Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Are the Boys Lost? With Scott Galloway

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

In this conversation, Scott Galloway highlights the economic struggles facing young Americans today, particularly young men, and critiques the current education and housing systems for creating artificial scarcity. Galloway proposes several policy changes to support young people and emphasizes the importance of male role models in fostering resilience and success. He also shares insights from his book, 'The Algebra of Wealth', focusing on the relationship between economic security and personal fulfillment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. From technology and business to society, political debate, and higher education, my guest today, Professor Scott Galloway can talk to it all.

Young people, particularly young men, are facing a crisis, and it's one we must address before it's too late. Professor Galloway is someone that is always on point with his knowledge and advice, so let's listen to what he has to say. I'd like to take a second to recommend my friend Andy Astroy's great podcast in the back room. Every episode is a fun, incredibly honest take on our society and the political situation, along with some brilliant guests. I've been honored to join Andy on the show, and you know anywhere that accepts me with no filter deserves a shout-out.

So joining us now on Open Book, Scott Galloway. Professor Galloway is obviously a NYU professor, serial entrepreneur, best-selling author, among many other things, podcaster, a brilliant thought leader for us here in the United States. But the title of his new book, Bestseller, It's called The Algebra of Wealth. I had the opportunity to read this book over the summer professor, and I enjoyed it. And so before we get to the book and some of the other things like your recent TED talk, just for some viewers that may not know you, which I think is remote, but I think it's important for people to know your background where you grew up in California, how you got into the businesses

that you got into and why you became a teacher? Sure. So my backstory is pretty unremarkable, raised by a single immigrant mother who lived and died a secretary here, actually in Westwood. California taxpayers really lifted me up. I got into UCLA with pretty unremarkable grades, but I didn't test well either. When I applied UCLA, Anthony, the admissions rate at UCLA was 76% and I was one of the 24% that didn't get in.

And I was actually installing shelving in the Inland Empire and the highlight of my day, literally was in a closet all day. The highlight of my day was I would get ridiculously high with my coworkers and then take to the highways of Los Angeles. And I said to my mom, you know, is this it? So I was very upset. And she said, well, let's see if there's an appeal process. I peeled. And I remember the admissions officer called me and said, you're not qualified, but you're a native center of California. And we're going to give a shot. And that kind of started an upward spiral. I came of age during the internet in the 90s. I went to grab a lot. I went to graduate school at Berkeley, and it just started a series of startup. Some failed, some worked.

Then at a very young age, I was blessed with the curse of thinking, what do I want to do with the rest of my life. I decided I don't want to teach, join the faculty at NYU 22 years ago, of taught 3,500 students, and then started slowly making content, books, podcasts, newsletters, and that's where we are now. I guess the question I have, there was a moment for me. Okay, I was a wayward teenager driving my Camaro on Long Island. We're roughly contemporaries. I was chasing skirts and not caring about anything. I had good grades. I ended up getting into Tufts. My father cashed in his life insurance policy from his union to give me $10,000, Scott. And I can remember the day he handed it to me. It was April of 1982. He handed me the check. And he said, this is really all I had. to help you go to college. And that was a big moment for me. I was like, all right, this is super important to my dad, that I not screw this up.

And then I made a academic commitment in college, which saw me to the Harvard Law School and saw me out the door to Goldman. Was there a eureka moment for you? Was there something between you and your mom? There was something between you and yourself where you said, okay, I've got to start this upwards spiral as opposed to meandering. Oh, 100%. And it's a generous question. graduate school, kind of been sleepwalking through life up until that point. I had a 2.27 GPA out of UCLA. Was it Morgan Stanley for a couple of years, talking my way in there, but didn't like it,

so left. I was living again at home with my mom, got into graduate school. In the middle of my first year in graduate school, my mom called me. My mom had gotten sick with breast cancer, and she called me and said, you need to come home, and I'm not doing well. And my mom's not a dramatic person, and I walked into a situation that was pretty frightening for me. It was like nothing I'd ever dealt with before. She'd been discharged from the hospital early as some of these HMOs do. And there were certain things I just couldn't help her with. And I remember calling around trying to get a nurse. And nurses were $35 an hour and we just didn't have the money. And I just remember what a feeling of kind of emasculation and humiliation it was to be the only man of the house. And I couldn't

take care of my mom who had taken such good care of me. And at that point, I just realized I'm going to try very hard to develop economic security so I can take care of my mom. And I wasn't, you know, my mission wasn't to save the world. It wasn't to be a good person. It wasn't to create jobs. It was to get economic security. It was just super important to me because I felt like I had failed taking care of my mom. And it was just a very ugly moment for me.

