A Bit of Optimism - Taking Comfortable Risks with Scott Galloway

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

When is a risk worth taking? We have to learn to embrace the comfortable risks - the ones where the pain of failure is worthwhile or even valuable.  Podcaster, author and NYU professor, Scott Galloway and I talk about a lot of things, including our concern that the youngest generation is too afraid of the risks worth taking and how that may be adversely affecting them. This is… A Bit of Optimism. For more on Scott and his work check out: https://www.profgalloway.com/https://profgmedia.com/the-pod/https://profgmedia.com/pivot/https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/713560/adrift-by-scott-galloway/ 

Scott Galloway is a man of many talents and many opinions. He is the host of the Prof G podcast and the co-host of New York Magazine's podcast Pivot. He's also a marketing professor at NYU's Stern School for Business and the author of Adrift, America in 100 Charts. He's also a speaker, an entrepreneur, and a famous pessimist. I'd never actually met Scott before, so I wanted to get together with him and talk about, well, everything. This is a bit of optimism. I wanted to invite you on the podcast for a very simple reason. You have a lot of opinions about a lot of things in the world. And I figured over the course of this hour, we could solve all the

problems together. Oh, wait, no, 50 minutes max. I mean, that's what I love. I mean, I love efficiency. Depends how much we're drinking. Depends how much we're drinking. Yeah. Do you find that when you drink more, your opinions get louder or stronger? Yeah, yes. And I find I like me and the rest of the world a lot more. I'm a better version of me, a little bit fucked up. Are we allowed to use half bomb here? You can use anything you want. Alcohol, like Winston Churchill said, I've got more out of alcohol than it's gotten out of me. One of the reasons I work out really hard and try and eat mostly healthy is so that I can drink.

I really enjoy it. I really enjoy edibles. I think substances in moderation are vastly underrated. I think that's a good place to start, which is this idea of moderation. We, at least as an American society right now, don't seem to be very good at moderation. I wonder, is it a human condition? Is it a modern society? Is it a tech problem? Or is it me just romanticizing the past? So first off, I think your body is a great regulator for what you need. And you know that science says regulate or modulate trans fats, sugars, alcohol. I try not to drink too much. And as I get older, I'm trying to replace alcohol with other things because I do think alcohol gets harder on your system as you get older. I would actually be very curious to know

what your view and consumption, if at all, is of alcohol and substances. What does Simon Sinek do or not do? I actually have never been drunk my whole life. We will be professional colleagues, but I'm not sure we can be good friends if you don't drink, Simon. No, I do drink.

I love good wine. You don't drink to success. Yeah, I love good wine. I love a cocktail. To me, a fine peaty scotch is the best thing in the world. So you drink for taste. You generally drink for taste. I genuinely drink for taste. And ever since college, I've never understood the concept that let's go out to get drunk. Never. I really never got it. And so I've never done it. Did you have alcoholism in your life? No. No alcoholism in my life. No alcoholism in my family. My parents would joke that we have the same alcohol in our liquor cabinet for my entire life. We would just move it from house to house

and guests would drink it. Okay. So let me ask a follow-up question. I'm really enjoying this as you as my guest, but I believe, and tell me if you believe this, my thesis is that everyone has a certain amount of addiction in their life. Addiction to affirmation, addiction to porn, alcohol, shopping, whatever it is, right? Yeah. Yeah. Where do you think your addictive tendencies, if at all, pop up? For me, it goes in and out of phases. Snacking for me, it's almost like an addiction where I will have a full dinner, I will be full, and I will come home and I will open the cupboard and start snacking like an addict. I cannot help myself. And I have the same guilt as an addict. I'll go, you shouldn't do this. You're eating. Why are you doing this? You're

doing this before you go to bed. Why are you eating ice cream? And yet I'll keep doing it and I'll do it every single night. And then for some reason, I don't know why, I just don't. Even healthy stuff, I do the same thing. I'll be exercising like crazy and I'm in the habit, hard to get out of the habit. And then I don't know what will happen. And then I'm out of the habit and can't get back into the habit. So my life tends to be a little more peaks and valleys of intensity and lack of intensity. This is an addiction I suffer from and it's pathetic and I'm trying to work on it. I am addicted to the affirmation from strangers. I care too much about praise

from people I don't know. I care too much about praise from the people I love. I don't think you can ever care too much about the praise. I would argue that's not an addiction. That's healthy. I don't know. If you've dated me. Who knows? I do drink a lot.

