Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway The Fight to Save American Democracy — with Heather Cox Richardson About this episode Scott Galloway speaks with Heather Cox Richardson, a historian at Boston College and author of Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, as well as the widely-read Substack Letters from an American.
They discuss the ‘No Kings’ protests and what they reveal about the state of U. S. democracy, the erosion of moral and corporate leadership, and the redefinition of patriotism in a polarized America. Heather explains how history helps us understand today’s authoritarian drift, why civic courage has faded among elites, and how national service could help rebuild a shared sense of purpose.
Follow Heather, @heathercoxrichardson.
Algebra of Happiness: closing the gap between your blessings and your mood.
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Transcript 15,023 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:14 Scott Galloway? Episode 373.7. It was the country code for Lithuania. 1970, the Boeing 747 entered commercial service as the world's first jumbo jet. Just do it. I like to sleep naked, and for some reason, flight attendants have a problem with that. Okay, I can do better than that. A vulture boards a plane holding two dead raccoons. The flight attendant stops, the vulture before boarding it says, "Sorry, only one carry on per passenger." Get it? Carry on, carry on. Things are getting desperate here.
1:44 Scott Galloway? Go, go, go!
1:54 Scott Galloway? Welcome to the 373 episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? I'm currently in London and have a quick trip to Paris this week for a speaking event. You know, I'm at the point, I don't even know. What I'm speaking at, I just show up, I don't even know what I'm speaking on. I generally have just, let's bring this back to me. I have three or four speaking decks and I give them sort of a melange. I say, you, you tell me what you want to hear. I have the AI optimist, where I talk about AI. I have predictions, where I talk about what predictions I think are coming in the next year. And I review my predictions from last year. And probably the most, the favorite one is Algebra of Happiness. A lot of these conferences I speak at bring spouses and so they want something sort of feel good and nice. And I kind of summarize my book, Algebra of Happiness.
2:39 Scott Galloway? And this is a big week for me, or it's coming up. I am planning my tour, my book tour, my book, Notes on, Notes on Being a Man, coming out. And I think there's a, there was a real pivot and I think it's sort of interesting. I was, I've always wanted to write, I was thinking about writing kind of this Algebra of series. And I wrote, I struck a book deal with Simon and Schuster, my old book publisher, Penguin Portfolio Random House, who's done the last five books. I like them, nice people, had a really good relationship with them. And Simon and Schuster, quite frankly, just came in and blew them out of the water and wrote me a much bigger check. And essentially what you hope from an editor is what you hope from a venture capitalist.
3:22 Scott Galloway? And that is you hope they just don't add negative value. I think if you expect almost nothing from your publisher, this is going to get me out of good graces, they won't let you down. Anyways, I have a, this book coming out and my agent, Jim Levine, had the kind of gangster idea. And that is originally it was going to be a book about kind of a history of maleness and coming of age and masculinity in different cultures. And my first chapter was on testosterone. And I spent a ton of time trying to figure out the surges in testosterone, whether it's in utero, right after you're born, and then when you're 17 again. And my book agent had literally the insight that changed the pivot of the book. He said, look, You're opening yourself up for criticism because you're not an adolescent psychiatrist
4:04 Scott Galloway? and you're not an endocrinologist and you're kind of talking to people around what maleness masculinity is. And what you should do, Scott, is you've written a lot about your upbringing and your relationship with your mom and your dad and other relationships and where you've gotten it right and more importantly, where you've gotten it wrong. And that's more informative and insightful and it will open people's hearts to listening to you and recognizing that you're trying to just talk about your learnings from your failures and successes as opposed to trying to position yourself as an expert on the topic because let's be honest, you don't have any domain expertise. And just that pivot, it kind of turned the book more autobiographical, which is, makes me feel self-conscious in some ways, but it's rewarding in other ways because I'm a bit of a narcissist and a megalomaniac.
4:47 Scott Galloway? But that one insight, turning it into trying to say, okay, I'm not an expert here, but this is my view, I think is really interesting. And, and a bit of a bridge, but something that's been a real insight and an unlock for me recently is the No Kings protest over the weekend. And I immediately got stressed out because I'm like, okay, I got, I've got to weigh in on this and provide a viewpoint. And then I realized and something I've finally gotten comfortable with, and it's been so powerful, is the following. Every issue does not demand your judgment. You do not have to have an opinion on everything. And by the way, I thought the No Kings movement was entirely inspiring, really exciting. I
5:32 Scott Galloway? just, it kind of made my weekend. I was so happy about it. I love watching all the videos. But I don't have to weigh in with a thoughtful analysis of it and repost stuff. And this is not every, everything does not demand your judgment. You do not have to have an opinion on everything. It is okay, and it has taken me so long to figure this out to say, to, to listen to a question or listen to an issue and say, I don't have the domain expertise here, or here's an idea. I don't know. I don't think, I think, kind of from the age of 18 to 40, I never got comfortable with the term, I don't know. And I think it's very powerful because when you say, I don't know a lot. Or highlight that you don't have the domain expertise there. It makes the things that you do opine on or makes the viewpoints you have much more credible.
6:16 Scott Galloway? So, speaking of someone who does have a lot of domain expertise, in today's episode, we speak with Heather Cox Richardson, a historian at Boston College, author in the voice of the newsletter Letters from an American. She's built a huge business on Substack. She puts out about a thousand words a day. She's really prolific and she's kind of having a moment because she talks a lot about American history and democracy and patriotism. And she is absolutely, occasionally the moons line up and having someone like Heather Cox Richardson for the pod, given what's happened over the weekend is just, oh, my God, finally, finally. We discussed with Professor Richardson the No Kings Protest, what patriotism means in
6:59 Scott Galloway? a polarized America and how military and economic power are reshaping democracy at home and abroad. So with that, here's our conversation with Professor Heather Cox Richardson.
7:19 Scott Galloway? Professor, where does this podcast find you?
7:21 Heather Cox Richardson? Coast to Maine.
7:22 Scott Galloway? Oh, nice, as always.
7:23 Heather Cox Richardson? That's right.
7:25 Scott Galloway? We were joking off mic that I can't imagine how busy you must be. It feels like this is sort of your sweet spot. I imagine you're getting a lot of requests for interviews, so very much appreciate your time today.
7:37 Heather Cox Richardson? Yeah, but you know, I was thinking about this, knowing I was going to talk to you today. One of the things that I find really interesting about this moment is there is so much coming at us all the time. It's kind of like being in a really big crowd where everybody is mumbling and you're trying to pick out the storyline and you can't quite tell if you're getting it or not. And that's, that's really how I feel this morning where there's been so much information coming at us over the last three days, trying to make sense of, for example, the extraordinary use of energy, the rise of cryptocurrency, what's happening in Venezuela, what's happening in Colombia, what's happening in the Middle East, what's happening in Washington DC, what's happening in streets all over the country and trying to pick out a story.
8:18 Heather Cox Richardson? I see why people get tired and why people are just, you know, starting to tune out.
8:23 Scott Galloway? You just summarized our editorial call for all the content we push out. And the thing that gives me comfort is, I forget who said it, but I've been trying to be better at practicing it. And that is, not everything demands your judgment. You don't have to have an opinion on everything. And I found myself over the weekend, so this is your wheelhouse. I would imagine people really want to know what you thought about what happened over the weekend. But I thought, this isn't my wheelhouse and I don't need to be online 24 by 7 over the weekend, trying to provide insight or moments of inspiration. Maybe I should just let this play out, realizing that just as I don't need my DJ to comment on AI strategy, I'm not sure that I need to comment on everything.
