The New Playbook for Resisting Authoritarianism — with Julia Angwin & Ami Fields-Meyer

23:07The reason that the authoritarians spend all their time trying to capture the media, which is item one, two, and three on their agenda, is because the way you get people to comply is you create an information landscape that just is a web of lies, but everyone believes it. And that's actually the way you keep people in line. You tell people that, oh, those protesters, they're just criminals, right? They were trying to kill people. That was just a law enforcement exercise. and we're doing all these things, especially these days when authoritarianism can look like democracy. They're like, oh, it's just weird rule changes.

23:39You don't need to worry about that stuff. Everything's still going just fine. And so the narrative fight is actually the way that you win, right? The Soviet dissidents actually, like there were very few of them, but they were great writers and artists. And so they actually were winning the narrative war because they wrote so poetically about what it was like to live inside this totalitarian regime. and it actually moved people around the world to support their cause. And so I think that we are in the beginnings of like building that new narrative and I don't think it's fully emerged yet here in the U.S.

24:15Scott Galloway:We'll be right back after a quick break.

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28:13So I think when we talk about authoritarianism, we have an easy time bridging it to the current administration, or at least I have it.

28:22Scott Galloway:I see a lot of echoes and similar flavors represented by the Trump administration. I feel like he's literally taken a page out of sort of the authoritarian handbook. But at the same time, just because, you know, we like to be equal opportunity offenders, I think authoritarianism can easily come from the left. And that is I oftentimes think as a progressive that where I get the most pushback is when I say something that doesn't comport with the narrative from the progressive orthodoxy and you're treated like an apostate. And I think that's how you normalize saying this is offensive. And that's what a lot of the most, the darkest periods in history, it basically the government decided, convinced people that these people are being offensive when they have a viewpoint outside of the accepted orthodoxy, whether it comes from the far right or the far left.

29:17And I worry we don't give enough time or attention or acknowledge that, I don't know what you want to call it, political correctness, a certain type.

29:28Scott Galloway:I feel it a lot on campus that there's an orthodoxy among the faculty and you're an apostate if you veer from that orthodoxy. But that can be dangerous, too. And that is a form or a path to authoritarianism. Ami, can you address that? And then I want to get Julia Sox. First of all, of course, authoritarianism can come from the left. And even like terms like left and right are beginning to, I think, broadly beginning to lose some of their salience. But Venezuela is, you know, is authoritarianism from the left, for example. I mean, it's a worker revolution turned authoritarian state. And that's true in all kinds of places.

30:08So, of course, that's right. One thing that we try to address, and we do it later in the book because we really want to spend time with the individual and the individual-finding community at the beginning, but we spend really the last quarter of the book on the question of coalitions. And no country facing authoritarianism, no society facing authoritarianism gets out of it. No democracy repairs its democracy without a massive popular front, a big tent, sort of non-traditional strange bedfellows coalition. We know this from Brazil recently. We know this from Poland. And now we know this from Hungary, actually, you know, fairly recently.

30:53You saw everyone from the sort of MAGA equivalents in the countryside in Hungary to the sort of purple haired university students all voting for the same Liz Cheney type figure. which I think is something that Americans who have been, even progressive Americans who have been celebrating what's happened in a place like Hungary have not fully wrapped their head around yet. It's called in political science, that term is called a negative coalition where you basically try to figure out what is the bare minimum that we can agree on and then move on from it. And it doesn't allow for purity politics.

31:25That's just, there is no place for that in the narrow work of what one scholar we talked to Erica Chenoweth calls getting the Jeep out of the mud. It doesn't matter what brought you to the Jeep. It doesn't matter why you're at the Jeep. We all have one task. It's to get this Jeep out of the mud. And then we can decide later where exactly it's going to drive, but we just have to get it out. So I think, Scott, I worry about this version of what you're talking about as well. I think that there are lots of folks in our country and even, I would say broadly construed on the American left and center left who understand that we're going to need to sit with people who we disagree with.

32:03But when the rubber meets the road, I'm not quite sure we're ready to do that. Julia? Yeah. I mean, Ami just wrote a big piece for The Bulwark on this exact issue, which is basically you can't shame people into joining your movement. Like you have to offer them something positive to be a part of. And I think what we are looking at, I mean, And when the thing about authoritarianism and the thing that sold the selling message in Hungary, I think, is the one that often works, which is anti-corruption. Right. The reality is authoritarianism is about stealing from you. It's about stealing your rights and your money.