But that's really when I got my act together. It's interesting. That's like me. I was searching for economic security. But you and I grew up in a different America, Professor Galloway. Okay. And I want to go to your TED Talk for a moment, which is titled, how the U.S. is destroying young people's future. I've heard you say this many times. I've watched

many of your interviews. You and I have had personal conversations about this, that American males are struggling, youth in general are struggling. Give us some of the stats that you often cite and tell us why this is happening. What is the cultural change in the United States that's contributing to this? Well, let's go back to UCLA when I applied the admissions rate was 76%. Today, it's 9%. When I graduated from business school, I made $100,000 a year, and the average house in San Francisco costs 280. Now, the average salary is $200,000 total compensation, and the cost of a house is $2.1 million. We have purposefully decided to artificially create scarcity around housing and colleges. How many people do you hear I would never get into the college I applied to, you know, if I applied today.

Well, that means your daughter's not getting it. A lot of these universities sit on the endowments of a small Latin American nation, yet they purposely constrain the number of freshman seats because it makes them feel important and also the alumni like it because if all of a sudden I own a home, I get very concerned with traffic. And one of the great problems in America is that housing permits have put in the hands of owners versus public officials. So we've had one and a half to three million fewer households built every year than we've needed. The result is that the primary lubricant for upward mobility and means of kind of forced savings and starting a family and really the March

Shorts adulthood, buying a home, having put out of reach. It used to be just pre-pandemic, two-thirds of people go to Ford a home. Now it's one-third. Pre-pendemic homes were 290. They've gone to 420 with the acceleration and interest rates. The average mortgage got from $1,100 to $2,200, again, taking it from two-thirds of people that can afford a home to one-third. Every economic policy, I believe, Anthony, is nothing but an elegant transfer of wealth

from the young to the incumbents to the old. Two biggest tax deductions, Morgan interest rate and capital gains, who owns homes and stocks, people our age, who rents and makes their money from current income, young people.

So the result is the average 70-year-old is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. The average person under the age of 40 is 24% less wealthy. 60% of 30-to-34-year-olds, 40 years ago had at least one child. Now it's 27%. And that in concert with social media, the outsourcing of jobs across industries that especially give young men an on-ramp into college who aren't cut out for college.

And we knew that person could take wood shop, bottle shop, metal shop, get a decent job in a factory and manufacturing. Those jobs have dried up. So we now have essentially are raising the most obese, depressed, anxious, and addicted generation in history for the first time in our nation. history. First time, a 30-year-old man or woman isn't doing as well as his or her parents were at 30. So there's the trope that the young people are entitled. No, they're entitled to be enraged. Take COVID, and I'll wrap up here, $7 trillion stimulus plan. 85% of it wasn't needed. 85% of it wasn't spent, which meant it went into the market, which took housing prices in the stock market to record highs, which was great if you were an incumbent. But if you're an entrant,

it just made everything more expensive. When you bail out the baby boomer owner of a restaurant, all you're doing is robbing opportunity from the 26-year-old recent graduate of a culinary academy. We need churn. We need disruption. The reason I'm here at the Barlios Hotel and with you is because since 2008, we bailed out the banks, but we didn't bail out the economy. So I, as I was coming into my prime income earning earnings, got to buy Netflix, Amazon, and what was the third one I bought, Apple, at between eight and 12 bucks a share. And they're up between 30 and 60 fold. Where does a young person find disruption, churn, and opportunity now. So we have embraced this rejectionist LVMH strategy where we artificially reduce housing. We artificially reduce college admissions