9:05 Scott Galloway? So I find some solace in that, but you don't get off the hook here because this is your wheelhouse. So we'll start there. Trying to find what, with respect to the protests over the weekend, 2,700 protests across the country, 7 million people, about, I think it's about 2% of the population. Any observations or anything you think the media is getting wrong about the protests this weekend?
9:29 Heather Cox Richardson? Well, first of all, there hasn't been a lot of coverage of the protests in a lot of legacy media, which itself is interesting. Missing that is a big thing because of course, this is a huge deal. If you remember when the Tea Party protests, which were organized in a very different way, first hit the news, you know, a lot of the then legacy media thought that this was a huge game changer. And of course, the No Kings protests were even larger. And they're not getting that kind of attention, which I think is a reflection on the state of the media in the United States, for one thing, which is a much larger picture as well. But there's a couple of things that I think really matter about the No Kings movements and the protests over the weekend. The first was the degree to which they went back into our history
10:13 Heather Cox Richardson? and championed our historical traditions of democracy, free speech, separation church and state, and so on. I mean, it's always interesting when a movement goes to the touchstones, not just of the imagery of our past, but also of the ideas. But it was also interesting that they were joyful. That actually really matters because that suggests they're charting a course forward. They indicated the idea of we, the people, coming together against a cabal taking over the country as opposed to us versus them, which is what the radical right has been trying to do. And crucially, I think it really matters that they were older and they were very visibly older and white.
10:56 Heather Cox Richardson? And that, I think, both harks back to the fact that it's those of us who are over 55 at this point, who can remember a democracy that worked much more effectively than the one we've had for the last 40 years. But it also makes it extraordinarily difficult for the radical right to look at, you know, an 85-year-old woman using a walker and say, this person is posing an existential threat to your democracy. And that, all of those things, I think, matter.
11:22 Scott Galloway? It's a really interesting observation. I want to take it forward to a couple of theses and you can push back or validate them. And that is when I think about the Women's March, or better yet, maybe more apt analogies for the comparison would be Black Lives Matter or the Me Too movement, that I don't want to say these were fueled by anger, but there was a sense of injustice and they attracted a greater non-white and younger participation. And I wonder if, just in general, this is almost like a sentimental rally, that we remember how wonderful America is and one out of two people our age feel good about America. It's something like one out of eight or one out of 10 younger people.
12:04 Scott Galloway? So this was, you're helping me connect the dots there. This is more like a sentimental celebration, missing what America was and how wonderful it is and recognizing that. And also, it was peaceful. And maybe some of the recent protests have been, I don't want to say, call them anger, but do you think this reflects that generally, as you go older, people are maybe a little bit less angry or more sentimental for the old days of America?
12:30 Heather Cox Richardson? No, actually, I don't think that's what's going on at all. I think that's one of the reasons we can recognize the moment that we're in. But this looks very much, and I can go through a whole bunch of movements, but let's start with the abolitionist movement. What really makes the abolitionist movement take off in the 1830s and the 1840s, you know, it's very, very small. People forget how small that movement is. People signed petitions and so on, but it really doesn't get a lot of traction until John Quincy Adams, who has gone from being in the presidency to being back in the House of Representatives, really hammers on the idea that the abolitionists who are making it impossible for people to introduce petitions into Congress are losing their rights because the elite Southern enslavers
13:14 Heather Cox Richardson? said to the House of Representatives, "We will not entertain petitions of people who are demanding abolition." And of course, we have the right to petition from the First Amendment. And John Quincy Adams, on Petition Day, Monday, every Monday, would try and introduce those petitions, and he would be forbidden. And what that did is it enabled the people who cared about abolition to go back to districts and to go back to their neighbors and say, "Hey, you might not care about Black Americans, or enslaved people at the time, but you do care about your right to petition." And similarly, when elite enslavers stopped allowing the mails to be delivered in the American South if they had abolitionist petitions in them, what the abolitionists did is they went to their neighbors and said,
13:57 Heather Cox Richardson? "Hey, now you're not allowed to use the mails." And I think that when you see a movement that goes from the reality that an ethnic or a gender minority group is being oppressed, that often tends to get marginalized. But when you can turn that movement into one that says, "Hey, you know, this isn't really about, in the case of the abolitionists, the enslaved Americans in the South. This is about your right to petition. This is about your right to use the mails. This is about your right to have a senator not getting beaten up on the floor of the Senate. This is about, you know, getting over that hurdle to say to people who were not previously involved in protests, especially those who thought the world was going on along pretty well, 'Hey, you need to pay attention because this
14:40 Heather Cox Richardson? government's coming after you.'" That's when you get a movement that changes society.
14:46 Scott Galloway? And I was sort of struck by, I think, the White House spokesperson saying that this protest was made up of violent criminals, illegal immigrants, and Hamas. And by process of elimination, that means I'm Hamas. Do you think, how would you describe the administration's approach to this? We've seen some memes of Trump dropping feces from an aircraft. How do you think the administration's response has been to this? Has it been effective? And try and provide some historical context for when the incumbents have responded to this type of protest.
15:20 Heather Cox Richardson? First of all, can you believe what you just said?
15:23 Scott Galloway? Unfortunately, I can now. Yeah.
15:25 Heather Cox Richardson? That conversation should have ended right there. Right? I mean, again, this is all the murmuring in the room, right? There, I think there's a lot of things going on with the administration. I don't, I think it's a real problem to think of it as monolithic. I think that there are a number of different forces going into what comes out of the Oval Office, and they are not always working together. So, one of the things I think you're seeing with the social media accounts of the White House and the people associated with the White House is a deliberate attempt to draw eyeballs no matter what. And that, we have certainly heard that this is the goal of Susie Wiles, the White House Chief of Staff, and certainly of the media directors, that what they care about is essentially running a reality TV show.
16:07 Heather Cox Richardson? And of course, the, the problem with that, aside from all the principled problems with that, is that you have to continue to escalate your content, or people look away. And we're seeing that constant escalation. But I think we're also seeing the recognition that the material that the White House is putting out is not real, is increasingly divorced from what people's lives look like. So I think that when they do something like the videos that we saw, not only the one to which you're referring, in which Trump goes into the air in what appears to be a fighter jet, that says King Trump on the side, and, you know, the videos in which both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance are wearing crowns, and, you know, they're putting their political opponents in Mexican
16:52 Heather Cox Richardson? sombreros, you know, all of those things, they're playing to a base. But there is a difference, I think, between the sort of noir films that the Department of Homeland Security was putting out early on portraying undocumented immigrants as dangerous criminals, and videos about potty stuff.
17:14 Heather Cox Richardson? You know, there's a difference between those menacing dark films that look like, you know, a horror, not a horror movie, a, you know, a crime movie and the president of the United States making a visual poop joke, which is so second grade. And I thought that was a really interesting shift because it's become almost cartoonish. Certainly, it must appeal to part of their base, but I don't think it appeals to the middle part of the country that is facing crazy prices at the grocery store, their rising premiums of their, their healthcare, an increasing sense that their businesses are going off the rails, that the, that the president is a loose cannon. And I thought that was a
17:57 Heather Cox Richardson? really interesting shift over the weekend and one that I often play with for fun. If I were writing the president's speeches, or if I were writing articles, you know, priming the president to look as if he is doing great stuff, what would I do? And I promise you, poop jokes were a thousand percent never going to make my list. So I thought that was really interesting that they did that.
18:22 Scott Galloway? What common elements of successful protests result in some sort of tangible change? What do they have in common and compare that against this protest?