32:37Right. And enriching yourself as the authoritarian and the friends of the authoritarian. And one of the sort of things that really was able to tip the scales there was that the few last remaining independent media outlets, there were very few of them. They were under constant pressure. They were defunded. They were just hanging in there. but one of them, Direct 36, a YouTube channel, did this sort of seminal series on how Orban and his children had enriched themselves and showed their yachts and their boats and their planes and their mansions and all the rest of it. And that managed to break through to a lot of people who hadn't really known that that was what was happening, right?

33:17People forget that Navalny was leading an anti-corruption nonprofit, right? Like that is the story is always about corruption. Nepal and the students who overthrew that government, it was all about the corruption and the wealth that they were stealing from us. And so I think one thing that is going to have to happen is we have to unite around that message. And right now, the corruption of the current regime in the United States is bold faced. Right. And yet it hasn't, I think, sunk into people that that's their money that's being taken from them. And I think there's more work to be done narratively on that issue.

33:53Something, I'll start with you, Julia, because I think you may have a different view on this than me.

34:00Scott Galloway:I worry that our fetishization of free speech and anonymity has essentially allowed it to become weaponized by authoritarians. and that is I see the importance of the Gulf, you know, the human rights activists in the Gulf needing an anonymous account. At the same time, I spend a lot of time looking at the comments in social media. I mean, social media is now shaping most people's worldview mostly. And what I find is that if you look at the really vile comments or the comments that are most divisive, most polarizing, that are responsible for the greatest coercing of our discourse, that do the most damage to undermining our institutions, that it's anonymous accounts.

34:53And that anonymity, whether it's state-sponsored officials who wear masks or letting bots run

35:02Scott Galloway:unfettered with no consequence or being able to call child services and lodge an anonymous complaint that results in child services showing up at a former cabinet member's house with what I believe were just totally non-credible claims, that this anonymity or this fidelity to anonymity, which I understand has gone way too far and has been weaponized by bad actors to create more division in society, then we don't, we have this absolutism around it that I believe authoritarians have weaponized. Julia, your thoughts? Well, you predicted correctly, Scott. I do not agree. I think that, I mean, I think you're, of course, you're right to observe this phenomenon.

35:50But the problem is that the solution of requiring identity papers, essentially, to post online, which several states have already started to do, is absolutely the favorite tool of authoritarians, right? And just to be very, very clear, we are in a nation that was judged a democracy, has lost its status this year as a liberal democracy, according to the VDEM Institute, which tracks all the metrics that you would want to assess democracies by. So we are on an authoritarian backslide, right? And so do we want to provide the government with identity papers that allow them to identify every person who dissents?

36:34I think the answer is no. And so I think it's a dangerous game. I get what you're saying, that there's like all sorts of foment that happens. But you know, there was in the American Revolution, a lot of anonymous pamphlets that were really inflammatory were strewn around the streets by men on horseback, right? Like, This is part of the American tradition. And so I think that focusing on quashing some people who hurt your feelings, which is what a lot of people are like really just desperate to do these days, is missing the bigger point that we need to have the freedom to express our views. It is absolutely the fundamental thing that we founded this country for.

37:14Scott Galloway:So I want to just follow up on it. And I mostly agree with what you said. I was just in Amsterdam, and Amsterdam was a kill zone for Jews in World War II. Seventy percent of Jews pulled from their homes, murdered, versus 40 percent in Poland, I think a third in France. And it wasn't because the Netherlands was especially more or less anti-Semitic. It was because their local government had done a great job of keeping records. and was able to attach identities to addresses and religious backgrounds. So quite frankly, and there were no escape routes. It was just the worst of all moons lining up. So when the Nazis got control of the local government there, they had a very easy time identifying people and rounding them up.

38:00Scott Galloway:So I agree that identity and unmasking has huge risks. The question I would have is, is there a middle ground where using technology, we can identify when anonymous accounts aren't there to try and hide their anonymity for the social good. They're there just, quite frankly, to wreak havoc and reject that anonymous account. I think, I mean, do you agree with this? I find that big tech hides behind the very important points you made around anonymity when they could easily use technology to go, okay, this quote, unquote anonymous account is clearly here saying things contrary to one another just to start fights.

