Modern Wisdom - #543 - Scott Galloway - Why Is This Generation Struggling So Much?

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Scott Galloway is a clinical professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, a public speaker, entrepreneur and an author. Millennials are the first generation who have not done better than their parents. Educational outcomes, finances, home ownership, mental health and marriage rates are all thrown up in the air. Why has this happened and what can we do about it? Expect to learn why covid worsened the wealth gap more than it already was, why TikTok is a trojan stallion which should be banned, why news pundits suck so much, what makes a news story go viral, Scott's advice to young people on how to maximise effectiveness in life, the most important things to focus on in order to be happy and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 15% discount on all VERSO’s products at https://ver.so/modernwisdom (use code: MW15) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy Adrift - https://amzn.to/3eO29zq Check out Scott's website - https://www.profgalloway.com/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Scott Galloway. He's a clinical professor of marketing at the New York Stern School of Business, a public speaker, entrepreneur, and an author. Millennials are the first generation who have not done better than their parents. Educational outcomes, finances, home ownership, mental health, and marriage rates are all thrown up in the air. Why has this happened? And what can we do about it? I expect to learn why COVID worsened the wealth gap more than it already was. Why TikTok is a Trojan stallion, which should be immediately banned. Why newspundits suck so much. What makes a news story go viral?

Scott's advice to young people on how to maximize effectiveness in life, the most important things to focus on in order to be happy, and much more. Don't forget, if you're listening, you might not be subscribed, and that means you're going to miss episodes when they go up, and it's a great way to support the show. So if you're on Spotify, press the follow button in the middle of the page, or there is a plus on the top right hand corner in Apple podcasts. Ah, thank you very much. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Scott Galawai.

Scott Galloway. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Chris. In the 1950s, a young person had a 90% chance of out earning their parents. Now, it's a 50% chance. On the half of millennials are earning more than its parents. Since 1989, people under the age of 40 have seen their share of the nation's wealth plummet from 19% to 9% and for the first time in US history, young people are no longer better off economically than their parents were at the same age. Nice, positive headlines to get us started today. Where did you learn that? Well, first I was great to be with you, but the,

what you mentioned that for the first time in a nation's history, a 30 year old man or woman isn't doing as well as those are her parents, that's kind of a breakdown. And what is the fundamental compact between a society and its populace? And that is if you play by the rules, and you're a good person in your work hard, your kids will do better than you. That's kind of what you want. Anyone who has kids knows you're only as least happy as your least happy kid. And if your kids on average aren't doing as well as you, it means to have kids in a nation,

means your life is going to go, it's going to, it, quality of your life is going to degrade emotionally and psychologically, which means society no longer works for you. And we got to hope it's temporary, but that's the bad news. The good news is, hang on, how you look at it, this is a problem of our own making. You mentioned that the wealth of people under the age of 40 has registered by their percentage of GDP has been cut in half. And there's this illusion of complexity that the incumbents will try and foment

among media and the populists to explain why these very intractable problems are intractable. And they're not. When we, the two biggest tax deductions in America that we have passed and we have decided make sense are mortgage interest and capital gains. Who owns home and own stocks? People my age and older who rents and makes their money working people year-age and younger. So we have effectively decided that the two biggest tax cuts had further enriched the

wealthiest generation in history and that is US baby boomers. If we look at the biggest transfer of wealth that's recurring in the world, it's a transfer of wealth of $1.5 trillion and people of working age in the United States to people of retirement age in the form of social security. And again, that cohort receiving a trillion and a half dollar transfer payment from young people

are the wealthiest cohort in the history of the planet. So education skyrocketing, a regressive tax, I mean, you can just go on and on and on. This isn't an accident. This isn't forces greater than us. These are deliberate decisions, mostly because old people vote, mostly because presidential politics start in the Iowa and Maine, the two oldest, widest states in the nation. And what do you know? We have a society that tilts capital away from your generation to mind. And it is, it's, it's, it's dumb, it's short-sighted.

And it's also morally corrupt. And there's, it just goes on and on and on. Education. When I applied to school in the 80s to college, the admissions rate was 76 percent, the tuition was $1,200 a year. That same school, the admissions rate is 6 percent, and the tuition is closer to 30,000 a year. So everything we've done has sort of stacked the deck, it's sort of baby boomers have decided, head sign win tails you lose. Did the baby boomers overachieve or are millennials and zoomers underachieving or is it a combination of the two? You've said that they were the wealthiest ever.

Did they get a disproportionate gain during that period, the boomers? So I think a lot of people will try and create this trope of the quiet quitting, expectant, lazy, millennial, or Gen Z. And I don't think there's any evidence of that. I think that you could argue them more socially conscious. I think work from home probably creates more temptation to spend more time with your dogs and maybe working all the time. But the kids, and this is, there's some proximity bias here. The kids that come out of my class at NYU, the kids I work with at the Proptee Media,

are more impressive every year. And they work very hard. What has changed is that things, housing's more expensive for them, schooling's more expensive for them, and a lot of their taxes have gone up. And my life has gotten easier as I've gotten older. So I don't, in terms of the baby movements,

I don't think of outperformed. I think they've been fairly lucky. They came of age during the greatest economic boom of history. The last, basically the last 13 years have been incredible. And the last 40 have been pretty remarkable in terms of prosperity. But what the baby members have done a great job of is ensuring that when there's a pandemic and

we need massive massive relief, it doesn't go to poor or young people. It goes to older wealthy people. Two-thirds of the PPP program ended up in the top quintile of household income earners. So we've basically done a great job of kind of weaponizing governments and creating what I call this really dangerous rejection as exclusionary society, where it's once I have a college degree, I'm going to encourage my university to pull up the gates and applaud the dean when admissions rates go down.

And the university rankings love this exclusionary kind of luxury ramp positioning. Once I have a house, once I buy a house, I find the money to get a house. I try and make it more difficult for other houses to be built. I show up to local board meetings and community meetings and I make it difficult to approve any additional housing. Once I have a tech company that's working, I spend more and more money on lobbying to ensure that I can abuse my monopoly position and ensure small companies don't get out of the crib. So it's this rejectionist exclusionary culture that has emerged that's turned America or morphed America from what was the best place to get rich into the best place to stay rich. There's very little churn here.

