Welcome to the week from Prof G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm Scott Galloway, and it's Friday, October 30th.
Today, Heather Cox Richardson on what history can tell us about the midterm elections on Tuesday. Then, why buying a home in America is so hard. And finally, the biggest IPO in history and the investors who aren't buying it. Let's get into it.
The midterms are Tuesday. Nearly 30 million Americans have already voted. Historian Heather Cox Richardson, author of the newsletter Letters from an American, joined Scott for a live conversation on Substack this week. It aired Thursday on The Prof G Pod. She told him the Republican Party as it was no longer exists.
It seems to me this is the kind of moment where, exactly as you say, there is plenty of room for a new Republican Party, which would really be kind of an old Republican Party, and we can talk more about that. But I'm actually really interested in who's left. If MAGA has jumped off a cliff, who's left? And what you're seeing in this election is a number of Republicans who went along with Trump until very recently suddenly jumping ship. And you're seeing that, of course, over the Amy Acton ad, for example. But you're also seeing it in South Carolina, where a Republican governor, former governor, just came out and endorsed Darlene Graham's opponent because he said, 'We just can't go this way.' You're starting to see that split again, very much like the 1850s, which we can talk about. But what you have left standing then, on the people who haven't jumped off the cliff, is an entire constituency, a huge constituency that doesn't necessarily know what it stands for yet. And we have as well the injection of a whole bunch of new issues like data centers, like climate change, like AI, like all these things that people actually don't have a position on necessarily, and they are willing to make common cause in ways that they haven't before. Again, very much like the 1850s. So I'm interested in what's happening with who's left on the table, because it looks again to me like — I'm so sorry to say it again — the 1850s, where you had a whole bunch of people jumping into the same swimming pool together and saying, 'Listen, we don't agree on immigration. We don't agree on finances. We don't agree on internal improvements.' But by God, we can agree that we don't want the elite enslavers to take over our country and turn the rest of us into serfs. And when that happened, you got the Republican Party rising. And then of course you also got the Democratic Party reforming in the North and coming up with a new approach to a bunch of older problems. And then of course we went forward with that system for a long time. And I think we did the same thing in the 1890s and again in the 1920s, 1930s.
These midterms are now the most expensive political advertising cycle on record. Ad spending has topped $11.2 billion, according to The New York Times, more than the entire 2024 presidential election. On Monday, Scott and Jessica Tarlov taped Raging Moderates live from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. Scott was watching the money.
If you look at what's happening in Texas, first off, we're spending more money. We're spending, I think, $11 billion versus $10 billion in this midterm. This is a midterm after a presidential election, and spending has gone up. This is the full local television station employment act, the amount of money that's being poured into this election. And I think this is going to have — I think this is going to be the biggest knock-on effect coming out of this election. And what do I mean by that?
They're going to spend $850 million on a Texas Senate race. I believe they're spending almost a billion dollars to tell people in Waco what they already know. I think this is going to be the election where the ROI on money drops off the face of a cliff, where you just, for the first time — and we all talk about, and I agree, Citizens United is terrible, we need to do away with it — but if you can't buy a senator in deep red Texas for $850 million, I think, and I think this is a wonderful thing, I think the ROI on money is about to hit an absolute record low in this race. And the broader picture is, I think we've spent the last 40 years trying to determine, talking a lot about how to build wealth. I think we're going to spend the next 10 years or the next few election cycles talking about what are the responsibilities of wealth. And when you have one person — I think it's, he said, $300 million so far at the midterms — these numbers are hard to wrap your head around. So let me help wrap our heads around that. Say you're worth a million dollars and you're worried about potentially having your business go away, getting hauled in front of Congress. I mean, you have a real vested interest in keeping one party in power. If you had a million dollars, what would you think of putting — and you had a real interest in getting Republicans elected — would you put $300 into a campaign? That is the equivalent of what it means for Elon Musk to put $300 million into politics when he's worth a trillion dollars. And whereas before — why I've become much more progressive on tax structure. I generally think the biggest threat — we talk about Citizens United — the biggest threat to democracy is that power corrupts, and absolute power absolutely corrupts. And in a capitalist society with no campaign spending limits, a trillionaire can basically decide, 'I'm going to spend $300 to swing an election,' and that we need progressive tax rates to, quite frankly, protect us from the tyranny of power. Because when someone can take a small amount of money and pour hundreds of millions of dollars into an electorate, an election, and you realize just how this means nothing to him — it literally means nothing to him. That's a millionaire going out for a nice dinner is what $300 million from Elon Musk spends. So, one, I think the biggest outcome or the most navel-gazing as a society we're going to do is, one, the election experts are going to go, 'Wow, the ROI on money has just fallen off a cliff here,' which I think is a wonderful thing. But also, what does it mean when you have individuals who, for the price of a nice dinner of a millionaire, can pour a quarter, a half a billion dollars into a campaign?