I do drink a lot. It could have happened. So a long time ago when I had a job, I would piss off people at work all the time. You know, Simon, that's not how we do things here. Or I would step on someone's toes politically in trying to get something done. For example, I sort of came to the realization that if I want to accomplish anything in this world, I have to get used to the idea that people aren't going to like me. I made a rule though. It wasn't blind. Rule number one is if they're intimidated by me, I don't care. If they disagree with me and that's why they don't

like me, I don't care. But if it's somebody I respect who doesn't like me, I have a problem and that's on me. But you know this, when people start disliking you, you're probably on the map. When people start disliking you, you're probably on the map. Because I remember when Start With Why first came out, the early comments on Amazon, for example, or my TED Talk were like, this is wonderful. This is great. I've been trying to say this my whole life. And it's only when it started to actually have some success, and it wasn't just the early adopters, that people started really harshing on me and harshing on the book. And to me, it's when you start getting negativity, you're probably doing something right. It took me a while to get to what you've gotten to. And that is simple. If you don't get pushback,

if you don't get people who really dislike what you're saying, you're not saying anything, or you're talking about dogs or something that's not that controversial. So I apologize. My son is at the door. I have to take a one minute break. Go do it. And he's back. So we had to take a little break because Scott was just letting in his son from the front door. How old is your son? I have two sons. I mean, I have a 12 and a 15 year old. Do you have kids? I'm an uncle. I love uncle life of an 11 and 13 year old. Do you plan to have kids? If I fall in love with somebody madly enough, yes, I'm totally open to it.

15 years ago, I didn't have any real intention to have kids. I was, I love my life. I'm selfish, but I was smart enough to know I was selfish and I was kind of ready not to do it and ended up having them almost, not accidentally, but got, you know, was very enamored with somebody. And basically she said, I want to have kids. And I said, well, I don't want to get married. And she said, I don't need to be married to have kids.

And before you know it, we popped out two kids. And the hard part is, I don't know how old you are. You look like you're in your forties. It gets harder. Your criteria for that right mate. Yeah. The bar gets higher and higher and higher. Because here's the thing. You probably have really interesting friends. You have economic security. You have

access to really cool things. You probably have some really healthy, wonderful relationships in your life. There's never a good time to have kids. Marriage gets, I don't want to call it an increasingly worse deal as you get older, but you kind of get too smart to make that decision. And by the way, the studies show that people in general in their 30s and 40s without kids are happier than people with kids. We don't like to say that out loud. It's when you get older that it gets hard. I'm like you. I don't really care about the institution of marriage. I do, however, think that marriage should be a renewable contract every seven years, that every seven years you can reevaluate if you want to re-sign the contract like we do in business. Nobody has a contract

in business forever. We would never do that. But we would sit down every few years and review the terms and say, yes, let's keep doing this. And I think every seven years there should be an out for people who are unhappy in their marriage. But that's just the opinion from somebody who's not married. That makes sense. Supposedly evolutionary from a biological standpoint, we're not meant to be monogamous. We're meant to be serial monogamous. That's supposedly kind of our natural state is to be with one person, but to occasionally switch it up. The thing that screws that up is kids. Because once you have kids, it's not hard to get married. I was married when I was a younger man. It didn't work out. And what it was is just a very expensive breakup when you don't have kids, it's not hard to get married. And I was married when I was a younger man. It didn't work out.

And what it was is just a very expensive breakup when you don't have kids. And it's embarrassing. You run into people who knew you, and they act like there's been a death in the family. It's like, no, really, we're both fine. It's kids. The most important decision you'll make is who you decide not to partner with, but if and who you decide to have kids with, because you are in that person's life for 20 to 25 years. You're inextricably linked financially, emotionally,

and the thing you care most about in the world, whether I couldn't stand kids, I couldn't stand being around other people's kids. But there's something kind of God reaches into your soul and turns on the switch when they look, smell, and feel like you. And you're just sort of, I wouldn't say, I wasn't in love with my kids when they first came kind of marching out of my girlfriend. I sort of fell in love with them. But now it's just kind of everything I do is sort of kind of reverse engineers to what is best for them.