38:44Scott Galloway:That appears this account is not really, we can't find a theme of something you believe in other than just creating dissent and agita and controversy. And so we're going to boot this account offline. I'm not, I'm not suggesting that everybody, everybody is, you know, the moment you say something, okay, you're on a list now and we know your address and who you are. But it feels like with just some basic technology, we could identify quote-unquote anonymous accounts that aren't anonymous for the right reasons. And that these firms have these technologies, but hide behind the power of anonymity and the important things you highlight such that they can create more traffic and more Nissan ads.

39:23Scott Galloway:Julia? I mean, I think you're, obviously the tech exists to do this, but here's the underlying assumption in what you're talking about that I think I want to question, which is, why is it that we have just as an underlying assumption of this discussion, we're like, okay, with the idea that there's basically four companies who determine where all speech can be around the world, right? So my feeling is, let's focus on that, because that is the actual problem. The problem is that we need more, much more decentralized tech, and we need much more competition, right? The idea of the federated social media universe, which has, you know, failed to come to fruition but is a good idea, is that we all could live on our own little social media pods.

40:07You could be on one that is just cleaned up and super censored and I'll be on the completely rowdy one where everyone says whatever the fuck they want. Oh, sorry, I don't know if we're supposed to swear on here. It's encouraged. Okay, great. So, and that is actually the way that we solve this problem, because really, as I mentioned before, authoritarians want to control the information universe. And they have an incredible advantage in that all of our media is intermediated by basically four or five companies. And those companies have made it pretty clear that they are absolutely going to bend the knee to this administration.

40:41Right. And so that is extremely dangerous, right? We are all, you and me as journalists, we are gig workers for the platforms. That is what we are. Every institution, CBS, CNN, no matter how big you are, you're a gig worker for the tech platforms. And that is the fundamental problem because that is a real vulnerability that makes authoritarianism easier to pull off in this country. And it's extremely dangerous.

41:04Scott Galloway:Mommy? She said it. Not going to say it better than Julia Englund. I mean, I think we're all going to be in violent agreement here that antitrust and more competition, that there actually might be a market solution to this, that if there's enough competitors, someone's going to say, we have an environment here that is more legit. I'll give you an example. I think LinkedIn is a kinder, gentler place because my sense is people, one, are thinking maybe this person someday might get me a job. But two, the bots don't just run free, just the fake accounts. But there might be a market-based solution here, and that is if the FTC and the DOJ wake up from what is, I think, a 30-year slumber and force more competition, that if you have a dozen, two dozen, three dozen scaled platforms, that there might be more of a market opportunity for platforms that are just better actors.

41:58Scott Galloway:Julie, did I say that correctly? Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. I guess the thing I would say is I just don't think we need to leave this to the courts, right? This is something that a functioning Congress, if such a thing exists, could do. We could pass legislation to create a more competitive tech landscape. It would be a huge boost to our economy and to our society and the fact that we haven't done it and that we have left it to the courts where the Google ruling on antitrust that declared their search monopoly and then actually declared they weren't going to fix it because AI would have been done.

42:35would fix it. The judge wrote in there very compellingly, he was like, I don't know why I have to do this. Like, why am I doing this? This is something that should be done by Congress, right? They should pass laws to do these things because it's actually 10, 15 years too late. I do think what we have found over and over again is that ordinary people are more likely to engage in principled acts of defiance or whatever you want to call it when they have an alternative to go to. Like, I think just asking people, and I'd be actually curious, Scott, whether you found this in your resistance unsubscribe work, but I call this like a lily pad theory.

43:14Like, I think that people really like to exercise their values. People would prefer to not be in a social media ecosystem or prefer to be in a social media ecosystem or on an app or in a platform that doesn't do all the shit that you're describing. And if they have an alternative, they're going to exercise those values. I think that we've seen, even though I think this is largely true at the level of narrative and probably not true at the level of substance, the anthropic open AI war that's happening right now is people are moving over to anthropic because it feels better. It's the same thing.

43:49People are getting largely the same thing, but it feels better. And you just give people the opportunity to defect, to do it in a low stakes way and give them just some alternative. They're much more likely to do it.

44:01Scott Galloway:We'll be right back.

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46:14Scott Galloway:We're back with more from Julia and Ami. You were both on American Conversations with one of my heroes, Heather Cox Richardson, last week. And Ami, you cited a study finding that the number one predictor of whether someone takes a political risk isn't education or party or gender. It's whether anyone asks them. Say more. I think this is the essential question about when we're, I mean, all of us are engaged in this question in some form or another. Like, how do you get people who don't feel, who feel like something is wrong to do something about it? Scott, like you've already, you know, you've laid out the risk that people feel.