and young people as a result just don't have nearly the opportunity we did. The closest they get to prosperity is they get to throw their credit card into the club where I'm doing rails and champagne and I run up their credit card. We have lost the script. We're no longer making the types of forward-leaning investments previous generations used to make. So, I mean, that's the LVMH strategy that you talk about. Tell us a little about what you mean when you call it the LVMH strategy for higher education. Well, LVMH could make more Dior bags. They could make more Ramoa suitcases. These aren't difficult items or Vitan backs. These aren't difficult items to manufacture. But the key to desire is scarcity. When we came off the Savannah, there were a variety of items that were scarce. Sugar, salty, fatty food, mating opportunities, opportunities for free, safe play.

So scarcity, sexist or the English language is no. The moment you sense, there's too little of something. You become obsessed with it. So when I walk into the Panorai store in Aspen, they tell me whenever you look, watch I look at. Limited series, only three left, which makes me want one. And essentially, the U.S. has decided that the ultimate strategy for creating, I'll use academics. My industry, my colleagues wake up every morning and we ask ourselves one question. How do I reduce my accountability while increasing my compensation?

And we've adopted this bullshit rejectionist LVMH strategy where despite the fact that you sit on the Harvard endowment of $53 billion, Harvard, your endowment is up 40-fold in the last 30 years, but you've increased the freshman class size 4%. Because the alumni love it, because their degree goes up in value when it gets very difficult to get in. And we've embraced the same kind of strategy as a luxury brand. We've decided that housing and we've decided that college degrees should develop a scarcity in an aspirational value. And it's allowed us in those in the housing industry and those in the academic industry to raise prices faster than inflation because there's just too few of these things for no reason other than we've decided that a great strategy is to constrain supply. Harvard could have 15,000 students, not 1,500. They have the resources. and yet they decide to keep it very small and very exclusive.

In my industry, we've more from public servants to Chanel bags because it makes us feel important. So let's say we could put you in charge. Let's say that, or let's say that you were having a meeting at the White House. It was for the new Trump administration or the new Harris administration, and you went over these numbers with the future presidents. It's January 2025. And that president, he or she agrees with you and says, okay, we have a crisis. And so, you know, I think this is one of the problems.

And you and I talked about this over the summer. You know, the, I think you said this to me, and I'm paraphrasing, so correct, we have one wrong, but there are 75 different advocacy groups at NYU. None of them are related to white males. They're all related to different types of people, ethnic backgrounds, et cetera, different orientations, but none for white males. So there's an epidemic going on. There's a psychological struggle going on.

What are some things you would recommend from a policy initiative that would help these people. So you mentioned something and I just want to touch on it. And that is these problems are especially acute amongst young men. Young men are four times as likely to kill themselves as a young woman. After divorce, a man becomes eight times more likely to kill himself. If you were in the morgue and there were five young people who died by suicide and four of them were men, or four of them were any specialist group, you might decide to weigh in with programs and try and do something. But because of the advantage that you and me received, there's a lack of empathy for young men now because we've had a 2,000-year head start, which is really a shame because empathy isn't a zero-sum game.

You know, civil rights didn't hurt white people, gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage, but we've decided to hold a 19-year-old male accountable for the advantage that you and I received. So this is really hit young men, especially hard, who don't have access to some of the manufacturing jobs and middle-class jobs that were so important to young men throughout most of our history. Now, what could you do about it? There's a lot of things we do. one, red shirt, young men. They should start kindergarten at six. Girls start at five. Boys biologically mature later, their prefrontal cortex is literally 18 months behind.

