quote unquote, "the science told us to do", even though we kept saying we're going to follow the science. Second, we got in a bunch of ancillary discussions that had nothing to do with reading, writing, and math. The name of the school, was it named after George Washington,
22:03 Speaker 04 Thomas Jefferson, or any other founding father? Or access to the bathroom and access to locker rooms? We've got into bathroom and locker rooms, and we avoided the classroom. So you have to go back, for political purposes, to the place where you build political support. That's one. Now, we're at a 30-year low on reading scores, and a, I think, near 30-year low on math scores. Alabama in 4th grade is the only state that has made gains on math. Mississippi, going back to 2010, but even through COVID and post, has made significant gains on reading. There's a couple of common themes to that.
22:48 Speaker 04 One, time on task. They dedicate more time. Two, early intervention. Three, where needed, one-on-one instruction. That should become an emergency meeting using the Oval Office, all the governors, etc. How do we get, over the next 18 months, what Alabama and Mississippi's done? What are the best practices? And how do we make them universal? And start getting back to basics of that. We have an absentee rate in Chicago of double digits. And that's true nationally. We have normalized absenteeism. Parents and kids have self-selected four-day-a-week school week, and we've made it a norm. And I think we should set a national standard. No child will go from 4th to 5th grade who has north of 7%
23:32 Speaker 04 I'm using for this discussion, 7%. Because we're doing social promotion. The data is quite clear. Kids can't learn if they're not in the classroom. So, if you're not in the classroom, you're not going to the next grade. End it. No more social promotion. Lastly, and I think this is really important, we haven't rethought the high school since introducing universal high school education. It's been 100 years. I'm not saying we did everything right in Chicago, but we did a couple of things, I think, that do matter in that reinvention. We went from a mindset of a diploma machine, get you to graduation, get you a diploma, to high school was preparation for what's next. So, we did three things. First, if you earn a B average,
24:16 Speaker 04 we made community college free. You got free books, free tuition, free transportation. And in a school district with 83% poverty, 20,000 kids have availed themselves of it. Three-quarters of them are the first in the family to go to college. You made it free, but you gotta have a B average. Two, you could not get your high school diploma without showing a letter of acceptance from a college, community college, a branch of the armed services, or a vocational school. You will not get your high school diploma without that letter. So you have to help parents do that. So we hired a massive amount of college and career counselors and got them into high schools across the city. We helped kids starting their freshman year, what do you want to do? How do you want to do it?
25:00 Speaker 04 Okay, and every year, you met with that counselor. So you were, did you need more math? Did you need more science? Did, you know, where were you on this or that? So they were preparing if they wanted to go Marines, they wanted to go plumbing, or they wanted to go to Harold Washington Community College, to Northern or UIC, or wherever they want to apply. And we had a 99.4% compliance. We re, as best we could, rethought and reinvented the high school education. So, you know, my motto always was, you earn what you learn. You get a high school education, you'll learn that. You don't get one, you'll earn that too.
25:42 Scott Galloway? So Rom, something we talk a lot about here is, along the lines of young people, is, you know, my view is that the group that's fallen furthest fastest is the one that gets the least empathy, and that is young men.
25:54 Speaker 04 Yep.
25:55 Scott Galloway? Four times more likely to kill themselves, three times more likely to be addicted, 12 times more likely to be incarcerated. What is your view on the plight? If, A, do you see it as an issue? And if so, how do we address it from a social policy? Can you point to any programs that you're in favor of? I know you've been an advocate for national service, but what do you think we do to help lift up our young men?
26:18 Speaker 04 So, there's two things I'll get to, but I want to finish one thought I was going to say.
26:22 Scott Galloway? Sure.
26:23 Speaker 04 Because it deals with at least that one data point you pulled out about incarceration. An oversized amount of the folks in prison are black men between the ages of 18 and 35, without a high school degree.
26:38 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
26:38 Speaker 04 The only thing I can change in that is whether you have a high school degree or not. Can't change gender, can't change race, can't change age. That changes on its own. And so to me, getting kids, one of the things that we drove, and I say we, meaning Dr. Janice Jackson and I, she was the chancellor of our schools, is if you said to our kids, "What are you gonna do in four years?", they could tell you. I had kids when I was mayor in Chicago, which is true today, four weeks was their horizon. They didn't know if they were gonna be alive at 18. You get a child that walks across that stage and gets a diploma, they have a tomorrow. They don't get to that stage, they're not thinking about tomorrow.
27:22 Speaker 04 Their horizon is different. So if you can get them thinking about tomorrow, they're gonna change the way they think about themselves. Second, and this was the inspiration for President Obama's My Brother's Keeper. University of Chicago comes to me, and they showed me this program, had about 80 kids, called Becoming a Man. And it's a circle group you sit in, you do about four hours a day, that's one part, and then they do other things with the children for about four hours a day, five days a week. I was smitten by it. I got Jimmy Butler involved in it, the basketball player, I got other athletes, everybody that came, including President Obama. I made him participate at High Park High School, and that became his inspiration.