And I think a lot of us, myself included, maybe I'm not sure I'd still be married if it wasn't for the kids. And I think it's a good thing. included maybe, I'm not sure I'd still be married if it wasn't for the kids. And I think it's a good thing. I think having something that binds you to someone or something other than your kind of needs at that time, because it's hard. I think it does something really sophisticated, right? My work is about cause and my work is about service and committing to something greater than yourself. And I think the choice to be a parent, the choice to be an engaged active parent is a choice of service. It is an act of service where I'm out of their life, after they're now leading their own lives. And I think there's no greater act of service than parenting. Maybe that's why

I'm more relaxed about it. It's maybe because I do try to live a life of service. And I think about these things in very similar terms. It just is not directed at one or two children. Have you changed your actual personality? Has it changed because of children? Oh, yeah. There's a downside. I've become much more anxious. I never used to worry about anybody.

I find out someone's not doing well when I was saying, oh, my God, it's too bad. How can I help them? And then I go back to, what am I doing this weekend? Or what fabulous event or fabulous people am I going to hang around? I went right back to me. And having people you care about this much is a lot of anxiety. And also it actually, in a very pedestrian way, made me very focused professionally. One of the most frightening moments of my life was when my first kid was born and I was 41. And I had just been run over by

a truck called the Great Financial Recession, and I was living in New York and wasn't as economically secure as I'd expected to be by that point. And all of a sudden, when it's just you and you're blessed with certification and pedigree and live in a good economy, you kind of know you'll be all right. I always knew like if I needed to, I'd just downsize and I'll be all right. Once you have a kid and you see schools and preschool and needing a two or three bedroom in Manhattan, you just realize, wow, this is, I'm responsible for someone. And all of a sudden I felt a great deal of that economic anxiety. But the good news was it was hugely motivating for me. And I got very serious about work again. And I said, okay, if you want to be

great at anything, Scott, you got to buckle down. Because I worked very hard as a younger man, had some early success professionally, and then just sort of kind of, I don't know, I'm going to say wound down, but I got a job on the faculty at NYU and I wasn't really going for it. And my first son really motivated me. But it's also just made me more empathetic. The things I love, the way I would describe it is when I was single, I was like a vampire. They say Anne Rice's vampires, no matter how much sex they have, no matter how much fun they have, they're never sated. I felt like I was never sated as a single person. I'm dating someone really cool and really attractive, but wait, could I date someone cooler and hotter? Could I make more money? I was constantly like swiping

left on everything in my life, hoping for a bigger, better deal. And for the first time in my life with kids, there are moments where last night I was watching Inter Milan and AC Milan play. And my son is real, my 12 year old's just fascinated with football. And he just kind of rolls into the couch and just sort of naturally throws his legs over mine. And that moment, like occasionally you have a moment like that and you're like, this is it. This, I don't, there's literally nothing more I want. I can't imagine a cuter kid with warmer legs. I can't, you can't imagine anything more.

It's the first time in my life where it's like, okay, I get it. I get it. I don't need more. I don't need more. And I've never had that feeling before. So huge upside, but it comes at a real cost. I loved, I know the life you're leading. I loved it and I was really good at it. Focused on your professional life, focused on doing really cool things, cool friends. You get to say yes to anything that sounds fun. And then what happens on weekends when you have kids is basically your whole weekend is the kids. And to some extent, it's kind of relaxing because it's like, what are we doing this weekend? You don't have to figure it out. Just look at the kids' soccer schedule and they're studying. It's like it's all about the kids. But it's a trade-off. Most people will tell you, oh yeah, it's an amazing thing. I don't know. I think you can be really happy. I imagine you have a very nice life. The thing I worry about is as an older person, do you start to feel a sense of, I don't know, I don't know who's going to take care of