A 17-year-old, two 17-year-olds applying to college. The 17-year-old is basically competing against a 15-5-year-old. We need more males in primary school. 70 to 80 percent are female. It's natural that they champion a young girl, someone they see in themselves. there are more per capita female fighter pilots in the U.S. than there are male kindergarten teachers. The result is it on a behavior-adjusted basis. A boy is twice as likely to be suspended for the exact same behavior as a girl, a black boy five times as likely. If you are not growing your freshman seats at a college faster than population growth and you have an endowment over a billion dollars, I believe you should lose your tax-free status because you're no longer a public servant. You are, in fact, a hedge fund offering classes. I believe we need national source. service. I think we need young people to move from an age of grievance to an age of heroism and meet people from different sexual orientations, different ethnic backgrounds, different income levels,

and realize that they're working in the agency of something great, and that is our nation. I think we need to do away with capital gains tax. There's absolutely no reason why we should be transferring wealth from young people to older people. I think we need expanded child tax credit. I think there's a ton of things we could do to put more money and prosperity in the pockets of young people. And at the time give boys more of a fighting chance. On a more social level, I think we need to recognize that the single point of failure for a young boy is when he loses a male role model. And we have the second most single-parent homes. It's interesting, Anthony, girls in single-parent homes have the same outcome, same rates of college attendance, same rates of self-harm. Boys immediately

come off the tracks and become dramatically more likely to be addicted to opioids, end up in jail. And so I think we need to recognize that white boys are physically stronger. They're mentally and emotionally and emotionally much weaker. And I think we need a series of programs immediately when a boy, when a boy loses a male role model that we should weigh in with big brother programs, social programs, ability for him to find his tribe. And also just on a very personal level, guys like you and me who've recognized some success, we need to get involved in the life of a boy that isn't ours biologically. The ultimate expression of masculinity, and I think about this a lot, need to take care of yourself, need to take care of your family, need to take care of your community. But the ultimate expression of masculinity is to get involved in the life of a young boy. You don't need to be virtuous. You just need to be living a good, righteous life. And unfortunately, because of the Catholic Church and Michael Jackson, anytime a young man has love to give or care to give to a young boy, he is suspected. There's something wrong with him. There are four times as many likely, there are four times as many female applicants to little sisters than there are to, excuse me, big sisters, than there are to

big brothers. So if we want better men, we need to be better men. We need to get more involved in the lives of young men. And if you look around, Anthony, there's just so easy to find. Your assistance is single mother. Your friends have gotten divorced. Your friends have a son who is struggling. Young men struggling are everywhere. And a lot of times all they need, there's just certain things men can provide for boys that women cannot. And there are men, literally millions of men, who go through school, go through college, or don't go through college, go into the workforce and haven't had a single real male role model in their life. So there's a variety of social economic programs. And there's also just, we need a new, a new zeitgeist in our society

that as soon as you have some success, it doesn't have to be monetary, but you live in a virtuous life, you get involved in the life of a young boy. Well, I mean, I think there's a lot of people like you and I can do in that area, by the way, and I totally agree with you. And I have four sons and everything you said about their rise compared to your rise or my rise is true. Now, they have the advantage of having me as a dad, of course, but they're still up against varying cultural speed bumps that we've, I think we've put in their way.

and I think we've done it unnecessarily. There's no reason for that, Scott, you know? Well, just look at school. Look at my industry. Who do we, what are the incentives? What are the behaviors we reward in school? Sit still. Be organized.

Be a pleaser. Raise your hand. You basically describe a girl. And so, and now in college, you literally have a situation where you're going to have three female college graduates in the next five years for every two boys. And I think, well, it's time, and that's great. Women are ascending.

and we should do nothing to get in the way of that. There's been no group that's ascended faster than women globally. More women are seeking tertiary education than men right now. In terms of parliament, in the last 30 years, twice as many women have been elected as some sort of parliament electoral body. We should do nothing to get in the way of that. We also need to realize, though, that there's a weird dynamic here, and we don't like to talk about this because it feels sexist,

and I've said I'm a sexist. I believe that for the most part, 95% of our population identifiable, ifies as binary, and men and women are prone to different types of behavior. And in the mating market, women made socioeconomically horizontally and up, men horizontally and down. 75% of women say economic viability is very important in a mate. It's only 25% for men. And when the pool of horizontal and up of economically and emotionally viable men keep shrinking every year, we end up with a lack of household formation. How many times have you heard I know all these great women, were high character, attractive, together professionally, and they can't find a man.