18:31 Heather Cox Richardson? Nonviolence, key in America. Nonviolence is so key in America. And that was really distinctive about these protests. And I think you've got to give credit to Indivisible and people like Ezra Levin, who's one of the leaders of Indivisible, the degree to which they emphasized nonviolence, joy, artistic expression, and crucially, made sure the protests happened during daylight. If you think about the other protests you talked about, the times when they got violent from the perspective of the people on the streets who were not necessarily the first protesters out there, was everything happened after dark. And the Indivisible folks got people off, onto and off the streets before dark.
19:13 Heather Cox Richardson? And that, that, that was really, really crucial. So that, that is the first thing that makes a difference. But as I said before, What matters in protest is that people can see themselves in it. And I mean, lots of people can see themselves in it. And that's, in this case, a reflection not only of the faces that you saw there, but the art. So, one of the things about protest movements, and one of the reasons I think that this administration is in real trouble, is because you want to have a movement in which everybody can see themselves. And to some degree, the MAGA Republicans did that as well. That was part of their rise. Trump promised everything to everyone, and so you could say, "Well, I don't like him on
19:56 Heather Cox Richardson? these 10 things, but, boy, I love him on these four." In this case, the sort of amorphous nature of "we don't want a king, and here's what we care about," enables virtually everybody to see themselves in that, or to have to take a stand saying, "Yeah, I want a dictator." And that's not really an American position. I mean, one of the things you can see is people taking it as a LOL form, you know? "Ha ha, yeah, I want a dictator." But the truth is, Americans generally don't want dictators. So, that ability to create a space in which many, many people could see themselves, and, crucially, demonstrate that there are a lot of people who do not like this administration.
20:38 Heather Cox Richardson? That really matters because that translates, not necessarily to the people who are currently in office, but to the people who are trying to get into office, and to people who are trying to find their constituencies. Well, there were, you know, about 7 million people on the streets waiting to be a constituency on Saturday. And that demonstrates not only to people going into politics, but also to businesses who, in the past, might have thought, "Hey, maybe I really do need to cater to MAGA Republicans because they're an important purchasing bloc, for example, an important consumer bloc." You look at that, and you think, "Hey, on the other hand, maybe I really shouldn't." And I actually would would date this protest and the momentum of the protest back to Jimmy
21:21 Heather Cox Richardson? Kimmel, and the getting Jimmy Kimmel back on the air, because that was a case in which, I think I said to you before, it seemed to me a lot of important pillars of American society were not necessarily kowtowing to Trump. They were buying time. For example, you know, they didn't fire Jimmy Kimmel, they suspended his show. And they were kind of waiting to see what would happen. And when what happened was there was such extraordinary popular pressure to get him back on the air that even the Sinclair and I think it was Nexstar Systems put him back on. That is a real message to people producing things that the people who are standing against this administration are stronger than the people standing for it.
22:06 Heather Cox Richardson? And that momentum seems, at least for now, to be building. Now, we'll see what happens going forward.
22:11 Scott Galloway? Have you given any thought to the idea of a national economic strike? Or, and there's different forms. What I think was so powerful about Kimmel was it was very specific against a specific company. It was frictionless in terms of your ability to cancel Disney Plus, take a screenshot of it. It didn't ask consumers to do a lot. And it was targeted with a specific required action. Any thoughts on the idea of some sort of national economic strike or strike against individual companies?
22:39 Heather Cox Richardson? So, yeah, I have a take on that. And it's informed by American history. And again, we're in a new moment, so who knows? It is my understanding of American strikes that targeted strikes work incredibly well. Targeted boycotts work incredibly well, exactly as you say. Look at what happened to Tesla, Jimmy Kimmel. But we could go on. I mean, Target. You could go and versus what happened with Costco where because of the way that they handled diversity, equity, inclusion issues, their stock has gone way up. People are all shopping there. But general strikes in the United States do not historically tend to work well for
23:20 Heather Cox Richardson? the simple reason that we are so interconnected that when you start to issue a general strike, that means that people don't get their medicine, or people don't get food, or whatever. And it's really difficult, especially in such a large country where people have so many different interests, to say to somebody whose kid needs an operation, or to somebody who needs food, well, this is for the greater good. And so when the country has tried national strikes, weirdly, it has turned against, it had people turn against them that you would think would have been on their side. For example,
24:02 Heather Cox Richardson? In the late 1890s, there was an attempt at a general strike. It wasn't really called a general strike, but a lot of stuff got shut down. The railroads essentially got shut down. And one of the people who came out against that was Jada Adams, who was really strongly in favor of workers' rights. But she's like, I'm watching kids not have food around me. I can't be part of this. So I tend not to support the idea of a general strike. People look at it and they say, oh, you're going to show how important we are to the economy. But you're also going to show people who should be on your side that you can't be trusted because you don't care about their need for basic necessities. So I tend to be against that and for, in very much for targeted boycotts, targeted
24:43 Heather Cox Richardson? strikes, because that enables people to have a workaround for those sorts of emergency situations. Now, like I say, I am not a specialist in where strikes pressure people, but I know in our past, general strikes have tended to split the movement rather than to create unity behind it.
25:04 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back.
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28:34 Scott Galloway? The last time we had you on the pod, you struck sort of an optimistic tone and said that, look, America's faced, while this might feel dark, it's not the darkest it's been. And that oftentimes, the America we know and love has bounced back even stronger, that its resilience, its elasticity, has stood the test of time. And that we've been in darker moments. And that we should be hopeful and realize the power of pushing back. Has your mood or your optimism changed at all since we've last, since we last talked?
29:05 Heather Cox Richardson? No, and I can, I can tell you what's wrong. I can tell you what's right. I do want to reiterate that my big disappointment in all of this has been the degree to which the lawmakers in Congress, especially in the Senate, the Republican lawmakers in Congress, especially in the Senate, have abdicated the prerogatives of the legislative branch. They have walked away from the separation of powers. And I, every morning I get up and think, really? Is this really what you're going to do to the Constitution and to the people who elected you? That sense has only gotten stronger. But no, I'm, I, I don't want to be. Look, none of us wants to be in this position.
29:48 Heather Cox Richardson? But I continue to have faith in the American people and the recovery of our democracy. What do you think?
29:56 Scott Galloway? This is your trick. You did this to me the last time. You asked me what I think. I have been, well, one, flummoxed and disappointed by Republicans who, I mean, everything from the people that, you know, the Second Amendment was meant to guard against this type of thing. A National Guard being sent into cities to violate people's rights. That's the whole point, that the fear of a tyrannical government rising up against- Citizens ignoring the co-equal branches of government. The thing that has been the most disappointing to me, and I want to get your take on this, is that I know many of the tech titans. And I asked myself, what's the point of being worth billions of dollars? These guys are pretty bulletproof. Imagine the worst.
30:39 Scott Galloway? Imagine that the DOJ has weapon against them. They can peace out to Dubai or Milan and have a really nice life. They have very little downside at this point. And it has just been, it is just shocking to me. The way I would describe the Trump's administration's tactics is shocking but not surprising. Like, would they, the things they do really upset me and shock me. But then I look at the pattern and I think, well, it's not surprising. What has been both shocking and surprising to me is the lack of backbone, the cowardice, the Neville Chamberlain and cashmere sweaters minus the dignity. It is our S and P 500 business leaders, who, many of whom, I would argue 490 to 499
31:21 Scott Galloway? of them, wake up every morning, look in the mirror and say, hello, Mr. President. All of them believe that they are natural born leaders who should probably someday be president. And leadership, in my view, is doing the right thing when it's really hard. And none of them are doing that. And I get text messages from some of these people saying, I hate myself. And my general response is, well, boss, that really doesn't do us any good. And they're showing up to what could best be described as the sycophantic, bend the knee, give you a plaque from Apple. That has been the most surprising to me. That I asked myself, what is the point of having all this money and power if you don't show any fidelity to the very principles, the Constitution, free markets, capitalism
32:05 Scott Galloway? that have given you this fortune? And yet you just absolutely ignore it. You desecrate it. That, to me, has been the most surprising thing is the, and also, I think it's a commercial opportunity. You talked about Costco. I think the first company that weaponizes media and comes out with, you don't even have to say Trump, Nike comes out, talks about the importance of immigrants, the importance of competition, the importance of free play in sports. And we'll know what they're talking about. And I think the majority of people who have disposable income probably tend to think more like us than the administration. And I think it would be an enormous boom. I think it's an enormous commercial opportunity. So I'm shocked that there has been the silence has been deafening from our corporate leadership. What are your thoughts?