you. I think about that stuff a lot. Who's going to come visit me? I think that's actually a good segue where you talked about the grants is always greener. There seems to come visit me? I think that's actually a good segue where you talked about the grants is always greener. There seems to be a trend and I'm hearing about it. I don't know if you're getting questions from the people you talk to as well, but I'm hearing more and more patterns in business of young people particularly, but it skews younger, young people in particular who the grass really is always greener in every aspect of their lives because the way they date is shopping. And I know you've talked about this, where you just go online, swipe left, swipe right, and you're just shopping. And that skillset that our generation had to develop

of walking up to somebody and be like, hey, and learning rejection and all these things. And there's real effort in trying to find someone new where now there's no effort in trying to find someone new. People are dissatisfied more in their relationships because they can just turn on a phone and see what's available. But the same with their jobs. The idea that I'm happy-ish in my job, but as soon as I turn on Glassdoor or something, I see somebody who's making more, doing more. And it's that Instagram problem where everybody's happier than me and everybody's partner is prettier than mine and everybody's vacation is better than mine and everybody's job is better than mine, everybody's boss is better than mine, I better start looking. Yeah, there's a lot there. So there's the Instagram, one of the

Instagram effects is everybody has more washboard abs than me, is hotter, or is living a wealthier lifestyle than me. It's either straight porn or wealth porn. And if you want to think less of your friend group, just start following them. I find that the biggest strain on my friendships has been when I start following them on social and I find out their political views or, I don't know, people rubbing wealth in other people's faces. I find it really, you know, the argument is always, well, the middle-class person is living a better life than the richest person just a hundred years ago. But if you're on Instagram and all you see is an edited version or a curated version of someone's life that is sort of unrealistic and unattainable for 99.9% of the life, we have huge,

huge FOMO. As it relates to work, I think it's probably a good thing that people are now switching a lot because I've always thought the loyalty to institutions is largely a mythology or a means of convincing young, mostly men, to go to war and kill themselves in pursuit of an entity such that old rich guys can maintain their wealth and land. So I think loyalty to institutions is vastly overrated. I think you should be loyal to people. Whenever people come to me and ask for advice around a job, you never want to leave a job unless it's terrible before two or three years because just selfishly you begin to look like someone that can't be dependent upon but you should be loyal to people not loyal to institutions you know i'm at nyu and everyone talks about

loyalty nyu i'm loyal to the dean and i'm loyal to my colleagues there but nyu is not gonna it's not concerned with the condition of my soul it's not gonna take care of me and now i'll segue to online dating i think online dating is just fascinating. And it's, especially with COVID, a third, and we don't like to talk about this, but a third of marriages used to begin at work. A third of relationships used to begin at work. The majority of relationships that come out of the workplace aren't toxic, don't involve a power dynamic. People meet at work and they fall in love and they have kids. I go to weddings all the time of people who've met at the companies I've started and it's a mitzvah. I love doing it. The hard part when you take out vibe and pheromones and body language and humor and all the magic and mystery of what makes someone

attracted to someone else and you turn it two-dimensional on an app, it largely becomes around guys are, does she look attractive? We're very one-dimensional, but our filter is more porous. We find a lot of women attractive, whereas women have a much finer filter and are only attracted to a certain type of individual. And it's usually a guy who can signal his ability to garner resources in the future. I've gone to MIT and I just started at Google and my Rolex accidentally got into my profile picture. And the same, if you have 50 men on Tinder and 50 women on Tinder, something like 45 of the women will show all of their attention, Simon, to just five men, leaving 45 men vying over just five women. So if mating online were an economy, it would have

greater income inequality than Venezuela if you applied the Gini coefficient. And the result is that the top 10% of attractiveness of men engage in what I call Porsche polygamy. And that is they have so many options thrown at them that it doesn't incent them to develop long-term relationships and quite frankly, doesn't lead to great behavior. The guys who are 50 to 90 in terms of attractiveness do kind of the same, but the bottom half of attractiveness of men online are totally shut out of the market. Like nothing. Swipe right on 20 people, get absolutely no matches, and it reaffirms this suspicion they've had as young men that society doesn't value them.