Most of the pandemic programs, if you think about it, were some loads of bread and circuses thrown for the poor, all creating cloud cover around the majority of the capital ended up in the market, which shot asset prices up, 90% of stocks are owned and 90% of real estate by dollar volumes owned by the top 1%. It was really just cloud cover to ensure that Nana and Pop-Up could upgrade their cruise cabins. And so I think these are deliberate, this is the bad news. We've deliberately taken money from young people

and transferred it to old people. The good news is that if we can make it happen, we can unmake it. All of these problems are solvable. Give me your thoughts on TikTok. I know that you dug into some of the research around that, the way that it's been weaponized and also the impact that it's having on young people. So let me just start off as saying, I love TikTok.

I think it's an extraordinary product. I think it was genius to take a platform and say, it shouldn't be social. It's not about what your friends think about you. It's not about choices. It's not about finding anything you want like YouTube. It's not about, you know, feeling bad about yourself because you don't have a six pack or you're not as rich as your friends on Instagram. It's about a streaming media platform where there's no choice. You have one choice. Tap the logo and it immediately starts calibrating based on what you like, what you swipe up, swipe down on.

And before you know it, you're in the ultimate tailored individualized, singular streaming media network that is just addictive. It's just I could go on to TikTok right now and for a couple hours, just watch it. I think my 12 year old boy, if he had his way, would disappear into his room with his phone, put diapers on so we could watch TikTok for 72 hours straight and not have a bathroom break. I think this thing is an amazing product. this phone, put diapers on so we could watch TikTok for 72 hours straight and not have a bathroom break. I think this thing is an amazing product. The issue is, if I were a member of the CCP and I saw that we had vested interests in

diminishing America's standing strategically in the world, and that the easiest way to do that was not with kinetic power because we don't have the capital that the US has to spend on aircraft carrier fleets or even through corporate espionage and they do a great job of that. I would just take my thumb and very elegantly and insidiously put it on the scales of content that reflects American a bad light. So whether you're Kim Kardashian or Joe Rogan or Jonathan Hyde, lot of your content reflects America in a very positive light. And a lot of your content highlights the problems we have.

It would be very easy. I believe they're doing this now. But I think they'd be stupid not to do this and put their thumb on the skill of content. They'd says our elections are being weaponized. Racism in US has not gotten better. It's gotten worse. That capitalism does not work.

You can't trust your leaders. And slowly but surely raise a generation of Americans, of civic leaders, military leaders, business leaders, that feel bad about America. And also aren't focused on the human rights violations in China. But basically, if you think of geopolitics as a horror movie, it's not outside threats right now. We are stronger than we've ever been. I would argue competitively.

No one's lining up for Chinese or Russian vaccines. Our GDP growth hasn't matched China's, but it's more consistent. The smartest, brightest, hardest working people in the world all have one thing in common, and that is they like the idea of either getting to Europe or getting to the United States especially. So we're the football team that gets the top draft choices every year from every high school in the world. So we're doing really well, but the horror movie would be that horror movie where they say the call is coming from inside the house.

We're eating each other in the US internally. A third of Republicans and Democrats see the other party, members of the other party is u.s. internally a third of republicans and democrats see the other party members of the other party is no mortal enemy twenty five percent of america is comfortable with an autocrat as long as the autocrat represents his or her ideals fifty four percent of democrats are worried that their kid is going to marry a republican and so that fastest way to atomize or the fastest way to defeat an enemy is atomize them. And I think TikTok, when you have kids under the age of 18 spending more time on TikTok than they spend on every streaming media company combined, would we be comfortable with Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, HBO Max, all being owned by China?

And I don't think we would. So I think there needs to be a separation between ownership and the product. I think the meta was the ultimate espionage product. I don't think the most odd, the NSA, the GRU, MI6 and the wildest dreams could have come up with meta. And I think we're going to find out that our ability to take out some of these Taliban leaders has been a function of their needs being on Instagram, we GPS drone them. And I also, and I realize this sounds paranoid, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong.

I think after the senators and elected leaders in America have their photo ops, berating Mark Zuckerberg, they go into a confidential hearing and he says, do you want us to continue help killing Taliban leaders? And they say, yes, and he says, we'll back the fuck off. I think that's why we haven't had any meaningful legislation against the big American platform. But anyways, the ultimate propaganda tools TikTok, I just don't, I think they would be stupid not to do this. And I think we're naive to think that they won't be able to do it easily. And I think we should, I think it presents a real national

security risk. The wild thing is that TikTok content that is disintegrating America or reducing patriotic feelings towards it, is generated by US citizens. Yeah, this isn't the Chinese creating content, but because of the dynamic of audience capture and the reinforcement mechanism of getting that status response, you can press your hand on the scale that rewards creators that create a particular type of narrative. And that it turns every individual TikTok user that cares to talk about politics to be more likely an unwitting, unwilling CCP agent.

It's so brilliant and insidious at the same time. And by the way, let's wrap all of this and really joyous dance videos, which makes it all feel really benign. Even done to adjust in Bieber, the catastrophe and the apocalypse will be done to adjust in Bieber soundtracks. That's right. It doesn't really matter. It all feel good. And you don't even have to put your thumb on the scale of certain individuals and not others. It can be the content from the same individual. In this podcast, I will talk about very hopeful things for America. I don't think there's anything wrong we can't fix. We 50% of the world's philanthropy originates from US institutions.

If you were to have one global headline, news headline for the last 100 years would be that British Russians and the Americans turn back fascism. The one headline for the last 50 years would be unprecedented global prosperity led by America. I'll also talk about failing young men in the US and how they're struggling and they've never done young men have never followed that cohort has fallen further faster in the US than in history. If you're TikTok and you have a series of 30 seconds, 30 second clips and you're with a CCP, which narrative do you want to see rolling more often? And it's just super, super easy. They could just take, they don't need any, they don't need to produce their own content.

They just need to tweak the algorithm to say, in the same 60 minutes, an individual will have pro and anti-American content and we're just going to slowly but surely dial up the anti-American content. And it's from someone you trust, it's from someone who also has pro-American content, so you think their content is credible. Let's create a lot of doubt about the efficacy of the vaccines. When there's thoughtful discourse on both sides, I would argue 90 plus percent of the thoughtful discourse about vaccines says on a risk-adjusted basis, you should get a vaccine.