32:48 Heather Cox Richardson? So this is why I, like you say, it's my trick to ask questions. I know what I think. And I don't think it's really very interesting to listen to me talk. But what you just said opens up whole, you know, whole areas that nobody ever talks to me about. Nobody ever asks about. So this is, these are two great directions to go. Before I talk about the tech stuff and throw that back at you, I think what you said about the Second Amendment, and that was the whole point, don't tread on me and so on. I think now you have to look at that and say, was it? Was that really the point? Or were what they, or were they saying, we don't like the way that this country is going and in terms of multiculturalism,
33:31 Heather Cox Richardson? in terms of its economy and so on. So we're going to say that what we really care about is an overweening government. But the truth is, now that we have an overweening government that we think is ours, hey, we're cool with it. So for what it's worth, if you think about the philosophy of history, a lot of people don't necessarily. But if you think of, you know, one of my favorite books ever is Absalom Absalom, William Faulkner, because the whole point of that book is that the present changes the past. That is, the way that you are in the present makes you look back at what happened in the past and reevaluate it. And in this case, I don't think you could write a book about the Tea Party and say, oh, yeah, it was about taxes. Not that you would have done that anyway. I just pulled that out of my head. But, you know, the, the idea of this don't tread on me thing.
34:16 Heather Cox Richardson? But the thing about the tech bros is really interesting, because I've actually spent a lot of time, I don't know any of them. But I spend a lot of time reading what they write and what they talk about. And what I see is, not knowing any of them in the modern era, is the kind of ideology that we saw in the late 19th century with the rise of the robber barons. And that is perhaps a natural human tendency, or perhaps a natural human tendency among people who have been lucky enough to make fortunes. The idea that you must be better than everybody else. Not that it was chance, as we know it was, because of the eras in which they lived and the ways in which the economy worked. So it enabled somebody like Andrew Carnegie,
35:01 Heather Cox Richardson? who came over and, you know, as a day laborer, to amass these extraordinary fortunes. And they start to think they're better than people, they're smarter than people, and they're really the ones who should run everything. And that's an idea that translates into, like you say, yeah, I should be president. And it's interesting, I would love to see the actual breakdown of those people who have come from nothing and moved up, who think that way, and those who don't. In the sense that it is also possible, as you say, to wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and say, I have been so blessed, I must give back. And the difference between the people who do the one and who do the other, what is that?
35:47 Scott Galloway? The robber barons, in my senses, they got very philanthropic and civic minded after they made their billions, right? About the point they thought, is that not true?
35:57 Heather Cox Richardson? Well, yeah, they did, except they gave away frac-- not all of them did, but they gave away fractions of what they had made. But that's an interesting question. What induces somebody in that position to either give it away or to amass power? And I would argue that's the pressure of popular opinion. So in the late 19th century, people like Andrew Carnegie, when he wrote what we know is the Gospel of Wealth, which was known as just wealth, what he was really angry about was not just the workers who wanted to have higher pay and better living conditions. He was mad at the other robber barons who weren't building opera houses and libraries. He's like, you guys got to give this back. If you think about the present era, how many of our extraordinarily wealthy people
36:40 Heather Cox Richardson? actually are pouring their fortunes into making the world a better place? Some of them certainly are, but I'm not seeing a lot of Elon Musk universities.
36:50 Scott Galloway? I think back then, your prestige, your relevance, your ability to have a larger selection set of mates, have more interesting friends, be invited to more interesting things, was not only a function of what you had and your money, it was a function of your perceived character, your perceived citizenship, your perceived strength physically, your military service. Whereas I think America's basically come, all of those things roll up to one thing, how much shit you have, or simply put, how rich you are. I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, my dad was, we were squarely middle class. And we knew his boss. And his boss had a nicer house, but it was in the same neighborhood. We were all members of the same country club.
37:34 Scott Galloway? The delta between the middle class and sort of the wealthy was afoot. Now it's a billion miles. The difference in services, relationships, power the life you lead. It's like that Jerry Maguire film. You know, business class used to be a bigger seat. Now it's a better life. The delta's become so enormous that America really just evaluates someone's character entirely on their wealth. And so the temptation of these individuals just to be focused on their wealth and then use the excuse of, well, I'm a fiduciary for all shareholders, leads to this incremental rationalization of just terrible decisions. And I think a lot of them are thinking, well, I just got to get through the next three and a half years of this and then I'll go back to being a good American.
38:19 Scott Galloway? We just have to wait this guy out. Do you see a difference in the way people are rewarded with prestige and relevance and a kind of citizenship award versus those awards and that judgment now?
38:31 Heather Cox Richardson? Hundred percent. And I would add more to that, that I think you and I talked about in July. And that is one of the things that the United States used to stand for, was working hard and prospering. That anybody who came here got to work hard and to build a better life for themselves and their families. And that idea of achieving things through hard work. Has really, you know, it's a cultural value, really, I think, has fallen by the wayside since the 1980s. And I remember strongly when Reagan started talking about how you didn't really have to work that hard in school because look at him, he was a C student from Eureka College and he was president of the United States. And it was really
39:12 Heather Cox Richardson? much more about, if you will, and I'm sorry, this is a cultural leap, but I hope it makes sense, you know, so long as the force was talking to you, you were going to go very far in the universe. And, you know, the same area, you also get a real doubling down on the idea of evangelical Christianity, which God's grace is freely given. And one of the things that that that has culturally turned into, I think, is this idea of instant fame, the idea that you don't have to actually put in any effort so long as you are successful in the end. And, and that, I think, has been culturally a real problem for the United States. It's been a problem politically, but I think it's also been a problem for
39:57 Heather Cox Richardson? individuals who, you know, don't value the, and this is a really broad brush, but, you know, as I keep saying, there is joy in the work, you know, learning to do something really well by hours and hours and hours and hours of failure has a human payoff as well as potentially a financial payoff. And that loss of America is the land of hard work in our cultural system, because I think individuals still 100% believe it, many of them. I think that that's been, that's been a real cultural loss and one that I would certainly love to see brought back.
40:33 Scott Galloway? Kind of feeds into what you write a lot about, and that is, what is the idea of what it means to be an American? And the right's fascination with heritage Americans as whose roots go back to the Civil War seems to recast patriotism as lineage. How do we trace this shift from ideals, including loyalty to the Constitution and the Declaration, to something more ancestral or exclusionary?
40:57 Heather Cox Richardson? Lineage and land, that's the other piece of what the people like J.D. Vance and the other MAGA Republicans who are jumping onto that train are talking about. And that is, you know, really quite explicitly the kind of language that the German Nazis centered around, the idea that being part of a society is about the land and the heritage. And the United States just simply was never that. And this is really a deliberate attempt to bring into our system this other kind of idea. The place you might have seen it, to some degree, is among the elite Southern enslavers in the American South before the Civil War, where they were literally trying to take on aristocratic names, for example.