28:06 Speaker 04 We blew it up, from 100 kids, over my tenure, to 7,500 young men, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th grade. Four hours a day, five days a week, nine months out of the year. It was their mentor. It was their coach. And it was their role model. And I'm not gonna do social science, but there's enough data about staying out of the criminal justice system, graduating high school, that it's overwhelming. And again, I'm dealing with the population in Chicago, doesn't mean it applies across the board, but I think it does. Just with a little mentoring.
28:49 Speaker 04 Their lives were different. You can see this hollowness in their eyes and it's changed when they're involved in something that's rewarding, which I also believe about why I think we should go to universal national service. Look, a kid's life is 20% in the classroom and 80% out. If you want the 20% to succeed, invest in the 80. Now, we blew up after-school programs and summer jobs and we tripled the enrollment. But giving kids something where they get their own sense of confidence back, and I would say to you, Scott, one of the things that's clear to me, our young men have internalized
29:32 Speaker 04 a self-loathing, a self-doubt beyond just what teenage years used to. There's something that has happened that they have, look, everybody has a level of insecurity and grows up with it, but they have internalized this anger that's self-directed. Sometimes it is outside and there's, you can just, they're craving a direction and they're craving, in my view, an adult who cares about them. You know, my father used to say, as a pediatrician, you know, he's never saw a kid that was spoiled because they were told they were loved too many times. So I do know what the government can do and I know what the government can't do.
30:17 Speaker 04 A government can support parenting, the government can support a child, the government program can give a child certain kind of supports. There's things they can't do. And I think one of the things we have to realize is we're not, I think you've talked, both of you have talked about this, we're not in a zero-sum game that somehow if you're helping young men, it comes at the expense of young women. But the crisis that is now a flashing red light, not a yellow light, is these young men, aimless, and I mean, you can hear it in their voice. And if we don't in some way interject ourselves and start doing different things
30:59 Speaker 04 rather than the same thing, we're going to pay a huge price and they're going to pay a huge price. So I looked at this mentoring program. I would look at summer jobs after school and then I would, I'm a firm believer that it's got to be across the board, universal national service for six months. Everybody's got to do it. Nobody gets to cut out of it just because you're going to go to college or med school. Forget about it.
31:24 Jessica Tarlov? So you're talking like somebody that has a plan, or at least some plans that we should be thinking about for the future of the party, for the country and all of us. And you've joked that you're in training for 2028, but you don't know if you'll make the Olympics. What does that training look like for you? Are you thinking about running for president? Are you thinking about running for governor if Pritzker takes the plunge himself?
31:53 Speaker 04 So just here's how I think about it. There's a lot of people, rightfully, on the other end of the pool, whose entire existence is fighting Donald Trump. And there's a lot to fight and I don't belittle it. If I'm right, this election in 2026 is a referendum. 2028 is a choice, not a referendum. And I'm going to spend my time, as I have both writing pieces, et cetera, on education, on national service. I've already done certain things on national security. And ideas about how to make the American dream affordable. I don't think it's an accident that the moment the American dream became out of reach,
32:38 Speaker 04 is less affordable. It's exactly the time in which our politics became unstable. They're connected. And so if I think I have something to offer that others don't, I'll take that plunge. But I am going to spend my time now thinking, writing about what I think are the big issues that we have to address. That gets to the topic of lost men. That gets to the topic of rethinking our educational system. There's nothing partisan about reinventing high school. You know, I happen to be for free community college. President Obama took our program advocated nationally, but that's not the only road to the same destination. And if I think I got something that other people aren't talking about and a way to
33:22 Speaker 04 talk about it, then I'll dive into the deep end. But I'm going to spend my time articulating that, thinking about that, talking to people. And if I don't think anybody else is going to do that, or I think if I'm present in that campaign, I can drive that, I'll dive in the pool. If I don't, I won't. That's how I'm thinking about it.
33:40 Speaker 01 Great.
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35:19 Scott Galloway? Welcome back. So just some recent news here. Two Israeli embassy staffers were killed in a shooting outside the Capitol Jewish Museum in DC. Obviously tragic and heartbreaking. What are your thoughts on this sort of light sleeper, which is antisemitism, what appears to be an increase in antisemitism in the US?
35:42 Speaker 04 Well, you know, so two things got the shooter. I mean, the Chicago Police Department has it. He's been at our house a number of times for protests, starting in 2017. So I have a slight connection with that. Second is I have a slight twist on what you said. You said an increase. Antisemitism has always existed.
36:07 Scott Galloway? More visible than?