And then 10 percent or less is doctors saying, it alters your DNA. If I'm the CCP and I want to create controversy and I want to get us hating each other more, let's make that content 50-50. Let's have everyone go out each other over the vaccines. So I would say just, quite frankly, if I were them, that's what I would do.

Why spend money on aircraft carriers? Why compete on 11th-plating field when we have this Trojan horse, the size of Montana, residing in the U.S. and we have this vehicle that the upcoming generation of Americans love and just a few small tweaks and slowly but surely. They won't even know. The movie The Sting, I don't know if you saw it with Robert Refford and Paul Newman, but the key to a great con is the mark never knows they were conned. Newman, but the key to a great con is the mark never knows they were conned. We're all victims of propaganda right now.

We all see on the left and on the right that sways our view, but we don't think we've been fooled. It's much easier to fool someone that convinced them they've been fooled. Because to acknowledge you've been fooled, it's like saying, I acknowledge I'm an ass. I'm acknowledged someone's gotten a better of me and people don't like that. So I think it's happening now. And I don't think we know it's even happening to us. We also don't know what's happening in China. I don't know how much truth is behind this. But I've heard that the Chinese algorithm on TikTok shows a very

different sort of world. It's young Chinese people doing engineering and being smart and conscientious and admirable and patriotic. Another consideration is 9.6 trillion minutes of Netflix watched in 2021, 22.6 trillion minutes of TikTok watched in 2021. Given the fact that a TikTok video at most can be 60 seconds and probably the average Netflix thing is 30 minutes. That blows my mind. It's just it's staggering. And to your point, the TikTok version, the Chinese version of TikTok and it's doing

in, it's all aspirational. Look at this kid from Shenzhen who's a concert pianist. Look at the incredible research we're doing. Look at these kids with their building in their high school. It's all uplifting, no politics. I mean, not at all. It's, so this is what the Chinese have decided they want their youth to see. Could you could that not be an argument that in China talking about the CCP in any way that's not

positive would be difficult to do no matter how you put your finger on the balance of the platform. They have a broader structure that stops people from doing that. A hundred percent and some people would argue they shouldn't be our role model. But even if you take the societal issues and the complicated conversation around censorship and media because whenever you hear the words ban and media in the same sentence, you should understandably have a gag reflex because I think one of the keys to a productive democratic society is that pretty much anyone can say pretty much anything about pretty much anyone else. I do think that's super important. But take that, push that aside,

should Chinese sectors and companies have unfettered access to our markets when we have absolutely none to theirs? Twitter, Google, Meta, what's our access over there? Zero. We have limited access. We have just enough access initially, and they create body language in a head fake that they might let us be in there just long enough so they can steal the intellectual property. They then prop up a local entrepreneur, fun that local entrepreneur and their attitude is we can steal the Google algorithm or create something reasonable fact similarly. And there's probably a two or three hundred billion dollar company Search engine that can just feed off the domestic market. What do you know? It's by do why on earth are we gonna go the Western way And go do it Italy or South Korea does and let our newspapers go out of business and let all of the shareholder value transfer to California I mean You got admire them from a Chinese standpoint. Really impressive. It's really, really.

Meanwhile, they're limiting the amount of time that their children can play video games. One hour between eight and nine PM Friday Saturday, Sunday per week, that's it. The only way that you can play games is through a streaming service. The streaming service just flick the switch. It's just not on. You can't do it. Meanwhile, you have men that are being given fakes, fitness cues and their conscientiousness and desire for aspiration and chasing goals

is being repurposed across into League of Legends or whatever other game they're now playing online. They are able to get uncanny vulvas from porn, so they're being given fake, reproductive fitness signals from porn, fake achievement fitness signals from video games. This is why, so they're being given fake reproductive fitness signals from porn, fake achievement fitness signals from video games. This is why, so you've got a quote that I found very interesting, so I had Richard Reeves on the show recently of Boys and Men, Brand New Book, which is out, and it's really interesting. You said, the most dangerous person in the world is a man who's broken and alone. What do you mean by that? Well, first off, let me signage. I had shutters go down my spine when I saw that my book was coming out the same book as Richard's book. I think that guy is amazing.

And I have been feeling and seeing this notion of how poorly young men are doing. I just can see it in my friends with their sons. I have friends who have two daughters in a son, and I'm saying this metaphorically, but loosely speaking, the daughters at Penn, the younger daughters, we're going to PR firm in Chicago, and the son is in their basement vaping and playing video games. Young men, seven to ten high school veterans or girls, for every one male college graduate over the next five years there's going to be two female college graduates. 93% of mass shooters are men, three times more likely to overdose, four times more likely to commit suicide, 12 more times more likely to be incarcerated. They do worse than single

parent households, for some reason girls have the same outcomes in a dual parent household versus a single. We have more single parent households. Our education system is biased against men, men on a behavior adjusted, our boys on a behavior adjusted, voices are twice as likely to get suspended for the same infraction as a girl. Two thirds to 80% of all primary and secondary teachers are women and understandably they're going to champion

little girls who they see themselves in. So young men just have the deck stack against them. If you walk down the avenue that is America, one in three men under the age of 30 will not have had sex in the last year. And people hear the word sex and their brain fires different ways, but sex is a key step to the elemental foundation of an A Society and that's a relationship. And then you wrap in COVID, you wrap in the biological fact that men's preferential cortex doesn't evolve this quickly. They're more immature.