41:41 Heather Cox Richardson? But even they knew it was pretentious because that land was so recently taken under their control after the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. So you don't really see that elsewhere in the United States. And it, you know, one of the things, I wish I had more time to write always, but one of the things that frustrates me to no end is the idea that there was ever a United States of America that was not multicultural is simply a fantasy. And, you know, we talk in history about how whiteness is a constructed category and, you know, that, you know, you get all kinds of pushback on that. But it is worth remembering that Irish immigrants to the United States were not considered white. Italian immigrants
42:25 Heather Cox Richardson? to the United States were not considered white. So when you think about whiteness as a category and you look at some of the people with very obviously Irish last names insisting that they belong to this white heritage, you know, I just sit there and think, okay, we're just going to make it up, right? We're just going to construct our idea of what the past looked like. Because the reality has always been that the United States was about working together as communities within a very, very broad range of people.
42:57 Scott Galloway? So you said that we're in a period where partisanship matters more than country and that politics right now is more about parties than is about advancing national interests. So I want to put forward a concern or a thesis and then an idea. And the thesis is that fascism, nationalism, refusal to condemn violence against your enemy is demonizing immigrants, but the juice of fascism is convincing people that it's the enemy within, that the call is coming from inside of the house. And it strikes me that as we should be more worried than ever about Russian soldiers pouring over the border of Ukraine, or income inequality, or the CCP and cyber attacks, that the majority of the juice is trying to convince people that, oh, it's your neighbor that's the problem.
43:42 Scott Galloway? One, do you agree with that and see the link with fascism? And then, two, is a potential solve for this a medication, a solution? I want to hear your views on mandatory national service.
43:56 Heather Cox Richardson? So, yes, the idea of this administration is to turn Americans against each other. And I think that was the real impetus for the whole push against trans athletes in high schools or in K through 12 schools, because the number of actual trans Americans is exceedingly small. And one of the things that you want to do is you want to make sure that the people you're using as the enemy, that there just aren't that many of them. So people can say, oh, you know, those people scare me. And the problem that they're having trying to convince Americans that immigrants are a problem is because we're all immigrants to this country, virtually all of us who are not of indigenous heritage have been immigrants.
44:40 Heather Cox Richardson? And we are traditionally a nation of immigrants. So it's very hard to convince people whose grandparents came from somewhere that the immigrants are the problem, which is why they've gone with, what is it, criminals, rapists, murderers, the worst of the worst, and so on. But then you see these videos of grandmothers being taken away and think, really? The worst of the worst? So I'm not entirely sure that that system of trying to other people is working. I think more what we are seeing is an increasing recognition when that happens that we really are, we the people. Opposed to this group of this cabal that's trying to take things over.
45:22 Heather Cox Richardson? I'm 100% in favor and I'm going to be pull a Donald Trump here. I am 1,500% in favor of national service for everybody after college. And I would say to you, I'm not after college, I'm sorry, after high school. And here's why. Not only because I think that national service mixes up the pool. And you get to know people from elsewhere and you recognize that they're not, you know, some monster that you're being told. But also because having been a college professor, I know that students coming out of high school are really not prepared to settle down into college for a two or a four year term. They need a break.
46:06 Scott Galloway? Especially boys.
46:07 Heather Cox Richardson? Yeah, and you know, quietly, I was, I always used to think, you're not allowed to, of course, but I always sort of thought we should be allowed as professors to have private conversations with parents, which you're absolutely not allowed to do. And of course, nobody would ever do it. And say, you know, you're wasting your money. Your kid is coming to class at nine in the morning drunk. You know, get him a keg of beer and an apartment and let him get it out of his system. And then when I get him back, I can teach him something. But you're paying an awful lot of money for me to babysit this kid.
46:38 Scott Galloway? I showed up to UCLA at 17. I came of age during the space race. And the moment he showed any aptitude, me and Debbie Brubaker were sent to the fifth grade when we were in the third grade for English and math. And they wanted to skip me two grades and my mom refused and only let them skip me one grade. And I got to UCLA at 17 and there was one of my fraternity brothers was 16. It was insane that we were put in an uncontrolled environment with alcohol and the opposite sex and trying to figure out mating and getting along with people and going to school and taking tests. Came so close to failing out my first year. I love what you said. I just think it'd be, I mean, well, let me, let me put forward this. I've always thought in the 50s and 60s, we had this really productive era of national
47:22 Scott Galloway? unity and great legislation. One, because we kind of had an economic monopoly on the world and we could afford a home and. Two cars with one person working because of our advantage because other economic infrastructures have been leveled, but even more than that, people had served, our leaders had served in the same uniform, and we need to figure out a way such that at some point, most of us have served in the same uniform. Would you agree with that?
47:48 Heather Cox Richardson? I would, but I'm going to alter it a little bit in that the 50s were not great times for all Americans by any stretch of the imagination. But what you are identifying, I think, I saw around me growing up, I was born in 62, everybody in our, in our, in our, all of the parents, and not just the fathers, but often the mothers, had served in the war in one capacity or another. And there was a very different sense of what it meant to be a man in the United States of America and a woman in the United States of America in the 1950s, in that what was privileged was not the kind of thing you and I were just talking about, how much money can I make, but rather, how do I take care
48:30 Heather Cox Richardson? of my town? And, you know, one of the World War II vets, was a Patton in Europe, was a guy who taught me how to shingle a roof, and how to do electricity, and how to fix my car. Wasn't my father, by the way, who taught me other things, but there was this sense that you stepped in because the goal was the community, not just yourself. And I see that, by the way, in the people my age who were in service. I don't necessarily see it so much among the younger people who have served, and this is not entirely across the board, but once we started contracting out to, to military contractors, things like
49:10 Heather Cox Richardson? fixing the trucks and cooking the meals and all that, you lost sort of that sense of there being a closed community in which everybody needed to do their, their part. And that idea of going back to a system in which people understood that, yeah, it really matters if you clean the bathrooms, as much as it matters if you shout the orders, that's not a bad thing for a society as a whole to recognize. And I think, by the way, it's something that the, this current administration is doing its damnedest to erase from our history, the idea that, in our country, the idea that caregivers matter, that elder care matters, that, you know... Making sure that people who are differently abled can still participate in our society is not about them.
49:55 Heather Cox Richardson? It's about us. And I, I think that's a really important thing to reclaim, and public service would do that.
50:03 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back after a quick break.
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52:09 Scott Galloway? We're back with more from Heather Cox Richardson.
52:14 Scott Galloway? He said something, a couple of questions. One, how would you assess the difference between how people or what people believe it is to be American when we were growing up versus how young people probably perceive or just the general population, how they perceive what it is to be American today? And then you threw out something and I can't resist. And one of the things I really appreciate you is you're willing to say that's not my area of expertise, but you said what it meant to be a man in America and what it meant to be a woman. I would love to know any thoughts you might have around how that has evolved over the last several decades.
52:50 Heather Cox Richardson? I kind of threw that out because I knew you'd like it.
52:52 Scott Galloway? Yeah, 100%.
52:55 Heather Cox Richardson? So, listen, I can't speak for young people in this country because I'm not one of them. I can tell you what I read, but you know, it's not the same when you don't have the references. And my great example of this is always those of us of a certain age, when you see a red telephone on a desk in a television show or a movie, you know what it means. It's the hotline. And it's the hotline between a leader and either Russia or something. To people who are below a certain age, it simply has no meaning because they don't understand the Cuban Missile Crisis, they don't understand why we got the hot phone and all that sort of thing, which was never a telephone, by the way, and so on.
53:40 Heather Cox Richardson? So the one thing I would say, though, from my observations at my age about where the country has been, is that for those of us who are over 55, we do remember a period in which politics was really about negotiation and making sure that the government was doing the best it could for the most people. Now, you could disagree with what one president or another was doing, and certainly, I suspect both of us did at times, but that was the idea. And beginning at least by the 1990s, and I think it was at least partly tied into the collapse of the Soviet Union and the idea that America was top dog and wasn't going to have to worry any further about...