And then as far as women goes, I would say it's just generally shittier across the entire spectrum for women. it's just generally shittier across the entire spectrum for women. And one of the things I talk a lot about is for a variety of biological, economic, and societal reasons, we're not producing enough economically and emotionally viable men. So women are choosier and we're producing fewer kind of what I call quality men. And the result is online. You have this winner take most environment. There's a lot to unpack there. There's something insidious about a frustrated man. I remember a few years ago, there was a sorority house that was shut up, and he was an incel, and he blamed the pretty girls that he was a virgin. The part that was scary, and the reason I'm singling him out, is he made a video of himself right before he entered the house and started shooting.

And he had this calm and joy. It was horrific to watch him talk about. And you got a sense of, for the first time in his life, he felt in control. And you realize that these acts of frustrated male, I think all people seek to have feelings of control. And I think loss of control is a very, very scary thing, loss of agency. The Middle East, for example, when the Middle East was a hotbed for global terrorism, you looked at the Middle East and as a region, it was the highest unemployment in the whole world, over 25% unemployment. You have a shame-based

society as well. So a young man, because of the shame-based society, literally won't be able to find a mate unless they have a job and they're not living at home, except they don't have a job and they are living at home and they're a 27-year-old virgin. That explodes in some way or some shape or form of somebody trying to assert themselves. You have summarized what I think is one of the biggest, most serious existential threats in America, and that is the most dangerous person in the world throughout history, is a young, lonely, broke male. When you hear about a mass shooter, you know who he is before you know who he is. Oh, yeah. Almost always.

Yeah. You know it's a young man who's not attaching to work, not attaching to school, not attaching to relationships, and feels like this is his only way of recapturing social status. And people on the right who want to avoid a conversation around gun control will claim it's mental illness. 95% of shooters the day before would not be classified as mentally ill. I talk a lot about this, that we have to find third spaces, vocational programming. We have to create more opportunities for random meetings for people, for them to establish relationships. We got to get people out of their house. We got to recognize that boys don't mature as quickly as girls and start talking about programs and national service so they can redshirt a year and develop. As a dad, I feel like really all I am is a prefrontal cortex for the stupid decisions my boys make every day.

Seven and 10 high school valedictorians are girls. for the next five years, there's going to be two female college graduates for every one male college graduate. One in three men in America under the age of 30 haven't had sex in the last 12 months. And people hear the term sex and their mind goes different places, but think of it as the elemental or a key step to what is the elemental foundation of any society. And that is relationships. The most violent, unstable countries in the world all have too many of this one cohort, and we are relationships. The most violent, unstable countries in the world all have too many of this one cohort, and we are producing way too many of them. And I got a lot of pushback because young men will say, just because you're an incel or you're an introvert

doesn't mean you're dangerous and doesn't mean you're a loser. That's a fair point. A lot of young women will say, well, where were you the last 400 years when women were having issues? And I would argue, you know, 40 years ago when it was 40-60 female to male college admissions, we did something about it. We leveled up women and that was the right thing to do. But I think the answer has to be, we need to dramatically level up all young people. And that is make a huge investment in increasing freshman class sizes, vocational training, funding athletic programs, after-school programs. And also, as men be more involved in young men's lives, 70% of people who are incarcerated didn't have a male role model.

They were raised by a single parent. I mean, the first thing a society has to recognize when you advocate for young men, it doesn't mean you're in any way against women. And unfortunately, a lot of the men who get all the attention on TikTok who are quote unquote pro-men, it's just thinly veiled misogyny. And so this, what I'll call any movement or any advocacy for young men is immediately conflated and understandably with being anti-feminist. And that's not true at all. The moment you start blaming women for your problems, you've lost the script. It means you really have problems and you failed. But I think one of the biggest threats to our society right now, full stop, is that young men feel like they have no

place, no opportunity. It would be hard to find a cohort in America, Simon, that has fallen further faster than men under the age of 30. Just to finish the thoughts, Simon, by far, whenever I talk about the crisis of young men in this country, the group of people I hear from and who are most supportive of the work, hands down, is mothers. And the conversation goes something like this. I have three kids, two daughters and a son. One daughter's at Penn, one daughter's in New York in PR, and my son is in the base room vaping and playing video games. No one sees this more closely and sees the problem more than mothers. A few years ago, I stumbled upon some research about alcoholics. And the research went something like this.