Back in his conversation with historian Heather Cox Richardson, Scott asked about the 1850s and whether there's a modern equivalent to the question that defined that era. The 1850s sort of ended in a war that settled one question. And today it feels as if we don't have one defining issue. We have immigration, trade, AI, bodily autonomy. But I'll put forward a thesis to you. I do think there is one central question that is being asked and potentially answered across the West, and I think that France is sort of the canary in the coal mine. And that is, in France, a third of the spending on education is going to teachers who are no longer teaching. Retirees have greater incomes on average than working Frenchmen and Frenchwomen. And it feels as if young people have been served a bill for a party or a dinner they never got to attend. And it is bubbling up everywhere in terms of a lack of trust in institutions, a propensity to riot over whether the match is Me Too or Black Lives Matter or George Floyd, which are all righteous movements. The kerosene we're knee-deep in is the fact that the entrants feel like the incumbents continue to vote themselves more money. I see that as the central issue. If there was one issue to be answered or fought over, similar to the one question that was answered in the 1850s, that it would be entrants versus incumbents, young versus old. React to that thesis.
I'm going to react by starting with the 1850s. The question that was answered was not human enslavement. The question that was answered was whether or not the government should protect property that privileged a very few people, or whether it protected the good of the community, whether it protected everybody else. And that's where we get, and why it becomes such a big deal, that the Gettysburg Address in November of 1863 talks about a new birth of freedom and the protection of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Because remember, before that, the elite enslavers who controlled the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Senate were very clear that no matter what people wanted — there's a very famous speech that says no matter if — it doesn't matter if 99% of American voters want something, they can't have it because the Constitution very explicitly prevents the government from doing anything but protecting property. So what Lincoln is really doing is he's bringing white voters, the white male voters in those days, of course, on board. Not by saying we're going to get rid of human enslavement on any moral issues, but rather we're going to get rid of the power of that small group of elite Southern enslavers to control the American political system and make you end up working for them. And then if you redefine that, then I think you look at this moment and you see a very similar question. And I won't speak to France because I am not a specialist in France, and it has its own history, of course, including of very public displays of disaffection with the government. But I think you are seeing in any number of issues in the United States today, and I think the fight against data centers is the symbol of that, this idea that we do not want a government that reacts only to a very few people in power. Because what we're seeing is more pushing back against billionaires than pushing back against retirees, for example, many of whom in fact aren't really hurting with the potential cuts to Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and so on. So I think if you switch that lens a little bit, it's just always the same story: a few people want everything, and the rest of us would like a government that actually serves our needs as well.
We'll be right back.
Support for the show comes from LinkedIn Ads. There's no worse feeling than making a major investment in something only to realize it didn't exactly live up to the hype — such as buying a nice piece of tech that ends up in storage collecting dust, or taking a business workshop where your main takeaway was little more than a few motivational words. If you work in marketing, this can happen with ads. You optimize for the numbers that look great: impressions, reach, and reactions. But when they don't show revenue, well, that can turn into an unfunded conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that: bull spend. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn Ads and invest in what looks good to your CFO. According to the 2026 Dream Data Benchmark report, LinkedIn Ads generated the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. It's 121%. You can target by company, industry, job title, and more. It's time to cut the bull spend. Advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $250 in your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com/scott. That's linkedin.com/scott. Terms and conditions apply.