No, they can find a man. They just can't find a man they want to date. So the results of some weird things in the mating market, one out of three men under the age of 30 has a girlfriend, two out of three girls under the age of 30, has a boyfriend because women are dating older and older. And because they have less money, there's a lack of household formation. And it's especially rough on men. When a guy doesn't have a prospect of a romantic relationship, he doesn't make friends. He isn't as interested in getting a job. He tends to get more involved in things like conspiracy theory, more prone to believing

misogynistic or nationalist content, not leaving the house. In some, he becomes a really shitty citizen. Loneliness is no less tragic for girls, but the outcomes aren't as severe. They're better at maintaining social networks. Oftentimes they pour that additional romantic energy into their career. So you have this entire generation of men that are kind of becoming a new species. They're very isolated. They're very lonely.

they have the deepest, pocketed, most talented people in the world trying to convince them they can have a reasonable facsimile of life with a screen and an algorithm. I don't need friends. I have discord and Reddit. I shouldn't go through the humiliation of trying to get a job. I'm going to trade stocks in crypto on Robin Hood and on Coinbase. I don't need to go through the rejection and effort of showering, getting in shape, having a plan, enduring the rejection involved in mating. I have you porn. So you have just half of millennial men have a given updating. They're not even trying. Three million able-bodied men aren't even seeking work. So we have this kind of new species of man who is essentially alone, sequestered from the rest of society, isn't making

an effort to advance his or her skills. And by the time they're in the late 20s, they're kind of unsavable. One out of five men at the age of 30 is still living with their parents. One out of three moves home after college. And they're just falling off the map. And they also become dangerous and not, it's important not to stereotype as every, you know, as every in-cell is going to become a mass shooter. But what they do is they become dangerous to themselves.

They become very likely to harm themselves. And also they just become very prone to this type of content that is very unproductive. They're less likely to believe in climate change. So without the process, of a romantic relationship, men without those guardrails tend to sort of come off the tracks. And young men have fewer and fewer economic and romantic relationships and prosperity. Leads to lower birth rates, which takes an economy down.

You want to see your economy go down? Just become a Japan, a China or in Italy, where it turns into an inverted pyramid in terms of aging. In the U.S., we now spend 40% of all of our government services on people over the age of 65, young people or old people have figured out they can vote themselves more and more money and they do. And we used to have 12 young people supporting everyone retirees. It's now down to three to one, which means we can't make forward-leaning investments in technology and in education, which have a much greater ROI than the investments in seniors. We're going to have 12 times as many old people, a third is few people under the age of five in the next 30 years, which means nursery schools are going to become like zoos. where old people go to stare at this creature called children.

I really do think that needs to be a martial plan to lift off all young people. I don't think you can target just men. I think it would be too politicized, but I think it would disproportionately help young men. So I got a couple minutes left here. I want to keep you on time. I wanted to get all that content in because I think it's very relevant to where we are, and I think we have to figure out a way to make a change. But in reading your book, my team and I, we pull five words or ideas out of the book,

and I want you to just address them in one sentence so that I can get you out of your own time, Scott. So if I say the word wealth, you think of what? This shit you can't see, having passive income that's greater than your burn. Okay. So there's independence, economic security, right? Options. When I think of success, you think of what? When I say the word success.

the economic security such that there's an absence of stress in your life so you can focus on what's key and that is your relationships without that stress which is a big thing for everybody by the way you and I experienced that growing up I mean that was our big thing okay so rejection I say the word rejection you say what the key to success key to the only thing I can guarantee you is a certain ratio of joy and tragedy in your life your ability to move through tragedy without losing your sense of enthusiasm is the key to success. Right. Well, you and I have that in space. What about the word, youth? Every man under the age of 30 should be able to walk into any room and know that if shit got real, he could kill and eat everybody. Physical fitness and strength is something that should be absolutely honored, glorified, and we need to stop this bullshit where we are telling obese people that they're finding their truth. They're not. They're finding diabetes. We need to be the

strongest nation in the world economically, socially and physically. Yeah, I probably have to fix the food to do that. Okay, so last word, I say the word masculinity, you say what? Acquiring the skills and strengths that you can advocate for and protect others. Okay, well, this has been fascinating. I want to keep you on time. The title of the book is the algebra of wealth, which gets into things like talent and passion, savings and relationships. But I think this is going to be the signature of that. I mean, you know, you and I are contemporaries, my friend. And if we've got another 20 to 30-year run, this could be the thing that we need to all work on to make it better for this new generation of people. But I really appreciate you joining us today on Open Book. Thank you.