54:22 Heather Cox Richardson? Standing off against another country, there was an increasingly powerful drive on the part of the movement conservatives, that faction that took over the Republican Party, simply to destroy the Democrats, simply to destroy their political opposition. And the Democrats, by the way, and those Republicans that people like Newt Gingrich, who was Speaker of the House in the 90s, called "Rinots," Republicans in name only. And by that, the people who embraced that idea put into the same basket anybody who believed that the government had a role in regulating the economy, or providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, protecting civil rights, or protecting a rules-based international order.
55:02 Heather Cox Richardson? And by doing that, and by trying to destroy those people who thought that way, gradually that faction of the party, as it took over the Republican Party, began to treat its opponents as illegitimate. So after the Motor Voter Act in 1993, you start to see in 1994, the argument on the part of those movement conservative Republicans, that Democrats are only winning by cheating, by ballot fraud, by voter fraud. And, you know, there's never any evidence of that, but they hammer on this idea again and again and again. And they, you know, they impeach Bill Clinton, thinking that this is going to be the end, we'll get rid of all Democratic Presidents, you know, from now and forever, amen.
55:43 Heather Cox Richardson? In 20, in the year 2000, you see the Miami-Dade recount, and Florida stopped to guarantee that it comes out the way that the Republicans want. And then voters elect Barack Obama in 2008. And in 2010, we get Operation Red Map, which is the Republican operative attempt to dramatically gerrymander states, the Republican-dominated states across the nation. So we get these extreme gerrymanders. We get Citizens United, which opens up the floodgates for dark money to come into our political system. In 2013, we get the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, which is only going to get worse. And you get right to the fact that you get to January 6, 2021, where
56:25 Heather Cox Richardson? A Republican president literally refuses to leave office with the argument that the election of a Democratic opponent has been illegitimate. And I think you're seeing that now with the Trump administration, the attempt to delegitimize the idea of Democratic opposition and Democratic loyal opposition to what Republicans are doing. So they're not seating Adalita Grijalva, the person who was elected on September 23rd to represent Arizona. They're not talking to the Democrats about ending the shutdown. They're simply saying, "Your complaints are illegitimate." And that is something entirely new in our political system, and it utterly negates what
57:05 Heather Cox Richardson? that system should be, and it makes it unable to function as a democracy. Part of that, and part of the way I think that the Republicans got that kind of power, was through the leveraging of that idea of the cowboy image, the idea that a real American was a cowboy. And that cowboy image has enormous roots, or has its roots, in the Reconstruction era, when, to stand off against the idea of a federal government that protected black rights in the American South, former Confederates especially, and people living in the West, began to champion the cowboy as the true American hero who wanted nothing from the
57:48 Heather Cox Richardson? government except to work hard and rise, which was completely a myth. The West depended more on the federal government than any other region of the country did. The cowboys were actually analogous to workers in the mills back East. I mean, you could go on and on about why that was never true. But that idea that to be an American means taking your gun and protecting your woman folk and working hard without the government, really embedded itself among a certain group of right-wing Americans. And I think you can see it still. CNN had an article yesterday about the rise, again, of cowboy imagery and cowboy clothing, because it's a certain kind of way of thinking about what it means to be a man in America
58:30 Heather Cox Richardson? and a woman, because it's the same period by 74, you're going to have Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little Town on the Prairie" becoming a smash hit on television, and the idea of prairie dresses and women being taken care of in this system in which, in that particular show, literally the cowboy Little Joe becomes pa, right?
58:51 Heather Cox Richardson? So you've got that on the one hand. And I would argue that that ideology, the idea that you can create your own future, is a crucially important aspect of American society. But in terms of survive, and I started, well, that's a rabbit hole. But in order for a society to survive, the other form of what it means to be a man and a woman in the United States is one that I think is exemplified, as I was saying, by those people coming out of World War II, in which they did what they did for the good of everybody. And that, I think, you saw in our presidents, who had been in the war or who had been close to the war after it.
59:34 Heather Cox Richardson? And that, you know, well, you really got away from that when you got away from political leaders who hadn't been in the war and who didn't have that idea that we have to make sacrifices for the greater good. And that goes as far back in our history as the other image does, and even farther, that idea that we are here as a community, trying to do the best for the most people. That's as deeply rooted as, as the cowboy image, or even more because it goes back further.
1:00:04 Scott Galloway? I want to highlight a couple of recent occurrences and see if you have any historical references and what it, what it might mean about these actions moving forward. One, the lethal campaign against drug smuggling boats coming from Latin America. And two, the refusal or the limiting of press access to the Pentagon.
1:00:23 Heather Cox Richardson? I'm so glad you mentioned that because I actually wanted to ask you about that too. This is one of the things and why I, well, this is why I was thinking about the murmuring voices. Because let's look at that attack on alleged drug smuggling boats. Just want to point out that if you want to stop a small boat with an outboard engine, you shoot the freaking engine. This is not rocket science, right? Yeah, drugs are a problem. The majority of drugs that are a problem are fentanyl, illegal fentanyl, coming over the border from Mexico, not the border, coming into airports primarily, but coming from Mexico. So theoretically, we're going after Venezuelan drug boats, small boats that are looking to go more than 1,000 miles. And now it appears we've hit somebody from Colombia.
1:01:07 Heather Cox Richardson? So who are we really at war with? And we're not really at war. It's just that the administration says we're at war. And
1:01:17 Heather Cox Richardson? Let me just throw that together with some other stuff. And I'm just going to sort of free associate here and see what you think about it. 1990s, I think it was, when James Comey was the director of the FBI, he gave a speech about how organized crime was different now, and threats to national security were different now, because they were a combination of businesses, world leaders, sometimes religious figures, who were essentially no longer ideological, but were just out for the money. Okay, so, we also seem to be making war on Venezuela, which has a lot of oil. We seem to need a whole lot of oil, both for AI and for the data centers
1:02:02 Heather Cox Richardson? that also support cryptocurrency mining. We know that there are fortunes being made from cryptocurrency. We also know that when Trump first got into office, he began to embrace the argument that Vladimir Putin had been making about dividing the world into spheres. An Asian sphere, a European sphere dominated by Putin, and an American sphere dominated by the United States of America. And that's why he's talking about taking over Canada and Greenland and so on. I don't know what's really going on in our attacks on small boats coming out of apparently South American countries.
1:02:45 Heather Cox Richardson? What I do think is that this is not really about drugs at all. And the reason for that is because, among other things, the recent reporting out of the New York Times that Secretary of State Marco Rubio destroyed an agreement that the United States had with members of MS-13, who were going to go on trial in the US, who were going to testify against Naif Boukely about his connections to that gang. You know, we turned him over to Boukely in order to send undocumented immigrants to El Salvador. Like, that's not about drugs. What's that really about? So I guess my... What I'm thinking about that is I don't know what to think about it,
1:03:28 Heather Cox Richardson? except it looks to me like what we're really up to is not stopping drugs so much as trying to exert American influence in the Caribbean in an extraction of resources that looks a lot to me like Vladimir Putin's concepts of imperialism and colonialism. What do you think?
1:03:50 Scott Galloway? Yeah, I think you're on to something. If you look at the supply chain of drugs, there's the demand side, people in the US who consume drugs. There's the supply chain or the supply side. That's Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela. And then there's the distribution side. And probably the least effective part of the supply chain to go after to reduce the drug supply chain is the transportation side. We can't keep drugs out of prisons because the demand is there and the supply is there. So the notion that we're going to keep drugs out of the United States by going after the distribution system here, it just makes no sense whatsoever. It's not going to do anything for the drug, to decrease drugs or fentanyl use in the United States. So it's one, it's either performative. It's either like Secretary of War, maybe big, strong man.