46:50So given that people feel those risks, and sometimes those are economic risks, and sometimes those are social risks, and sometimes that's, you know, my dad will never talk to me again. Only you know what those risks are. So it's really important to be able to get people on an on-ramp and to not ask people to make sure that the first thing that they do is stand in front of the tank. You got to give people something more gradual to do to get in there. And then like, yes, this study says that the way that people, the most likely thing that you can do, the determinant that gets people in is whether somebody asks them.

47:23Social connection is unbelievably powerful. And so, you know, I'll give you two examples of this. One is we talked to folks who are involved in the student movement right now in Serbia against a corrupt government. And they're doing things like barricading universities to try to get government reforms. It's an enormous movement. It's the biggest movement in Serbia since the Milosevic revolution at the turn of the century. And what we've heard from those folks is that what has brought their peers who don't feel predominantly courageous onto the front lines is they were asked just to bring the blankets to the protesters.

48:07And when they brought the blankets to the protesters, not to sit in the protest, just to bring something. And when they got there and they saw the camaraderie, they witnessed what was going on among their friends, they felt a sort of a form of social connection. They felt a form of belonging and felt more able to get involved in the work. The one other example I'll give you is from a guy named Nathan Law, who is a now living in exile, but a dissident from Hong Kong, who also as a student sort of felt like something was wrong and didn't like the way that Hong Kong was being treated by the Chinese government.

48:39But the way that he got involved was that he showed up to a student government meeting. And when they asked him, there were three options for how you can get involved in the protest. One was to sit on the front lines and risk arrest. The second level was to be like a little bit, be part of the crowd that makes the mass. And the lowest level of risk was to pass out water bottles. And he passed out water bottles. Passing out water bottles got him so involved in the movement, he witnessed so much violence against his countrymen, against his friends, that he ended up becoming the leader of the movement.

49:13This is not rocket science, but in order to get other people involved and in order to get yourself involved, you have to start with something small. And I will say one other thing here, which is that something I learned from working on campaigns, I always thought that working on campaigns, the way to get people involved and invest in your campaign was to do something for them. And the thing was always to ask them to do something for you, to make a phone call for you, to knock a door for you, because then you just feel like you're part of the story. And so that's the work of getting folks involved in a movement.

49:40Scott Galloway:Julie, I'm curious, per your earlier comments, it's authoritarianism by a thousand cuts. You just don't wake up one night and the switch has been turned, right? And it gets normalized. It feels incremental. Oh, that's too bad. And before you know it, you wake up and the president has extracted$600 million in corrupt crypto payments. And Larry Ellison and his donors are carving up TikTok. At least that's how I see it. And at the same time, I'm hopeful when I see 2 % of America turning out for no kings protests, the largest protests in decades. And supposedly the tipping point is 3.5%. I don't know why anyone got that number, but we're getting there.

50:23Scott Galloway:And there's a lot of young people per year comments who seem really engaged. But at the same time, I worry that—I guess the question—I'm a glass half empty kind of person. I feel like we're losing this war and we have normalized a level of corruption and movements towards authoritarianism, the likes of which I just never would have imagined. That the gag reflex has not been that severe or nearly as severe as I thought it was going to be. At the same time, there does appear to be reasons or signs of hope and a rejection of these, of refusal to normalize this kind of stuff. Where do you think we sit on the spectrum?

51:01Scott Galloway:Do you feel like we are absolutely barreling towards authoritarianism or that there is enough severe pushback that we will essentially get back to? And let me just put out there, I think America has shown an ability that when we get to these dark places, we not only bounce back, but we bounce back stronger. I think that's been the American story. Where do you think we are in that story right now, Julia? Yeah, I mean, I think it's complicated, right? Like you said, every single day brings another outrage, another breakthrough, another bit of lawlessness or corruption that just seems impossible to imagine.

51:40Every day would have been a different Watergate story. At the same time, it's possible I had just low expectations for Americans, but I've been actually very impressed by the resistance movements. They've been broad spread. they have been homegrown and they have been most importantly non-violent so the data that you're referring to that shows that three and a half percent is sort of like the tipping point for movements comes from this Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth and the movement scholar Maria Stefan and they studied more than a hundred years of movements and rated them as to their effectiveness and their violence levels.