36:08 Speaker 04 Yes. And the question is, why is it more visible? Why these people? Why now? Straight up why? And to me, we're gonna have to have a hard conversation. There has been a permission slip for what used to be behind closed doors said about Jews or said in a kind of Snyder remark, et cetera, to where it's said now publicly, where antisemitism or antisemitic expressions are said openly. Yes, October 7th ushered in one level, but antisemitism has existed and what's new is it's got a green light. And that green light, not only to expressing it.
36:54 Speaker 04 Bubbles over into violence, not just stays rhetorical. And I said this last week, and I'm gonna say it again, I said it at the 92nd Street Y. When you have people in 2017 marching around saying Jews will not replace us, blood and soil, and the next day doesn't call for Lincoln's malice towards none, we say there's good people on both sides, we got a problem.
37:18 Jessica Tarlov? Mm-huh.
37:19 Speaker 04 And I want to be very clear, I'm not saying that this is on President Trump, but we have a permission slip for what was once repressed or said in hushed tones is now fully said, and there's no boundary to where we'll lead. You know, look, my, my life, adult public life, I remember, when I was working for President Clinton, because of certain things said about Rahm Israel Emanuel, we had a dog that would smell the car before we were allowed to turn it on. When we were in Japan, somebody spray painted the fence in front of our house with neo-Nazi signs, etc., and to this day, I don't know who, a neighbor went and painted over it.
38:02 Speaker 04 I got elected Rahm Israel Emanuel in a congressional district that used to have, represented by Dan Rosenkowski, Frank Nunzio, Roman Pachinski, Rob Bogayevich, Flanagan, Quigley, you know, what doesn't fit there? Rahm Israel Emanuel. But I had people in a district vote for a Jewish kid. I was elected the mayor of a city of Chicago whose Jewish population is 3%, a working class city. So I have seen the best of folks, and I know firsthand the worst of folks. I think antisemitism today is at a heightened level, and for a host of reasons, not singular,
38:47 Speaker 04 there's a green light to expressing it that didn't exist in years past.
38:53 Jessica Tarlov? I just quickly want to say, you mentioned, you know, I'm not putting this on President Trump, but there are a lot—
38:58 Speaker 04 I'm not.
38:58 Jessica Tarlov? No, no, I get that, but there are a lot of people who would argue that it's actually our party that has allowed the green light to antisemitism more, and he was chanting, "Free Palestine," he was part of a leftist organization and college protests.
39:14 Speaker 04 I'm wary of what he's part of. No, I look, I don't—antisemitism doesn't have a political party or political identification or ideological, and if you do that, then you're actually not dealing with antisemitism. You're getting sidetracked into a political discussion that's actually extremely unhelpful. I have seen, as I said by the anecdote I gave in Virginia in 2017, "That wasn't the Left," quote unquote.
39:40 Jessica Tarlov? No.
39:40 Speaker 04 And I don't find, trying to figure out which party is responsible, I really not only think it's a sidetrack argument, it actually blinds us from dealing with some core issues, and we're going to have to deal with it as a country and ask some really hard questions. And I think the notion that somehow Democrats bear more of it is not just unhelpful, is actually trying to wash your hands of coming to crux because antisemitism doesn't have a party or ideological point of origin.
40:11 Jessica Tarlov? I personally don't disagree with you, and I've just been disappointed, I guess, in how life has been handled since October 7th, but that's—
40:21 Speaker 04 Look, it's a fair point, except for I want to say, you know, this country, I not only represent it, I mean, I don't want to go through my titles, but I'm the son of an Israeli immigrant and the grandson of an immigrant from Moldova who came here fleeing the pogroms. This country has been incredible to the Jewish community. It's based on the rule of law, self-determination, and a series of freedoms. When those get degraded, that is not good. I got 2,000 years of Jewish history where that's not good. It doesn't have a philosophical or ideological point. And the reason you stand up for these values or these principles is because it has allowed
41:05 Speaker 04 us as a community to flourish and contribute in a way that we just haven't anywhere else. And I'm not disappointed in my party. I would say there are people on both parties that want to confront and fight antisemitism.
41:19 Scott Galloway? Brahm, I see you as, I don't know you well, but I've been following your work more closely recently. I think you're a brilliant messenger, a great strategist.
41:28 Speaker 04 Will you call my mom?
41:29 Scott Galloway? Well, she's clearly done an impressive, a pretty impressive job. I think you're like the Case family. It's like, who's more successful than the other in terms of kids? Anyways.
41:37 Speaker 04 Who's more neurotic?
41:39 Scott Galloway? Your mom's clearly done something. She should definitely write a book on parenting. So what about, again, repeat what you think the one kind of puncturing message should be from the Democratic side right now?