1:04:35 Scott Galloway? I do think there's a lot around, I'm a bit of conspiracy theorist, that I think the country is being run by a dead man. I think the country largely, a lot of its activities in the White House are being driven out of an AI-driven communication strategy that every 74 hours they put something into the ecosystem, into the atmosphere that distracts from one word, Epstein. Regardless of how crazy it is, regardless of how damaging it is, just we sense Epstein's starting to creep back into the news. 100% tariff on China, just anything, anything, just to keep him out of the news. The more Machiavellian and intelligent move would be, we've decided that the best way to end the war in Ukraine
1:05:18 Scott Galloway? would be to take oil down to $40 a barrel and to secure new supply lines through Venezuela that has a lot of oil, but more important, establish strong alliances with Guyana that has light, sweet crude. And potentially take oil. If if you want to end the war in Ukraine, take the 17% of Russia's oil infrastructure that's in dam and give them tomahawks and take it up a half a percent a week. The Russian economy is 50% of GDP is energy. If oil crashes or their ability to refine oil goes down, all of a sudden Putin starts talking about a real deal. So I don't know whether this is performative. I don't know whether it's wildly strategic to secure additional supplies of oil and crash the price of oil and bring Putin to the table.
1:06:02 Scott Galloway? Or, you know, Dorsey. But what I do know is that, you know, these folks are strange. They're not democratic. They have fascist tendencies, but I don't think they're stupid. I don't think they genuinely believe this is going to solve the drug problem. Any reaction to any of that?
1:06:18 Heather Cox Richardson? Yes, I will put behind Dorsey the fact that the Trump family was in hard shape financially before the second term. And we know that the fortune that it is sitting on now is largely thanks to cryptocurrency, which depends on huge amounts of energy. But just to go back to Epstein, and again, I'm just playing with these ideas, which is always why I like talking to you is because we get to play with ideas. I don't think that Epstein is a sex scandal as much as it is a business scandal. That is, it is truly horrible what happened to the survivors of Epstein and what they
1:07:01 Heather Cox Richardson? what the men did to those girls and so on. But the reason that they're covering it up, I think, is partly to defend Donald Trump. But I think when you peel back the layers, you're going to see exactly what James Comey was identifying back there whenever he gave that speech, that this was a business that was multinational and was worth billions of dollars. And if you start to peel back the layers of that business, you will see that there are a lot of business ties like that. And that, I think, will probably end up being the defining feature of this era in world history, this sort of multinational, these multinational criminal enterprises that involve
1:07:46 Heather Cox Richardson? a number of extraordinarily powerful people and that include increasingly, we will discover also involved Russian money, which we know the Epstein files did.
1:07:56 Scott Galloway? So this is gonna be a hard pivot, but we're running out of time. And I can't imagine how many.
1:08:02 Scott Galloway? It's not what networks or news outlets want you on today. It's which ones don't. I imagine you are literally the most in demand professor in America right now. But I wanted to just, we have a lot of young people who listen to the show, men and women, who are trying to get their career started. And I think they look at someone such as yourself and they think, I would love to be Professor Heather Cox Richardson, because my sense is you're doing something you love. You have relevance. There's a big, big vein of patriotism that runs through it and civic responsibility. But also, you're commercially really successful. We're trying to do this Substack strategy, and everyone keeps bringing up your name as someone who has just nailed it and is doing really well. I would love, could you provide advice to someone who says,
1:08:46 Scott Galloway? I would like to be in academia, or I'd like to be in thought leadership, but I'm looking for new channels to have relevance and also to be commercially viable? Like, what for you has worked really well? Because whenever anyone talks specifically about a Substack strategy, they reference just how extraordinarily successful you've been. Advice to young entrepreneurs who want to find new channels for relevance and commercial opportunity?
1:09:11 Heather Cox Richardson? I'm laughing because I don't have a strategy. And, and, and I can tell you-
1:09:16 Scott Galloway? Well, it's working.
1:09:17 Heather Cox Richardson? Well-
1:09:17 Scott Galloway? Your non-strategy is working.
1:09:19 Heather Cox Richardson? Maybe it is, because that's the, that's the, my answer. And this, by the way, is individual to me, and it's advice I got from my parents. And what I, what my parents did is they left careers to do something they loved and took a real hit for it. And they were my examples as I got older. I, everything that I have done, I have done because it interested me and I loved it. And that meant I made really unusual choices. The most important, deciding to write for a children's magazine while I was a person trying to get tenure. And everybody said, you are crazy. And I'm like, but it's interesting. And that's where I started writing for the public and so on, and ended up where I am.
1:10:03 Heather Cox Richardson? I just want to point out, though, that, once again, absalom, absalom, right? It looks like I'm a great success. Remember, I was denied tenure at my first job. My career was over. So this idea that, you know, that you hit a great idea and you have smooth sailing, it is absolutely belied by my career. And the number of things that I have done that didn't work, the through line is enormous. The through line is simply that I, it's not even that I made conscious choices. I have zero patience for things that bore me. I can't do it. It's not that I'm unwilling to do it. I can't do it. And so that meant that I always seemed to be on a track to do things that were important
1:10:48 Heather Cox Richardson? to me. And what was important to me was writing, teaching, and history. And so that's what I've done. And I would suggest that because each individual is unique, there are people out there who are going to do this so much better than I ever did it because you're seeing the world in a completely different way. And again, my strategy is not to have a strategy. I do what I love and I'm thrilled that people want to do it with me. But I think the minute you start to try and guess what other people want, you've lost what it is that makes you unique and makes you able to communicate with people from a really raw, authentic place. So I guess just do what you love and don't tell your parents that I said that because until I was about 55, it didn't pay.
1:11:34 Scott Galloway? Well, you sort of embody one of my favorite sayings, and that is, after working my ass off for 30 years, I'm an overnight success. And, but there is some, I won't call it strategy, there's some tactical discipline here. My understanding is you put out about 1,000 words a day. You have, no?
1:11:51 Heather Cox Richardson? At least 1,200.
1:11:53 Scott Galloway? I'm sorry, at least 1,200 words.
1:11:54 Heather Cox Richardson? That matters, it's a lot.
1:11:56 Scott Galloway? Yeah, a lot. I, I put out 1,500 words a week in my newsletter and come Thursday morning at 3 a.m., I'm hating myself every week. I think to write, to put out something fact-checked and credible is really difficult. And the fact that you do that every day, one, just because I do want to extract something a little bit more tactical from you. Trying to put out 1,200 words a day. Do you have any hacks in terms of timing or how you go about it? And also, my understanding is, Professor, is that you are making an exceptional living on Substack, that you have extraordinary amount of subscribers who see your content is so valuable, they're willing to do what few will do, and that
1:12:37 Scott Galloway? is pull out their credit cards. So specifically, when do you write? How do you manage to put out 1,200 words? I don't think that's easy for anybody. I don't care how prolific you are. And any thoughts on building a content strategy, a subscription content strategy?