It's that children need double the amounts of dopamine than adults to get the same feeling. So you're filling them with more drug. And if they discover alcohol before the age of 15, you know, and they use it to numb the stresses and strains of adolescence, the stresses and strains of adolescents, the statistics are something like 40% of them are likely to become alcoholics when they're adults. Whereas if they simply wait to start drinking till after the age of, I don't remember, something like 19, that number plummets to like 7%. And the few people who accidentally discover alcohol during their high stress teenage years during adolescence to numb the pain,

not only increase their likelihood for addiction to alcohol, but also like any addiction, don't learn the skills of forming deep, meaningful relationships. In other words, asking someone for help. I wonder if social media and the video game and the TikTok are now the modern alcohol that unfortunately are being exposed to young children much younger than 15. And they aren't learning that skill. And I hear from older Gen Zs and younger millennials that they've struggled to form, and these are their words, not mine, that they have struggled to form in their lives, deep, meaningful relationships, that they like their friends, but they actually wouldn't trust their friends in time of need.

And I wonder if a young boy's brain and the easy access to the video game is contributing. I'm not blaming video games. It's not about video gaming companies. It's about limitations and balance. Your instincts and your data are correct and they're powerful. So what do we know? We know that a young man is four times as likely to overdose than a woman. We also know that 85%

of people who are addicted to gambling are men. That dopa around gambling, men are much more prone to it. Where it flips back to harm for the girl is there's now peer-reviewed evidence that when social went on mobile, it became very taxing mentally on girls. The number of hospital admissions for self-harm and self-cutting among girls skyrocketed when social went on mobile. The correlation isn't as strong with men. There actually isn't a correlation with video games. What there is a correlation with is that young men are finding those DOPA hits with digital means. The number of high school seniors who see their friends every day has been cut in half of the last 10 years. They're not having sex. They're not going on dates. One in seven men in America say they don't have a single friend. And then you layer in COVID and you layer

in fewer third spaces, whether it's church or softball leagues or continuing education or junior college, you have especially a group of men who aren't as social, they kind of go down a rabbit hole or in their parents' basement. They also sent some signals around that toxic masculinity is maybe approaching a strange woman. So they're sent some confusing signals around that. And they never develop the skills. One of the things I do with my boys when we go out is I force them to speak to at least one stranger while they're out. Because the reason I'm here with you is that I got comfortable taking uncomfortable risks. I got comfortable asking people to invest in a stupid organization called a startup.

I got comfortable emailing people I didn't know. No, I got comfortable approaching a woman in the middle of the day at a hotel pool and asking her name at the Raleigh Hotel in South Beach. And then, you know, four years later, our son's middle name is Raleigh. Nothing wonderful is going to happen to you unless you take a comfortable risk, especially around relationships. And if men don't figure that out early and they're told for whatever reason they get dopa hits from video games or Netflix or vaping, whatever it is, and they can just stay at home and have these reasonable facsimile of relationships, they're just going to be less happy and they don't develop those skills. But everything you're saying resonates around addiction, around finding alternative means of dopa. My youngest developed device addiction. And you can just see the way their brain gets rewired. They're so used to constant feedback, action reaction on TikTok, on a video game, on a device, where he just started gravitating towards any screen for that immediate feedback, that immediate dope hit. I suffer from the same thing. I get off a podcast and I used to go on Twitter and say, do people love me? And I could, if I was bored at dinner, just pull up, see what tweets I got, what likes I got. And there was a DOPA there. And the