41:51 Speaker 04 Between now and 2026, rubber stamp Republicans. That's winnable. And if you get the House back, it's going to be essential to giving us a chance in 2028. In 2028. And whether, and it's not just by election. I think the core principle for the Democratic Party, the American dream is unaffordable. It's inaccessible, and that is totally unacceptable to us. The idea that you have people in our country with three, four, five, six homes and a young family can't get a starter home is crazy. It's the core crux of the American dream. I grew up, my dad was a pediatrician, my mother was a radiologist. If you asked a second opinion, it was another healthcare professional. Today, it's an insurance bureaucrat sitting on the other line telling you, you can't
42:35 Speaker 04 get that procedure, or we're not going to cover it. And to me, the American dream, and this gets back to why I think, how people think corrupt, I don't know you, Jess, I don't really know you, Scott. You guys kind of know me through me. Our kids are going to be fine. We have given every other person's child the shaft. The system has screwed them. And we have allowed both parties, over the years, as long as our kids were okay and it kind of didn't really hit a crisis, it's fine. It's not fine. And the core premise, if you want to strengthen democracy, make the American dream more affordable and more accessible. And if it's got a restriction sign around it,
43:19 Speaker 04 you're gonna get a lot of people pissed off. And I don't know if we can solve it overnight, and I don't think we can. I think it's gonna take a long time, because it's gonna take a long time to get here. But you can't have a situation where people are using their 401K, which is supposed to be for their retirement, to make up for their paycheck not covering their costs. Healthcare, they spend more time arguing with their bureaucrat than they do talking to the doctor. And we have young couples sitting at their parents' home down in the basement and can't find a home. And unless we fix that, the rest of it is gonna come apart. And second, on a very crass political level, if we put that at the core, A, it will shut out this weak and woke, and will look like we're fighting exactly for the people
44:03 Speaker 04 and against the exact interests that have been giving people the shaft for years. So to me, that's the core thing. That's where I'm actually spending my time. And I think it's gonna take us a long time. And the reason we disappointed people, and they got disappointed in the Democrats, not only for these tangential issues, but we lost connection with what they expect from us. We were always the defender, what comes under inclusive economy, that more and more people would have a shot at just the basics. Own a home, save for your retirement, save for your kid's education, afford your healthcare, and take a three-week vacation. And none of that is affordable, unless you're well off. And you shouldn't be comfortable, if you're well off,
44:47 Speaker 04 that the rest of the country isn't comfortable.
44:52 Speaker 04 So that's my core thing of what the party needs to do. And we get all caught up in, you know, not only tangential issues, but overthinking. You look and you just, you know, as I used to do when I was a mayor and I was doing this when I used to do Congress on your corner. You go to down Target, you walk down the aisles, you go to Walmart. I used to call them Target Town Halls or Walmart Walk-ins. And people that would stop to, you know, other people say, oh, hi, Mr. Mayor or whatever. But people would stop and talk to you. This is not complicated. Solving it is, but understanding people want somebody there that will get in there in the morning, roll up their sleeves, and the one thing they're going to focus on like a laser
45:36 Speaker 04 is making sure they have a shot. And what survived Bill Clinton and Barack Obama through the ups, every presidency has ups and downs, is that at the core, the public knew who they were working for and who they were working against.
45:52 Speaker 04 And we've abandoned it. And guess what? They got us read right. We're dead to rights, man. We got caught off on bathrooms and Latinx and making people, you couldn't use that language, you're doing that cultural approach. And people couldn't figure out how to get a down payment on their home. They could, they had to pick which child goes to college and which one doesn't and postpones it. They were taking money that they knew in their gut was supposed to be for retirement, but they couldn't make the bills. They were taking another 401K and paying penalties. We've put people in untenable positions just to do the basics. Just to, you know, if I had a medical problem, like obviously when my dad was, I could call my dad or whatever.
46:34 Speaker 04 We, people spend hours arguing with an insurance executive. Half a doctor's time and a nurse's time is talking to some jerk on a telephone about a procedure that's fundamental. And I will tell you that why I loved being mayor and when I did these graduations, when kids were coming with the Chicago Star Scholarship to free. The relief in a parent's eye, that they didn't have to either take a second job, a second mortgage, or pick between the two kids who goes to college and who doesn't. That, because your son or daughter earned a B and they're going free. They earned it. That relief. I used to tell Amy, I said, "You've got to come to one of these."
47:19 Speaker 04 So she came, I mean, people were, parents are crying inside. There was an emotional catharsis. Because they were in this crazy Solomon choice. Second job, second mortgage, or second child. This is insane. Insane.
47:40 Speaker 04 So that's what to me is what matters.
47:43 Scott Galloway? Rahm Emanuel is two-time mayor of Chicago, former White House superstaff, and most recently, U.S. Ambassador to Japan. Rahm, really appreciate your time and your message. Thank you. We're glad you're on our side, Rahm.
47:56 Speaker 04 Thanks, guys.
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