1:12:52 Heather Cox Richardson? Yeah, okay. So first of all, it's very difficult to write as much as I do. And one of the ways you get there is by habit. Like, even the nights when I don't write, I actually write, because it's like being an athlete. You've got to get in the habit. And if you look back at my early stuff, it was not like it is now. Now, it is incredibly carefully fact-checked. And that's what takes the longest amount of time to find out. And I made a big mistake the other day. I said that a grand jury had indicted John Bolton, and it wasn't. It was the prosecutors. And I had checked that, but I'd taken it from a legacy media post, and that was incorrect. But, you know, just chasing that crap down,
1:13:34 Heather Cox Richardson? that's what takes all the time. When I write about history, often, that's pretty quick, because I know it really well. But there, too, it's the fact-checking that really does me in. So at this point, I've written more than 3 million words, and that means I'm a pretty good writer. And that helps a lot, because in your head, you can hear it. You can hear it sing. So partly, it's put your, sorry, put your ass in the chair and work. Now, there's a difference between that and writing a book. I'm supposed to be writing a book right now, and I have all the habits of book writers. Like, I sit down to write the book, and I'm like, you know, I haven't cleaned the refrigerator in a while, you know? And that's a really different thing. So if you have several million people waiting to see you write, you do it. Because you know you can't go to bed without doing it,
1:14:17 Heather Cox Richardson? because you're not going to be able to sleep if you have, you know, millions of people waiting for you to write. So partly, it's habit. And I would say, if you're trying to build a following, you must post every day. I don't like a lot of things, so I only post once a day. Some people have a different method. But if you think about the people like... Liza Donnelly posts every day and Joyce White Vance who posts every day. You you expect it. You don't necessarily read it, but you like that it's there. So one of the things for me, I write every day because I need to understand. You can't miss a day because then you're like, who was that? What really happened there? You can tell I've already read about the bukeli issue in MS 13, even though that happened yesterday and I wrote something different yesterday.
1:15:02 Heather Cox Richardson? So be there every day. Now, in terms of strategy and the financing, that's really interesting because everything I do is free. I would do what I do for nothing. You do not have to pay me for anything that I do. And yet, people choose to pay. And what I love about that is that that I have a much lower, by the way, conversion of subscribers to paid subscribers. That average is about 10%. Mine's significantly lower than that, which is fine. I don't care. As I say, I'm not here for the money. But what it has enabled me to do is something that we don't really talk about a lot. And that's that I'm actually running these history videos as well and building out that side of the teaching stuff, which, again, all free.
1:15:47 Heather Cox Richardson? You have to take money on YouTube, which we've just started to do because otherwise they put their own ads on and you can change what you you have control over it if you say you'll take it. We've just started to do that, but we're building that out as well. So I see it in a really funny way as being about sort of crowdsourcing our country's politics and history. And again, it's never been a strategy. And not only do I not ask for money, I tell people I will not ask for money because that's not the point. It's really mission driven. And and that, I don't know how replicable that is, but I do think that I was extremely lucky in that
1:16:29 Heather Cox Richardson? at a time when everybody was saying, look here, look here, look here, look here. My take has always been, hey, listen, I'm here if you're interested, but you don't have to look here. I don't dress well. I don't, I don't, you know. Say glitzy stuff. I don't ever do clickbait. I'm just really interested in the world. And what that has enabled people to do is build a community of people like us who are just interested in the world. So again, I'm not sure it's a strategy, but it's really, for me, just about understanding myself and that's, you know, understanding the world. And that seems to have an audience.
1:17:07 Scott Galloway? Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College and an expert on American political and economic history. She's the author of seven award-winning books, including her latest, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Her widely-read newsletter, Letters from an American, synthesizes history and modern political issues. She joins us from the coast of Maine, where she continues to write the story of America in real time. Professor, love our conversations. Thanks so much for your time.
1:17:35 Heather Cox Richardson? It's always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
1:18:00 Scott Galloway? I was a river of happiness. I've been struggling lately. I'm having trouble getting my mood to foot to my blessings. I am pissed off and angry all the time. I think most of it is my body chemistry as I'm getting older. I don't know if it's the mix of THC, alcohol, testosterone, or just general hormonal, I don't know, hormonal poor alchemy as I get older, but everything pisses me off. I go out, the waiter is an idiot. And I know you're, I know all service people are supposed to be saints, but I've gotten so used to good service that I get a, I get bad service and it just like infuriates me, which is not a quality I like in myself.
1:18:38 Scott Galloway? People in my company are pissing me off. I'm pissing me off. I'm disappointed in myself. I get very angry. I get upset at just super stupid, small things. And I get angry and that anger is like acid in my veins. And then the next day I just feel hollow. I just feel exhausted. And then any reasonable assessment of my life, and I'm a smart guy and I can disassociate from my mood and say, all right, let's do an assessment of your life. And it's like, okay. Beautiful family, health, make a shit ton of money doing something I love. People come up to me and are nice to me. I mean, literally, I, I, how incredible is my life? And it hasn't always been incredible.
1:19:21 Scott Galloway? I've been through periods, not real hardship, but periods where I was very lonely, where I was having trouble finding a partner, where all the people I liked didn't seem to like me, where I would work my fucking ass off and get nowhere or get worse than nowhere, make an investment and lose a shit ton of money after working at a company for seven years and taking all these risks. I mean, I've had dark moments. And so for the first time, I'm actually thinking about going to therapy and just talking to someone. I've never been to therapy. My therapy is I talk to friends. I'm good at friends. I usually talk to a friend 30 to 60 minutes a day about different issues. That happens a lot. And I'm being very honest about it. I've been talking to people about it and I'm thinking of just spending some time with a quote unquote professional. Haven't done it yet.
1:20:06 Scott Galloway? We'll see how I feel over the next week or two weeks. But something is going on with me. And what's unacceptable is I think a lot about, I've written a lot about end of life. I'm sort of fascinated with death, but I actually find it quite liberating. And the three biggest regrets of people at the end of their life are, one, they wish they'd stayed in better touch with their friends. Two, they wish they'd led the life they wanted to lead, you know? Been with who they wanted to be with, be the sexual orientation they wanted to be, go into the field they want to go into, not what their parents, society, or their own demons were telling them on it. But the number one regret of the dying is they wish they'd allowed themselves to be happier. They wish they'd taken stock of their blessings and been less
1:20:48 Scott Galloway? hard on themselves. And I am, I get angry about my anger because I look at my life and I think, if anyone should be dancing around and singing "The Hills Are Alive" with the sound of music, it should be me. And I'm not. I'm not. And I also think that a lot of it, quite frankly, is social media. I think that 20% of the global equity markets and 40% of the S and P is tied to figuring out a way to keep you glued to your phone. And the number one way to keep you glued to your phone is to show men being tripped and hitting their, doing a face plant and bleeding at a No Kings protest, which I find, quite frankly, really disturbing and upsetting. Or seeing all these idiots on fucking Fox
1:21:31 Scott Galloway? News just lie after lie, or seeing Speaker Johnson say, "Oh, we're not in legislative session. I can't swear this woman and I have problems disassociating. It pisses me off and it ruins, makes me angry for a good 10 or 15 minutes." And that is a real flaw. That is, I've been approached about running for office and one of the reasons I don't think I'm fit to run for office is I just take shit too, not too personally, but I get angry too much. I just want to, I wouldn't want to walk around the halls of the state Capitol or, or Congress just fucking angry all the time. I just don't need that. I don't want that. I'm going to try and find something. I exercise a lot. I eat really well. My sleep's okay. I probably have, I've toned down the alcohol. I still use THC and edibles, but
1:22:15 Scott Galloway? not too much. I'm trying to figure out, is it something to do with my chemistry? Is it something where I need some sort of medical or pharmaceutical intervention? I've never done that before and I'm not excited about the idea of it. But I have gotten to a point in my life where I recognize if the gap between my blessings and my mood is too great, I need to do something about it. And the key to doing something about it is to recognize it, to talk about it, and then to pursue help. And I'm going to do all of those things. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our assistant producer is Laura Janer. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from Prop G Media.
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