And then you have all this, these, this kind of short formability to get similar Dopa of relationships on social similar dopa that you're learning or or or taking risks with robinhood or gambling and not learning you're not investing your gambling and it's fun but it's gambling you don't have to put on a shirt or figure out the skills to meet women because you can get some of that hit by watching porn. What's your motivation to go out and go through the humiliation of dating

to get to your own sex when you get a sort of a reasonable facsimile of it at home? What's your rationale for working hard and delaying gratification when you keep seeing these screenshots of men who've made 12,000% return on Salana. So, and men aren't good at executive functions. They're kind of two years behind,

an 18-year-old boy applying to college is sort of on par with a 16 or a 17-year-old girl. Or put another way. Did you see Paige Hardin published a study looking at the comparative levels of impulse control between boys and girls. So you can imagine there's a graph over time in terms of impulse control. The time is going along the bottom. You've got two lines that are both male and female for a male to have the same level of impulse control as a 10 year old girl. They need to be 24. Yeah, the delta I've heard,

that's striking. The delta I've heard, that's striking. The delta I've heard is two years. But even if you think about two years, you basically, if you have two 18-year-old people applying to college, basically the 18-year-old is competing against the 16-year-old. So imagine your intense grade applying to college, and all the girls are in 12th grade That's that's what we're facing right now and at NYU I can tell you that some of the schools there if they were totally applicant blind It would not only be predominantly female. They'd be 70% Asian female I mean the Asian community has been so successful in our society as it as it comes to producing traits and behaviors that college is love

And people think well, okay if men if men are finally not doing very well, I mean, we basically, we level the playing field about education and what we found is women just absolutely blue by. Yeah, man. Absolutely blue by. And you think, well, what's the problem with that? Well, when it was 40, 60 female to male, we decided to do something about it with Title 9 and affirmative action. And we leveled up women. was 40-60 female to male. We decided to do something about it with Title IX in affirmative

action. And we leveled up women. Now that it's 40-60 or you can even already be 30-366 in terms of graduation because men drop out. The question is, well, are we concerned now? And the knock-on effect here is that getting a college degree is still a really good plan B for economic security. On average over the course of your lifetime, a college degree is still a really good plan B for economic security. On average over the course of your lifetime, a college grad will make about double what a non-college grad makes. And so, what you have is women made socioeconomically horizontally and up, men horizontally and down.

The bottom line is women with college degrees are not interested in mating with men without college degrees. So you have this what I'll call Porsche polygamy effect. And that is when you take the chaser of online dating, which is doing the same thing that technology does to every sector is consolidating it and creating a winner take most environment, the top 10% of men in terms of attractiveness on Tinder get 80, 90% of the swipe rights.

They get all of the attention, which quite frankly doesn't lead to a lot of great behavior. Too much opportunity is not necessarily a good thing. The 50 to 90% talent in terms of attractors from NDO, okay, and the bottom 50% are just totally shut out. And what happens to these men who are totally shut out for mating opportunities? They lose confidence. They start becoming much more prone to misogynistic content with these internet celebrities telling

them it's not their fault, It's a woman's fault. They become less likely to believe in climate change. They become more nationalist. I mean young men are very good at blaming other people when things aren't going well for them. And so what are the most violent dangerous societies? I'll have them common. They'll have a disproportionate number of the most dangerous person on the planet, a young broken alone man, and we're just producing way too many of them. And we can't even have an honest conversation about it because the moment you start evangelizing for young men, the moment you're seen as quote unquote pro young man, the natural assumption is that means you're anti women because admittedly there's some guys out there on TikTok claiming to be trying to get men

confidence. It's basically thinly veiled misogyny. Yes. Referring to women as bitches and you got to own the bitches and you got to get out there, take my class for $49 a month and you'll get the money and put the bitches in their place. And you're like, Jesus Christ. that's what young men are susceptible to. It's really, it's dangerous and it's ugly. So I think a lot about masculinity. I think we need, I think the left needs to take back masculinity. And one of the things I enjoy doing on the podcast,

I'm a profane vulgar person. And for some reason, profanity and vulgarity has been conflated with some sort of non progressive person. No, it's not. Comedians who've been really profanable tend to be more progressive. Masculinity is a wonderful thing. It's not necessarily the domain of people born men, but advocating for others, protecting others,

using skills and strengths to protect other people, being aggressive, that is a wonderful thing. When Russians come pouring over the border in Ukraine, you want some of that big dick energy. Masculinity is a wonderful thing. When Russians come pouring over the border in Ukraine, you want some of that big, dick energy. Masculinity is a wonderful thing and it should be embraced. And to conflate toxicity and masculinity is bad for society. And we've got to a point where we don't value young men. We're not giving them as many opportunities as we're giving older generations, much less other young women.

And it's a, I think it's an existential crisis for the United States. And you know who wants more emotionally economically viable men? Women. And women have a much finer filter for mating than men. And they're just not finding that many good young men. They're just, we aren't producing enough of them. It doesn't surprise me that it's a confusing situation to be in. Men are being told to both man up and open up, but to avoid being toxically masculine. But when you see the revealed preferences versus stated preferences of the way that women date, that guys should get over their fear of tall women

when Zendaya and Tom Holland got into a relationship together. It's like, I don't think that short guys were turning down Zendaya. I think that it's the other way around. On average, women want a partner that it's the other way around. On average, women want a partner that's 21 centimeters taller than them. On average, men want a partner that's 16 centimeters shorter than they are. So all of that is something that everyone listening to the show will be very familiar with. This mating crisis that we're seeing at the moment

is something that I've been very passionate about. Something that Richard talked me about last week when I was on the show is young male syndrome. Why have we not got these swaths, roving gangs of young, disaffected youth guys pushing over granny and causing havoc and stuff like that? That hasn't happened. That just doesn't seem to be happening. Yes, you've got school shooters. They are individual groups.

Yes, the salmon-rushy thing again as well was also an individual lone actor probably somebody that had he had been more integrated into a family and into his local community would have been less likely to commit that sort of an act. But we haven't seen it on mass in the same sort of way. You correct with what you say between 2008, 2018, men went from 8% to 28% the number of men that haven't had sex in the last year. However, we haven't seen this proliferation of young male syndrome occurring. And Richard's contention was that the fake fitness cues that you're getting from technology are sedating men that are repurposing some of that energy that they would have put into being very aggressive out into the world. And as opposed to us going out with a bang, we're going out with a fizzle. And from what I see, the sort of rhetoric

that I hear online from men, it is a lot less. I'm going to go out and do something about this. It is a lot more. I'm going to retreat in to me, just hold on tight boys, the sex robots are coming soon. These are non-ironic comments that I see on the internet. So I think this is a bit of availability bias because it's something new that I've just learned about, so I'm all excited about it and it seems to explain stuff. But I do think that there is a very good argument to be made that you're not going to end up with dangerous men. You're going to end up with the useless man. I think that's fascinating. I mean, everything you're saying, I'm kind of trying to take mental notes because the, the, we always go back to history, right? And in early 30s, Germany, it looked more like the US and we'd like to admit.