52:22And what they found is that nonviolent movements are twice as likely to succeed as violent movements. So there's an incredible difference, right? And it's really important because that is actually part of the narrative war. The narrative war is that the movement has to be the one that you would want to join, the nonviolent one, the good guys, right? And so whenever the state enacts violence against the nonviolent movement, it actually draws more supporters towards the nonviolent movement. Right. We saw that in Minneapolis. The state violence actually ended up being the fatal moment where they had they lost the war.

53:02They had to retreat from that city. And so we are now in a situation where we're seeing wins like that regularly. We saw the Avello Airlines boycott, which like basically all these people stood at their like local airline airports and protested for months and months and pressured lawmakers until finally Avello canceled its contract to be the ICE deportation flight. We saw the universities. No one has caved since Columbia, right, where I guess we have fingers crossed right now for Yale. But like, honestly, there has been a real pushback. The slush band got for the J6ers, you know, was abandoned.

53:38And so we continue to do the right things. And what needs to happen is just more and more resistance, right? So we've done all these things. We're doing the most important work of keeping nonviolence disciplined. It's just that there needs to be more people in the movement and there needs to be more of these boycotts. I mean, honestly, boycotts, strikes, things that really gum up the works are the most effective ways to do resistance. Ami, any thoughts? I would say that we are, I agree with Julia that we're doing the things that we need to do. I worry a little bit when our conversations about authoritarianism and whether we're winning or not end up in the sort of abstract academic space.

54:20Because I think that what people need is a set of tools. We've tried to do that in this book. We've tried to give folks 16 stories, 16 tools that they individually can use to get involved in the movement. And I have to imagine that there is somebody listening to this podcast who has had what we describe in the book as a moral collision, who hears the voice in their head inside their law firm that's cooperating with the administration or whatever it is.

54:50and feels like because the winds of authoritarianism are blowing in this particular direction, because we're now at 1965 levels of democracy, according to the VDEM Institute that Julia Stutt described, that everything is inevitable. And I think maybe the most important piece of our research is not everything is inevitable. You know, we talk in the book about the toast when Soviet dissidents were drinking together in the 1960s and 1970s, their favored toast as they were raising their glasses of vodka was to the success of our hopeless cause because it felt so unbelievably dark. Much darker, Scott.

55:30Much, much, much, much darker than it feels here right now and much more inevitable that things were headed, you know, in a sort of endlessly negative, dark direction. And then in 1989, the wall fell. And so people in much, much, much worse circumstances have expanded their circles of commitment and have found ways to do this work. And what my message would be, and I think the message of the book is to anybody who's listening to this and who's feeling this way, is that there is a way forward. It's not just to stand in front of the tank. It's mostly—usually starts with gathering with a few other people like you, a few other people in your office.

56:08Just start talking. and then find a way to tap into the movement that's going on. But nothing is inevitable and you are the vector to make sure that it's not.

56:17Scott Galloway:Just as we wrap up here, I had one of those moments, those spontaneous moments. You know, as you get older, all you want to, at least all I want is, I find I want to feel something. Like I'm just not that impressed or inspired anymore. I'm so fucking cynical all the time. And I had one of those surprising emotional moments. I went to the England-Norway match on Saturday. and the whole stadium, Neil Diamond's song, Sweet Caroline started playing and the whole stadium started singing. And it's largely associated, I think with Team England, but the Norwegians were singing it. And then when the Norwegians started rowing and doing that whole chant, the English fans, we all started rowing.

56:56Scott Galloway:And when you see what I think was 64 ,000 people at the Hard Rock Stadium, all singing in unison, it just kind of brings you to, It kind of motivates you, makes you feel like when everyone is singing, if everyone decides to do something positive together, it just grabs you by the heart. And I was sitting there thinking, if you could just convince everyone in the stadium to do something that pretty much 99 % are going to agree with, something that's very positive, just the power of that. We're going to reach triple that with this podcast. When you look at YouTube views and the number of downloads, we're going to get three times the number today of the sold-out Hard Rock Stadium.

57:40Scott Galloway:If you could ask them to do one fairly simple, not even courageous thing that would create that type of harmony, synergy, and effect around trying to arrest what I think 99 % of people are going to believe is a good thing, and that is a slow burn towards authoritarianism, whether you see it coming from the right or the left or what have you. Most people on the left or right are going to go, authoritarianism, bad. What would be that one thing, based on your research, that you would ask people to do? Ami, I'll let you go first, and Julia, you'll have the last word. To find a political home. I think that this is going to be a long haul.