DOPA supposedly happens before you open it and see what it is. But I'm old enough to recognize it and modulate it. Our kids aren't. And imagine being presented with your full self 24 by seven as a 15 year old. It also opens up an uncomfortable conversation. It seems this younger generation, older Gen Z, younger Gen Y, they're in the workforce. And I'd say high school age too, but we've become very uncomfortable being uncomfortable. People are messy. And because people are messy, and we're filled with egos and insecurities and ambitions and doubts and all these things. And because people are messy, that means relationships are messy. And because relationships are messy, it means companies are messy and governments are messy

and interactions between companies and governments are messy because it's all people. A productive relationship is one that can lean into discomfort. It doesn't have to work out the way we necessarily want it to. It's not Pollyannish, but we can lean into discomfort and we learn to sit in discomfort. And it seems that for reasons which we could have an entirely separate podcast about, a younger generation is working hard to avoid any discomfort at any cost. You and I both know that leaning into tension, which is not fun at all, like nobody wants to lean into tension and have an uncomfortable

conversation with a boss or a partner or a kid, but 99 times out of 100, if at least one of you has the skill set of how to manage that conversation, you come through it stronger and actually like each other more. I think the thing that's missing is we aren't teaching young people human skills. We don't teach in a classroom listening. We don't teach how to have difficult conversations. We don't teach how to give and receive feedback. We don't teach how to resolve conflict. And so what we end up doing is resorting to blame and shame and accusation. All of the things you and I are talking about are just symptoms. There's a few things there. One, as parents, the mistake we've made over the last 20 or 30 years is kind of helicopter concierge

parenting, where we use so many sanitary wipes on our kids' lives, they don't develop their own immunities. And then they get to college. Everything that's gone wrong with our kid, we figure it out for them. And they're not doing well at school, we get them tutors. Teachers being unfair, oh, wait, I'm going to call and I'm going to solve this problem. They just don't develop any kind of resilience or immunities. And this happens, it's happening across America. They come to university and they get the heartbroken or they get the first C and they don't have the ability to manage it, or even on a lesser scale, I think there's a general belief that they believe that in this era, they should never be offended, that they shouldn't hear something that upsets them. And we create these things called safe places. A decision comes down about a high-profile case that doesn't break the way progressives would want, and NYU puts out a message saying, we have a safe place. And I find that, I'm like, we're not

helping. If people need help and we want to discuss the issue and think about it, that's fine. I mean, but we're falling into this trap of creating this princess and the peace syndrome where people can't bounce back or people feel that the world owes them an obligation to not be offended. We have gone so far down the rabbit hole of what it might offend people that we don't even have what I'd call intelligent conversations around the issue. And people are so afraid.

When my company was acquired, I got my first call from HR and I had made a joke in the all hands meeting. Someone said, jokingly said, I'm new here, what's vacation policy? And I said, the vacation policy is new people don't ask about the vacation policy. And everyone laughed and someone said, jokingly said, I'm new here. What's vacation policy? And I said, the vacation policy is new. People don't ask about the vacation policy. And everyone laughed. And I said, you know, it's this and it's this. HR immediately weighs in. You can't ever say anything discouraging people from taking vacation. I use foul language a lot. I'm a profane and vulgar person. I use

profane language in meetings. And they're me like, you can't use, you can't use profane language in meetings. And I'm like, well, I don't know. I don't know if this is going to help. I mean, it's more profane to find out you're fired and never know why no one really sat this person down and said, you got to get better at these things or you're tone deaf in meetings. You're saying dumb thing. There's never hard conversations anymore in companies until you get a legally approved memo from HR that shuts off your email and fires you. I think there's a lack of mentoring. It's important to be sensitive. I don't think you ever give feedback around things people can't change. You can't tell someone to have more presence or you can't tell them if you could just be more charming. Well,

okay. That's something they can't work on, right? But I find we have gone so far the other way that we're creating a very fragile generation. And I don't think it's going to do them any good in the work world. I think we've also confused discomfort and toxicity are not synonymous. Like toxicity is uncomfortable, but not all discomfort is toxic.