Germany. It looked more like the US and we'd like to admit. It was prosperous. It had a thriving LGBT community. And then when it was economically harmed, a young member doing well, they found scapegoats. And you're right. They put on brown shirts and they started, you know, mistreating old people. And you're not seeing that in the United States. What I would argue though, is that we're electing people who are doing it in a more insidious fashion. And that is, there's been more women, almost all elected representatives have a college degree. So to a certain extent, our elected representatives should somewhat mimic college grads.

That's the one thing they all have in common. And most all of them went to college. For 40 years now, we've been producing more female college graduates, male college graduates, which would lead you to understandably believe there should be more female electo-lators, the male electo-lators. There's not 28% of our elected leaders are female. And I think it's because men and women incorrectly conflate the tone of your voice and your height with leadership qualities.

So show me a woman who's 5'3 and has an IQ of 130 and I'll show you school board president. Show me a guy who's 6'2 with a full head of hair, who has 105 IQ, I'll show you school board president. Show me a guy who's six, two with a full head of hair has 105 IQ. I'll show you a senator. And what you have is a group of men and our parties are now bifurcating and the Democrats are representing female college graduates and Republicans are representing non-college graduate males. And I think some of the rhetoric coming out of Washington that feels a little bit, especially on the right, feels a little bit like fascist light, and you see the Italian prime minister,

that it's a different type of repackaged violence. It's violence against immigrants. It's slow-burned violence against women in the form of taking their rights back to old Spain. So it's not as obvious as a gang of young men going into the streets and beating up on vulnerable people. I think in some ways it's more institutionalized, where we elect people who say,

I think they don't even believe, because they know that they have a powerful voting group and young disaffected males. And I think they're overrepresented in Washington, actually. When you look at our, if you look at the United States, we have a minority rule. And that's on the left, far left, and far right because of Jarem Mandering, but about 30 percent of our senators represent about 5 percent of our population. And those senators tend to represent conservative districts.

And those conservative districts are producing all of these kind of young, uneducated men who are looking for scapegoats, looking for to blame immigrants. Not being as concerned about climate change, not being as protective of women's rights. So I think the violence is still there, it's just being repackaged. But to your point, just as cancer was an epidemic

that we finally started talking about, not an epidemic, but it was closeted, and we had open conversations about that, and made it normalized it to talk about it. I mean, huge progress against it because we normalize the conversation. We're going through the same thing with mental illness. People are openly talking about their own mental illness

challenges, and it's a wonderful thing, and it'll help normalize it and address it. I think that the next thing that's going to come out of the closet is the crisis and loneliness. And that is I think so many people, and boys scout and girls scout enrollment, is way down. The percentage of people talk to their neighbors is way down. The percentage of people playing an athletic league, play sports, see their friends every day, have a good friend. The number of people talk to their neighbors is way down. The percentage of people playing an athletic league, play sports, see their friends every day, have a good friend. The number of people who say they have a good friend is declined by a third in the last 10 years. The number of kids who see their friends every day

has been cut in half of the last 10 years. And it shows that loneliness raises your blood pressure, increases the likelihood you'll have a stroke, increases the likelihood of depression, and for young men, especially it's important. Because if you don't have. Because if you don't have friends, if you don't have a girlfriend, I joined a fraternity when I was 17 years old. Exactly 40 years ago this week I rushed a fraternity at UCLA. And there's a cartoon of fraternities. And

there's a lot of bad things about them. I would encourage any young man to join a fraternity if you go to college. Because it took a 30,000-30,000- person community and it shrank it down to something manageable for me. And I remember my roommate saying, stop smoking so much pot. I remember my roommate saying, you know, oh, you're on crew or you want to row for crew. I had other male role models. The difference between a 22 year old male who I was friends with in 18 months huge. And there were men, young men on the crew team at 22.

I wanted to bro crew. And so they mentored me and worked out with me. And I got much more fit. I needed that socialization. I needed those guardrails. I needed other men to tell me to get my shit together. I didn't go up with siblings. My father wasn't around. Young men, there are now neighborhoods where there are no men. I mean, just none, especially in black neighborhoods, because of incarceration rates and male abandonment. And what's really interesting is I think we should think about really unconventional experiments in New York and New Jersey, because of COVID, we had big prison relief programs because COVID just ripped through the prisons because most of these prisoners had not been exposed. Any novel coronavirus or coronaviruses,

so they just ripped through. So they had a prison release program. And what they found was the communities that absorbed the most men from a prison release program, crime went down, because what they found is in general, these men would speak to younger men and say, don't fuck up like I did. And so this absence of men, this absence of male role models, the moment a kid doesn't have a boy, doesn't have a male role model in his life, he becomes immediately twice as

likely to be incarcerated. So this numbing of America, this loneliness epidemic, and this lack of male role models, I think is a big deal. But I love the way, it's really interesting, I want to do more research on what you just said, that they're not as external a big threat, they're more of a threat to themselves. And you're right. It maybe does that they're more dangerous to themselves than to others. Yeah. I mean, so much to go through that, I think one of the interesting things when it comes to controlling reproductive independence for women, it seems like women are mostly the inactors of control when it comes to that.

If it was left up to men, women's abortion rights would have almost certainly not been touched based on a bunch of polling that I've seen. That might be interesting for you to look at if you've not seen it before as well. A ton of polls seem to suggest that men are less enforcing when it comes to this than women are, that women tend to be the people that are voting pro-life as opposed to pro-choice. That was something surprising that I learned about. But yeah, I mean, all of this together is a very messy situation in a maladapted, an evolutionary mismatched world filled with novel technology that can not only propagate ideas, but allows people who don't have worth of status to gain status.