58:24And Trump will, whatever will happen to Trump is going to happen to Trump, but they're going to keep trying to do this for a very long time. We know this from every other part of the world. We understand in our lives that in moments of spiritual crisis, it's important to have maybe a faith community. We understand that in moments of health crisis, it's important to have a social safety net. For whatever reason in this country, we don't have a sort of consistent political home, somewhere to engage with, somewhere to be regularly, somewhere to be with other people. Scott, all of this is deeply connected to the first thing you said about people taking risks online and not taking risks offline.

59:00We have to start gathering and building power together at the most local level. And I'm not, and the reason I say this is because there's not one thing that's going to end this. But if we are all deeply engaged in a regular political community where that is where we can decide our futures together and people are deciding together what are the issues that matter to them, that is actually genuinely, according to the research, the first step in getting us off this path. Julia? I mean, I think I would maybe end with what I ended up doing because writing this book sort of radicalized me to think about my own life and how I really—as a journalist, I had a kind of view, I don't need to participate in this stuff.

59:42In fact, it's like more pure to sit here and witness everything. And so I put flyers up on every house on my street and I said, let's all meet. I didn't know my neighbors. I've lived on the street for 15 years. and I had a little wine and cheese party and I gave everybody ice whistles and I said, let's get on a group chat. Now we're on a WhatsApp group all together. We've had a second meeting. I'm planning a barbecue this summer as soon as we're off book tour. And it's actually transformed my life in a way that is so positive and it means we're ready, right? I learned this from the activists in Washington, D.C., which is basically an occupied city.

1:00:26There are 5 ,000 troops right now in D.C. patrolling and intimidating people, arresting people for being past curfew. People don't realize, like, we're already in a situation that we would write about in another country as like, oh, the Capitol has been militarily occupied. And the way that they prepared in D.C. for that was every block started group chats because that is how you need to know where are the military, who's going where. And we have to prepare now by getting to know everyone in our lives and building solidarity with them.

1:01:04Scott Galloway:Julia Angwin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and founder of Proof News. Ami Fields Meyer is a former White House senior advisor and political strategist. Very much appreciate your time today and congratulations on the book On Courage and very much appreciate your good work. Thanks to both of you for your time today. Thank you. Thank you, Scott.

1:01:46Scott Galloway:Algebra of Happiness. I'm at an incredible university on campus in a hotel near the campus. And I just dropped my son for orientation and carried over where there were all these, you know, nice parents in cargo pants and sundresses and some, you know, 18-year-old kid looking embarrassed that they have to endure hanging out with their parents, carrying pillows and blankets, and it's just for one night. So I'm fine now. I think I'm going to be a mess during drop-off day, but I've been reflecting a lot on kids and the separation. You know, I'm not going to lie. This is tough. I planned to do so much with my oldest.

1:02:32Scott Galloway:We were going to buy a car or an old car and fix it up and drive across the country. I always wanted to take him to Latin America. I always wanted him, quite frankly, to come on tour with me when I was speaking because I thought he would be impressed. these crowds. You know, I wanted to take, and we did a lot of stuff. We did more than most dads did, but the reality is I missed a lot because I was working a lot. And no lesson here. I'm glad I worked a lot. We have a level of opportunity now in an absence of stress that is a function of the fact that I did sacrifice a decent amount, but there's just no getting around it.

1:03:09Scott Galloway:It's tough. And the only thing I would say to you is that, you know, my kid not wanting me around when I drop him at the dorms, that's a good thing. He's comfortable on his own. He's confident. Because he knew he had someone in his life who's a good person that wants him to succeed. You know, your parents are the only people who want you to succeed or be more successful than them. And for the dads out there, one, it goes really fast. So if you're planning to drive across the nation with your son, schedule it now, because before you know it, they're moving into the dorms. And that the most important thing is just presence.

1:03:46Scott Galloway:And whether that means FaceTiming from when you're on the road, I call my boys, something I'm really proud of. I call my boys every night, no matter where I am. And if they don't pick up, I call them again until they pick up, even if it's only a 15-second call. So what's the lesson? It goes fast. You've heard that before. but just presence and just them knowing that you're their priority or they're your priority. You drop off your kid at the dorm and he says, I'm good dad and rushes you out of the door, not because he doesn't like you, not because he doesn't love you, but because you were there and he has that basic confidence.

1:04:30Scott Galloway:This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Genere. Cami Reek is our social producer. Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from Prop G Media.

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