Support for the show comes from USAFacts. I've interviewed countless politicians, and if there's one thing we all find disconcerting, it's when they butcher the facts with some biased half-truth. Give us a break already. So when I had the chance to debate conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, our natural response was: bring it on. Why? Because it was sponsored by USAFacts, and each debate segment started with a presentation of government data and facts: employment, government spending, income data, housing, and more. The topic: the American dream. Is it still within reach? We argued, we found some common ground, we actually debated, and there were no personal attacks. Watch the full debate on the USAFacts YouTube channel. We think you'll find it unlike any other debate — entertaining and informative. We hope you check it out.
Welcome back. Scott's entrants versus incumbents argument has a very obvious test case in housing. We talk a lot about how housing is one of the clearest indicators of the separation between earners versus owners in our economy. On Tuesday's bonus episode of Conversations, Aziz Sundary, author of the Home Economics Substack, and Kyla Scandlin, economic commentator and host of the new podcast Best of Luck with Kyla Scandlin, explained to Scott where young people are getting pushed out the most.
Yeah, I mean, I think America does have a really complicated relationship with housing because, you know, Derek Thompson has talked about this before: housing has to be both a speculative asset and a place to live. And I think for a lot of people, a lot of their wealth is wrapped up in the house, so they're going to push back against anything that they think can threaten that. And increasingly that's turning towards the stock market. Stock market wealth is becoming more and more of people's total net worth. But I think that for younger folks, like when they look at the refusal to build, and when they look at older folks, you know, just saying like, 'No, you can't build near us, like we don't want this housing near us,' I think it can feel like everything is sort of working against you. Because what you've been told since you were little is that in order to be a successful person, in order to reach this American dream, you have to buy a house. And you know, I'm 29 and I don't know when I'm going to be able to buy a house. And I know a lot of people in the situation, and more and more people are starting to lean on their parents for financing a home or leaning on some sort of outside help. And I think that's the really hard part: is that housing is the foundation of the economic ladder. And if people feel like they can't climb up it, they're just going to be like, well, you know, maybe it doesn't make sense for me to work really hard at my job, and it doesn't make sense for me to get married, it doesn't make sense for me to build this economic future because I don't feel stable. And I think for older folks, they were able to benefit from the post-World War II boom. You know, there was just so much policy that worked in their favor, and that's why people over the age of 55 had so much wealth in the United States.
Aziz spent 15 years in research at Barclays and later worked as a data journalist at The Wall Street Journal. He wanted to put the current crisis in perspective, so he read the group an article from The New York Times.
The article is called 'High Rents.' This is the season of the year when the people of New York break out in loud complaints about the rise of rents, the scarcity of houses, and the impossibility of making both ends meet while landlords demand such exorbitant rates for their tenements. So that last word might give you a clue about when this is from. This is from 1856. So, aside from the word 'tenements,' you could kind of just copy and paste that onto The New York Times today, and it would read pretty accurately. So my point is that this is a big crisis. It's happening around the world, especially in these big productive cities where the economic opportunities are, and it's been happening for a long time. So I think we should stay very humble about our ability to influence this. I think if I could choose one thing that is driving it that we don't talk about enough, it's income inequality. You know, the fact is that you have some people — like Scott, as you were working at a bank, and when I moved to New York, I was also working at an investment bank — they come to the city and they earn these high salaries, and they're competing with everybody else, teachers and, you know, all kinds of people who don't earn high incomes, for the same parcels of land. Housing is a positional good. We're all competing for it, and I think inequality is a huge engine explaining the fact that we've been in a housing crisis around the world and clearly for like hundreds of years. So I, you know, I don't know if there's any like silver bullet for it.