Thank you, Annie. Thanks for your success. And also, thanks to the good work you're doing. I've had you on my pod. And I think you were the most popular guests we had all year. So thanks for your influence and your good work. What sweet of you to say? Hopefully you'll invite me back.

I wish I had the verbal dexterity of Professor Scott Galloway in terms of his. total recall of data and information, but I think it's very, very telling how focus he is as an educator on the war on youth in the United States and particularly young men, where young men need to find their way back to self-esteem and resiliency and some of the things in life that have made our country so great. I'm always blown away by my time spending with the professor, but one thing is very clear that the next portion of Scott's life is going to be dedicated to this idea of self-actualization and the idea of ego improvement for young men, young women as well, but basically trying to restore the confidence and the self-esteem of people that we need to succeed in our civilization. So it's wonderful to spend time with them. Ma. What?

I got one more podcast. You want to come on? What is it? Go ahead. All right. So I talked to a NYU professor from New York University. His name was Scott Galloway. I know you don't know him.

But he has an interesting concept that I want to bounce by you. Okay. You're ready? Go ahead. Okay. So he's saying that men, you know, ages, say 16 to 25, are having a little bit of an identity crisis now in the society. because, you know, we're spending time evaluating and propping up women, propping up African-Americans, propping up a whole group of different groups of people.

But white men who used to have lots of privileges in the society are having a tough run right now. Do you think that that's true? Well, everything goes with the kids of today. Right. So what would you do about it, Ma? Let's say you were raising me today, Ma. How would you handle that? I would try to direct them so that they know who they are and what they are.

Okay, so you're basically saying that you would focus on traditions for people that sometimes in our new America we're losing our traditions, right? Like I identify with my grandparents who were Italian and I see myself as Italian American, but over time these traditions get liquidated and that may not be good for children. Well, I think that children will lose something if they don't know their evidence background. Okay. I think that's a fair comment. All right, so you want more traditional upbringing. How do you feel about, you have a phone from like 2004, don't you have like an antique flip phone? Yeah.

Okay, you won't get yourself a smartphone because you don't want to learn how to use it. But what do you think of all these smartphones? Is that good for people or bad for people that everybody's staring at their phones? I think it's good. Tell me why. Well, I think that if you're, you know, in cable of going to the stores to get your stuff, you have that kind of a phone, and it's a good thing to have. I can't deal with it because I have a problem shopping and more than I should years ago. So if you had the phone, you spent all day shopping on the phone.

Is that what you're telling me? I would be shopping yet. I don't know all day, but I'd be shopping. Okay, so you think it's a good thing because it provides lots of conveniences today, but is it a distraction for young people, all they do is stare at it, and sometimes they compare themselves to other people with the pictures and everything, and everything? Well, you have to know what you're doing with your children. You have to give them a time limit on the phone,

and if they don't listen, you take the phone away. I don't think the phone should be on them at school. Right, we agree on that. I had a younger children need a phone because there's a lot of crooks around. And this way they can dial 911 or their parents. Okay. But I don't think they should use the phone in school. Okay.

All right. What else, Mom? Anything else going on? Not really. No. No. All right. So thank God I not getting you a smartphone because it ends up on my credit card anyway.

So thank God. Well, you got enough on your credit card from your mom. All right, Mom. I love you, baby. All right. I love you. All right. All right.

I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. I'd love to hear from you.

I'll see you back here next week. When a country's productivity cycle is broken, people feel it in their paychecks, their communities, their futures. What does this mean for individuals, communities, and businesses across the country? Join business leaders, policymakers, and influencers for CGs' national series on the Canadian Standard of Living, Productivity, and Innovation. Learn what's driving Canada's productivity decline and discover actionable solutions to reverse it.