It's a real sort of blending, dangerous blender of a lot of novel stimulus that no one really understands how to deal with. One thing that we maybe previously would have had would have been commentators that we trusted coming through mainstream media, and I know that you looked at what makes a story go viral and why pundits suck nowadays. I think this is a little bit more prevalent in the US than it is in the UK. I'm not saying that the BBC or ITV are completely impartial or sky news or anything else like that. I do get the sense that they're a little bit more about news than about opinion. So why aren't pundits stepping in and being the appropriate gatekeepers between reality

and cultural consciousness that they should be? Because there's no money in it. And I just moved to London. In my initial observation in Granite, I'm gonna, everything British is charming and novel for me right now. I'm right. And I accent any. What I find is, I believe in a nationalized healthcare system

that also has a private layer. I think in a democratic or capitalist society, we have to acknowledge the rich people are gonna have better lives. And I think that's the basis of capitalism that we're gonna have billionaires and people wanting to be one of those people is a huge motivator. And so I think a nationalized system that has a certain baseline level, a pretty good level of health care and then

a private label that emerges above it is actually a pretty decent system. And people will get upset about the inequity that let's have a longer conversation about the inequities of capitalism. It's a lease, like I believe what Churchill said, it's a lease bed. The worst system of it's kind except for all the others. I think the same is true of media. The BBC wouldn't survive. I don't think it was for profit. I think if you're going to have straight down the middle, just the facts, ma'am, it's not as entertaining. It's harder to keep people engaged. It's a good brand positioning, but the reason why CNN and Fox went to either end of the poll is that it's just more entertaining. In the 70s in the US, the news used to be a public service of networks that were making so

much money running commercials against the Brady Bunch or the A team or a love boat. They said, 30 minutes a night, we're going to tell you what's going on. It's going to be nine minutes of commercials, 18 minutes of news and three minutes of opinion. And there was this great skit based on that opinion on Stein Eilat, where basically Dan Acroid would call Jane Curtain and Ingrid Slut. That was the opinion section and they go at it. And then slowly but surely Ted Turner and Ruben Murdock realized that they should flip it, have three minutes of actual news and 18 minutes of opinion, and reinforce people's tribal beliefs,

and get angry, and go after the other side. And it's really entertaining, and we have this situation room. Like a headline or a chiron that says, things slightly better today globally, doesn't sell. So we've kind of catastrophized the world, and when there are increasing gas prices, 71 or 73 days, there's 21 New York Times headlines. When of 80 of the last 85 days, gasoline prices have declined,

there's one headline. And so we've started, you know, CNN and Fox go to the left, go wait at the left and wait at the right. So I think having government, I think the only way you have what I'd call non-partial or an attempt to have some sort of non-partial news driven, I think it's got to have government support because it's not entertaining and it doesn't get the eyeballs. So I'm a big fan of the BBC, I'm a big fan of government supported news and media. I think also social media needs more identity verification because I think bad actors weaponize misinformation. And I think we also need section 230 carve out such that

if you spread misinformation around vaccines or elections just so we've done around trafficking, you have the same liability that this show has or the traditional media has. But pundits don't step into the fray because the ones that are really trusted can make $10 million a year being partisan and they're capitalists too.

So could they go to PBS and be more neutral? Yeah, could they go to the BBC and be more neutral? I'm doing a show on BBC, I just signed up, I'm doing a show. I like it just signed up. I'm doing a show I like it. Thank you. I'm really excited about it and I did it because Everything the BBC does does kind of wreaks the quality and production values I also like the fact that they will fact check everything to death everything to death And they will do their best

To to you know to call balls and strikes I'm not making as much money there as when I worked at CNN. There's just not as much money in it. And so I like it, I feel good about it, but I'm in a position to do it. And when other people get offered big money to do something for Fox or CNN, you can't blame them. Well, you get a tragedy of the common's effect a little bit here, right? That by you taking the high road, that leaves a spot at CNN open for somebody else.

So by you curtailing your ability to make money. Now, it's that you don't perhaps need to make so much money anymore. But I went to Broadcasting House about four weeks ago, I was back in the UK for a while, and I got to go to Broadcasting House. I don't know whether you've been there yet, but even the atmosphere inside of that place

is a proper newsroom out the back. And it's behind where they filmed the six o'clock news on an evening time. And you can see everyone scurrying around, writing bits and pieces. Apparently the gentleman that I was there with that was interviewing me told me that during Hugh Edwards announcement of the Queen's passing,

like the main one that's going to be used for the next century for when the queen passed two of the workers that were in the newsroom behind were taking photos on their phone or some Instagram story. So Key Edwards is doing this really serious thing and in the background. There's two people taking a video of it who apparently were reprimanded very quickly and given a very big slap on the wrist. I was thinking there about this way that competition for eyeballs has evaporated some of the other higher quality elements that came about in news programming. And there's this thought experiment that I learned about years ago to do with rats living on an island. So there's a hundred rats living on the island. The island has

a carrying capacity of a thousand rats. These hundred rats are spending their time. They're doing art and poet elves, the very smart rats, art and poetry and playing sport and making love and finding food and stuff, but they don't need to compete that much for food or for finding love because there's tons of spec carrying capacity. Now over time as the population begins to grow and grow and grow, you find that the rats who focus more on survival and reproduction and less on the superfluous things that add color but doesn't actually add a reproductive benefit or a competitive benefit if it was in a commercial market, they end up being more successful. Which selects the survivors. Yeah, which selects over time more and and more. And then after you reach full carrying capacity,

once you hit that 1000 mark, any rat that decides that he or she wants to try and do art or culture or poetry or whatever it is, they're immediately competed out of the gene pool or defeated in the market of ideas or the market of attention and eyes because they're unable to compete with the people that are chasing the only thing that really, really matters in terms of survival and reproduction. And I kind of see something similar here that it does become a race to the bottom of the brainstem. If you decide to do less partisan talking points, if you decide to talk about more positive news stories, if you decide to be more balanced in your approach to things, if that loses the amount of attention that you get,

where's that attention going to go? Well, it's going to go to somewhere else that does decide to put that sort of rhetoric across. So you have to play this game. Are else you become one of the rats that's competed out of the gene pool? Yeah, there's a lot there. I'm not familiar with that study,

but the notion of, I'll equate survival techniques with grit. And there's a ton of studies showing that intelligence does dictate success, but tops out at about 110 IQ. So smart people are more likely to be wealthy and successful than dumb people, but really smart people are no more likely than smart people. The Delta is perseverance and grit. So survival mentality, the reason I'm wealthy is because I didn't have a lot. I'm very talented, but if I had, I say this a lot. If I had what my kids have now, I wouldn't have what I have now.