If somebody's in a bad mood at work and that person happens to be higher than you in the hierarchy, they happen to be your boss, that is toxic. If somebody's in a bad mood at work and that person happens to be higher than you in the hierarchy, they happen to be your boss, that is uncomfortable. And I think what we aren't learning is empathy. Instead of saying my boss is an asshole because of this one time, if it's repeated behavior, that's different. There are lines. Sometimes the lines are fuzzy. I'm not arguing that the lines aren't clear, but there are lines. And I think what we're doing is erasing the lines. Your notion around empathy and generosity, right? When I teach my class, we talk about sensitive issues and I'm like, every once in a while, someone's going to say something they didn't mean to say. And the tendency I find in this era is to make a cartoon of their statements and go after them and try and score a few points among your colleagues for calling them out and playing guardians of gotcha. And why can't we be more generous with each other? You don't know what's going on with them. Maybe, who knows, maybe their kid's struggling. Maybe

they're going through a tough time in the relationship. Maybe they're stressed about making the rent, whatever it is. Or maybe they just said something really stupid and they wish they hadn't said it. But what I find, especially in a campus environment sometimes, this generation is so aware of the problems in our society that they go on the hunt for fake racists. They go on the hunt for fake bullies in an environment that is so collegial and so diverse and wants to do the right thing that we should be so open to each other and provoking each other intellectually and trying to learn from each other and being generous with it. If we can't be generous with each other on a campus, for God's sakes, where are people going to be generous with each other? But it's like, given the benefit of the doubt, he or she probably didn't mean to upset people or be insensitive. You should absolutely disagree and say, this is why your comments don't make any sense, or this is why I thought your comments were dumb. That's good too. That's a good learning moment. And then

make sure that you say, you know, does what I say make sense to you? But everyone's in this environment now where they feel like they're scoring virtue points for calling people out. And then what happens is it creates resentment under the kind of seat because people want to work with people that basically will give them the benefit of the doubt. Occasionally I screw up. Occasionally you screw up. We're going to give each them the benefit of the doubt. Occasionally I screw up, occasionally you screw up. We're going to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Here's where I want to end. Optimism. I'm known as an optimist, at least, and we've had a very soapboxy conversation. What are you optimistic about? And what is good about a young generation? What can we leverage and amplify that is good, that will make this world good?

You're naturally an optimist i'm naturally a pessimist i'm a glass half empty kind of guy and um that's a shocker right look we need guys like you to invent the plane we need guys like me to demand seatbelts so i have a role i have to force myself to look at the data to be an optimist but when you look at the data you can't help but be optimistic. The World Health Organization wanted to cut poverty in half, abject poverty in half, in 1980, over 40 years. It took them 20, and then they did it again in the following decade. Child poverty in the United States was cut by 50% through COVID. A child born today will likely live 100 years. We're passing

infrastructure acts. We're passing acts to address climate change. I think America is reasserting its dominance. I think, and this sounds, this is political. I think we're kicking a murderous autocrat in the nuts over and over through Western unity that's brought NATO back together. Europe's a union again. We are sending natural gas to Europe. We've come together. The West has come together like it hasn't since World War II. I think that kids born in America who are blessed to be born in a democratic society, more people live under democracies every day. Fewer and fewer people are dying of infectious diseases every day. I mean, there's just- But what about the people? What about individuals? Those are all trends, which are great. And those are policy decisions, which is great. And those are reactions to autocracy, which is great. But what about

the kids we're talking about who are 14, your kids, 13 and 15 years old, their friends, their friends' friends, their high school friends, their college friends, their first job friends, what are we optimistic about that they have or that they will improve that our generation couldn't or didn't? They're more talented. They're more skilled with technology. And they're much more socially aware, distinctive of some of the issues they face, the challenges they face that we discussed, more prone to depression, social media technology. They are much more socially conscious than I ever was.

They're going to be more productive. And they're going to lead much better lives. They're going to have cancer vaccines. They're going to be able to help each other. The number of people, the best chart in my book, Adrift American 100 Chart, which by the way, Simon, you did not bring up once. The best chart in the whole book is that if you look at the amount of time people are spending helping people they will never meet, it's at a record high in every region of the world. People are planting more trees the shade

of which they will not sit under than in any time in history that's a reason to be optimistic something's working this is how much i like you scott i would like to take up drinking you're ready you're ready to start just just so that you and i can be friends that is the only reason because everything else doesn't appeal to me how about this i'll even drink things i don't like the taste of yeah that's a deal no one can turn down if you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts and if you'd like to learn more about the topic you just heard please check out the optimism library at simonsenik.com, where you can get access to more than 35 on-demand classes about leadership, culture, purpose, and more. Until then, take care of yourself.

Take care of each other.