If I were my sons and this is my struggle, the only two things I know I would have as an adult male would be a Range Rover and a cocaine habit. I'm just not that I wanted money and I didn't have any. And I was smart enough to look around in American go. The difference between having better health care, living in a nicer place, having a broader selection set of mates is money. And for me, it became very apparent very early, because my mom got very sick, and I just saw US healthcare is really a caste system when it comes to money. And I decided very early, and people don't talk about this,

or they don't like to admit it, I had a monocular focus on it. That's it. I was like, oh, I don't want to meet a great woman, or I want to change the world, or I want to help climb a chit. No, no, no, I'm going to be fucking rich. That was my decision as a younger man.

And I want to be clear, it's not a dissent. It's not something that, tirelessly in your control. I had a lot of wins in my back, but it was a sole focus of mine. I also coach young men, take economic responsibility for your household. And sometimes that means getting out of the way and being more supportive of your spouse or partner who's better at this whole money thing than you, that's also being a man. But a good place to start as a young man is you need to take economic responsibility for your household.

That means figuring out a way that at some point you might be able to help your parents, figure out a way that you're economically viable, figure out a way that you can have the money such you have a very stressful life if you have this side to have a family. So I like the grid component. I think the problem is the opposite. I don't think the island runs out of bananas and food and only the survivalists.

I think the problem is actually opposite and that is we live in an era of super abundance and that is our technology is so extraordinary at taking the same amount of inputs and producing so much more that our instincts haven't caught up to institutional production of sugar, fat, entertainment, porn. We're just we don't know how to modulate these things because when we saw red meat, when we saw sugar, salty snacks, just a few generations ago, it was like, shit, eat it all because you don't know where your next meal is coming from.

And so the fact that we get all of the super abundance now results in externalities. And anytime you take one commodity and turn it into something much more valuable, whether it's oil into petroleum, whether it's attention into money, there's externalities. There's been enormous externalities from the refining of fossil fuels, and I believe now there are enormous externalities around turning attention into dollars, specifically through social media. And with fossil fuels, we watch it happen slowly, and what do we know about it? We know there's externalities, we know the longer it takes to address, the more expensive it is to unwind. But with social media and technology and search, we've seen these externalities like go up exponentially and just two decades. So I would argue it's the super abundance that's the problem because if you look at, if you look at, there's some truth

to a middle-class person right now in America, the UK, lives a better life than the wealthiest person a century ago. But there's so much abundance and so much opportunity to communicate abundance that nobody says, well, I should be happy. Look at how our grandfather lived and he was richer than us on a relative basis. All they think about is Instagram's shoving this picture, this person, all these people in my face all day long. And all I know about them is they're hotter and richer than me. That's the benchmark now. Dude, status and our living conditions are relative, not absolute.

There was a study done where they offered people the choice between a £10,000 increase in their annual salary or a promotion to a newer, more hierarchical job title. More people chose the job title and £10,000 are simply because we want relative status. That makes us feel good. And I think that you're right as well. It's all well and good saying, look at the material abundance that we have now, but it's very quickly gone from scarcity to overabundance,

hypernormal stimuli, too much food, too much information. Think about this, there was a period, I don't know, maybe the autumn of 2011 or 2012 or something like that, when we had the optimal balance between how much information we wanted and how much information we could access for almost all of human history, a tiny, tiny little bit more information was maybe meant the difference between life and death, this winter because you knew how to stitch a different sort of cloak together that you and your family could sleep under or you found a new bus or a way to hold the guard, whatever it might be. And then in at some point between 2005 and

2013, that switched. And there was way more information than we needed. I think the pivotal moment was when social went on mobile. And that was all day long. You had an opportunity to get a quick dope ahead. And you get the dope ahead pulling your phone out, even before you see it, to see what kind of affirmation, what kind of love, what kind of, how do I, pair up, how do I measure up versus competitors? What's happening in my dogecoin that day? Is anyone swiped right on me?

Can I go, do I have an alert from you porn on some weird fetish thing that increasingly gets weird or in weirder? And it's in my pocket all day long. And what you see is in 2013, when social and on mobile, he saw skyrocketing levels of depression and self harm. And this isn't self reporting,

this is actual hospital admissions. So the overabundance of information, constant stimuli, and then what you have is, it's especially appealing and especially prevalent among people whose brains have developed enough to appreciate it and need it and want social structure. You know, shaming and adulation and reaffirmation are an important part of the species. It's important that we value certain affirmation

that creates good behavior and good role models. But when you don't have the capacity to absorb the negative stuff or modulate it, which is exactly where teenagers are, it results in an America, there's between one and four thousand parents every night who take their kid to the emergency room Because they're scared to go to sleep for fear what might happen in What they might find in the morning with their incredibly depressed 15 year old girl

So they just go they just take the kid to the emergency room and the emergency rooms around America Don't know what to do because they they were not used to it. I'll use tricks this problem. They don't know how to, they basically say we can put them, we can put them on suicide watch, we can submit them to the hospital, but we don't know what to do. There's no like immediate therapy or drug we can have. Even SSRIs aren't going to step in and stop you from,

I mean, what do you do? Take the phone. Take the phone away, isolate them from all of the people, the only form of, one question that I had in my head. A lot of the time people ask about, what would you do if you were in your 20s and pieces of advice? Very rarely hear people get asked about what you would do if you were in your 30s. So what advice would you give to people that are in their 30s or entering their 30s about how to operate in life? I think it's really situation odd. I think there's a user's manual. I think it's really situational. I don't think there's a user's manual.

I think there's some best practices. And I don't think it's that much different than in your 20s. The first is very primal. I think every person in their 20s and 30s should lift heavy weights and run long distances in their brain and in the gym. Push yourself really hard.

When you're in your 20s and 30s, you don't even realize how old you. 34. Okay, so like you look like a beast and in 20 years, you're just going to look back on how strong you were and just marvel at it. And you're going to wish as strong as you were that you even push yourself harder. I rode crew. And with such a valuable part of my life I did at the age of 19. And I remember in the midst of a race, it's a 2000 meter race. And I remember not being able to fuel my legs, starting to black out and having to concentrate on not blacking out from exhaustion, and the oxygen or the air going down my esophagus was on fire.

It tastes like blood and metal in your throat, yeah. And that was at 800 meters. And you go 2000. And that ability, just when you think, just when you think you can't take anymore, that means you're about a third of the way to your limits as a human, as a species. Learning that as a young man or woman is a blessing. Because what it means is you have the confidence that when things are hard, physically, emotionally, mentally, you realize, oh my God, I could take so much more and still be fine.

And when I worked, my first job was a Morton Stanley investment bank. And I was undereducated, relative to my peer group, not because I didn't go to a great school. I went to UCLA, but I spent the majority of my five years there making bongs out of household items and watching Planet of the Apes. So I wasn't as skilled as my peer group. So I decided every Tuesday morning I was going to come into work and I wasn't going to leave till Wednesday night. And I'm like, I can do that. I'm physically really strong. I'm mentally, really strong. And it sent a signal to the rest of the organization that I came to play, developed that kind of grid and strength, emotionally, physically, and intellectually, in your 20s and 30s.

You're capable of it. You're just gonna look back on that area and be like, just marvel at how out of fucking control strong you are, both mentally and physically. To get to a city, if you can, and that sounds very practical, a wrote, but you'd rather be good in a big city than great in a small city.

Before you collect dogs and kids, being in a city is like playing tennis with Roger Federer and Adal. When you play with people much better than you, your game gets much better. You're playing against the best when you're in a city. Find, create as many opportunities to find a mate. Now, what do I mean by that?

Get out is often as possible, except invitations force yourself to go out, force yourself to meet strangers, develop the skills. Start whenever you're waiting in line at Starbucks, talk to the person in front of you, talk to the person behind you. Develop the skills to begin opening and establishing relationships.

And it's uncomfortable and it means getting used to rejection. And by the way, the only thing I can guarantee you in life is rejection. And the only thing I can guarantee a lot of, if you want to be successful, is a shit ton of rejection. Being an entrepreneur just means you're willing to take out a big spoon and eat shit all the time. Talking people into working for you, talking clients into engaging you, talking investors into investing and having 90 plus percent of them saying no.

And the same is true with successful mating. The most important decision you'll make in your 20s and 30s is where you live, where you work, what industry you're going to, it's who you decide to partner with, specifically who you decide to ultimately have kids with. And I have close friends who are monstrously successful by every external metric, and they don't have great lives because they don't have real partners in their spouses. And I have other friends who struggle economically, and it's hard, but everything's a little easier for them because they have a real partner. And the way you punch above your way class and find a great mate emotionally and intellectually

from a value standpoint sexually is you give yourself as many opportunities as possible. And my story is I met my partner who I had kids with at the Raleigh Hotel at the pool at the Raleigh Hotel in South Beach, about 17 years ago, it was the middle of the day and I walked in and I think it's important to do this. I walked in and I saw someone, I was really attracted to and I said, I'm gonna talk to this person before I leave

and I promise myself and I went up in the full light of midday sun when she was sitting with another guy and another girl and opened. And without the aid of alcohol, that is not easy. That is not easy. And fast forward, my oldest son's middle name is Raleigh. If you, nothing wonderful is going to happen to you unless you're taking a comfortable risk. So get good at taking them.

Get good at sending blind emails, linked in contacts to ask them for coffee to see if they'll talk to you about that industry. Reach out to people, tell them you admire them, try and become friends with them. You know, you're an interesting guy. I was just saying to myself, I'd love to know this guy. Does he live in London? He just seems very cool. Get comfortable taking those sorts of risk, get comfortable with rejection. Nothing wonderful will happen to you unless you take an uncomfortable risk. The most important thing you can find in your life in your 20s and 30s is something that

you're good at, so you can start building a base around economic security. But the real key is to find a great partner. And that is going to be a function of liquidity, how many great partners, potential great partners you approach. And unfortunately, the far left of which I'm a part as is counseled men that if you start talking to a woman at work and you express any sort of interest, it means you're toxic.

No, it doesn't. If you don't know the difference between expressing interest and having coffee with someone and harassing them, you've got much bigger problems. A third of relationships begin at work. I'm not suggesting anyone should ever abuse their power. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't be very careful that you're ever leveraging power

or making anyone uncomfortable. But for God's sakes, go up and talk to strangers. There's nothing wrong with that. And if you approach a strange woman and try and get a conversation going and she's not interested, you're both going to be fine. You're both going to be fine. And what I see as a generation of men who don't take care of themselves physically and become so isolated that the idea of talking to a strange woman

is so alien, alien and uncomfortable to them, they just rather stay home and do something else. And I don't want to stereotype all introverts is leading to bad places, that's not true at all. But the majority of men you talk to, they want to be financially successful and they want to have a great partner at some point. And that is a function of your willingness to put yourself in uncomfortable situations. So anyway, get mentally and physically strong, take economic responsibility for your household, get out of the house as much as possible, try and find things where you're building something in the agency of others. I don't care.

Every day you should be around strangers. Every day on a cup of work, on a cup of church, on a cup of it's work on a� if it's church on a� if it's nonprofit a softball league the gym classes, whatever it is, you need to be around a massive number of strangers and finding reasons to have bump off of them and find economic and personal and platonic opportunities is often as possible. We are a social species. Get to a city, get around a lot of people, get out there every day, start making money and become really strong. You should be able to walk into any room at your age and think if shit got real, I can kill and eat everybody or outrun them. One of the other. One of the other.

Now I'm at the point where I can do neither. I'm not strong and my knees are going, but anyways, at your age, it should be one or both. You could pay someone to kill everybody or come and go. That would be awesome. There you go. Yeah. Scott Galaway, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, I appreciate the fuck out of you. This is really, really interesting. I've been looking forward to speaking to you for a while. If people want to harass you online and find all of your stuff, why should they go? Yeah, the resistance feudal, I'm everywhere. At ProfGallway on Twitter, profgalway.com, and just my new book, A Drift American 100 Charts, available on.

Let me think Amazon. Let's go. Scott, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for your good work and congrats on all your success.